Bill McCallum, a lead writer for the Common Core math standards, and Kristin Umland, then a faculty member at the University of New Mexico, led the effort, which was supposed to last a year or two. 

At first, Umland said, the organization was focused on helping other groups, including the and testing companies, improve their products to meet the more rigorous standards. 

Eventually, she said, the group shifted to creating the curriculum — including lesson plans — that it felt best served students as they strove to achieve both a conceptual understanding of math, the why of how math works, alongside procedural fluency, the ability to solve problems. 

Illustrative Mathematics now encompasses 90 employees — all are remote workers — with no central location. For those states that still use it, the curriculum is aligned to Common Core standards — and there are also state-specific versions for those states that don’t.

“Our goal is to change outcomes for students, regardless of the standards they are using,” Umland said. “Math is math, and all states agree that kids should learn math.”

Select schools within the New York City system have been using Illustrative Mathematics for half a decade. A recent, massive rollout across hundreds of campuses has been met with sharp criticism from many teachers and  

Some said the curriculum and for students to practice what they’ve learned. One educator acknowledged these initial growing pains but said , one that helped students more easily understand abstract concepts.  

Umland has heard all of the complaints. While she acknowledges these early days struggles,  it doesn’t mean the move is a failure. Only that it needs more time, she said. 

“There’s no magic bullet,” she said. “If there was, somebody would have figured it out by now.”

Los Angeles, which adopted the curriculum in its middle and high schools in 2023, meanwhile, .

The 74 talked with Umland recently about the math wars, how her organization’s approach stands out from the rest and about Illustrative Mathematics’s bumpy New York City rollout.

The interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Where does Illustrative Mathematics fit into the math wars? And by math wars, I mean that push and pull between teacher- and child-centered learning? 

We always see ourselves as a third way. There’s no-one-size-fits-all for all students in all contexts. There are times when students need to understand and hear a direct explanation. And there are other times they should be given a chance to think about it for themselves, make sense of it, grapple with it and discuss it. So, it’s not either or. It’s what’s appropriate for what you’re trying to help students learn in the particular moment.

What type of lesson would require a direct explanation? 

So, a perfect example is when kids are learning to count. There’s no way they can figure that out on their own. Numbers are different in different languages. That’s a completely cultural thing. That’s something you have to learn by hearing other people say the number to you. 

But when you’re starting to do addition, once they understand what three is and what two is, you can say, “If I have three marbles and two marbles, how many marbles do I have altogether?” 

The things that are cultural have to be taught directly. But once you understand what the meaning is, you can figure it out. 

How does Illustrative Mathematics’s approach to teaching and learning compare to most other curriculum methods?

A lot of folks learn mathematics from an “I do, we do, you do model,” where the teacher does an example question, then they work together with the students, and then the students go practice.

Our method sort of flips that model on its head, allowing students to think about a problem so they can get oriented to it. And then there’s discussion where they make sense of it. 

And, finally, the teacher brings it all together. It gives students a chance to think for themselves before being shown something. 

I can show you how to do two plus three by counting it all myself, or I can say, “Here’s a picture that shows two marbles and three marbles. How many marbles do you see altogether?”

Some kids will know how to count it and will do it. And some kids won’t. They’ll talk about it, share their strategies, and then the teacher can make sure that the student who does it correctly shows their solution. Or if none of the students do it, they can show them how.

Illustrative Mathematics had a rough rollout in New York City. What went wrong for some teachers/schools? 

A lot of the complaints weren’t necessarily about the curriculum itself, but about the rollout or the implementation. 

Teachers need to have professional development where they get oriented to the design structure and they get a chance to experience what a lesson feels like. They need a chance to practice.

Ideally, they have opportunities to collaborate with their colleagues on planning and they have coaching support as they go. It’s just sometimes hard to coordinate all of those pieces.

A lot of teachers, in the first couple of months, are still trying to understand how it works. But once they get to the second or third month, then they start to see how it works. When something is new, it’s harder. It doesn’t necessarily make sense. And it takes time for people to get oriented to it. 

We’re seeing the best success in the places where they’ve been doing it longer. They’ve put in a lot of time to support it and when they get to that phase, then they’re really seeing the outcomes for students.

What do you want to fix about mathematics education in this country?  

A lot of school districts have come to realize that they need high-quality instructional materials. They’ve made that commitment. Then they start to ask themselves, “OK, so what do we do for (struggling students)?”

In a multi-tiered system of support, tier one instruction is the core instruction that all students receive. Students identified as needing additional support will receive tier two instruction. Often, this means they will be pulled for small group instruction or additional instruction.

One of the problems is that for many of these students, it’s like they’re on a highway and then they get pulled off onto the frontage road — only they never find a way back. They end up on a parallel track. What we want is to figure out how to support these students.

How might you help kids stay on track? 

Right now, we’re really focusing on early math. We are currently developing a pre-K math curriculum. It will be available next school year. If you can get to students early, it has an exponential impact on them before they head on to later grades. If we can do a better job with the youngest math learners, they won’t have the problems that we see at the secondary level in the future. 

For a year and a half in 2023 and 2024, Cohen traversed the country, interviewing educators, researchers and policymakers and observing tutoring sessions in seven states and the District of Columbia. 

Now the vice president of policy for the education group , Cohen shares her findings in a new book, out today from Harvard Education Press: .

She explores “the accidental experiment” that took place across American schools starting in 2020, as researchers figured out the principles of what was originally called “high-dosage tutoring” but has come to be known as “high-impact tutoring.” 

Its four pillars, according to Stanford’s : 

1. It must take place at least three days a week.
2. Sessions last at least 30 minutes.
3. Sessions are with a consistent tutor.
4. There are no more than four students working in a group. 

The moment couldn’t have been more tailor-made for such a comprehensive intervention. In the course of just a few months, federal aid to K–12 schools more than tripled, with districts slated to get at least 90% of the new funding. Federal rules eventually dictated that they reserve at least 20% of the largest pot of money to treat pandemic-related learning loss. Tutoring, Cohen writes, “quickly became the watchword of how learning loss should be addressed.”

Cohen interviewed everyone from Stanford scholar Susanna Loeb, whose research helped lay the groundwork for the movement, to Katreena Shelby, a Washington, D.C., middle school principal who somehow found a way to get a tutor for every student in her school.

Ahead of the book’s publication, Cohen spoke to The 74’s Greg Toppo about her findings and her belief that, despite the bleakness of the past few years, educators “want to do good things for kids, and they’re willing to try new things.”

Their conversation has been edited for length and clarity. 

I want to start with a kind of impertinent question: I believe it was former U.S. Education Secretary Bill Bennett who said that many schools serve up what he called a “14-egg omelet.” Have you heard of this?

No, but I like where it’s going.

When what they’re doing doesn’t work, they just do more of the same. I’m guessing you would say that high-impact tutoring does not resemble one of Bennett’s lousy omelets. Are schools truly doing something different?

It’s, of course, impossible to answer universally for every school and every tutoring program. And there have been tutoring programs that haven’t been super additive. But at this point, the schools that have implemented high-impact or high-dosage tutoring within the definition of what that is — and to the gold standard that the evidence suggests — are offering something different. Whether that’s home fries on the side of the omelet or a salad, you can choose, but it’s something else.

You write that a couple of places have done better jobs than others. New Mexico, for instance, seems to have made a few missteps. What’s the difference between places where tutoring is working and where it’s not?

Where tutoring works the best is where it is a strategy in service of a broader goal. Sometimes in education we make the mistake of thinking the thing is the goal, and tutoring isn’t the goal. I don’t want people to do tutoring just to do tutoring. I care if kids are learning in school, and so the places that are doing a great job with tutoring, first of all, are doing tutoring in service of the goal of improving learning, and that means it’s often connected to lots of other pieces around instruction, curriculum and all sorts of other things. One is being strategic. Two is recognizing that to do this kind of program well requires a lot of effort on the implementation side, and being willing to put in the resources necessary. Literally assigning someone at a district or at a school a role of high-impact tutoring manager — who a significant part, if not all, of their job for some period of time is making sure this program is working — is another hallmark of places that have had success as well.

When you were in Louisiana, you looked at this Teach for America Ignite program, and you mention that it’s become a strong pipeline for TFA Fellows and, by extension, teachers. Should we look at tutoring as a pipeline for teaching?

I think so. We have an evergreen population of college students, even if fewer than we used to. We’re always going to have some amount of college students. And what’s generally true about those young adults is that a lot of them are looking for ways to make some money, and a lot of them are not sure what they really want to do with their lives. So one of the interesting things — and the TFA program highlights this — is that when you create opportunities for young people to be involved in education, as a tutor, for example, they start thinking, “Oh, maybe this is a career that I would want to do.”

I like to joke that teacher unions have done such a great PR job that they’ve actually convinced people that they shouldn’t want to be teachers. They’ve convinced the American public that teachers don’t get paid enough and aren’t respected. And if you look at parent polls, more than 50% of parents in this country say they to become teachers.

But what we’ve learned from some of the tutoring with college students is that when you actually give them a positive framework to enter the education space and interact with young people in this way, they start thinking about it. It’s not just the TFA program — I would say also the in charter schools in New York and New Jersey, that also has had partnerships in D.C. and other places. Similarly, they’re using college grads through the AmeriCorps program. A lot of those young people end up sticking around and becoming teachers.

At a school in D.C., you met Delilah, who you say could easily pass for a high school student, but she’s doing this great job leading students on a lesson about Homer’s Odyssey. It made me think that tutoring could blur the boundaries between who is an effective teacher — and how we find them. Do you have any thoughts on that?

I don’t know about “blur,” but it certainly broadens how we might think about who can play effective roles in the learning of young people. And we see that in a few places. This isn’t in the book, but in Chattanooga, Tenn., they had a that started during COVID where they actually hired high school students to tutor elementary school students. And those high schoolers, I believe, were getting school credit, and were getting paid. I spoke with this young woman, and she would literally walk down the hill from her high school to the elementary school, where she worked as a tutor and got real-world experience. She said she felt like she was treated like one of the staff at the school, and it was an incredibly positive experience. She is now graduating high school a year early and enrolling at the University of Tennessee-Knoxville to become a teacher, and she’s the first person in her family to go to college. 

The other thing that I did write about is the way that education schools are rethinking the role of tutoring in teacher prep. We have all these college kids or young adults that we might want to expose to education. But then what about those who already think they want to work in education? The dean of the ed school of Bowling Green State University, which is the biggest teacher prep program in Ohio, has always been committed to giving kids as much field work and experience as possible, because she says, “I want to make sure before I send these students as graduates into classrooms, that that’s really where they want to be. How many different kinds of opportunities can we give people who think they want to be teachers to actually play teacher-like roles?” And so they’ve really leaned into tutoring. They think that the experience of me, Liz, trying to really just help Greg master how to read or how to do third-grade math is going to help me in the classroom, but also gives me more touch points to make sure this is really what I want to do. 

Another way to think about that: A principal in Alexandria, Va., told me, “The one thing I’m always looking for is how do I get my kids more time? More time learning. How do we give our kids more time?” And it wasn’t just him that I heard this from. This is a repeated theme that school leaders and teachers feel: Tutoring helps them add time. Time on task, quality learning time. And time is often the most precious resource we have in education, and that is how a lot of folks are thinking about this.

One of the things you say is that if tutoring is woven into a school culture, the relationship that the student has with the tutor can be this “fulcrum that changes the student’s trajectory.” You’re imagining that tutoring could really transform schools at a very basic level, that the student-tutor relationship is transformative for a lot of kids.

That’s right. What made this story so powerful was the power of the relationships. To me, the big takeaway is that young people are really hungry for meaningful adult relationships in ways beyond what even the best classroom teacher can possibly give to a full classroom of kids. Even when I interviewed some of those TFA college tutors, the thing they would tell me that surprised them about their experience was that kids were willing to open up to them even after just building a relationship on a Zoom call and doing tutoring. And I don’t know if it’s because after the pandemic there had been so much disconnect and isolation that people were hungry for a reconnect, or if it’s just a truism of human nature that we like to have relationships with other humans.

There’s something really powerful about bringing more people in to interact with young people in education, in an educational setting, in a variety of ways. And that’s why, even though generally I’m pretty bullish on tech — I don’t write in the book at all about AI because the stuff’s being built too rapidly — while tech can inform and empower, what’s happened, at least in the last five years, is really a story about human relationships, and it’s worth telling in a time when people feel more separate.

Near the end of the book, you talk about one way to make tutoring work on a large scale, something called outcomes-based contracting. Would you like to talk about that?

I wrote a whole chapter about contracting, and tried to make it so you wouldn’t fall asleep while you read it. Partly why I dedicated so much space to it is because I actually think that we spend a lot of money on education in this country — we really do — and we don’t often get a lot for it. And so it’s interesting that we have this model now. Tutoring is the perfect case study to do an outcomes-based contract, because we have potentially clear outcomes that we’re trying to measure: We want kids to grow a certain amount, and then we can actually link the money to what we’re getting from it. 

Especially now that federal COVID funds are gone, district and state budgets are tightening. I hope we don’t throw the success of tutoring that we’ve had to the wayside and instead think about how do we continue helping it deliver on its promise? And so if you can measure it and then pay only for getting the results that you want, that seems worthwhile, and something that we probably haven’t spent enough time exploring.

Speaking of ESSER funds, that’s a lot of money that’s basically gone. You mention AmeriCorps as well — AmeriCorps is either. Going forward, where can schools turn if they want to fund these sorts of things? What’s out there that is not at so much risk?

First of all, some districts are using their Title I funds. Now, those Title I funds might have been used for something else, and so you have to maybe make some tough choices — and I’m not going to say you should definitely do tutoring. I’m saying you should look at the evidence: What are you getting out of whatever it was you were doing? If you’re already doing tutoring and it’s going well, I’d rather a district keep it and give up something else that’s not working as well.

Ector County, Texas, has kept their tutoring program going to some extent, using Title I funds. Some other districts have done some similar work, even as districts like Guilford County, N.C., are having to scale back. But they are repurposing existing Title I funds, often to do this. One reason it’s really important to continue making the case for tutoring’s impact is that you can convince state legislatures, in some places at least, to fund tutoring. Louisiana put , both for last school year and this current year, into high-impact tutoring. And the funny thing about Louisiana is I didn’t even end up writing about it because it was happening so quickly last year while I was trying to finish the book.

I was like, “Wow, it’s a lot of money. Is this really going to happen?” And this year, 2025-2026, Louisiana is tutoring something like 240,000 kids using $30 million from their state budget, and I think some other district funds too, in a pretty effective model tied to their Science of Reading and their math work. And they have funded a lot of other pieces too, around curriculum, teacher professional development and instructional coaches. So for them, tutoring is that exact thing I said earlier about being a strategy within their broader goal of how to overhaul core instruction — and the state’s put in real money for it.

Connecticut passed to continue some high-impact tutoring work. But then in other states, we aren’t seeing that. Where to look for money? Can you convince your state legislatures to support tutoring because it works? Some places are able to do that.

And also some city budgets: The mayor in D.C. has . And the mayor in Nashville has into tutoring. 

At the end of the book, you lay out these three truisms from your reporting: “1. Public schools are hungry for new ideas that work. 2. Tutoring works. 3. Nothing is perfect.” It sounds like you’re a bit impatient here, and just want us to sort of get on with it. 

I do! Every single day you have kids showing up to school, and those kids either want to learn or it’s our job to help them want to learn, and we need to figure out the tools to do that. If you look, for instance, at continued problems with chronic absenteeism, we flipped a switch during the pandemic, and we thought we could just flip it back on.  That’s not what’s happened. So I believe we have to continue the sense of urgency that we had in 2021 and 2022, because there are kids every day in our schools. But the other thing I really want people to know is that in all of these places I went, people want to do good things for kids, and they’re willing to try new things and implement new programs and make big changes.

That’s not the reputation that K-12 public education has overall. And I want people to believe that that is part of the story of public education in the United States in 2025. I want us to get on with it, because it’s what people want to do. So let’s just do the thing.

As the largest school improvement effort in U.S. history matured, so did the energetic transplants. Wanting kids of their own and more sustainable jobs, many moved back home, bringing their experiences to bear in classrooms in places where life is easier.

Patrick Dobard has been there the whole time. He was born in New Orleans, grew up in the city and cut his teeth there as a teacher. In the years before Hurricane Katrina, he worked for the Louisiana Department of Education, trying to figure out how to address the decay of New Orleans’ schools — beloved but crumbling, scandal-ridden and some of the lowest-performing in the country. 

In 2012, Dobard became head of the Recovery School District, the state agency that took control of most of the city’s public schools in the wake of the flood and steered their overhaul. There, he oversaw the district’s conversion to the nation’s first all-charter school system, as well as the return of the schools to the control of the local school board starting in 2016.

In 2017, he became CEO of New Schools for New Orleans, the district’s nonprofit partner. Today, he is a partner at the City Fund, which helps districts engineer their own school turnarounds. 

What follows is a conversation in which Dobard reflects on the first two decades of the largest — and most controversial — school improvement effort in U.S. history, and outlines his hopes for the next 20 years. 

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Among education wonks, discussions about public education in New Orleans can feel like a Rorschach Test. Some people are laser-focused on academics, some on policy innovations that might transfer to other school systems and still others on privatization conspiracy theories. Locally, though, one of the most enduring conversations involves popular perceptions of a takeover of a Black-led school system by white outsiders who valued test scores more than the city’s culture. This is true — but also not the capital-T truth. Can we start there?             

I started as a classroom teacher in New Orleans in 1989 at Gregory High School, which was a junior high school, grades 7 through 9, located in what at the time was a pretty middle- to upper-middle-class neighborhood, Gentilly. Most high schools then started at 10th grade. Junior highs were extremely important as athletic and band pipelines. 

The workforce for the most part at Gregory represented how the workforce across the city’s schools looked at that time: predominantly Black middle- to upper-middle-class individuals teaching kids. 

The schools that had really stringent enrollment criteria, like what was then named Lusher [now the Willow School] and Ben Franklin High School, more white students went to those schools. They had majority white staff.

By 1999, the state had created an accountability system under which a large number of the schools in the city — I believe about 60% — were identified as academically unacceptable. At that point, I was working at the state Department of Education. 

There was a lot of corruption in the air in New Orleans. There were conversations about the district being bankrupt. There was a Federal Bureau of Investigations [probe] going on. 

In 2003, the state created an agency called the Recovery School District. In the spring of 2005, the initial plan was for it to take over about three schools in New Orleans. We didn’t really know what that was going to look like. But then Katrina hit Aug. 29, 2005, and all those plans were put on hold. 

We were getting phone calls weeks and months after Katrina from teachers trying to get a hold of their teaching certificates so they could work other places. There was just mass displacement of teachers.

And that’s where I think people’s knowledge of what happened gets told in different ways. The district was bankrupt. There wasn’t a way for it to pay teachers, so it was forced to lay them off. The state didn’t step in to try to offset that. So it was the district that had to fire the teachers and not the state. 

People were setting up the modular trailers and all the things people did after Katrina to get their lives back on track. There were schools — mostly the selective-enrollment schools that I mentioned earlier — where people were able to come back a little bit more quickly. Those schools were bringing teachers back and hiring.

The Recovery School District was trying to recruit back New Orleans teachers, but a lot of the Black middle class didn’t have the ability or the wherewithal to come back to New Orleans those first few years. 

Once the state decided that they were going to try the chartering model, the RSD started to recruit from Teach For America. A large number of TFA folks from all around the country wanted to come help. A number of those individuals were white. They didn’t look like the kids that ultimately were in front of them in schools.

I have no inside knowledge of this, but I don’t think TFA leadership at that time had lots of conversations strategically thinking about race. They were just functioning the way they normally functioned. 

Data shows having kids in front of teachers that are really strong and that look like them helps make for much better educational progress for young people. Once John White came in [as state superintendent in 2012], we were hearing a lot about the lack of diversity in the teaching force. 

John and I talked to TFA leadership about diversifying. While the number of Blacks and other minorities in TFA increased, it didn’t match the number of teachers of color that were there before the storm. 

Seven or eight years ago, I brought that awareness to the teacher work that we were doing at New Schools for New Orleans [where Dobard was then CEO]. We wanted to help schools build a corps of teachers that reflected the kids in the classrooms. Schools just took that on. They owned up to where they fell short, and then they actively recruited to make sure those numbers improved. 

I don’t think anyone had intentional ill will. It was a series of unfortunate circumstances that folks were reacting to after Katrina: the bankruptcy of the district and the uncertainty of people coming back to the city at different times, which was skewed to more white and affluent Blacks coming more quickly than others. 

And yet the narrative persists. 

Yeah, the narrative persists. I think what’s been missing is no one from the Orleans Parish School Board who was part of the decision to lay off the teachers to my knowledge has ever publicly acknowledged the firings. Or apologized for having to do that. Or for what transpired in the years before 2005, with the FBI having to be there and how bad it was. 

There’s no closure. There should be a moment of healing. The times that the district leadership over the years was approached, nobody really wanted to acknowledge it that way. Some felt like it was on the state for not stepping in. So maybe the state leadership at that time should apologize.

It feels like in terms of the school governance experiment, you’re at an inflection point. There’s continued improvement, but there are also tensions over whether an accountability-driven system is still something the community is lined up behind.

I think the governance contract is working well. Around 2016, I was leading the work on behalf of the Recovery School District. School leaders and advocates like the Urban League, New Schools for New Orleans and a number of other groups were working together on what the unification structure would look like. A number of legislators at the time helped to codify in law the governance construct that was created over the years as Act 91. 

It’s no longer an experiment. It’s really how schools function in New Orleans. The district has fully embraced it, maintained it and actually improved upon it. It’s a different role than any other school board in the country, but it’s also an extremely important one that’s proven to have spurred tremendous gains.

Yes, there are some people who would like to see the district go back to the way it functioned prior to Katrina. But I don’t think those individuals are but a small minority who are for the most part consistent and persistent in their viewpoint. 

When things are working well in New Orleans, you don’t hear from people. Nobody’s going to say, “Hey, the governance structure of this school that my kids have been at for the last 15 years and my grandchildren have gone through is great.” When I was state superintendent, I used to ask kids and parents, “Do you know if this school is run by the Recovery School District or by Orleans Parish?” And they’d just look at me, like, “No.” 

The average citizen, what they want to know is, is my child getting a good education? Do we have good extracurricular activities? Does the transportation work well? 

I’ll tell you one quick story. Dana Peterson, who now is the CEO of New Schools for New Orleans, was involved in some sessions with parents. He had this parent who was just railing against charter schools. Like, “We need to go back to what was before.” 

Dana was like, “Do you realize your kid’s in a charter school?” The parent was at a loss. She was happy with where her child was, but she was indoctrinated that charter schools are bad. I think for some of the critics, that’s what it is. 

If you don’t really know what the governance construct is, at the end of the day it’s all about who’s working with the kids. There’s more proximity when it’s a charter network, with the urge to improve all the time so they can continue to have the privilege to teach kids. Versus a bureaucracy that’s expected to do it but that doesn’t have strong accountability to make sure it’s not year-after-year failure.

And that’s what it was before 2005. 

Reams have been written about the rapid academic improvements, the all-charter model and, more recently, the racial upheaval. What about the fact that you had to rebuild — as in, rebuild the buildings — 85% of the schools?   

Prior to Katrina, the buildings said to our kids and families, “We don’t care about you.” Those dilapidated buildings are no longer there. That’s something worth celebrating. 

Being a young boy that grew up in New Orleans, I’m extremely proud of the facilities. The price tag came to a little over $4 billion, if I’m remembering correctly. About a billion came from the disadvantaged business enterprise program that we started at the Recovery School District.

My first months as superintendent, there was an article in The Times-Picayune where they followed me as I rode the bus the first day of school with some kids to see what their experience was. I met the kids across the street from Dooky Chase’s Restaurant on Orleans Avenue. 

I was talking to the kids and a mom, and I pointed to Dooky Chase and right behind Dooky Chase there was a school. It was [what is now] Phyllis Wheatley Community School. There was a debate whether or not to rebuild it. 

I said, “We’re going to rebuild this school right here. And if we did, would you have your kid come here?” She’s like, “Absolutely I would.” We demolished the building and built new.

I’m extremely proud of that because my father was a part-time electrician and I could remember when I was a young boy, him getting work with one of his friends who was a subcontractor on large jobs. As I got older, I understood how important it was to be able to have subcontractors that were often minorities to work on large construction projects.

When I took over the RSD, New Orleans didn’t have a disadvantaged business program. And once I realized what that was, I felt it was important that we try to implement one. I was told that state agencies couldn’t have a DBE component. 

But we had legal take a look into it, and they advised me that the law was silent. It didn’t say whether you could or you couldn’t. I felt like it was important for us to at least try. And if we were challenged in court, we would see what a judge would say.

Once we launched it, I received maybe one or two emails from, like, the carpenters union saying we couldn’t do that. But they never followed up. We generated over $10 billion of revenue for local businesses and I’m extremely proud of that.

To this day, every now and then if I look at the placards on the front of a school I see my name and those of the folks on my team that helped make that happen. It brings me a great sense of pride and joy to know we played a small part in making sure that we have facilities where, when children and families walk in, they say to themselves, “This district really cares about me.” 

Do you have a wish for the next 20 years? 

I wish that we continue to build upon the foundation that’s been laid. I would love for us to eliminate all D-rated schools, to have a true system of good-to-excellent schools. 

That we would have a much more robust early childhood system where 5-year-olds and 6-year-olds are entering kindergarten and first grade on grade level. Today, we still have kids that enter all grades not reading on grade level, so schools have to keep almost starting over with kids. 

The last thing that I would hope for is that the school board in New Orleans more vocally embrace the structure that’s been created. To be unambiguous about its power in being a manager of a system of schools, versus being a traditional school district. That they fully understand and embrace that role and lead the way on that evolution. 

If you had a do-over, what would you change?

I would have intentionally built the next generation of leadership to think more about the system as a whole and to prepare for inevitable transitions — everything that we did 15 or so years ago. We had this rare confluence of strong leadership at almost every level: the schools, the state.

We leveraged everything in our power. For every metric evaluated by external entities, the growth was really powerful. We virtually eliminated F-rated schools. The on-time graduation rate is hovering close to about 80%. It was about 54% around 2005.

I wish we would have started to build that next cadre of leadership in real time. But it’s hard to be in the midst of something so unique and try to think 15, 20 years ahead. I was literally trying to think eight hours, one week, one month ahead. Things were just always coming at us, and we were constantly building and adjusting. 

We get these great leaders, and they do great work — almost like a meteorite or something that comes and then goes away just as quickly. People move on. 

The work is so hard. This is generational work.

Disclosure: The City Fund provides financial support to The 74.

The director of the Institute for Education Policy at Johns Hopkins University, she thinks that language presumes too much about how education should be delivered in a free country. Sure, it seems to suggest, there are options out there — Catholic schools, charter schools, Montessori schools, take your pick — but the default is the local public school into which families are zoned. Anything else is just an anomaly.

Many other nations, including some that have been operating schools for much longer than the United States, don’t see it that way.

Just 30 percent of Dutch children attend their equivalent of district schools, with the rest enrolled in a variety of secular and parochial academies that all receive support from the state. Australia’s federal government is the most significant funder of private education, helping to subsidize the tuition of a huge number of economically disadvantaged students. Singapore, perhaps the most famous academic powerhouse in the world, directly funds private and religious schools attended by a diverse mix of pupils.

The overarching concept is one Berner calls “educational pluralism”: Governments don’t favor one system or model, but all are held to common academic standards. Parents can send their kids to an Islamic school, but they must learn the tenets of Christianity and Judaism as well; similarly, students at creationist-minded institutions have to demonstrate knowledge of the processes of evolution in their biology classes.

The idea is unfamiliar to most Americans, who grew up in school communities that all straddled a central divide of private versus public. Those favoring secular instruction have recoiled at the thought of public aid flowing to religious institutions since the end of the 19th century. Meanwhile, many critics of the ubiquitous district public school also seek independence from state control and accountability, even if it comes with funding attached.

The last few years have seen an explosion in school choice systems, including the streak of red states establishing education savings accounts, which grant families money to spend on schooling costs, including private tuition. This spring, in the ultimate clash of public authority and private conscience, the U.S. Supreme Court will rule on the constitutionality of a proposed Catholic charter school in Oklahoma.

Donald Trump’s return to the presidency seems likely to escalate the tension between warring camps. But in her 2024 book, Educational Pluralism and Democracy, Berner argues that a considered embrace of diverse worldviews can actually be a salve to cultural conflict by separating two key functions of schooling. No matter where they attend class, all children receive academic instruction in core subjects like math, literacy, science, geography, and languages. But the work of imparting ideals and moral values can differ according to the preferences of families. At the heart of pluralism, she says, is the acknowledgment that schools are character-forming institutions by necessity.

“Education cannot be neutral,” Berner said. “It’s going to inculcate some values in children, however thin.

In an extended conversation with The 74’s Kevin Mahnken, the author and academic spoke about the possibilities for more pluralism in the wake of the national ESA wave, the unexpected consequences of the end of school prayer, and why she feels schools get it wrong by trying to build students’ skills instead of knowledge.

You’ve been writing about the idea of educational pluralism for some time now. What led you to it?

Ashley Rogers Berner: I came to educational pluralism because of the shock of living in another country and realizing that their framework for education was entirely different from ours.

I went to Oxford to get my doctorate when my children were in elementary school. When it came time to enroll them in schools, I was confronted with a panoply of state-funded options. And it didn’t take long to realize that this division we’re so familiar with in the States, public versus private, just didn’t apply. The Anglican Church was the top local provider of elementary education, but there was a state-funded Jewish school down the street. There was a Montessori school, all kinds of secular schools.

At the same time, my doctoral research allowed me to learn a lot about how schools were funded in the 19th century. That’s how I discovered that the U.K. has funded educational pluralism since 1833, and they were taking their cues from Prussia, and the Netherlands has been on a similar journey since the time of the American Revolution.

I realized, “This could change our whole conversation.” This zero-sum game of pitting sectors against each other is not only dysfunctional, it’s actually rare. We’re the outliers.

You say something similar in one of the book’s early chapters, describing pluralism as “countercultural” to what we do in the United States. Why is that?

It’s countercultural in two respects.

First, a plural system assumes a certain level of diversity by design. It assumes that the government should not dictate students’ beliefs and values, so you need to support a variety of institutions. The fact that that is taken for granted is totally countercultural to what we expect of education, including the binary of public versus private. Even the language of “school choice” derives from an expectation that the district school is the only carrier of public education, and any departure is basically asking for an exception from that. I don’t tend to use the word “choice,” even though it’s the American terminology, because it just reinforces those assumptions.

And just as important, it’s countercultural because of the importance of shared content taught in schools. At its very best, a plural system is one in which the ethos of each school should be distinctive — but there is also some kind of shared academic material across all kinds of schools. That’s how you fulfill the civic mission of public funding for education, by having some basic content in common in order to teach kids to exercise effective citizenship. Some examples would be historical documents, the geography of the country and the world, the markers of history, comparative religion and ethics, basic literary references, etc.

That second aspect goes against the grain of what we do in the United States because our teaching profession has opted in favor of skills and process over content for 100 years. Many of our teachers have come up in a system that says that learning something specific is less important than learning how to learn and that setting goals for knowledge-building is somehow oppressive. It’s countercultural to say that building knowledge really, really matters for closing achievement gaps.

I’ve sometimes considered it strange that kids learn very different material depending on where they live. But it sounds like you’re saying that’s only half the picture: Teaching differs a lot across state lines, but our system is also very rigid about only wanting to fund local public schools, plus the occasional charter.

That’s right, and I think it’s a losing proposition to offer children a really uniform structure and really eclectic content. Wealthy kids are going to be better off in any system because their families take them to museums and talk to them about the world all the time. But this is really the worst of all possible worlds for first-generation, low-income families: There’s a rigid structure in which parents do not have agency about where they enroll their children, but also really patchy content where kids miss whole areas in the English curriculum.

The uniform structure was built by design after the Civil War, and it was the product of an unholy alliance between nativist groups like the Ku Klux Klan and the Republican Party. Up to that point, we had funded all different kinds of schools, but there was suddenly concern that all these Catholic immigrants just couldn’t become competent citizens, and all the variation between schools was going to undermine democratic formation. So lawmakers at the state level decided to defund “sectarian” schools — which meant Catholic schools — and only fund district schools. But those same state legislatures then turned around and required that district schools be, in effect, Protestant institutions with Protestant prayers and Protestant Bibles.

To me, this history makes the core point of pluralism: Education cannot be neutral. It’s going to inculcate some values in children, however thin. And interestingly, one of the big Progressive complaints about district schools is that — because they can’t answer some of the deeper questions with explicit moral frameworks — they unintentionally reinforce the baseline culture of the United States of individualism and utilitarianism. It’s just going to default to whatever the cultural majority is.

Whatever schools do to build character, or civic virtue, or whatever, doesn’t seem to be producing great results. There was a really startling survey in 2023 showing huge declines, among younger adults especially, in the importance attached to patriotism, family formation, hard work, and community involvement. Meanwhile, well over half of Generation Z has said they would choose to be a social media influencer over any other career.

I’d make two points. One is that the civic outcomes we care about, whether it’s volunteering or civic participation or affirming others’ right to disagree with your views, are learned behaviors that have to be explicitly taught. And we’re not doing that; classrooms aren’t really places marked by a lot of deliberation and debate.

But it’s also true that those outcomes are the byproducts of deeper sets of belief and moral frameworks about what it means to be human. For a long time, Catholic high schools have been great at producing graduates who give back to their communities. It’s very difficult to analyze what about that is coming from the direct influence of schools, but eminent researchers like James Coleman and Tony Bryk have looked at the data and said, “There’s something about this organic community that forms a certain kind of person.”

You can’t control people’s beliefs, and you can’t control outcomes. But in the aggregate, you can make it more likely that your students have a sense of duty to something outside themselves.

You list a lot of places — England, Australia, the Netherlands, Israel, Hong Kong, Belgium — in which the government directly funds private schools, including parochial schools. But do those countries deal with the same constitutional issues we face in the United States? Things may be changing at the Supreme Court, but my guess is that until very recently, the Establishment Clause would have been a massive obstacle.

That’s a fair question. Obviously, England has a state church. But the Netherlands has had a secular constitution since the end of the 18th century, and they’re the most pluralistic system in the world. They fund 36 different kinds of schools!

The argument for pluralism is not a religious argument. It’s a principled argument about political philosophy and the role of civil society, but not one that gives special pleading to religion. The Anglican Church is a huge provider of elementary education in England, yes. But in another pluralistic country, Sweden, only 3 percent of non-state schools are religious because the population is mostly secular and doesn’t want those schools. It varies quite a bit.

But in a country like the U.S., there would presumably be a huge appetite for direct government funding of Christian schools. And the political opposition to that kind of shift would also be huge, right?

There’s the reality of our separation of church and state, and there’s the mythology of it. When you look at the Supreme Court decisions over the last century, there have consistently been mechanisms that allow state funds to flow to civil society organizations that include religious institutions.

The landmark ruling with respect to schools was Zelman v. Simons-Harris [the 2002 case in which a conservative majority ruled that Ohio’s school voucher program did not violate the Establishment Clause], where the Supreme Court said very clearly that these programs are constitutional as long as the state laws authorizing them are neutral. In other words, if the state law sets out to give low-income kids either state funding or tax credit funds to go to a private school, it’s constitutionally viable even if every school that families choose is religious. It’s robust because it’s the result of private decisions.

There are now lots of state mechanisms that support private schools. Florida has had a tax credit program for 20 years, the outcomes of which have been studied by the Urban Institute. Low-income kids who attended private schools on tax credit support scholarships had higher college-going and college graduation rates than their peers. Indiana has had something similar for a long time. And this isn’t just in conservative states. Illinois had a bipartisan tax credit for a brief episode. D.C. has one. A state as blue as Maryland has one, with a built-in requirement that money can’t go to a school that discriminates on the basis of sexual orientation or gender identity.

So there are a lot of levers that states can use. What you want is for high-quality private schools to participate, but you can’t impose so many regulations that the best schools opt out.

How long have American kids mostly attended public schools that are, as you put it, “uniform” in their outlook? You draw attention to an event that I haven’t thought much about in the context of education policy: the Supreme Court’s 1962 ruling in Engel v. Vitale, which banned school prayer. What was the importance of that decision?

Public education had a particular kind of uniformity from the end of the 19th century. After that, public schools were basically Protestant institutions all the way through 1962, when the Supreme Court effectively secularized them.

Up to that point, they were uniform, vaguely Protestant schools, and if you were Protestant, you probably didn’t notice it. But if you were Catholic, Jewish, atheist, or Jehovah’s Witness, you knew that the schools your children attended were values-laden institutions that reflected the majority culture. Following Engel v. Vitale, schools were still uniform, but now they were secular.

That was when you started to see the evangelical grievance about taking God out of public schools. That cultural animus came from a decision that I think was completely correct, but evangelicals experienced a sense of loss.

It seems like that moment unsettled a lot of families who had unconsciously believed that public schools were meant to embody their own worldview and values. And throughout the 1960s and ’70s, you start seeing the origins of what will become the movement for both school choice and homeschooling.

You’re right that those decisions in the 1960s spawned a whole host of church-based schools to spring up, including evangelical schools. There was some religious homeschooling as well.

But there was also a concurrent movement on the progressive side that was called “deschooling.” When you look at the history of the homeschooling wave, it included evangelical pietists as well as people in the hippie culture, who thought school bureaucracies were oppressive and conformist. I wrote a report last spring that looked at the criticisms of district schools that grew out of the Left during those years, and it was interesting to note the parallels.

The school choice movement has gotten a lot thicker. There’s a whole strain that emerged among progressives who were concerned that district schools weren’t serving African Americans well, and that helped build the charter movement. Even long before that, there were Freedom Schools in the South in the ’60s. Some of the biggest champions of educational pluralism were radicals in that period. Look at Howard Fuller, who eventually launched Milwaukee’s voucher program. He was a civil rights activist, and he’ll still say, “Let this community regulate its own schools.”

You write that the case for educational pluralism is connected to a need for more emphasis on knowledge and content-rich teaching in schools. You’re arguing that knowledge has been crowded out, to an extent, by things that have variously been called “social adjustment” or “21st century skills” or “social-emotional learning.”

In the book, I call it, “anything but the academic curriculum.”

The consequence of that long-term trajectory toward teaching skills, which has been written about by people like E.D. Hirsch and Diane Ravitch and Natalie Wexler, is that we have generations of teachers who haven’t worked in knowledge-building classrooms. When my colleagues at the Institute for Education Policy work with states to help them adopt high-quality curricular materials, we also try to push them to allocate resources toward professional development so that classroom leaders know how to teach it well.

The great thing about a historically pluralistic system like the U.K. is that they have both a large variety of schools and a knowledge-rich curriculum. The people leading classrooms had to pass serious exit exams to graduate and demonstrate that they actually knew the content they were going to teach, whether it’s history or philosophy or English. So there’s a virtuous cycle where young people learn a certain amount of shared content; they have to pass content-specific exams to graduate; then they get more of the same while preparing to be teachers in university. And by the time they’re in a classroom talking to an eight-year-old about the Greeks and Romans, they’re confident in that knowledge.

In the United States, we haven’t had the same virtuous cycle. So there’s a lot of work to do, including in professional development.

Do you think the way we approach instruction has something to do with the way the teaching profession is thought of in the States? A lot of teacher training seems to prepare them in disciplines like child development and theories of pedagogy, rather than just pushing lots of academic content that they can later teach to kids.

I spent a lot of time studying the history of teacher training institutions in the U.K. Going back many years, they were seen as both cultural and academic institutions that tried to impart cultural experience to teachers — many of whom came from the lower-middle classes in England — as well as knowledge. In the United States, these programs also had these two functions of building up knowledge and expanding access to cultural experiences such as theater or live debate.

But there was a shift within the profession that eventually led to the emphasis of skills over knowledge. In the early 20th century, there were voices within the field of teacher preparation that wanted programs to be based in universities as opposed to local communities. The key lens was essentially meant to be child psychology, so by the ’20s and ’30s, everything became very influenced by the psychoanalytic model, and teachers were supposed to know all about Freud and child development. That kind of thing became the currency of teacher preparation.

England actually also went down that path, but the ministry of education kept the curriculum knowledge-based. So whatever else was going on in the training programs, aspiring teachers had graduated high school with subject-matter expertise. They came back from the brink, but we haven’t here in the States. To this day, our teaching programs are not institutions that really promote knowledge building. Just look at the science of reading.

How do these dynamics influence policy discussions? It’s unclear how this debate involves teachers’ unions, for example.

There’s dogmatism on both the left and the right. On the left, it’s tied into the unions and their claim to sole authority — that only the district schools, which they run, are legitimate. And on the right, you have the argument that parent autonomy is the desired end goal, that it’s sufficient to determine school quality and the government has no legitimate role.

We need to push against both those dogmas because they’re distorting of what healthy school systems need in the long term. That’s why I’m attracted to the pluralist vision: It acknowledges the rightful role for the parent, it acknowledges the rightful role of the state, and it locates the delivery of education in civil society and voluntary associations. No system is perfect, but I think this vision does a good job encompassing all of those realms. It’s a third way.

Do you think it’s a philosophy that is so attractive that most developed countries are just inevitably going to adopt it?

I’m on the board of an NGO [non-governmental organization] that works on educational pluralism and has privileges at the U.N. I’ve learned so much just from the U.N. covenants that affirm the rights of cultural minorities to enroll their children in schools that reflect their values — and the obligation of the state to ensure quality. Both of those things are there, and they’re both practiced in so many countries.

Internationally, the historic practice in many, many countries has been to support nonprofits and religious groups to deliver education. According to UNESCO, 171 out of 204 countries are pluralistic in some fashion. But there is a huge pressure against those funding systems, and it’s coming from both the international teachers’ unions and a number of NGOs that have some animus against religion.

There have been a lot of conversations at UNESCO wrestling with these questions. What do you lose if you say that only the state can deliver education, and how does that comport with the organization’s human rights documents? So these arguments are very much international.

Where are you looking for signs about the future viability of a more pluralistic system? It seems as though there’s still room for growth in state ESA systems, and the Supreme Court has taken up the case of a proposed Catholic charter school in Oklahoma.

I’m not someone who thinks that all school choice systems have to offer religious options, and I don’t think that more state funding for private schools is contingent on that Oklahoma case. The funding is already happening, and there’s a wide array of state policies making it possible.

You’ve got Iowa, where ESAs can be applied to any private school. I’m personally a little more skeptical of the ESA in places like Arizona or Florida, where parents get a lump sum and a huge menu of options. I’m skeptical that that’s sufficient quality control to drive better outcomes. No doubt it’ll work fine for most families, but will it work for a majority of families? Will it actually change academic outcomes? I’m not sure it will.

What I’m hoping will happen is that the momentum to expand options will be met with a reasonable concern for academic quality. That’s where centrist Democrats can come along and be supportive. The teachers’ union was able to kill the school choice legislation that went through in Illinois, but that law was bipartisan. There was support for more funding for district schools, funding for tax credits for low-income kids to go to private schools, and the requirement of an assessment for those students.

I think that’s a reasonable approach. I’m looking for the grand bargains that can sustain education into the future. For me, it’s not just about destroying the situation we have; it’s about making sure that all families can choose among good options.

How would you accomplish that? Should big school choice expansions always be accompanied by a curricular or accountability reform, including testing if necessary?

Texas is actually doing this. They’re starting to change their curriculum, and while they’re unlikely to command all funded schools to use some individual curriculum, there are ways of incentivizing the use of better curricula across the board and testing the knowledge base.

In places like Texas, the horse is out of the barn. It’s going to be a school choice state. The question is, how do you protect quality in the long run? Should all participants have to take a nationally norm-referenced test? Most private schools require their students to do that and report the scores to the state. But if you’ve got a plug-and-play ESA model where parents can buy a trampoline here, a homeschooling curriculum there, it’s pretty hard to ensure that children are getting an appropriate education. So in my view, you have to test outcomes.

We all get attached to things that don’t serve us well, and that’s true of parents and schools along with everything else. Even a miserable school, whether it’s public or private or charter, can win the affection of parents who don’t want to shut it down. So it seems like an appropriate goal of public policy to make sure that bad providers don’t get into the market to begin with.

Look at the Drexel Fund, which helps high-quality, low-cost private schools scale up. Well, if I were expanding access to private schools, I would want those Drexel Fund schools to be able to grow rapidly in my state. We should go where the high performance is, where there’s already attention to detail and quality. We simply don’t have enough good seats right now.

What was so great about Florida is that they built it slowly, and the market responded. There are schools for autistic kids, schools for kids with dyslexia. But it’s taken time. We need stability around high-quality providers, and we need to remember that we’re educating for a purpose: civic preparation, academic capability, and social mobility. If we’re not doing those things, we’re failing.

We have to keep these purposes in mind. There’s confusion around some of these points because of the political dogmas on both sides. To teachers’ unions, I would say that the key question can’t just be how school choice will affect district schools. District schools are a means to the end. I also would say to libertarians that parental choice and autonomy is a means, not the end itself.

It worked. Reimbursements rose from $1.7 million in state funds to 41 providers in 2017 to to 328 providers in state and Medicaid funds through the Early Intensive Developmental and Behavioral Intervention benefit in 2023.

Most of those new centers engaged in applied behavior analysis. ABA is an intensive behavior modification technique that aims to make autistic children act more like their typically developing peers by “extinguishing” certain traits through compliance with specific repeated commands. (A 74 investigation last year demonstrated that there is no reliable data to show the treatment works, and that it may actually cause harm to patients.)

Last year, the FBI began investigating whether some of those treatment centers have defrauded Medicaid, billing for services never provided. Though investigators have not said how many for-profit centers they are looking into or who their clients are, many are believed to enroll the children of East African immigrants, who are particularly vulnerable because of the lack of culturally appropriate services. There are also indications the alleged fraudsters may have ties to defendants in the country’s largest , in which nonexistent food distribution sites supposedly created to provide children with meals during COVID-related school closures billed the state for hundreds of millions of dollars.

As the 2025 legislative session gets underway, state lawmakers are holding hearings on proposals to tighten oversight. Most of the testimony has centered on to require services to be provided by licensed professionals in safe settings. But some autism advocates have expressed concern that those standards will entrench ABA as the dominant approach — one that, among other things, is replacing other special education services in schools — instead of supporting alternatives that they say are more effective and humane.     

One of those who testified is Native American Jules Edwards, the autistic parent of three autistic youth, ages 11, 19 and 21, and a member of the Anishinaabe Eagle Clan. After , she told a state Senate committee that ABA is not a therapy, but “a specific methodology that was created by the same people that created gay conversion therapy.”  

Right now, providers are not required to be licensed; are allowed to describe employees who may have only a high school diploma as therapists; and are not held to the same safety standards as even home day care centers, Edwards testified. “Despite the ABA industry lobbying for more power over the autism community, they need their power restricted until they can prove with empirical and independent evidence that they are doing what they claim they are doing” in terms of providing effective, safe services.  

Edwards recently expanded on her testimony in an interview with The 74. This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

What motivated you to testify?

When my children were diagnosed with autism, I threw myself into research. I learned about autism and I learned about interventions. I learned from professionals, parents and autistic adults that autism is a social, communication and sensory disability, and not a behavioral disorder. I learned that applied behavior analysis is a behavior modification program that requires autistic children to suppress their natural way of being in order to please the adults around them. 

That didn’t make sense to me. Why wouldn’t we want to address any underlying needs first? Typically, autistic kids specifically need to learn the why, because we’re bottom-up learners. We like to gather information about things before taking action. But ABA requires a top-down, authoritative approach, where autistic children are not allowed to ask why. They are required to comply with authority, and that poses a lifelong danger to that child. 

Testifying was an opportunity to highlight the fraud, waste and abuse that happens within the ABA industry. American taxpayers pay billions of dollars per year to enrich private equity investors under the guise of an autism therapy that works. However, ABA isn’t a therapy, and it hasn’t been proven to improve quality of life. 

The Department of Defense’s 2020 reported that 76% of children in ABA showed no improvement after one year, 16% had improved, but 9% were worse after a year of treatment. That really brings into question the cost-effectiveness of ABA. When we’re talking about fraud and waste of Medicaid dollars or taxpayer dollars generally, we need to be honest about the actual outcomes. 

But there’s little oversight. The state doesn’t require health and safety procedures, behavior guidance, standards, first aid, CPR. They aren’t required to have a mental health response, crisis response or suicide intervention plan. They don’t have to provide culturally responsive treatment practices. 

A 5-year-old child was just in a hyperbaric chamber in an unaccredited ABA center in Troy, Michigan. The chamber exploded with the child inside, and he passed away.  We know that hyperbaric chambers aren’t actually a treatment or cure for autism or anything like that. It’s not approved by the FDA. If there was oversight, if there was licensing, if there were safety requirements that prevented this kind of alternative treatment it could have saved that boy’s life. 

The state’s suggests “modern” ABA has largely stopped using punishments to discourage certain behaviors. But I have heard parents and autistic adults who have experienced ABA say it is still coercive. Can you give us an example?

Planned ignoring, which is a technique used in ABA, basically denies the humanity of the child who is subjected to it. When we’re children, whether you’re autistic or not, and you’re hanging out with another kid, and the other kid is pretending you don’t even exist, it’s dehumanizing. But now, within ABA, the adults do that to the children.

Say a child is throwing a toy that they shouldn’t be throwing. They may not be hurting anybody. They might be throwing it because they like the sound. It could be stimming [the term for a repetitive sound or motion an autistic person may use for emotional regulation or to express ]. It could be anything. The adult doesn’t want the child to play with the toy that way. 

They might try other interventions before planned ignoring, but then the child is being ignored completely, whether the child is trying to gain the attention of the behavior tech or not. This can cause increased “behaviors” of the child escalating, trying to gain that attention. But no matter how much the child tries, the adult is not going to give in.

We can see how frustrating that must be, particularly if that’s a child who may be struggling with communication and may not say, ‘Hey, I really want to play ball right now.’ That kid is maybe unable to ask for what they want, or the way that they’re asking is a behavior that the behavior tech doesn’t like.

Is there a danger that as the state creates standards and licensing procedures to protect children, it will further codify this industry as the dominant treatment? 

Absolutely. ABA is currently the dominant treatment. They have lobbyists. They absolutely can persuade legislators to further empower the industry. Because they have the most money, they have the most power right now. 

A lot of the research about ABA, claiming it’s the gold standard treatment, etc., is funded by and conducted by the people who profit from it. We need to be sure that decision makers are looking at facts and data and information that isn’t that doesn’t involve a conflict of interest. It’s really important that we refer to outside, independent researchers, like the Department of Defense study.

There was a push at one point for board-certified behavior therapists [credentialed ABA supervisors] in Minnesota to be able to diagnose autism. They would then be able to enroll those children in their services. That is dangerous, because children who need a diagnosis need to go to an actual medical professional and have other conditions ruled out. They need to be evaluated for potential co-occurring conditions, etc. If a behavior therapist is able to diagnose autism, but they can’t diagnose anything else, then all of that child’s underlying conditions or additional conditions may be overlooked. 

If my children didn’t have full-team neuropsych evaluations, I wouldn’t know about their learning disabilities, and I wouldn’t know how to provide support. I wouldn’t know how to advocate for my children in school. My child used to be punished for his writing disability until we learned, through that neuropsych evaluation, there’s a dysgraphia issue. So let’s provide writing prompts. Let’s provide support for writing. Let’s provide adaptations and assistive technology. If he only had an autism diagnosis, that would have been met with behaviorism, he would have been rewarded for doing well, punished for struggling, and he wouldn’t have had access to the tools that he needs. 

There are definitely other treatments that don’t have that same level of influence but may be more effective, may be more humanizing. A lot of those are not as widely available. 

Many kids spend half or or all of their day in an ABA center rather than in a school where their learning would be attended to.

It’s a problem that begins in preschool. Children are often pushed out of public schools when a school or preschool doesn’t have the knowledge or resources to care for the child. They say, “Maybe this isn’t the best fit for you.” That’s something that my family has heard from our local public school. That’s not really a thing that a special education director should be saying to any family, and we should be concerned about the people who are most marginalized in our communities. When those kids are excluded from public schools, parents are often left with very few options. 

ABA centers market themselves as being able to help children to gain skills and become more independent. But if that were so, why isn’t inclusion in public schools the ultimate goal of ABA centers? ABA centers are not schools. They’re not accredited to provide education. There are very few ABA centers that have transition paths or goals for kids to move out of ABA and into mainstream schools. Instead, many children remain in ABA, sometimes throughout high school, deprived of the opportunity to learn what their peers are learning. It’s a form of educational neglect. 

Children in ABA often aren’t allowed to learn the most basic things. For example, [behavior therapists] often dissuade spelling to communicate, which means that they’re not encouraging autistic kids in ABA to even learn the alphabet. They aren’t taught literacy, they aren’t taught math, they aren’t taught history. That’s sad and scary, because then when these children grow up, all they’ve learned how to do is comply with authority.

There was a hearing a couple of days after yours where a number of East African parents testified about the conditions that compelled them to take advantage of ABA. There’s an element of desperation, in terms of a lack of alternatives, that must be clouding the picture.

It’s a sad reality that there’s a history here in Minnesota of people preying on immigrant communities. For example, in 2017 there were 75 cases of measles identified in the Somali population in Hennepin County alone, a result of anti-vaxxers who saw an opportunity to push their narrative that vaccines cause autism. They targeted immigrant communities with fearmongering tactics. 

The ABA industry pushes itself onto parents by claiming to be the only hope for their children. I’m very concerned that marketing targets immigrant communities without sharing balanced information that will help parents make informed decisions for their families. I’m worried about the conditions in which ABA is the only option. 

A lot of the time, parents are in a desperate situation where it’s like, “I have to go to work to pay the bills, and I have to have a place for my child to be that is safe and supervised.” And instead of lobbying for inclusion, for appropriate support and services in schools, we’re saying, “Well, this kid can go to ABA instead.” 

That’s not good for anyone, because inclusion benefits all of us. Inclusion benefits abled and typically developing people just as much as it benefits disabled people. I think we can see that right now in our current political climate, where it’s been so normalized to “other” people. That causes harm to all of us. 

ABA is problematic in your culture.

I’m Anishinabe. ABA could never meet my needs as a Native person. “Culturally responsive” essentially means to adapt services to meet the needs and values of a person’s culture. Some cultures, particularly settler-colonial culture, values assimilation. Settler-colonial culture prefers when people blend in and are agreeable to authority. ABA is rooted in that.

Behaviorism seeks to control a person’s behavior with the carrots-and-sticks analogy. We reward the things we want to see, we punish the things that we don’t want to see. We all do get rewarded for doing certain actions, and we all could potentially be punished by other actions.

But it’s not the same micro-management of behavior — you can only communicate the way I want you to communicate. You can only experience your senses the way I want you to experience your senses. You can only socialize the way that I have determined is a valid way of being. 

There’s the stereotype that autistic people don’t make eye contact, but that eye contact is a cultural phenomenon. Not every culture thinks eye contact is this great thing. Some cultures find it disrespectful, but ABA doesn’t always take that into account. It’s determined by the [therapists], not necessarily the child and their family and their culture. 

We should all have some self-determination with how we use our bodies. If I’m not hurting anyone else, I should be able to stim. If I communicate best by writing, that should be encouraged, and I should be provided support and tools to do that. Rather than what happens often in ABA, where parents are told, “This will help your child speak,” but it’s not speech therapy. 

One of my children didn’t speak until he was a little bit older. Starting when he was about 2, he would use one or two words here and there, but he wouldn’t combine them. It was tough, because at the time, we didn’t have a diagnosis, we didn’t have any sort of speech language therapy. As a parent, I relied on very basic sign language. And I was thrilled because I could communicate with my kid whether he was using mouth words or not. Do I wish that we had speech language pathology at the time? Yes, absolutely, that would have been great. But we didn’t. I think that if we had pushed that particular child into using mouth words, I think it would have built resentment.

Now he can speak, but his preferred language now is music, which is really cool because he’s a musician. Music is a really strong cultural practice that’s traditional for Anishinaabe people or Ojibwe people. It’s healing for us, something that we love. Why don’t we encourage that, rather than the ABA ideal of mouth words?

In this interview, Hydon, who serves as the director of the School and Educational Settings specialization program at USC’s Dworak-Peck School of Social Work, shares insights on the impact of secondary trauma on educators. Hydon, who has also been a consultant for the U.S. Department of Education, served as president of the American Council on School Work, and led the co-development of an on secondary traumatic stress with other experts in the field. He’s traveled across the country and world to train schools on secondary traumatic stress, many of which were impacted by natural disasters. 

This conversation has been edited for length and clarity. 

What is secondary trauma, and how have you seen it manifest in teachers? 

Secondary traumatic stress is like PTSD, but it’s not your trauma. It’s the trauma of someone that you’re working with. In this case, students. Teachers might hear about neglect, abuse, food insecurity, and they’re exposed to it every day. And so they start to show symptoms that are kind of PTSD symptoms. They can’t sleep, or they avoid certain areas or they’re hyper-vigilant. Sometimes it can make them question whether or not they can stay in the profession.  

I’ve had teachers say to me, “I just don’t think I can do this anymore.”  

What can teachers do to take care of themselves when experiencing secondary trauma?

Self-care is so important, but sometimes it’s hard for teachers because they’re givers. They’re taking care of their students, their families, and sometimes it’s hard to take care of themselves.  

We know that taking care of well-being across life domains — environmental, social, financial, cognitive and spiritual wellbeing can help mitigate the impact of secondary traumatic stress. Taking advantage of vacation, taking your lunch breaks, actually enjoying a good meal, going for a walk outside, making sure you’re checking in–all those things can help remind us that we’re going to be okay. And yes, I might have experienced secondary trauma, but it too will pass.

One thing I’ve seen work really well is groups of teachers coming together for support. In Joppa, Missouri, they had [what they called] The Breakfast Club, where they walked together before school, wore comfortable shoes, and made a rule that they couldn’t talk about work. They’d talk about dinner plans, their weekends—things that weren’t work-related.  

It’s also about finding little moments in the day. Taking a breath. Stepping outside. Even just having a quiet moment to yourself can help. Teachers need to give themselves permission to take a break, even if it’s just for five minutes.  

What can schools do to better support teachers? 

There’s a concept out there called trauma-informed or trauma-responsive schools. It is that everybody in the school is aware of how trauma can impact us. So it’s teachers, it’s bus drivers, coaches. It’s the custodial staff. Everybody in that school knows that trauma can impact all of us in certain ways, and so to be trauma-responsive is to understand that, “Hey, trauma happens. It’s inevitable. It’s going to happen. It’s happened in the past, and it’s going to happen in the future. So let’s be ready. Let’s be understanding. Let’s be gentle. Let’s be aware. Let’s have spaces to bring people together to talk about something.”

Is there anything else you think people should know about secondary trauma among teachers in areas affected by the Palisades, Eaton, and other fires? 

The districts I work with, whether they’re local or regional or national, they’ve been fantastic. When I think of the districts over here—Pasadena, South Pasadena, and LA Unified—I mean, these districts understand crisis response and emergency response and trauma. They’re trained, they’re good at it and they know what they’re doing.  

We should feel safe that our students are going to be taken care of, and that’s important, especially as we see these fires pop up in other places.  

I know that the Santa Monica Malibu School District—it’s a fantastic school district, and the social workers there are awesome. And so we’ve got good people on these grounds and they’re doing good things.

This article is part of a collaboration between The 74 and the USC Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism.

With the exception of an uptick in fourth-grade math scores, virtually every state posted disappointing results compared with 2022, when NAEP was last administered. Only two, Alabama and Louisiana, could boast of achievement in either math or English that exceeded what students enjoyed in 2019. 

Amid the dispiriting national data, Louisiana’s sizable gains in elementary reading were a particular bright spot. After trailing the national average in every prior iteration of the test, local policymakers were eager to celebrate the first time their state managed to pull ahead — the result of both sagging performance elsewhere and real gains at home. 

Cade Brumley, Louisiana’s schools chief for the last half-decade, was among them, in both literacy and math at a press conference Wednesday. A career educator who oversaw impressive gains in rural DeSoto Parish before leading the state’s largest district, he took the statewide job just before the pandemic threw schools across the country into chaos.

Since COVID’s emergence, state lawmakers have also undertaken a long consideration of K–12 policy, passing of literacy instruction in 2021 and establishing a statewide (ESAs) last year. State social studies standards , and Brumley’s Department of Education rolled out an initiative aiming to give teachers more autonomy over their day-to-day tasks. 

The results have been promising thus far, with one research consortium to a significant bounce-back from pandemic-era lows at the beginning of last year. Brumley himself has won a measure of national recognition for his leadership, that he might join the second Trump cabinet. 

In an interview with The 74’s Kevin Mahnken, Louisiana’s superintendent discussed what’s working in his state, the roadblocks he believes prevent teachers from succeeding in the classroom, and how he’s targeting math scores next.

This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity. 

The 74: A number of previous indicators — among them the scores from the last round of NAEP, but also your own state testing — suggested that Louisiana was likely bouncing back from the COVID experience. Were you anticipating good results on the latest exam?

Cade Brumley: This release corresponds with our internal data. When we look at trends on LEAP [the Louisiana Educational Assessment Program, the state’s standardized test], we’re seeing progress on both reading and math. So the NAEP release was not a surprise.

However, it was affirming in many ways. Most of all, it shows that the comprehensive education reform we’ve implemented over the last five years is working. It’s not simply state-level data, it’s national data that’s indicating the progress.

What are the big policy or governance factors that have allowed Louisiana to see this improvement?

I operate from what I call the BRAVE plan: going back to basics, redesigning systems, accelerating parental rights, valuing teachers, and expanding educational freedom. This department is organized to accomplish those things — that’s the way we push out resources, and it’s what drives our conversations with community members, policymakers, and educators. It’s a comprehensive set of reforms we’ve put in place, and it’s really encouraging to see movement.

Right now, we also have a ton of alignment between our governor’s office, our legislature, our state board, and our agency, and that united front helps with implementation in schools. I also think we execute really well. I’ve had conversations with individuals in other states that have attempted similar reforms, but the execution wasn’t what it needed to be. We’re really intentional about both the initial launch of policies, but also support afterwards. 

There are some famous examples of reforms that fall apart between the legislature and the classroom. Are there specific aspects of implementation you’ve focused on?

One thing that’s helped me is that I have experienced so many roles within the system. I can drive a school bus, I can lead a classroom, I can lead a school, and I can lead either a rural or an urban system. When I’m having conversations about education policy, I can relate it to personal experiences when I’ve led in similar situations.

Our teaching and learning team at the Department does a great job. If we’re making hires for our reading team, we’re not bringing anyone onboard who can’t go into a classroom and teach a child to read. We’re not going to hire a staff member to launch or implement in a field when we’re not confident that they can step into a classroom role and deliver math instruction. Those things are important.

Mississippi has received a lot of plaudits for the gains they’ve made on NAEP over the last decade or so. I’m wondering if you’ve consciously emulated the path they took.

I applaud the effort in Mississippi — they definitely stepped out front, specifically on a number of reforms relating to literacy. We had the benefit of seeing that, so our legislative package included items that were in Mississippi’s years before. We probably were a little more assertive, but we absolutely looked at the legislation and policies adopted in Mississippi. Candidly, given the progress they made, why would you not? 

Our reading strategy is the right one, but now we have to work on accelerating math outcomes. It’s good that people can talk about the science of reading, but is there a similar approach to math that is going to be universally accepted? For me, it’s just teaching foundational math skills. Across the country, and in Louisiana, math outcomes decline pretty universally as students matriculate from fourth grade to eighth grade. We want to be the first state in the country to flip that trajectory.

Everyone is pretty familiar by now with some of the big planks of a science-of-reading approach: LETRS training for teachers, universal dyslexia screening, and coaching provided to struggling struggling students, among other things. Can you identify some effective techniques to lift math performance? 

That’s the big question. It’s one that hasn’t been solved nationally, but we have a commitment to try to change it here.  

This gets fairly technical, but in the same way you mentioned LETRS training, at the University of Texas to build a foundational math training; then we required that all math teachers in grades 4–8 undergo that training. We did something similar for K–3 reading, but our math data tells us that serious regression starts in fourth grade, so to mandate that training. 

We’ve done symbolic things, like shipping old-school flash cards with math facts to every elementary school in the state. We’ve used a few online platforms that we feel comfortable supporting, and we offer high-dosage tutoring in both reading and math. Really, we’re trying to take the approach that is yielding results in reading and make it more applicable in math.

If we can blend high-quality instructional materials with confident teachers who are ready to implement them, that’s where the magic happens — particularly when we can also involve parents in that process.

How far does the old-school vision extend? Are you guys going to bring back slide rules?

We’ve got a very wide range of supports, from very traditional flash cards all the way to students getting additional support from AI programs. 

That transition from elementary to middle school is a key area where student engagement declines and learning slows. For all of your state’s impressive growth in fourth-grade reading, eighth-grade scores have been stuck at their current level since before the pandemic. How can educators move this needle?

I can’t necessarily answer for what’s happening in other places, but it’s definitely concerning. If I were to opine on it, I’d say that in certain ways, schools have moved away from the original purpose of educating students in academic content so they can be successful. 

Many schools and systems and educators across the country have chased shiny things, and sometimes even ideologies, that aren’t necessarily relevant to simply teaching kids to read and do math. At a time when funding is becoming less plentiful, and states need to look at academic returns on investment, it’s a really good time to focus on schooling, particularly in elementary schools.

Can you please be more specific about that? What do you mean when you talk about extraneous elements distracting schools from teaching?

Many systems, schools, and educators are unfortunately focused on pursuits that aren’t teaching kids to read and do math, and they’re not trained to do it. Teachers are not clinically trained to be social workers or nurses, and many schools attempt to put them in those roles. I am not suggesting those supports aren’t needed, but it shouldn’t be teachers who are made responsible.

If we effectively train teachers to deliver their content, I think we’ll see outcomes improve. 

I’m not a certified math teacher, but if I were to give an opinion, I’d say there are a few explanations for the dip in math between fourth grade and eighth grade. One is that there’s not enough investment in building math fluency in elementary school. We need to be talking more about those foundational skills in the early years, but fourth-grade teachers have also not received the support and training in pre-service programs to be as successful as we would like. 

I will frequently talk to math teachers in grades 4–8 who never intended to hold the job they have. It was an open job they were able to secure, and they’re doing the best they can do, but we owe all of those teachers the training, support, and resources to succeed in teaching. The data indicate that, across the country and in the state of Louisiana, that’s where the slide happens.

When you mention teachers being asked to act like social workers and nurses, it sounds like you’re referencing like social-emotional learning. 

I’m trying not to get into cultural issues, but yes, I think schools have taken on many tasks that they were never ordained to do. We’re trying to narrow the scope of that.

We launched an initiative called , which was meant to remove some of the onerous bureaucracy on teachers and teacher trainings. We wanted to put our foot down on disruptions that complicate the classroom. In general, we think teachers are important; it’s a noble profession, and they need to be supported. We’ve launched differentiated compensation so that, on top of base pay, teachers can receive additional compensation for merit or for staffing a discipline that is in high demand. They shouldn’t be distracted by having to take on all these additional tasks — and that even extends to needing to leave the classroom to make copies and so on. 

Smart, responsive school systems are thinking about ways to be more efficient and allow their teachers as much time on task as possible.

Some has indicated that the prestige and desirability of the teaching career path is at a very low ebb right now. What would you say to a novice or pre-service teacher in Louisiana wondering if they’ve chosen the wrong field?

I’d start with a few data points. Our teaching workforce in Louisiana has grown. We’ve seen our retention numbers increase, including for first-year teachers. Our last data review showed that the rate of teachers exiting the system decreased by two percentage points. So we’re seeing positive signs.

But there’s no doubt that the teaching profession has been under attack. That’s one of the primary reasons we put together Let Teachers Teach. We pulled together several dozen teachers from across the state, and I basically said, ‘I want real solutions, not an exercise for a press release.’ We worked over a period of months, and those teachers developed a series of recommendations that we’ve since turned into policy, and we’ve implemented them across the state.

The results and growth we’ve seen are a testament to the teachers of Louisiana, and I’ve been clear since these results came out that my first nod of appreciation goes to our educators. We have a statewide ballot measure that would offer teachers a permanent pay raise, and that will be up for citizens to vote for in March. These are people who deserve an environment where they are free to teach. They deserve to work for a principal who is acceptable to them, and they should be compensated like professionals.

Louisiana received about $4 billion in federal ESSER funds for pandemic-era school initiatives. National assessments have shown that the $190 billion in overall ESSER spending didn’t come close to bringing student outcomes back to pre-pandemic levels, but I’m interested if you think the state was helped by the support. 

I think the criticisms of the national program are warranted, and you can tell by looking at the Nation’s Report Card. I’m not suggesting that Louisiana is immune: Too many of our kids still aren’t reading on grade level, too many of them can’t do foundational math, and we have too many students enrolled in schools that fail them. We have a ton of work to do.

With the funding we made available, we did try our best to get our state locked into a few core tenets, which mostly related to academic recovery and professional learning for teachers. We for the public, so they could have transparency on how each system was spending their money. But I can’t disagree with the suggestion that some of the ESSER funding was excessive and wasn’t used in the most appropriate ways. We tried to do our best in this state to be good stewards of those dollars, and I haven’t heard much criticism on the way we handled it.

While the overall NAEP picture for Louisiana is very positive, some of the divides are very stark. Digging into the state snapshot, I noticed that while about three-quarters of white fourth graders are at or above the Basic level for reading — meaning they grasp the fundamental skills of literacy — fewer than one-half of African American students are. What accounts for that divide, and what is your department doing to rectify it?

It’s a problem. We need to make sure that we’re lifting every child out there. Out on the stump, this is a question I get frequently: What are we doing to attack these gaps? 

I don’t like to approach it from the mindset of pulling one set of students down to advance another group, but I feel really comfortable about two things I believe will help close this disparity. One is that we just passed that is responsive to the needs of growing every individual student. It double-weights the bottom 25 percent of achievers in every school, so schools across the state are going to have to identify those particular students and know that they’ll be held accountable for both the absolute performance and the growth of those students.

We also passed a law offering high-dosage tutoring for students between the kindergarten and grade-five levels. Every student in those grades who is not proficient in reading or math has to receive high-dosage tutoring throughout the week to improve those outcomes. We’re also trying to take tutoring to scale across the state. We did a pretty good job last year beginning that work, but it’s something we have to fine-tune.

You’ve cited the expansion of educational freedom as one of your critical goals. I can imagine a lot of state superintendents passionately fighting against the rollout of education savings accounts, which were passed in Louisiana last year. Why do you feel differently?

We believe in a broad portfolio of options. In our state, families overwhelmingly choose their traditional neighborhood schools, but we also have a set of public charter partners. In our state, faith-based schooling actually predates public education, so we have a large percentage of our students in non-public schools. We have a robust homeschool community whose independence we want to protect, and now we have ESAs coming in. So it’s a good mix for parents to choose what makes the most sense for their kids.

Many education advocates would argue, though, that voucher-like programs take resources away from the public system — including charters, which have posted some incredible results in New Orleans. Do you disagree?

I appreciate the question, and it’s certainly something we hear, but you either believe in education freedom, or you don’t. I believe in educational freedom. So I’m going to do everything within my power to make sure we have that portfolio available for families and we do our part to make each of those options as strong as it possibly can be.

How do you plan on celebrating a result like this? Are you headed to a crawfish boil this weekend?

Look, we’re very excited. Our team is excited, teachers are excited, the governor is excited — everyone is happy about the progress. I am thankful too. This is a place we’ve never been as a state.

But too many kids can’t read on grade level. Too many can’t do math. And too many are still stuck in schools that are failing them. We’ve got a ton of work to do.

The former independent presidential candidate has a complicated past as a member of a famous Democratic political dynasty that includes his uncle, former President John F. Kennedy, and his father, U.S. Sen. Robert Kennedy, both assassinated in his youth. He struggled with addiction, and an arrest for heroin possession in the 1980s led him to volunteer with the Natural Resources Defense Council to fulfill community service hours, which jump-started his career in . 

Then, about two decades ago, Kennedy became interested in vaccine conspiracy theories, including the disproven link between vaccines and autism, which has become a focal point of much of his work since. He has peddled other , including that Wi-Fi causes cancer, that chemicals in water can lead to children becoming transgender and that AIDS may not be caused by HIV. In 2021, he was named one of the of misinformation about COVID vaccines on social media. 

Doctors and advocates have expressed alarm about the impact he could have on the department, while some have applauded his more mainstream views, such as a focus on preventative care through healthy eating and exercise and a commitment to removing processed foods from .

His beliefs and proposals are particularly relevant for kids, amid heated debates around school vaccination policies and a in the percentage of kindergarteners who have gotten state-required vaccinations.

If confirmed by the Senate, Kennedy would take control of an agency with one of largest federal budgets — — that employs about 90,000 people across 13 agencies, including , (the latter pays for a host of for eligible children), the and the

To better understand the pediatric and school-based health care implications of some of Kennedy’s proposals, The 74’s Amanda Geduld spoke with Leana Wen, an emergency physician and contributing opinions columnist for . The parent of two school-aged kids is also a professor of health policy and management at George Washington University, a non-resident senior fellow at the and Baltimore’s former health commissioner.

Geduld then spoke with medical legal expert Richard H. Hughes IV about how likely Kennedy’s confirmation is and what kind of power he would wield if confirmed. Hughes is a professor at George Washington University’s law school, where he teaches a course on vaccine law, and a partner at the firm . He formerly worked as the vice president of public policy at Moderna — one of the co-producers of the first FDA-approved COVID-19 vaccines — guiding the company’s policy strategy during the pandemic.

These interviews have been edited for length and clarity.

The medical perspective

The 74: Kennedy has a long record of promoting and even before the pandemic had built a following through his anti-vaccine nonprofit group, . 

In the past few weeks, he’s backed off these assertions a bit, but I’m still wondering what impact his rhetoric around vaccines could have— especially around parents vaccinating their kids. Can you also speak to some of the science behind vaccinating kids in the first place and what impact that’s had on pediatric health care?

Leana Wen: I think it’s important for us to start with the facts and to talk about what happened before there were vaccines for a variety of diseases. In the decades past, prior to vaccines, we used to see children succumbing to diseases that we now do not see anymore. We used to see children becoming paralyzed from polio and their parents being too scared for them to interact with others and go to school. We used to see children with severe, lifelong problems — including with their brains and other organs — because of measles, mumps and other diseases that we now consider to be eliminated thanks to vaccines. 

And so I think part of why vaccine misinformation has caught on is that the current generation of Americans have not experienced how terrifying these diseases have been that vaccines prevent. And I would really hate for us to see these diseases return before people recognize how much vaccines are life saving. 

I think it’s also important for us to mention the facts. It’s a fact that in 1900, 30% of all deaths in America occurred in kids under 5. Now that number is 1.4%. Back in 1900, the three leading causes of death were all infectious diseases. Now they aren’t. Thanks to antibiotics, thanks to sanitation, also thanks to vaccines. 

There was done recently that was published in the journal The Lancet. The study found that vaccines against the 14 most common pathogens saved 154 million lives globally over the past five decades, and that these vaccines cut infant mortality by 40%. 

And so it’s really heartbreaking to hear anyone spread misinformation about vaccines, but certainly it would be extremely concerning from a public health standpoint, if the individual in charge of science and health in this country is the one spreading such falsehoods. This could have a huge impact on trust in vaccines. And unfortunately, that could reduce vaccine uptake and lead to the return of these diseases that we thought were eliminated.

Kennedy has proposed removing processed foods from and limiting the use of food dyes, saying that the U.S. obesity epidemic, as well as a rise in chronic diseases like diabetes, are the result of He recently called out the nutrition department, which he says is Can you talk a little bit about what impact the food that we see showing up in school lunches has on kids, and what we know about food dyes?

I want to focus on ultra-processed food. We know that ultra-processed foods are associated with a whole variety of health problems — certainly things like diabetes, obesity, other chronic diseases like that — but also with depression and early dementia and potentially behavioral developmental issues in children as well. 

Unfortunately, some studies show that as much as 70% of the diet that Americans consume come from ultra-processed foods — that the calories from these diets come from ultra-processed food. I think it would be great if we can start reducing or removing ultra-processed food from school lunches. There has been some research done on food dyes and other additives. Reducing these in school lunches would also be a positive step.

He’s also mentioned that the same way that a doctor can prescribe Ozempic to treat obesity, they should also be able to prescribe, say, and have that covered by health insurance policies. I’m wondering what that might look like for kids as well, and what role pediatricians might play.

I don’t think any pediatrician would disagree with the idea that we have to focus more on prevention — that promoting healthy lifestyle, increasing exercise, improving diet, these would all be excellent for the promotion of health and well-being in our children. 

To be clear, it’s not these ideas that Kennedy is promoting that the medical profession would have an issue with. It’s that mixed in with many of these good ideas, are our concerns about misinformation around vaccines and that traditionally have not been considered to be safe and effective. 

After Kennedy’s nomination, he wrote on on Jan. 20, “The Trump White House will advise all U.S. water systems to remove fluoride from public water.” Can you talk a little bit about the role of fluoride in drinking water — specifically for kids.

This is an area where re-examination of the current policy would be a good idea, because this is a nuanced and complicated issue. On the one hand, we know that fluoridating the water supply has reduced cavities in children, but that effect was seen the most before widespread use of fluoride toothpaste.

We also know that fluoride in large quantities has toxic effects, including on bone development, on teeth discoloration and potentially on the developing brain if consumed by the pregnant woman. And so the question then is, what is the amount of fluid that would be optimal for promoting both dental health and reducing other effects? …

I think these are all reasonable questions to be asking — again, though, using science as the basis and not approaching this as an activist who already has a preconception in mind.

Are there any other policy ideas that Kennedy has put forward that you have thought of as either welcome news and an exciting change or particularly concerning?

None of what we’re talking about here is new. I think we can divide the proposals by Kennedy into three categories. One are things that are good ideas. For example, removing ultra-processed lunch or ultra processed food from school lunches. 

The second category are things that deserve a re-examination, and depending on what we find, may or may not be a good idea. That includes the fluoridation.

And then the third area would be things that have been proven to be wrong. For example, misinformation around vaccines.

And so again, I think to your point, none of these things that have been brought up in the category of good ideas is new, but that’s how I would think about this.

The legal perspective

The 74: Speaking about Kennedy at a rally recently, Trump said, How accurate is that? Can he really go wild on health? What are some of the congressional stopgaps there, and how much power does Kennedy actually have to enact these proposed policies? 

Richard H. Hughes: I think we could break that down into sort of two parts: Is Trump going to make good on that promise? and How far will RFK go? 

I would say that President Trump is very intent on making good on that promise. He went through with the selection of RFK. If you look at the appointments across the board, the nominees he selected are very unconventional. He’s very intent on disruption. 

And if you look at the health appointees in particular, there is some consistency there, right? They all hold really unconventional views. They come from very unconventional backgrounds for these types of roles. There are some questions about the adequacy of some of their experience and qualifications for these roles. There is also some consistency across the nominees that this sort of unconventional, non-mainstream views on COVID and the COVID response, as well as this focus around infections versus chronic disease. A lot of them have said we think we should be focused on chronic disease. A lot of them have espoused misinformation about vaccines. 

In terms of the legal authority, Congress has given a lot of really sweeping power to the secretary. When Congress gives the authority to the executive branch to do something, and it does it really clearly, the executive branch has a lot of leeway … 

So I’ll just give you an example. A lot of the questions I’m getting are about vaccine recommendations and vaccine requirements. There is the (ACIP). That is a committee that is created by the secretary… 

There are all of these requirements for programs or payers to provide coverage of the vaccines that are recommended by the committee. And so there are really interesting questions about, well, if he stopped convening the committee, if he eliminated the committee, what impact would that have?

There’s a potential trickle down effect, because a lot of states actually either look to that committee to determine what their [vaccine] policy should be, or they just refer to the committee and require, say, you know, for school entry, they require vaccination in accordance with the schedule that’s determined by the ACIP. 

That’s sort of a very specific area … 

At the FDA, there’s a lot of room for someone to come in, introduce subjective views on science, and say, “Well, what do we mean by safety? What do we mean by efficacy? Your traditional randomized, controlled trial, that doesn’t tell me what I need to know…” [That] might be the view of somebody at the agency in this administration, and they might try to introduce alternative evidence, and they would have some latitude to do that.

Just turning a little bit more to vaccines, it sounds like whoever is running this agency and convening this committee has a lot of power to potentially help determine what vaccines are going to be covered by health insurance. Is that correct?

That’s right. Congress requires payers to cover vaccines that are recommended by that committee. If those recommendations are rescinded by the secretary, which the secretary has the authority to do, that really throws a lot into question there. 

Now I’m having a really healthy, friendly debate with one of my mentors over the legal challenges that one could bring to challenge that sort of decision. There are some potential checks on this in the courts, but it’s all going to be really circumstantial.

Thinking specifically about schools, you mentioned that folks look to this committee to help determine what vaccines are required for students. Can you explain a little bit about how that works? How might RFK’s policies impact that?

If you’re interested — it’s open access — I just wrote in this month’s issue of Health Affairs on the relationship between ACIP recommendations and state school requirements … 

But, this is the authority of the states, and it’s really interesting in a Republican administration to think about the federalism debate … and you’re going to see this tension play out in this administration over the role of the states and the federal government. 

And it’s going to play out in the arena of public health and around vaccine policy … The federal government can come in and play a really important role when you have a threat that, say, goes across state lines. But states have to be able to enact these measures to protect themselves, to protect their people. 

The Jacobson v. Massachusetts case recognized that states can require immunization. [In] 1922, [in] the case Zucht v. King — lesser known but very important case when we talk about school requirements — the Supreme Court came back and said that a school district was able to exclude a young girl from school when she wasn’t vaccinated, even though there was no active outbreak. 

And so that’s a really, really important case, because if you think about why we require kids to get vaccinated to go to school, it’s a decision that the state makes to impose these requirements so that we don’t have disease outbreaks. It’s the suppression of endemic disease. You take those requirements away, you weaken those requirements, you’re going to see outbreaks potentially. And we’ve seen that with measles outbreaks, where we weaken those policies. 

So it sounds to me less like RFK can put out a mandate that schools federally cannot require vaccines, but more that there could be a trickle-down effect of some of what he does at the federal level, and that might impact then state policies. Is that correct?

Well, yes, but this is something I’m thinking a lot about right now because there is this statute that some of us have looked at over time — — which is the old isolation and quarantine statute that allows, essentially, the CDC to come in and and impose certain measures when necessary to control communicable disease. 

And every semester, I ask students, “Would this actually allow the federal government to impose a vaccine mandate?” And we debate that endlessly, whether that language actually would allow it or not. 

And right now, I think that poses the question: there is preemption language in that statute, so could it potentially be used to set a policy that would undermine state requirements or weaken state requirements? And it’s just a really interesting academic question. I don’t know that realistically that’s something that RFK or the CDC would pursue, but I think we’re living in an era where everything’s on the table.

Well, all of that said, how likely is Kennedy to actually get confirmed? And could there be, from a policy or a legal standpoint, any roadblocks put up in his way?

Yeah, so I do think he’ll get confirmed. I think that what you have seen is President Trump came forward and put together a slate of nominees very rapidly. And all of the ways that you could say that President Trump is inconsistent, he has been very consistent with his health nominees — a lot of similarly held views, a lot of unconventional backgrounds. 

I think just if you look at the pool of appointments as a whole, there’s a lot to take aim at, whether it was Matt Gaetz, his AG nominee () or the selection of the defense secretary nominee (), there’s a lot to provide sort of political fog. And I think that in all of that noise you lose sight of the fact that RFK does not have really the ideal qualifications for the role [and] holds some views that are anti-science. 

And you look to the Senate and ask, “Well, is someone going to stand up and push back and say, ‘We’re not going to confirm this nominee because they lack the qualifications?’” … No one has come out and sort of put a stake in the ground and said, “We’re not going to confirm nominees who don’t meet these qualifications,” or “If they hold these views, there’s no way that they’re going to get a hearing.” 

We just haven’t seen that. And so I do think they’ll get confirmed. I think President Trump expects loyalty from his party. 

School was becoming the place he poured all his energy into, on the heels of his father’s incarceration and uncle’s murder. But simultaneously, from as young as four years old, disgusted looks from educators taught him schools were a place where he would be treated differently because he was Black. Being your authentic self, raw emotions and all, seemed to only be okay for white children.

He watched Eric, a Black classmate frequently isolated and paddled for disruptions or difficulty focusing, be expelled in first grade after bringing a water gun to school. From an early age, aunts and uncles imparting wisdom shared their experiences, told that they “would be lucky if they graduated.” 

Marrying autobiography with research and analysis of education reform movements, Fuller recounts his educational life in devastating detail in Being Black in America’s Schools, “an American story that I honestly believe is begging to be told.” 

From managing suicidal thoughts at eight to becoming desensitized to students’ humanity in pursuit of higher test scores working for a network charter, perpetuating the educational violence he thought he never would, Fuller verbalizes how policies landed in the mind of a Black child and educator. 

Amid debates of how and where Black history will be taught and a youth mental health crisis that is disproportionately felt by Black children, Fuller’s work has been described as a “beacon” that showcases “what keeps us captive while giving keen insights on what can free us,” by Abdul Tubman, activist and descendant of Harriet Tubman. 

Revealing the humans behind data and educational movements, Fuller shows the dehumanization happening in ways big and small in classrooms across the country. Tracked into advanced work in high school, for instance, he remembered how it felt to be isolated from his Black peers, then to see counselors write them, and their futures, off before they’d even graduated.  

“In the same way that the inherent racism in our criminal justice system is killing Black and brown people all the time, the inherent racism in our education system is killing the dreams of Black and brown children in the classroom,” Fuller, now an associate provost at The New School in New York City, told The 74. 

Released in late July by Dafina, an imprint of Kensington Publishing, Fuller’s story exposes hundreds of anecdotes and presents models for transformative change in the education system. Uplifting models that champion children’s emotional wellbeing and cultures, like community schools and the freedom schools of the 1960s, he imagines a future where all children grow up learning Black history, critical thinking, and financial and emotional literacy in order to lead and “dream their way out of a dreamless land.”  

Drawing from time as an educator and administrator in and around Philadelphia, Boston and New York City’s schools, Fuller has also released a workbook companion for educators about how to concretely apply these concepts to the classroom at grade level. 

“I would have loved for them to tell me that I was worthy, to see me as their child, their nephew, a younger version of who they were, to see me the way I witnessed teachers often see my white classmates. To see me as ‘just a good kid.’ … To attempt to understand me rather than punish me. I would have loved for them to ask me about my hopes and dreams and then cultivate them in me. I would have loved for them to have fun with me and show me the joy they felt from being around me,” he writes. 

In conversation with The 74, Fuller reflects on the importance of transforming schools to teach Black children to love themselves and what’s at stake when kids aren’t taught how to interrogate the world around them.

This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity. 

Jelani Cobb, writer and dean of Columbia’s journalism school, calls this “a book we needed yesterday.” Why write this now? What does it mean at this moment? 

Being Black in American Schools really came from a deep commitment of mine to marginalized children, all children, but specifically Black and brown children. And to liberatory education and powerful storytelling. I think this book is so important now in our current climate, given the attack on education that’s happening. The rhetoric in the conversation is pretty horrible.

It’s so important for us to have stories like this one to cut through a lot of the noise of the pundits, the politics because under all of that are the lived experiences of our students in our classrooms.

This book has been a four year journey really for me. In 2020 I was working for the New York City Department of Education. That was a summer where we had the killings of George Floyd, Ahmaud Arbery, Breonna Taylor all over our television screens. What pundits now call the racial reckoning was happening. 

For me as an educator, I was looking at the world and our society and seeing that we were calling to the carpet our criminal justice system in a way that I felt was very valid – starting to interrogate its inherent racism and its inherent flaws. 

I wanted us to have that same conversation about another major American institution, which is our educational system. In the same way that the inherent racism in our criminal justice system is killing Black and brown people all the time, the inherent racism in our education system is killing the dreams of Black and brown children in the classroom. 

I imagine that coming to that realization also shaped the storytelling form you chose for this, weaving in and out of your own personal narrative, research, and historical moments in education reform. How did you decide to do that, and why are those lived experiences so necessary for people to hear and hold? 

It was really important for me to craft the book in the way that I did and I actually fought really hard for it. [Powerful storytelling] is what’s needed to really inspire action and change. Storytelling is what connects us, it’s the human aspect. 

Over the years, through false narratives, through so many things, things get so politicized and so up in the air. There’s not enough of hearing the stories and the real lived experiences of people underneath all of the theories, underneath all of the data. It was really powerful to use my own story – one that is uniquely mine but is not unique, right? 

I talk about being a child of an incarcerated parent growing up. There are millions of children right now who are living that experience. I talk about being one of a few or sometimes the only a Black child or student of color in my classroom as I was being tracked in school [into advanced coursework]. There are hundreds of thousands of children that are experiencing that right now. 

My own story was authentic to me, I knew I could tell it well and analyze it now from my lens as an educator, but also, I felt like it was one that so many people could connect to. I weave in the research and the history and keep it greater than the story because I think it helps people connect to the point that I’m trying to get across … This is what happened, and this is what this means, and this is how it looks.

That comes across in moments like when you describe working in youth development in Philadelphia, seeing the distrust in the community, both for strangers coming to their door and for education after . You feel it, the lived impact of those moments. 

And at so many points, you describe having to advocate for yourself, against the bias of white educators who assumed you cheated or wanted to discipline you or your friends more harshly than your white peers. You show why believing a phrase you repeated often, “I deserve to be here,” was necessary. How do you instill or encourage that in youth who are systemically underserved, and how might we get to a point where youth don’t have to be such fierce advocates? 

I am a strong believer in advocating for yourself, especially as a marginalized person in this world and in our society. In schools, I think how you encourage it is through developing their critical consciousness, developing their own empowering concept of self. 

We come from a legacy of being marginalized, being pushed to the side and being told that we are less-than in society. Because of that, we’re not necessarily the first to advocate for ourselves, especially where we feel discredited or feel like we are seen as second-class citizens. 

I always encourage students that I work with and parents that they deserve to have quality education, they deserve to have a quality experience, and their voice deserves to be heard. 

That advocacy is so important and as you see in the book, my advocacy saved me in many ways. That was something that was really important in my household; my mom taught me to be an advocate for myself because she was an advocate for me. I had that, but not every student is gonna have that because parents come with their lived experiences as well.

To your other question, how do we get to a point where we don’t need to … I think at some level, we will always have to advocate for more for ourselves. �ճ󲹳�’s not trying to be bleak, but I just think that’s reality. How we get to a point where there’s not much as much advocacy needed is really, the point in the book: to first acknowledge that our educational system was, in its current designs and its original intention, not designed to properly educate Black and brown people well. And then start to interrogate the designs – how we restructure an education system so that it serves all students. 

You also explore why early childhood education is particularly important for forming a sense of self. Reports keep coming out revealing how many millions of young children – for some states like New Mexico, one in two – are experiencing parental incarceration, abuse, death or other ACEs [adverse childhood experiences]. How can educators better support the earliest learners with these lived traumas?

And also RST or racial stress trauma, which is still severely underreported. I believe that every child born outside of the nucleus of what American society is, whiteness, experiences some racial stress trauma. 

We know that from the age 0 to 5, so much of your child’s development takes place. Their mental development, their identity of self. When that is compounded with trauma, we have to address that – in our early childhood centers, our Head Start centers, and as soon as they’re entering into school. 

I normally break it down – at the earliest stages, our children have to love who they are. So what does that mean? However they identify needs to be honored, uplifted and they need to be seen, empowered and know that they have a place in our society. They’re not second class in society, they’re not “other” in society. They are front and center and important in society. You do that through building authentic relationships, and in curriculum. Liberatory curriculum is age appropriate, but also brings in the identities of those youngest learners in ways that are normalized, uplifting to their identities. 

The reality we need to face in America is what you just mentioned, most of our students are coming into the classroom with some form of trauma. We are creating an education system that is just ignoring it. Early childhood is also extremely underfunded. We need more mental health counselors and specialists in our early childhood centers … to think about the designs of your classrooms, schools and how you are addressing the needs of your students.

People will probably read this and be like, well, we don’t even have them in our middle or high schools. But that just tells you how much mental health children’s mental health is put on the back burner. We see it in the numbers. . We have to start putting our resources behind these things. 

That’s a part of liberatory education too, providing them with the tools and trained individuals to help them cope with the traumas that are the reality of living in America. 

You go through some models that try to do this very thing and put a huge emphasis on building up Black children – like community schools, the , and in . That emphasis on love, grace and empathy, it’s not something that’s necessarily taught to teachers in preparation programs. How do you remind educators or leaders who are currently in positions of power of that, to champion kids’ humanity? 

It is not taught in our teacher professional development programs as much as it needs to be. There are programs out there – I mention one, Glenn Singleton’s Courageous Conversations work which does great educator professional development around race – but there’s not a lot.

I’m not saying that children shouldn’t learn in your classrooms, but they won’t be able to learn if they’re in your classroom where they don’t feel safe or loved or like they are seen. 

I always say what moves people is storytelling. But also there’s and data out there that actually shows the more a child feels included in the curriculum, the more the child feels safe, or the better relationship the child has with their teacher, the better they’re going to do academically. There’s so much talk on disparities and how do we close the gaps … [We need more] access to that data showing that we need to have an emphasis on identity development and affirming curriculum. We need to have an emphasis on building authentic relationships. We need to have an emphasis on deconstructing bias in your practice. 

When I finished this book, we weren’t in the present day, of course. Now I’m thinking about the potential of what could happen with current policies, like book banning and the banning of diversity and inclusion, and what could come with Project 2025. I think where we need to focus is really on the grassroots. 

At the end of the day, regardless of what’s happening from a legislative standpoint, we still have millions of kids in the classroom that we are responsible for and can’t let fall through the cracks. If they ban diversity, equity and inclusion, so you can’t say those words, then don’t say those words, but still affirm your students in the classroom. Still honor their identity in the classroom. Those are the conversations that we need to be having with our teachers. 

We get caught up on, this is banned now so we can’t do this, or now we can’t teach AP African American studies. No, you can still honor your students and, and you don’t have to call it that, but you can still do it in the classroom on the ground. Our kids are suffering and we can’t continue to allow them to suffer at the hands of a small minority of people.

Particularly as you’re mentioning the hyper emphasis, especially after the pandemic, on learning losses and academic performance. I keep hearing from educators that we cannot lose the person in all of that, because it’s going to make it that much harder to do anything else. 

I hear sometimes this distinction that, oh, well, if we honor our student’s identity or if we really have a focus on what people like to call “soft skills,” they’ll lose the focus on the academic outcomes. Those two things are not separate, they go hand in hand. Children do better when their lived experiences are brought into the classroom, when you tie in real world current events and their lived experience, when you’re able to connect that to what you’re trying to teach them. They feel they feel more connected to what they’re trying to learn and therefore have better outcomes. 

Speaking of censorship and fear culture, in your writing, you express exactly why learning Black history, accurate history, is important for all children at every stage of education. Referencing the first ethnic studies course you took as a college student at Emory, you said it enabled you to “finally put theory and evidence behind many of mine and my family’s experiences. It was as if up until this point, I had been in a battle without armor.” 

Can you speak more on this, which alludes to a James Baldwin quote, about what you found in that course that you wished you had gotten earlier or that you think youth need exposure to today?

My dad was a part of the mass incarceration of nonviolent criminals who faced very long sentencing for drug related charges. I had experienced that act of violence by my society. Then growing up in South Carolina and experiencing on the ground discriminatory comments … I experienced all of that, that legacy of slavery, of racism that was passed down from generation to generation in our American society. 

When I got to Emory, I learned about redlining. I learned about mass incarceration. I learned about Jim Crow laws, I learned about all of these things and it was like, wow, no, I get it now. This isn’t just something that is happening. This is very intentional and it’s by design. It almost was an empowering thing because, as much as I had my family trying to let me know the great contributions of Black people in our society, your lived experiences are telling you a lot of different things counter to that. 

Without having the knowledge of, oh wow, our American society was designed to have these outcomes for this group of people, Black people. It’s not that we’re not as smart, or we’re just not as successful or we’re just not as capable. 

Now I understand the corrupt designs behind that lived experience, why my family and those around me have that experience. Now I understand it and I can go forward and combat it. I think that’s so important for our students to experience. 

The Baldwin quote came from a where he also said, children see everything, they are like a sponge. They’re observing everything but they can’t articulate necessarily what it is that they’re observing. But they know that something is off. They know that there’s some “terrible weight” on their parent’s shoulders that menaces them. That terrible weight is racism, is white supremacy. 

We’re experiencing that every day. Our children are experiencing it every day and they can’t necessarily articulate it. But if they’re not being taught the true history, they’re not being taught how to interrogate society, be civically engaged, and understand those individuals that were critical thinkers of our society – individuals like Baldwin, Malcolm X, Dr. Martin Luther King. If they’re not taught the designs of our American society, then that is still a very disempowering curriculum that perpetuates racial propaganda and a social caste system in America. 

It’s so important at the earliest stage I got a little bit of it at home. My first [classroom] experience of it was when I got to college, but children need to be experiencing that at the earliest ages of early stages of their educational experience that is developmentally appropriate. 

I just want to emphasize that perspective and name that it runs counter to the narrative that I often hear used to minimize the importance of teaching Black history or systemic racism: this is going to teach kids to hate America, that they will feel depression, not pride. 

I hear those same things that you’re talking about, we don’t want to feel bad, or sometimes, we don’t want kids to feel guilty for things that they had nothing to do with. But to teach truth and to learn truth is empowering for everybody. It puts everyone on the same playing field. 

It’s so empowering for a Black child to know, hey, it’s not just because of who I am innately. It’s because of the legacies of how this country was designed and policies and practices that took place that impacted my ancestors and now have impacted me. Then, what can I do now to change those things so that my legacy can be different? Or my children, grandchildren, whoever’s can be different? That’s empowering for a white child too, like, oh, this is, this is where we messed up in the past. Now what can I do to make sure that we don’t repeat that in the future? 

This book is also referred to as a call to action. To whom and for what are you calling out for? 

There are three things I hope people get from this book. One is first just the knowledge and the acknowledgment that our educational system and in its original intention and current designs was to perpetuate a racial and social hierarchy within our American society. 

Then, let’s look at the designs of our educational system and figure out, in what ways is this design perpetuating that hierarchy so we can start to redesign, reimagine, make necessary change. So that those in power who are able to make the change from a legislative perspective, do that. Those in power who are able to make the change from a school design perspective, do that. Those in power who are able to make the change from interactions with students in the classroom, do that. And then those who maybe are not a parent or educator per se but are interested in the ways that we educate children in this country, they can then start to advocate for those for changes within their local communities and school systems. 

My hope is that this book really inspires us all to action. All of us play a part in that. You don’t have to be senator or work for the federal Department of Education. I hope that this book really makes everyone feel like they all have a part in it and they all can be actors agents of change. 

How could a system millions rely on simply not exist?

Wuori’s answer: That a “crisis of misunderstanding” has turned early childhood centers into an exceedingly expensive and “industrialized form of babysitting” based on the false idea that child care is somehow separate and distinct from education. Instead, Wuori says babies learn from birth — and some research suggests even before that — and their time outside the home should be treated as schooling, not as a place for them to be watched over while their parents work. 

In not embracing learning as an essential purpose, the current child care system, Wuori says, is harmful both educationally and economically for children, their parents, child care workers and society at large.

“All environments for young children are learning environments,” he said. “The question ultimately comes down to, “Is your child in a good one?”

Wuori, who espouses a “transformative” investment of public funding in early child care, began his own career in the field over three decades ago in the classroom. Teaching in an afterschool program “lit the fire” in his interest in child development and inspired him to return to graduate school.

After teaching kindergarten in South Carolina public schools for five years, he moved into school district leadership before spending 14 years as the deputy director of South Carolina’s Early Childhood Education Agency, . 

He eventually founded a public policy consultancy practice, , focused on the needs of America’s young children and their families. Through his work, he partners with state elected leaders and advises them on early childhood policy topics. 

But Wuori is perhaps best known for his social media presence on where he posts delightful videos of babies, using them to explain key child development concepts. His feed, which has amassed a prominent following, was recently described in a New York Times as “educational, but also, simply put — ‘awwwww.’”

Your baby learns to speak – not just from listening – but from watching.

I’ve written many times about the keen observational powers of babies. Infants are expert observers of their parents’ faces, which (among other lessons) provide important clues as to how mom and dad…

— Dan Wuori (@DanWuori)

Days before the official release of his book, The Daycare Myth: What We Get Wrong about Early Care and Education (and What We Should Do about It), Wuori spoke with The 74’s Amanda Geduld.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity. 

The 74: Your book makes the argument that day care doesn’t exist. I think readers will hear that and say, “Well, my kid is in day care. So what do you mean that it doesn’t exist?” Can you explain what you mean?

Dan Wuori: What I mean by that is that for the better part of 100 years, we have had a policy in place — one that has really created services that are designed to support parental employment more than they are designed to support the optimal development of young children. The central thesis of the book is that we have fooled ourselves into thinking that there is this thing called day care, or child care, that is separate and distinct from education… 

What we know from decades of science at this point is that that’s simply not the case. We know that young children are learning, not only from day one, but increasingly, we have this understanding that some very powerful early forms of learning actually may begin in utero. And so that’s a very different proposition, right? 

… This artificial distinction between care and education is really what I’m talking about … We have conceptualized child care as almost like a holding facility, right? We’re thinking about very custodial forms of care, and that translates, in many cases, into policy. We have states that are proposing, for example, as a solution to the financial crisis that the child care industry finds itself in, deregulating in ways that sort of strip away any requirement other than those that just entail the very basic health and safety of those kids. And that is a very low bar, and, frankly, a dangerous bar, and one that frankly, we end up paying for in the long term.

You also note that the vocabulary we use matters. If we’re getting rid of the term day care, what should we be using instead?

The truth is the term day care has fallen very much out of fashion even in the field in recent years and been replaced with child care. What I would love to see is an acknowledgement that this is all either early childhood education or early care and learning. Because some acknowledgement that ultimately these are not simply holding facilities for children, [but[ that these are powerful learning laboratories, and developmental spaces, and that’s true regardless of what the sign out front says. 

All environments for young children are learning environments. The question ultimately comes down to “Is your child in a good one?”

You talk also about how our current model, “Simply doesn’t work, and it doesn’t because it can’t work.” Can you explain a little bit of what you mean by that? 

What I’m talking about in that section is our current economic model for child care. What we know about child care is that it is sort of like a broken, three-legged stool. We know, for example, that parents are paying more for child care in most every state at this point than they pay for in-state college tuition or for their housing costs. And so that it is unaffordable to parents in really significant ways. 

We know concurrently that for the business owners themselves, this is not a profit-making venture … Providers are scarcely keeping their doors open, and the whole sad thing is sort of cobbled together on the backs of a low-income workforce that is almost exclusively female, and in many states, majority women of color, who are literally subsidizing the cost of care to families in the form of their low wages. 

They are highly dependent on public assistance programs themselves, making at or near minimum wage in most states. And in fact, according to some recent data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, making roughly 60 cents an hour less than we pay dog walkers in this country.

The whole thing gets down to: we talk about all of those different forms of crisis that the field is in. There’s a compensation crisis, and there’s an access crisis, and there’s an affordability crisis. But the book makes the case that all of those crises are really a side effect of the fundamental crisis in the field, which is a crisis of understanding. 

That we are failing to acknowledge these settings for what they truly are, and that as a result not only are we sub-optimizing this incredibly powerful window of human development, but we are saddling taxpayers … for decades to come for the result of our inaction and our failure to get things right in the early years in ways that are ultimately far more costly than doing things right in the first place.

Throughout the book, you make arguments for why we need to shift this system — for economic reasons, for educational reasons and just because it’s the right thing to do. What would a shift in this system look like, both practically on the ground and in terms of outcomes?

Yeah, I think about that question in two categories, really. The big picture message of the book is that we need transformative public investment in young children and families. I have also worked in the public policy space and with policymakers long enough to know that transformative system change very rarely happens in one fell swoop. So while making the case, for example, that early childhood development needs to be seen as a public good instead of a private market service, the book … also suggests then both some low-hanging fruit in terms of things that we could do proactively right now in ways to help improve compensation, for example, but also there’s an entire chapter that is dedicated to what I have labeled sort of forms of public policy malpractice — examples of federal and state policy where maybe with all the right intentions, the execution of our policy is actually exacerbating some of the financial crisis in the field. 

… I see policymakers increasingly saying to me, “You know what I get the brain development pieces of this. I know this is important. I know we need to do better. What I don’t know is, how do we pay for it?” 

And one of the major messages in the book is we are already paying for it. We’re just doing it in the dumbest possible ways. We are very much taking out, at scale, a payday loan that we are meeting our very basic immediate financial needs at the highest possible long-term cost to taxpayers … We’re paying more in terms of remediation and retention and special education throughout our K–12 system. We are paying for worse health outcomes … that could be mitigated against by doing right in the early years …

There’s an anecdote later on in the book that was recounted to you about how much some of these early child care and education teachers are struggling financially. Can you share that?

I had the good fortune two summers ago to partner with the state of Kansas on a listening tour as they were assessing the strength of their early childhood system. I traveled across the state, talking with business leaders and early childhood providers and parents, and got into a conversation with a child care provider. 

We’re there, and I was asking her, “What do you need most? How could state policymakers help support you?” And she said, “Oh, well, you know, the thing that I really need the most is a floating substitute who could sort of go from classroom to classroom.”

And I said, “Oh, that makes a lot of sense. Like, somebody to help give teachers a break or use the restroom or have lunch to themselves?” And she said, “Oh no, we mostly have that covered. I’m worried that I need to give them time to get to the bank.”

… And so I said, “Oh, you know, to deposit their checks?” And she said, “Oh, no. Not that kind of bank. I can’t pay them enough to feed their families, and so I try to make time for them each week to be able to visit the local food bank.”

And boy, that just — I mean, to this day, that’s one of the most upsetting stories that has been conveyed to me in this field in my career. These women, who are literally being entrusted to help co-construct the brains of young children, are making so little that we would have to be sending them to a food bank despite their full-time employment in what I could argue is the world’s most critical profession.

One framing motif that you use throughout the book is the food pyramid (released in 1992 by the U.S. Department of Agriculture based on what turned out to be of healthy eating). Can you explain why you chose that motif and how it reflects what’s happening in this day care myth?

I use that food pyramid example as sort of a framing around an area of public policy that we got boldly and catastrophically wrong and raise the question for readers: Where might we be doing that currently? What’s happening in our public policy that 20 years from now, we might look back at and say, “Wow. We can hardly believe we ever got something so wrong.” 

And the book really makes the case that right now in our approach to young children and families we have created … this bizarro world for children that — in so many ways unexamined — is precisely the opposite of what we know from the science of early development …

One good example of that is that we know that the earliest weeks and months of life in particular play an absolutely critical role in attachment … And so then we juxtapose that against knowing that this is a country where 1-in-4 American mothers have to return to the workforce within two weeks of giving birth. And you know that in our early childhood settings we are seeing data that suggests that the teachers in those programs turn over to the tune of about 40% a year … And so during precisely the weeks and months of life that young children most need continuous, stable, nurturing relationships, we are seeing those relationships interrupted — both by a lack of paid family leave provisions and through our terrible misunderstanding of the importance of out-of-home, early childhood settings, in ways that are bound to fail us later on. 

… My hope is that the book is an opportunity for us to press pause and to really rethink some of the underlying assumptions around how we have structured provisions for young children and families in this country and to come together on a bipartisan basis. One thing that I feel very strongly about — and I’m very proud of in the book — is this idea that … if ever there was an issue that really should bring us together across the partisan continuum, this ought to be it, because it makes sense for children, it makes sense for the strength of nuclear families, it makes sense in terms of our economy, it it makes sense for taxpayers … There really is something for everyone — hopefully in this conversation and hopefully in the book.

Famous in the institutional lore of New York City public schools, the rubber room was actually a number of spaces, called Temporary Reassignment Centers, where hundreds of teachers awaited arbitration related to official claims of incompetence, insubordination or abuse. They’d been removed from classrooms and spent years going through the process, all the while receiving full compensation. 

When veteran journalist Steven Brill introduced the term into the wider American lexicon with published in the New Yorker, it instantly became a byword for the ailments that many believed were ruining American schools: Too-powerful unions protected unfit workers from being fired, while feckless administrators filed paperwork and awaited hearings that might never come. All the while, kids paid the price.

His investigation, later expanded into a book-length treatment, wasn’t greeted with universal praise. Critics accused him of attempting to “” teachers while subjecting deep-pocketed charter school supporters to . In the New York Review of Books, education historian and reform foe Brill’s book was actually “about politics and power, about how a small group of extremely wealthy men have captured national education policy.”

Still, the story became a central text during the reform movement’s golden age, with newly elected President Barack Obama pushing states to tighten academic standards and link decisions on teacher hiring and compensation to standardized test results. Local education leaders — none more prominent than those Brill profiled, New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg and his chancellor of public schools, Joel Klein — attempted to oblige, often coming into fierce conflict with teachers’ unions through their support of charter schools.

As the most determined reformers discovered, nothing gold can stay. The decade-long push for testing and accountability generated an even stronger response from educators, parents and policymakers, whether the being implemented were worth the incremental gains in student test scores. By the middle of the 2010s, Washington had , and most districts began to reconsider their own posture toward school improvement.

The latest example: In New York, lawmakers of measures that had allowed districts to expedite the termination process for tenured teachers, effectively allowing each school system to establish its own teacher evaluation process. In July, Gov. Kathy Hochul signed the repeal, which counteracted legislation that had been enacted by her predecessor, the reform-minded Gov. Andrew Cuomo, less than a decade earlier.

Brill professes ambivalence about the change. The rubber room may have been an intolerable feature of schools in his hometown of New York, but he believes the steps taken to eliminate it were largely “cosmetic” to begin with. A student of complex and hard-to-change systems — after writing a book-length treatment of dysfunctional schools, , he moved on to a volume on — he strikes a cynical tone on the near-term possibilities for improvement.

In a discussion with The 74’s Kevin Mahnken, Brill spoke about the political shortcomings of reformers like Klein and Michelle Rhee, the organizational exhaustion facing charter schools, and what he describes as teachers’ unions legitimate arguments against education savings accounts.

“If you shift the political power and market power to people getting vouchers, you lose the constituency that funds and manages and holds accountable public schools,” he said.

This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

The 74: What’s your response to New York reversing course on these policies? And what do you think was the legacy of your reporting on the “rubber room”?

Steven Brill: I have questions of my own about how much policy has actually changed since my story came out. 

To the extent that Race to the Top had any effect, it’s long in the past. To win that competition, New York State enacted certain changes in process that were cosmetic and useless. From what I know of the rubber room, was that they stopped having teachers appear in one place, where some pesky reporter could go and find them. They still didn’t have to do any work, they just didn’t have to gather in one place.

To come to your larger question, I’m not sure how much of a difference this repeal makes. I’d want to know if there was some district, somewhere, that actually showed some real teeth in their accountability requirement and now have to abandon that.

If there was an exodus of low-performing teachers from New York classrooms over the last two decades, we never heard about it.

No. And if your only recourse is to fire teachers — as opposed to holding back salary increases from some that need improvement, or giving good ones bonuses — it’s not likely to work anyway. 

As far as I could tell, the principal problem of public education had to do with having some quality control, accountability, and incentives. All of which the private sector has in most workplaces, especially workplaces that actually matter, but which there’s a total lack of in public education in New York and a lot of other cities. 

The irony is that I went from writing about public education’s failings to writing about healthcare, where I found the problems to be exactly the opposite. In public education, I think it’s generally true that the people actually doing the educating were under-compensated and not given any kind of performance accountability. Whereas in healthcare, the people actually doing the healthcare are also under-compensated, but the ones really ruining the system are everyone except the doctors and nurses and orderlies; it’s the insurance companies, the hospital administrators, the drug companies, the equipment makers. 

In other words, in medicine, the people who aren’t abusing the system are the doctors. But in public education, I think there’s a pretty good argument that the people abusing and undermining the system are actually the teachers.

What’s the lesson you draw from that comparison? Are these just the vices of the public sector versus those of the private sector?

What I’m really driving at is that the structure around American healthcare is what undermines it, creating profit incentives for everybody except doctors and nurses acting in good faith. In public education, there are no incentives, and the reason there’s no change is that the workers basically get to help elect their bosses.

I don’t think it’s a matter of doctors being more accountable in the private sector. If you compare public sector doctors with private sector problems, you notice the same problem, which is not the doctors themselves but rather everything around the system.

A moment ago, you mentioned that teacher accountability needs to involve both carrots and sticks. And it’s true that the hard-charging reformers, like New York City’s Joel Klein or Washington, D.C.’s Michelle Rhee, created political problems for themselves by being perceived as hard on teachers. Do you think they should bear most of the responsibility over the intense conflicts that arose over education reform in major school districts?

Maybe people like Joel Klein were just too instinctively combative toward the union, but I would put the onus on the other side. The worst thing you could say to [American Federation of Teachers President] Randi Weingarten, other than that a teacher should be fired, is that a teacher should get a bonus.

I really like Randi, but to her, that idea was extremely divisive. I remember having conversations with her, and she’d say, “Who is a principal to judge what makes an effective teacher?” And I wondered, “If you don’t want to use test scores, what else is there?” In every other workplace, a supervisor is responsible for judging the comparative effectiveness of his workforce in one way or another. 

So it goes in both ways. Some of it may have been unduly confrontational from the management side, but it was certainly unduly combative on the workers’ side as well. My view is that we should start by having teachers be much better compensated, and beyond that, we should be able to have positive accountability: If someone’s a really good teacher, they should be able to be promoted rapidly and compensated fairly. That doesn’t happen. It’s not an environment where that can happen.

In charter schools, which have their own set of sustainability problems that I’ve written about, it does happen — maybe to excess, but it happens. If your focus is purely on the kids, it’s easier to just ask the question, “Which teacher is doing the most for kids?” rather than “Which teacher has been breathing for the last 20 years?”

You were writing about these issues at the zenith of the education reform movement, right in the early Obama years. What would you pinpoint as the beginning of the end of that period of possibility?

When did [New York City Mayor Bill] de Blasio get elected? Whenever that was, I’d put it there.

The first time I ever met de Blasio, I was in a public meeting where politicians were arguing over the location of some charter schools. This was in a big auditorium in Lower Manhattan. And this big, tall guy stands up, introduces himself as a city councilman, and says that charters are just a right-wing plot by hedge funders to get rid of public education. It was a big speech.

At the end, when I found him and asked which charters he had in mind, he said he was talking about Success Academy. I asked, “But if they’re so terrible, why would all these parents line up to try to get into the lottery?” He said he didn’t have time to talk, but he gave me his card. 

His election as mayor of education reform. Then Rahm Emanuel’s mayoral tenure ended in Chicago, and his successors didn’t feel the same about education reform. So you’d place the implosion somewhere in there. I don’t think there’s any big district run by reformers anymore.

It’s instructive just to look at who’s in charge. Michelle Rhee and Joel Klein haven’t run districts since I was in college. Randi Weingarten is still here, and as close to the pinnacle of the Democratic Party as she’s ever been.

I think the unions basically waited everybody out. Randi helped negotiate with [then-Deputy New York Education Commissioner] John King to get the final Race to the Top application in, and after it went through, and called Joel Klein. We just laughed about it because it was such bullshit. You knew it was never going to mean anything.

The only upshot was that they decided, “Why do we have these rubber rooms that a reporter can find? Why don’t we just use the principal’s office in a school or something?” And I think that’s basically what’s happened.

Have your views on charter schools changed? I remember that your observation from this period was essentially that they have some promise for the children enrolled in them, but they can’t possibly be scaled sufficiently to make a meaningful impact on American school quality.

What I always felt about charter schools was that, first, they shouldn’t be thought of as a cure-all because there were always going to be scams and bad schools. And those should be held every bit as accountable, or more so, than a traditional public school. 

But there was a second thing that I was always sensitive to as someone who has run companies. And that is, at a certain point after the first or second year, the adrenaline wears off for a young teacher working 10–12 hours a day and meeting with parents and kids on weekends or times of crisis. That experience just has to be made more normal for teachers. One of the young charter teachers that I tracked in my book just experienced a life change when she had kids and couldn’t keep going. You can’t expect people not to burn out and turn over as time goes on. 

When I was first looking at them, the energy around the Success Academy schools was equivalent to that of a political campaign. I mean, people were working all-out, 24/7, and . [Success Academy founder] Eva Moskowitz has done a very good job of normalizing that. I remember, towards the end of when I was writing my book, the founders of another charter network instituted a rule stating that some proportion of their faculty couldn’t be on email over the weekends. It was the beginning of realizing that the jig was up in terms of everybody running at a full sprint all the time. If you think about a big organization sustaining its energy and its quality, you really have to start doing that.

On the positive side, charters provided competition in the best sense of the word. When I found out that Success Academies co-located in the same building as New York City public schools, I immediately saw that as a perfect story. It was like a science experiment in that there was literally a line going through the building, and the results on either side were so different. What explained it? The money was the same, so it had to be something else. 

To me, that is the surviving benefit of charter schools, along with all the value that kids got out of them.

Their value was as a proof point of what could be accomplished?

It should really be an embarrassment. But that’s where politics comes in. People like Randi were willing to sustain the embarrassment for a while and wait it out.

What do you make of the spread of universal education savings account programs? Do you think they could help bring about improvements to public schools, or are you worried about a potential lack of accountability in that sector?

Here’s the theory: If you give me, as a parent, $10,000 dollars a year to get an education for my 10-year-old, and I can spend it on whatever educational costs I choose, then the marketplace will work. I’ll spend my $10,000 in the place where I’ll get the most value, which would typically be defined as the best education in math, reading, civics, athletic opportunities, and everything else a school is supposed to do. It wouldn’t be defined as the best Orthodox Jewish education or indoctrination into a certain political standpoint, but it would be education.

The problem is, how do you try to hold accountable everyone who gets those $10,000 checks? You end up with the same kind of system as public education. Maybe you send your kid to a school down the block with nine other kids, and the total cost of that to the public is $100,000 for 10 students. Someone — and you would think it would be Republicans leading this charge — would want to make sure taxpayers are getting the most for their $100,000.

So how do you do that? I’m asking because I actually don’t know. What does, say, Florida do to make sure kids in a private choice school are reading at the level you want them to? In charters, kids take tests, and the schools’ scores are public. I’m not convinced that a public elementary school should have a monopoly on those kids either; they should have to earn it. But a lot depends on whether we’re holding accountable the schools receiving those $10,000 checks. 

A lot of ESA proponents would make the argument that by voting with their feet and withdrawing their kids if results aren’t good.

Well, take New York. My kids, because their parents have money, all went to private schools in Manhattan. You’d better believe those private schools were accountable for the ridiculous fees they were getting to educate our kids. If they suddenly weren’t getting into college or learning how to read, those schools wouldn’t exist because the marketplace would do its work, and they’d close. 

That’s hardly a solution to the shortage of educational opportunity. You can’t say, “Let’s just keep those alternatives for wealthy people and nobody else.” I understand the inclination to not have that be the only alternative to public schools. But you do have to set up some kind of accountability and regulation. In the case of the elite schools on the East Side of Manhattan, the accountability is that parents, by and large, are really sophisticated and tough. Sometimes they’re too tough and too demanding. But it works.

The political war around this issue seems so contentious that you wonder if any kind of compromise exists to introduce a level of accountability besides parental choice.

The other issue the unions raise — and they’re probably right in this case — is that if you shift the political power and market power to people getting vouchers, you lose the constituency that funds and manages and holds accountable public schools. 

If I were Randi Weingarten, the example I would use is that of jury duty. This is going to sound way off-topic, but it’s not. Some years ago, a new chief judge was appointed to run the court system in New York, and the first thing she did was for jury duty. In the past, if you were a good citizen and reported for jury duty, they’d send you to this dingy place where there weren’t enough chairs to sit down and clerks treated you terribly. It was just a miserable experience.

Judge Judith Kaye started hearing complaints from neighbors and lawyer friends and people at her country club, basically saying, “My God, have you seen what it’s like to go to jury duty? It’s disgusting, you can’t use your laptop, the people are so rude!” And jury duty in New York is now a much better environment and much more democratized. 

My point is that if there were a constitutional amendment saying that all K–12 schools in the United States needed to be fully public, those schools would get a lot better. Trust me, the kinds of people who ended up in the rubber room would be hounded out. But it’s perfectly tolerable if some kid in Harlem is subject to those teachers while my kid is off at a private school.

As you mention, a situation like that would be politically unworkable. I wonder if we’re heading toward the inverse scenario, in which everyone is given choice.

Another analogue, which is a sign of the times, is to imagine how nice commercial air travel would be if you banned private jets. We should think of the voucher movement in those terms. People are saying, “I’m a captive of these crappy public schools — why are you allowing it? Is it because the teachers elect you?”

Another big change in the education world over the last decade or so has been the dramatic shift in focus toward matters of equity, which has recently proven controversial in some of its manifestations. I’m thinking of San Francisco trying to stop teaching Algebra in eighth-grade, or KIPP from “Work hard. Be nice.” What’s your view on these developments?

I think it’s just awful. The idea that working hard was something negative — what does it even mean?

I wrote a book about the problems of the intensely merit-based society that we’ve become. But it was really meant to be a critique of how we decide merit. The idea that everybody should have the same outcome, rather than the same opportunity, is just ridiculous. Politically it’s a total loser because obviously most people think they’re the exception in some way.

Another area where we’re seeing the debate over merit play out is in college admissions, where high-prestige institutions are now like the SAT to determine their applicants’ ability. For a few years there, it looked like we might be .

The first long magazine article I ever wrote was about what a scam the Educational Testing Service and the College Board were. But that had to do with the merits of the test, not the idea of testing for merit. If you’re left with nothing but your high school grades to get into college, and the Ivy League just accepts the top 2 percent of every school, that doesn’t work. That’s saying to parents, “Whatever you do, don’t send your kids to Stuyvesant or Brooklyn Tech because the odds of finishing in the top 2 percent are tiny.”

What I try to set aside is the question of whether the merit-based tests reflect true merit. Life is always unfair in different ways. I always wanted to be a pitcher for the Yankees, but if the tryouts involve how fast you can throw a baseball, it’s not going to work out. That’s just how life is.

When I spoke with Bill Gates last year, he compared school improvement efforts very unfavorably with his foundation’s successful work to lower malaria deaths. Specifically, he called American K–12 schools a “challenged space.” Would you agree with that assessment? If so, why?

That’s a very interesting observation. I think it’s because nobody’s against cutting malaria. 

The malaria lobby isn’t that strong. But you run into a whole set of challenges when you do all the things Gates tried with schools. And some of his investments were entirely logical! 

He was willing to invest money in having teachers be able to be observed by their supervisors. Who could be against that? It turns out, a lot of unions were.

So again, who is against holding teachers accountable, both in a positive and a negative way? Who’s against changing the type of textbooks that get used? The people who sell the current textbooks. Who’s against having schools structured in a new way? The people whose jobs depend upon the current structure.

I have a house in a village in Westchester called Katonah. Katonah is part of Bedford, but each place has a separate school district, and each district has a superintendent who supervises the same number of students as a large middle school in the Bronx. And the last time I looked, each of those people had a salary nearly equivalent to Joel Klein’s when he was the chancellor of New York City schools. 

But if you try to merge 6–10 school districts in Westchester and form a school system about half the size of the Bronx, you’ll get resistance from whoever is the superintendent, the deputy superintendent, the general counsel, the purchase manager, and anyone else who has good jobs in those districts. That’s different from finding a cure for malaria.

“Why,” she asks, “are so many of America’s brightest students apparently interested in teaching but not availing themselves of the training their school has to offer?”

A decade later, Harvard Graduate School of Education lecturer Zid Mancenido continues to study these same questions. As a former high school social sciences teacher in Canberra, Australia, the educator and researcher says in some ways his work is autobiographical. When he was an undergraduate student deciding to become a teacher, he said he heard his peers say, “I’d love to be a teacher but…” He now wants to better understand this apprehension.

“Often when we talk about teacher recruitment we only talk about things like how much teachers are paid or this amorphous thing like teachers aren’t prestigious enough … All of those extrinsic motivators [do matter],”, Mancenido said, “but there’s a lot of subtle, more social drivers around those things that really need to be paid attention to.”

Mancenido first began exploring these questions as part of his doctoral research at Harvard, when he collected the stories of over 100 college seniors or recent graduates to gain a greater understanding of what differentiates people who are categorically uninterested in teaching, those who are interested in teaching but ultimately pursue another career and those who are committed to teaching. 

Recently, he spoke with The 74’s Amanda Geduld about his work and why, despite permeating defeatism about how to improve the education system, he ultimately remains hopeful. 

This interview has been edited for length and clarity. 

The 74: Can you share an overview of your “How High Achievers Learn That They Should Not Become Teachers,” and some key findings?

Zid Mancenido: This paper tries to get a little deeper into the questions of “What makes someone want to become a teacher?” or “What makes someone not want to become a teacher?” Often in the news or in public media, people talk about, “Well, it’s just about pay” or “It’s about pathways,” or “It’s about, you know, schools being really messy.” There are just lots of ideas about what it could be for why people want to or don’t want to become teachers …

What I found is that high achievers aren’t born knowing that they want to become teachers or they’re not born knowing that teaching isn’t an appropriate career path for them. They learn it and they relearn it through a number of signals that are built into their interactions with family and friends. They learn it through others’ expectations of them and their careers. They learn it through observing the career trajectories of their role models and their peers. And it really emphasizes that these sort of negative conceptions of teaching that we all sort of generally know but can’t really land entirely. They’re really fostered and reinforced by all the social signals that are around us.

So if we really want more people — more academic high achievers — to become teachers, we need to work on that social discourse. We can’t just be thinking about the individual’s choice in becoming a teacher. We have to think about how everyone perceives and thinks about teaching and how that influences people’s decision making.

What are some of those signals that high achievers are receiving? 

A lot of people might think that these signals are explicit. They’re things like parents and friends responding to you when you say, “Oh I think I’m becoming a teacher,” and those parents and friends say, “No, don’t become a teacher. You shouldn’t do that. You’re too smart for that,” or something like that. And that’s something I did hear amongst my participants. Many of my participants did mention explicit signals like that.

But rather what most participants reported was that it’s much more subtle. It’s things like going to career fairs and seeing that everyone is milling around corporate, high-flying jobs — legal pathways, medical pathways — but very few people standing around the teaching pathways, the sort of social, public service career pathways. It’s in lots of people coming into college and saying they’re really interested in social-impact careers, but then all of them taking pre-med, pre-law, economics, business, all of those sorts of majors.

It’s in the really, really subtle way that as one of my participants, Amanda, mentions that when she says that she’s interested in becoming a lawyer or a diplomat or something like that, people light up and go, “That’s a really exciting career. I’m so excited for you.” But then when she says something like, “Oh, I’m interested in becoming a teacher,” they go, “Oh, that’s really nice.” And then change the subject.

Part 1: Students are exposed to messaging — both explicit and subtle — that teaching is not a desirable career. Harvard’s Zid Mancenido wants to fix that

I know this is a question that you’ve been asked before, but what made you focus specifically on high-achieving students and how do you define what a high-achieving student is?

This is a really messy and challenging thing because truthfully there’s so many ways to be a high achiever in the world … And often because of the sort of standard, conventional ideas of what makes someone a high achiever, we’re really limited and we box kids into saying, “Oh, you’re an achiever or not.”

So I recognize that it’s a really complex social environment with these sorts of identifying figures. I wanted to step back and go — who do we want in the profession? We want smart, talented, funny, committed people, passionate people who are interested in what they’re doing.

And when I looked to the literature and the recent work around what kinds of teachers lead to more academic outcomes in schools, I found there’s a bit of a mismatch there of like, well, we want these kinds of people to be teachers, but we’re not really measuring that. 

What we are measuring in the research is academic achievement. And what we do find is high academic achievement amongst intending teachers does predict future improvements in student outcomes …

Would increasing pay be effective? How necessary is the social component? And how do you see this playing out on the ground, from a policy perspective?

What my research suggests is exactly what the research really has continued to affirm over the past few decades: There’s no silver bullet to getting more academic high achievers into teaching. 

What is particularly interesting about all of the work on offering financial incentives at career entry — scholarships, loan forgiveness or alternative certification pathways — all that research generally finds those policies to be effective, but some of the research finds that it’s only effective for individuals who are already interested in teaching. So if you’re interested in teaching, but you’re on the edge of, “Do I do teaching or not?” scholarships, loan forgiveness, all of that makes you more likely to want to become a teacher.

What that’s missing, though, is that whole other pool: people who aren’t interested in teaching because they haven’t been exposed to it as a career, because they don’t have the signals around them to encourage them to even consider teaching in the first place. And that’s a much larger pool of people who we really could have a lot of leverage on if we just had more structured pathways into exploring teaching as a career, encouraging people to be thinking about teaching, supporting them socially to want to become teachers …

Part 2: Students are exposed to messaging — both explicit and subtle — that teaching is not a desirable career. Harvard’s Zid Mancenido wants to fix that

Can you talk a little bit about what an example of that might look like?

It can be as simple as school systems or colleges collaborating to identify and raise the profile of alumni who have become teachers … Some of my participants talked about wanting to make sure that their degree was worth it. And so in elevating alumni who are teaching, who are in education pathways, is one way to say, “Actually, yeah, this is something that’s worth it because it gets these sorts of outcomes.”

We could also do things like elite colleges could be providing various summer internships or term time options where they are working in schools for course credit, trying to get students to explore what it looks and sounds like when you’re in a K –12 setting …

Or it can be sort of more broad: It can be things like school systems finding ways to go beyond the sort of teacher appreciation days and actually go into a, “What does it take in order to run a school system?” days where we really build up our collective understanding, peak behind the curtain of schools and really understand what does it take in order to create a healthy flourishing system? …

What I’m hearing you say is that by introducing that to a larger body of students, you’re perhaps opening the door for more students to become interested in this career path in the first place rather than just communicating with students who are already considering it.

That’s correct. Recently I’ve talked to some of my friends who are teachers, and I asked them questions like, “When was the last time that you said to one of your high-achieving students, ‘You should become a doctor’ or ‘Have you thought about becoming a lawyer’ or ‘Have you thought about going to this elite college?’” And every single one of them says, “I say that every time. It’s so important to be supporting your kids’ aspirations.”

And I go, “When was the last time you told one of your high-achieving students that they should consider becoming a teacher?” And so few of them say yes. �ճ󲹳�’s a small switch for teachers to make. Us turning around to high-achieving students and going, “Have you ever thought about becoming a teacher? I was a teacher once and it was a really incredible career that could potentially change the game.”

Well, one thing that strikes me there is then how much of that is about teacher satisfaction? 

Right.

So, are teachers not telling students to become teachers because they are not personally satisfied with their careers?

What I found really interesting in my research was that if you had parents who were teachers, the influence could go both ways. Some participants said, “My parents were teachers, and they lived such great lives and they got to do such important stuff. And so I want to become a teacher as well.” And then you have some people whose parents were teachers who said, “I watched my parents every day. I really learned through that what teaching was and I would never want to do that.” 

Some of my research was trying to find out how much of this was just people’s partial view of teaching. If they had seen a different part of teaching would their minds have changed? While I don’t have the data to suggest one way or another, what I do have is a lot of really strong participant beliefs that what they saw and observed were really pivotal in influencing how they ended up wanting to become a teacher or not …

It’s about creating the environment that allows for parents and teachers to want to encourage students to become teachers themselves. 

For this paper, you collected the stories of over 100 college seniors or recent graduates. Was there one perspective teacher’s story that stood out to you?

… Graham was a student who had gone to an urban charter school on the West Coast, and his mother was a teacher in that school. He had asked himself all the time while he was going through high school, “Why is my education like this and other people’s education like that?” 

He was really, really committed to education and had written about it in his college admissions essay, but then went to an elite college in the Northeast. [Once he was there] all of his friends who had said that they were [also] interested in education were voting with their feet and ended up majoring in business or economics or computer science. And when they would talk about their interest in education, they would always be doing it as a volunteering opportunity or an extracurricular.

When I probed him on why he was doing that, what were the underlying assumptions, he said to me that many of his other peers felt like — given the sorts of education they had — they couldn’t do work that was more technical or “front line” [like teaching]. They really wanted things that were more broad, high level or working in policy or in the strategic area. 

He reflected on how these codes that high achievers use — “front line,” “technical versus high-level policy having more of an impact” — were language games. They were delineations of occupational prestige and status that were masked otherwise as personal preference. 

And so it was a really interesting conversation that really illuminated how there’s no malice here, there’s no talking down about teaching. Everyone thinks teaching and education are really incredible, important careers. But in terms of the choices that we make in terms of the language that we use, it’s incredibly subtle but really streams people away from wanting to become teachers.

So where is he now? Did he end up in the classroom or did he stay in management consulting?

It was years later that he ended up going into the classroom, but there was a sort of personal realization about a number of all of these different things and a return to what really mattered to him.

And that’s what was also really exciting about undertaking this — that it told me that people can have these trajectories, but these trajectories aren’t path-dependent, these things can change. And our social environments can change and the support that we get to encourage people to want to become teachers can change and get people to make that choice in the end.

All isn’t lost, basically, when it comes to encouraging more people to become teachers.

Piney Woods is a co-educational, Christian college preparatory high school. With over 2,000 acres of land, it has a 250-acre farm that its 100 students tend to daily while caring for the animals and learning about crops. Tuition is $45,000, though every current student receives at least some financial assistance. William Crossley, the school’s fifth president and the first to be an alumnus, spoke to The 74’s Sierra Lyons about Piney Woods’s survival and its parallels to his personal education journey.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Before Brown v. Board of Education, there were about 100 Black boarding schools across the country. What does it mean to you to be leading one of the last four that remain?

It’s an interesting thing that many of these institutions have sort of gone by the wayside. But in our case, we recognize that the challenge [of] providing high-quality educational opportunity for young people, particularly low-income young people and people of color — that challenge still exists for us as a nation. 

Piney Woods has a 250-acre farm and over 1,000 acres of wildlife. What opportunities does the land allow for students to learn hands-on? What’s a typical student’s day like?

We say, “The campus is our classroom, the land is our lab.” Yesterday, we had students down on the farm caring for the animals. We’ve got eight horses, 60 to 65 head of cattle, roosters, chickens, goats, sheep and some farm dogs. There’s something about caring for animals, and there’s something about working with one’s hands, that connects to one’s brain.

We’re starting a farmer’s market here. The kids are helping to grow that, and we will teach them entrepreneurship. The kids have to sit down and do business and marketing plans. Those become part of how we decide what to sell in the market, which is on our campus. It’s not just for our young people, but it’s for our community, too. 

We do study things in the history books, but we also go to the site of Emmett Till’s death here in Mississippi. We go to the Civil Rights Museum here, and we go to the preserved slave cabins on plantation land in Natchez. We go to Memphis and we see the hotel where Dr. Martin Luther King was shot and we go to the founding site of this institution and see where Lawrence C. Jones was brave enough to find a way to start this enterprise, and we’re all here because of what he did. 

And so we literally live that history and we do it in science because we have five ponds on our campus. And so when we’re testing for bacteria, we’ll get the water out of the faucet, and then we’ll get the rainwater that made its way into the pond and our students will do comparative analysis on what’s in the water. 

Historically, you will have seen pictures of a classroom in 1920 with the desks all lined up and the teacher in front of a blackboard. Then people show a similar classroom today with desks all lined up, with the teacher in front of the whiteboard. One of the things we try to do is break out of that to help our young people understand that to live is to learn and to learn is to live. We don’t make this distinction that you’re in school so you have to sit at this desk a certain way. Our students field calls at our switchboard, our students call our donors and thank them for supporting us with scholarship funds. They call admitted students and say, “Hey, I understand you’ve been admitted to Piney Woods. Well, I’m a 10th-grade student and we’ll both be together next year, and I wanted to see if you had any questions.” Our students go out and carry the message of this institution all over this state and nation, and so it really is learning practiced through living.

How did Piney Wood survive as all those other schools were closing?

One of the things is that we understood our mission, and we try to situate our mission and our vision in the period in which we live. Prior to Brown, Piney Woods issued associate degrees. Once the junior college/community college systems began to allow Black people to come, we recognized that the need was not as great. And so our program adjusted, and we stopped issuing associate degrees. It did not mean that the mission was not still viable. It’s no secret that you can pretty much track an individual’s educational progress by the income levels of their families. If you come from a family with a higher income, you’re that much more likely to succeed and have access to higher-quality education. Part of what we wanted to do was to ensure that we’re still addressing that challenge. You have to adjust to what’s happening in the world but still question what’s the relevance of your mission.

Piney Woods has had an alumni community that’s come forward to support its work and that sacrifices to make sure Piney Woods can still exist and do this work. Piney Woods has an independent board of directors. Sometimes these schools were run by churches, and they sort of went the way of the congregation or denomination and didn’t have as much control over how it advanced. Particularly during days of segregation, there were a number of these institutions that received state support because states didn’t want integration, so they would send some money to the Black boarding schools, which would essentially allow them to avoid integration. When the money left, these institutions couldn’t operate. Piney Woods operated independently of that for most of our existence. I think leadership matters. Piney Woods had strong leadership from our founder, but then we’ve had strong leadership from other folks who preceded me, and our goal from the start has been about building next-generation leadership in all that we do.

This month marks 70 years since the Brown v. Board ruling. Following the decision, many Black teachers and principals were dismissed. What generational impact do you believe this has had on Black students?

You know the old saying, “if you can see it, you can be it.” When Black males have one Black male teacher in elementary grades, their chances of success increase exponentially in school. To some extent, that was true for myself. I grew up on the south side of Chicago and I had teachers who were white, who were Black, but for the most part, they were female. I can remember one male teacher that I had along the way, but who was white, and then the folks in charge were typically white. We didn’t have Black models in leadership at the classroom level, or even at the local school level, and so we are pioneers. Piney Woods is by no means an all-Black staff. We have a diverse leadership structure here that I hope sets a standard for our young people to see.

Laurence Clifton Jones founded the school to educate the children of impoverished Black sharecroppers. With that history in mind, how has Piney Woods remained a safe haven for students who may have financial hardships or face other forms of marginalization?

This is near and dear to me because I will confess that there were moments when this institution faced financial challenges and some thought the answer would be to pursue more exclusively — essentially, people who could pay tuition. Lawrence Jones founded Piney Woods with $1.65. The ability to pay tuition has never been how we [decided] who would get this kind of an opportunity. Our board has worked diligently to ensure that we stay true to that from a mission standpoint. If you can afford to contribute more, we ask you to make a bigger contribution. But if a family doesn’t have the funds, no child is turned away for an inability to pay his or her way. Every young person who is here today has a scholarship. If there are folks who want to come and don’t want a scholarship, we welcome them, too.

The reason we can do that is that members of our community … we have something called the Circle of Faith that they sometimes will recommend a student and they will send contributions to help support that student’s education. Across this nation, the community of supporters makes this kind of work possible.

What does it cost to attend?

About $45,000 per student per year. �ճ󲹳�’s with room and board and really all their expenses. We don’t say if you want to be on the basketball team, you have to pay an extra fee. Once you’re here, you’ll be part of whatever’s happening, The National Association of Independent Schools pegs the cost of attending a boarding program like ours … we are 50% less than the average boarding school costs in this nation, and we successfully get all of our young people admitted to postsecondary options: community, college, college, military, etc.

You are the first principal to be a former student. How did your time as a student impact your view of education and opportunity in rural Mississippi?

My experience before coming here to Piney Woods was not a good one. I grew up in difficult neighborhoods on the south side of Chicago. My life changed when I came to this institution, and it took me some time to realize that. I was having leadership opportunities that I don’t know I would have ever had, had I stayed back in a public school at home. My grades and my GPA were well beyond where I would have been had I stayed home.

I got a chance to go to the University of Chicago as an undergraduate. We lived with my grandmother, and she lived about a 15-minute drive from the university. Nobody from our neighborhood went to the University of Chicago. I had driven by it my whole life but I didn’t even know it was a university. Nobody in my family had gone to college. Maybe my last year in high school at Piney Woods and my first year in college at the University of Chicago, it dawned on me that the people I grew up with didn’t have the opportunities that I had. I knew my cousins and folks at church. I also knew that I wasn’t as smart as some, I just had had an opportunity that they didn’t, because Piney Woods had given me that opportunity. I had really at that point in my life said, “This is unfair. It’s unfair for me to be at the University of Chicago and for my cousin to be in Joliet federal prison. That sort of ignited my passion to ensure that we were making educational opportunities available despite the accident of one’s birth, and that’s what this place has done for 115 years. And when I spend my life doing that, that’s the most fulfilling thing I can imagine.

Before returning to Piney Woods, you worked as senior adviser in the Office for Civil Rights at the U.S. Department of Education. What was your experience with returning to Piney Woods after having such an aerial view of education in the country?

I actually started my career in the classroom. I was teaching in Chicago Public Schools and was volunteering for a first-time-ever candidate for Illinois state Senate from our little district in South Side Chicago named Barack Obama, who went on to do some other things after he got into the Illinois legislature. So I started there and I became really frustrated with the bureaucracy. I wanted to find a path that I could make change on. I didn’t think I could do that with the 26 kids I had in my class, I went to law school, I ended up in a senior position working in government trying to change educational disparity, and Piney Woods sort of came along. 

So I went from this space of working on policy to working directly with people. That was life-changing. I was no longer just putting a policy on the table — I was sitting across the table from a young person who was making a decision about whether to go to college or which college to go to. Or the young person who was sometimes making adult decisions about whether to even remain in school. In many ways, I went from a kind of work that felt very transactional in Washington, D.C., to work that I know is transformational in nature here on the ground. It’s been really a thrill and a delight, because I literally get to touch and sit and really know the people whose lives are being changed by the work we’re doing.

Piney Woods is 20 miles south of Jackson, in the state with the nation’s largest Black population. When policymakers and education leaders are discussing school choice, what specific needs for Black parents and students in the rural South do you believe should be considered?

When I was in D.C., my daughter was on a soccer team, and they lost every game. Sometimes they just lost because the other team had superior skills. But many times they lost 1 to 0, and the one goal the other team made sometimes had gone in accidentally. The reason the ball was able to go in accidentally is because it consistently was on my daughter’s team’s side of the field, which meant that they were always on defense. Another person could, just by sheer luck, put points on the board.

I think that Black kids growing up in America often live their lives on defense. The expectations of them are low. When a Black child fails in school, nobody’s surprised, and that’s a problem. This place changes that. We say this is where you belong, that we expect you to excel and to achieve, and you’re not going to live life on defense. Quite the contrary. We expect you to put points on the board.

One of the things we offer is an atmosphere that says you’re a part of this community. You’re a part of, dare I say, this family. Just as my two daughters aren’t allowed to say, “I can’t do it,” neither are you. There’s a whole field of scholarship from Tocqueville on the impact of community and advancing and turning around its members. The solutions often live on the ground in the community. I think we can choose whether to subject our kids to a mass-production factory model, one-size-fits-all notion of learning, or a personalized, culturally supportive environment in which every single young person is expected to achieve in their own right. I think we do the latter, and we’ve had success, certainly for my 10 years, but for 115 years. I hope that serves as a lesson for us as a nation about the kinds of spaces we should make for the best learning outcomes for young people.

When the time comes, how do you hope to leave the school better than how you found it?

This place was started in the middle of nowhere with almost nothing but a burning desire and passion to have an impact on the lives of others. People invested in that and it came to fruition. Lawrence C. Jones, our founder, described it as “a resistless urge to help people build better lives for themselves and their communities.” I got to be here because people who didn’t know my name, and long before I ever got [here], invested in this space on the belief that someday somebody like me might come through.

I tell our students it so deeply humbles me to think that our enslaved fought for freedom that they never would personally realize, but they fought for those freedoms for future generations and people invested in me in ways that I can’t fully measure. I hope that someone will say, “He did his absolute best to pay it forward, that he did his absolute best to ensure that this institution would become a regenerative community that gives more to the world than it ever takes from it.” If we can position this work to go out and have that kind of an impact, then I think we will have done our work well.

But one person feels especially perturbed by the botched implementation of the new Free Application for Federal Student Aid, or FAFSA.

Lamar Alexander — former governor of Tennessee, U.S. education secretary and Republican leader of the Senate education committee — thought the would be his legacy.

He was so bound up with the quest to streamline the process that he became known for  the 108-question paper form at press conferences.

“There are not many things that happen in Washington, D.C., that really improve the lives of 20 million American families every year,” he told The 74 last week. “This did, and once they implement it properly, it will be a great relief to these families.” 

But the string of delays and mean that three months after the rollout, some high school seniors still don’t know if they’ll be able to afford college.

“I’m very disappointed with it,” he said. “​​If they spent more time figuring out how to implement FAFSA and less time forgiving student loans, they might have done better.”

Alexander, 83, served as governor of Tennessee from 1979 to 1987 and then as president of the University of Tennessee until President George H. W. Bush appointed him as education secretary. But he said it wasn’t until he was in the Senate that he understood how much of a barrier the form was to some students getting into and completing college.

In a brief interview, Alexander discussed how he would have handled the rollout differently, his ongoing work advocating for higher education in Tennessee and writing his political memoirs.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity. 

The 74: For readers who don’t know the history, why was simplifying the FAFSA so important to you?

Lamar Alexander: In 2005, the third year I was a senator, a group of college presidents from Tennessee came to see me and explained that the complexity of the 108-question form was the single biggest obstacle to low-income students going to college. It was difficult to fill out and many low-income students needed to get their grandmother’s tax returns. Maybe she didn’t have them or didn’t want to give them. They talked about the verification process, which means that if you made a mistake on the form you might lose your Pell Grant in the middle of your first semester. I was too junior at that time to do much about it, but 10 years later when I became the ranking Republican on the education committee I got busy on it. 

As time went on, Gov. Bill Haslam in Tennessee signed offering two years of free tuition for community colleges. Filling out the FAFSA was the single biggest obstacle to two years of free tuition for Tennesseans going to college. When I had a hearing on it — I can still remember the day — we had witnesses from many different points of view, and I asked four witnesses to write a letter each explaining what they would do. They looked at each other and said, “We don’t have to write four letters. We can write one. We all agree.”

Did your frustration with the process begin when you were a university president?

I didn’t pay that much attention. I didn’t really see the size of the problem. I didn’t know it affected 20 million families every year. What people forget is you have to fill this out every year, and it’s easy to make a mistake. That means it’s easy to lose your scholarship. 

How much have you paid attention to the chaos that has unfolded over the past few months?

I hear about it first hand — the problems it’s causing right now with admissions officers who are having a hard time telling families how much financial aid they’ll receive and families who are having a hard time deciding what school they can attend. I’m hearing a lot about it, not so much from the news. 

There’s really no excuse for it. The problem is not the law. The law was thoroughly vetted.

If you were still leading the department, how do you think you would have handled the implementation? 

If McDonald’s has a new hamburger, they don’t roll it out to the whole country. They test it in a few markets, sometimes for a long time. This is too important to 20 million families just to throw a big mess out to them. That would have been the wise thing to do, to say, “OK, we’re going to gradually begin to implement this, and we’re going to test it and make sure it works. And then within a year or two more, we’ll make it available to all 20 million families.” 

I’m very disappointed with it. ​​If they spent more time figuring out how to implement FAFSA and less time forgiving student loans, they might have done better. 

Do you miss being in the U.S. Senate? 

I miss my friends, but I had 18 years. That’s long enough, and I’ve moved on to other things.

When I was in the Senate, I would tell people, “It’s hard to get here. It’s hard to stay here, and while you’re here you might as well try to accomplish something. And you can’t accomplish anything in the Senate unless you get 60 votes.” I learned how to count in the Maryville City Schools. So you have to work across the aisle if you want to get a result. There’s no reason to run if all you want to do is make a speech. You can do that at home.

How are you spending your time now?

I’m on the . Number two, I’m helping the University of Tennessee create the , which was just officially dedicated. And number three, I’m helping Maryville College, in my hometown, create a . It will have an environmental education program, which fits. We’re right in the foothills of the Great Smoky Mountains, which is one of the most biodiverse places in the world. I’ve gotten drawn back into higher education without trying.

I’m also writing a memoir. I’m about finished with that. I kept a diary, so there are lots of interesting stories, interesting people, lots of things that I got to work on that didn’t make much news — like fixing FAFSA — but helped a lot of people.

At the time, Susan Enfield was superintendent of the Highline Public Schools outside Seattle, close to the site of the first U.S. outbreak. Like her counterparts in neighboring districts, she was still in disbelief that sending students home was even an option. 

“I’m not sure, at the end of the day, that that was the right decision,” said Enfield, who recently shared her reflections with The 74. “I don’t think we’ll know for a long time how that really impacted all of us.” 

As the debate over reopening that fall intensified, Enfield was outspoken about the no-win situation leaders were in as they struggled to balance the needs of students with the demands and fears of parents and employees. To her, the predicament felt like having “an enormous square peg that I’m trying to squeeze into a microscopic round hole.”

Like many families and educators over the months and years that followed, Enfield relocated, leaving Highline in 2022 for the larger Washoe County Public Schools in Nevada, which includes Reno. She described the move then as hitting the “superintendent lottery,” but ultimately, stayed just a year and a half. She to return to the Seattle area.

“I’m really happy to be home,” she said. “I’m taking this moment to breathe and figure out how I can contribute from a different vantage point.”

In an interview, she reflected on the past 48 months and how the pandemic has — and has not — transformed the nation’s education system.

The interview has been edited for length and clarity.

The 74: The Northshore School District, not far from Highline, was the first in the nation to close because of COVID. What comes to mind now as you recall those frantic early days of the pandemic?

Susan Enfield: I’m really in awe of what educators across the country were able to do under really trying circumstances. I’m proud of how we responded. If memory serves, we deployed over 13,000 devices within the first couple weeks of having to close schools. There’s a real sense of pride in how people came together in a time of serious uncertainty and stress and did what they could to take care of our kids.

For those of us that stayed closed for so long, I don’t know if that was the right thing to do. Thousands of kids were out of school for so long, and we know that’s had an impact on them.

Moving from Highline to Washoe, what differences did you see in how the districts approached the closures?

How districts approached it was tied to local politics. The Puget Sound area is the bluest of the blue, whereas Washoe is really purple, politically. Washoe kids came back a year before Highline kids. That was probably the right thing to do.

What Highline was able to do that Washoe wasn’t was device distribution. We had under 20,000 kids, but Washoe had over 60,000, so there’s a magnitude issue. Washoe is a vast geographical area, so it was a challenge for them to distribute devices. Those differences speak to how every district responded as best they could based on their local political context and just the sheer makeup of their district.

Was there anything you would have done differently?

We would all go back and probably do some things differently, but I also had to recognize what was within my control. Our governor mandated schools be closed. I didn’t know at the time that keeping schools closed would be so detrimental. But there was so much fear and uncertainty around the virus, especially for a district like Highline. We have a lot of multifamily, multigenerational homes. The fears people had were very real, very legitimate.

How did the last four years change you personally as a leader? 

It fortified my values as a leader. I’ve always been a big proponent of health and family first, but that was really amplified — not just preaching it, but modeling it. I had to make sure that I was taking care of my people. 

We have a saying out here when it’s a beautiful clear day: “Mountain’s out.” I remember one Saturday. I just tweeted out a beautiful photo of Mount Rainier and said, “The mountain’s out and it’ll be out again tomorrow.” For those of us in leadership roles, we really had to dig into who we were as people, what our values were. The pandemic had an impact, not just on our children, but our teachers and staff as well. They had to re-learn how to be in community with other people after being in isolation for so long.

What are the biggest lessons we’ve learned from the past four years?

During the pandemic, there was so much talk of “We’re not going back to normal” and I was like, “Well, I don’t want to be the voice of doom and gloom, but the muscle memory of a bureaucracy as large as the public education system in the United States is very strong.” I predicted that we would by and large go back to what we knew. 

We learned some things and continue to do some things differently, like the option for virtual meetings. Family participation in [special education] meetings is up because now parents don’t have to take time off work. On the flip side, we still have a digital divide. We still have too many kids that don’t have access to the internet. There’s been some backsliding there.

One of the key lessons is that we can’t focus on instruction without focusing on the overall well-being of our children. We have to make sure that our kids, and staff frankly, get the resources they need to be physically, emotionally and psychologically healthy. For all of the opportunities that technology brought, being in person matters — seeing that face, being hugged, having someone look you in the eye and sit down with you. 

There are various predictions about the chances of another pandemic in our lifetime. If that bears out, how do you think the system would respond? 

We’ve got some playbooks now. We are better prepared because we actually have some blueprints on the logistical part of it. I don’t think it will be the scramble that it was before. And since many of us blessedly lived through the last one, I’m hoping maybe there won’t be the same level of fear and uncertainty that existed before.

I remember doing virtual happy hours with my family in California and a lot of them were literally wiping down their groceries and they weren’t going anywhere. Those of us in school districts couldn’t do that. I don’t think I ever felt that same level of panic and fear because I just couldn’t afford to. I had to help hand out meals.

Do you think schools would close again? 

That’s a really good question. As much as I think closing schools for the length of time we did wasn’t the right thing to do, I know that officials in Washington state have pointed to the very that we had. I don’t know what the perfect answer is.

I was pretty critical of a lot of our elected leaders during that time, but in hindsight, I have more empathy and compassion. I do believe everyone was doing the best they could with what they knew.

In Natasha Sonia Alford’s newly released memoir, American Negra, she describes an early childhood memory of being the new kid at school: “What are you?” another student asked. “I’m Puerto Rican and Black,” she responded, noting these were “the only words I had at the time to explain my identity in terms that made sense.” 

“Language mattered,” she writes, “and yet at this age no one had prepared us to explain who we were accurately.” Her memoir does just that: it is an exploration of her intersecting identities and an explanation of their impact on her experiences as a student, teacher, hedge fund management associate and journalist.

Alford’s story begins with her childhood in Syracuse, New York, where she excelled academically and was ultimately selected as one of three college-bound students to be profiled by the local newspaper during her junior year. After receiving acceptance letters from a number of selective schools, including Howard University, Alford enrolled at Harvard. 

Despite her successes and on-paper credentials, as she calls them, Alford struggled at first to find her passion and her place as the pressures of perfectionism wore on her. 

While American Negra is a study of Alford’s personal identities, it is also an analysis of American society more broadly, with a particular focus on our education system. She writes about the mantra she was taught that for kids of color in the U.S., education is the path out of marginalization. She encourages readers, though, to expand their understanding of this idea: too often, she argues, students are told that in order to be successful in school they must erase parts of themselves and conform. 

“I wanted to unmask the image of the successful, inner-city poster child with this book,” Alford told The 74. “The point is that that pressure to be ‘twice as good,’ if you bring up a child in that culture and with that rhetoric, they may still struggle years from now — even after they’ve left school — to feel like they are worthy and that they are good enough.” 

Years after graduating from Harvard, the 37-year-old, former Teach for America alum said she finally felt ready to take a risk and pursue a career in media. Alford, who got her master’s at Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism and who freelanced for The 74 early in her career, now serves as the vice president of digital content and an anchor at TheGrio, where she leads a national team reporting on critical issues facing Black communities. She is also a CNN political analyst and the recipient of numerous awards including “Emerging Journalist of the Year” in 2018 by the National Association of Black Journalists. 

American Negra, published by HarperCollins on Feb. 27, was named a “Best (and Most Anticipated) Nonfiction Book of 2024” by and the audio version list for Black and African-American books. The 74’s Amanda Geduld chatted with Alford about her book, education policy and solutions journalism. 

This conversation has been edited for length and clarity. 

The 74: I want to start with a little bit of context. Can you explain to our readers how you selected the title for your book, American Negra?

“American Negra” is a phrase that describes what it’s like to live at the intersection of two worlds. I wanted to paint a portrait of an American experience that we don’t see often portrayed in the mainstream: being an African American and being a Latina — Puerto Rican specifically. The term “negra” just means a Black woman. If it’s “negro” it means a Black man. When you are in Latino cultures, it is not uncommon for somebody to refer to you as a “negra.” It is often a term of endearment, but it can also be used as an insult. But the point is, ultimately, that they are centering your race and your identity.

What makes it so interesting is that often in Latino cultures, we hear about color blindness and we hear about racial democracy. There’s an assumption that because many Latinos are people of color, there’s not really an issue with race — that race is something that is sort of a U.S. obsession. And so there’s a bit of a contradiction in that obviously: a culture that doesn’t really see itself focused on race to identify people by their race. I wanted to highlight that experience, while also making it clear that my experience was one that is based in America. I’m an upstate girl — grew up in Syracuse, New York — and so my experience of being Black and Latina is very much influenced by the United States and all of our recent politics and all of our histories.

And then finally, I think it’s also a declaration. It’s an embracing of the term because for some people to be called “negra,” or to be identified that way, is a bit of an insult. They don’t want to be called Black. But for me, I’m really centering my Black identity to say that no matter where I go, I’m a Black woman. It shapes my experience. I’m proud of it. 

So much of your book comes back to the themes of education and opportunity. What inspired you to tell the story in this way — with such a heavy focus on the education system — and can you talk about the ways in which your Black and Puerto Rican identities shaped this journey?

That is exactly why there’s an apple on the front cover of the book. That was very much intentional, because this is an education story as much as it is a story about identity. The reason why is because for so many communities of color — communities that are marginalized in the United States — education is our path out of that marginalization. At least that’s the message that we are told from the time that we are children. And that was the message that my parents imparted to me: that I came from two peoples who had been discriminated against in this country at various points in time throughout history, but education was something that no one could take from me.

What you see in this book is the pursuit of education, but also the pursuit of authentic self. I think too often when we talk about education and young people, it’s framed through this lens of conformity: you go to school, you have to assume a different identity, you have to speak a certain way, there are certain careers that are so-called successful. At each step of the way, young people are shedding parts of themselves or feel that they’re forced to. In the end, they may not recognize themselves. They may have succeeded on paper, but they’ve lost themselves in the process. 

I wanted to disrupt the education narrative that ends with someone getting into the Ivy League or getting into college and that being the end. And say no, actually, that’s when things just get started. The success is not just getting into this institution or conforming to this institution, but it is what you do with [it]. That’s the power of education … 

In terms of your own path to becoming an educator, your senior year at Harvard, when you were initially debating your career in education, you write in your book about this fear that people might say, “You went to Harvard to become a teacher? Shouldn’t you be doing better than that?” I’m wondering where you think this devaluation of educators comes from and what we can do to combat it.

There’s this really … about how high achievers learn to not become teachers. It explains essentially that we have created a culture in which young people pick up messages about what careers are valued and which ones are not. In terms of where this comes from, I can only assume that there’s a gendered dynamic to this. 

There is an element of sexism that has made its way into education and the fact that the majority of teachers are women, and women are not always paid what they deserve — we are often behind in terms of our male counterparts and many more are behind when you look at the different segments of women by race. So we are a society that gives teachers lip service, but doesn’t actually back it up with a financial investment in teachers and education more broadly. 

I actually don’t blame young people for seeing that. I don’t think that young people should have to be martyrs, frankly, especially young people who may be coming from working-class families themselves — may be coming out of broken educational systems. To go back and teach I don’t think they should have to struggle. From my short time in the education policy space and just in education, my takeaway was that we have a pipeline problem in terms of recruiting generally, but that in order to change education, you’re going to have to pay the talent — you’re going to have to pay them, you’re going to have to nurture them, and that it shouldn’t be an industry that you’re going into to make a sacrifice … This is something where we’re going to make the investment and see the results or not make the investment and the overall system will continue to struggle …

How can we get teachers to persist in the classroom when they’re up against challenges like the ones that you write about, like chronic absenteeism or eighth graders reading at a first-grade reading level? 

… I think what maybe would’ve kept me in the classroom was just having realistic expectations about what I could do in two years. Sometimes when teachers come in, they’re idealistic and they’re not necessarily ready for how long these problems have been brewing. If a student has not been supported academically from kindergarten, and you get them in fifth grade, there has to be some level-setting about what you can do. 

And so one critique I have of the short-term teaching programs is just with the optimism and the accountability and the expectation of making change. Sometimes there’s also unrealistic pressure put on a new teacher about what they can accomplish in one or two years, and that can be really deflating. If that teacher comes in hoping for the best, working really hard, going above and beyond, and they don’t see the “results” that are so valued by the people who are counting the numbers and counting the test scores, that makes them feel like a failure. When in fact, it takes much longer to build — whether it’s building school culture, establishing yourself within the school community, or just becoming the teacher that you truly can be … 

You recently tweeted about Nikki Haley’s “revisionist history” and the general idea within the Republican Party of color blindness. You were on CNN talking about why those narratives are so harmful, and I’m wondering if you can comment a little bit more on that in terms of how this plays out in the educational landscape.

She’s used the talking point many times: that if we tell children America was once a racist country, that somehow they will feel disempowered, and that they will feel like victims, and that they will have no incentive to try. That couldn’t be further from the truth. We have examples every day of people who were fully aware of America’s racist history, and who are strong in spite of that, who invested in this country in spite of that, who served this country in the military and in schools and universities, in spite of what they faced … 

We have to contend with this history because it’s ours. We have to own it. And that’s how we become a better county with each passing year, with each passing decade. But to ignore it is to handicap our children. It can leave them without context or understanding of what they’re looking at. What it does, then, [is lead to them] blaming themselves, believing that they’re inferior, thinking that something is wrong with them, and not necessarily wrong with the systems that produce many of the inequalities that we see today. 

So I completely differ from Nikki Haley in terms of my approach to history, and also just my general acceptance of America’s past. But I think it’s instructive and yet another reason why teachers are on the front lines of these culture wars around what is true and what is not. I give my deepest respect to all the history teachers and all the social studies teachers, because they’re doing some serious work right now that is important for raising a conscious generation who will go forth empowered to make change for the better.

You also recently wrote about race in higher education specifically around the former president of Harvard, Claudine Gay, stepping down. And this line really stuck out to me from your :  “With a new generation of Black students and young people looking to us adults for lessons from this moment, perhaps they are better served to know the truth: that even being ‘twice as good’ won’t always protect you from people who need your failure to justify their blind rage.” I’m wondering if you can expand a little bit more on how you experienced Gay’s stepping down and the vitriol that she received, especially as an alum of Harvard.

It became apparent right away that the attacks on Dr. Claudine Gay were about more than her testimony on the Hill. We’ve essentially forgotten about the third president who testified. It just went to show that this was always about more than the initial conversation of anti-semitism. What was really disheartening was that she became a punching bag for all of these critics’ anger and rage and a sense of frustration with what they feel is a loss. What they feel is that Black people’s advancement is somehow their loss, even though we’re all in this together. We’re all living and creating community and shaping this society together. Somehow they see it as a zero sum game … 

I wanted to unmask the image of the successful, inner-city poster child with this book. The point is that that pressure to be “twice as good,” if you bring up a child in that culture, and with that rhetoric, they may still struggle years from now — even after they’ve left school — to feel like they are worthy and that they are good enough. 

I read an article, I think it’s called “Contingencies of Self-Worth,” and the biggest lesson of that piece is that our own self worth can’t be contingent upon grades or upon getting into a certain school. We have to shift the way that we’re teaching young people about their value. And so “twice as good” is a survival strategy, but it’s not necessarily a strategy to thrive. I hope that my story — by being honest about many of the struggles that I’ve had despite having acquired certain credentials on paper — [encourages] others to talk about some of their struggles as well, and that we can cultivate a new generation that will be kinder to themselves and also accepting of the fullness of their humanity.

As a high schooler, you were followed by the local newspaper for all of your accomplishments. What kind of impact did that have to be so perceived at all times? It was because you were a role model and accomplishing so much, but I wonder what kind of narrative that instills in a young person about what they need to do to be successful.

Right. It was certainly a privilege, and I am grateful for the coverage that the local paper gave and appreciate that they wanted to show a young person of color from the city doing positive things. However, that also created a sense that failure was not an option. Making mistakes was not OK. And it inhibited me in ways. There were certain things that I wanted to try or do that I was afraid to do because I couldn’t guarantee my success. And that is not a way to go through life. You have to make mistakes, you have to experiment. You have to fully spread your wings in order to discover yourself and so really, I don’t spread my wings fully until I’m long gone from college. 

Five years after that I truly am honest with myself about what I’ve always wanted to do, and that was journalism and media. And I’ve made peace with, “OK, this might not work out, but I have to give it a try. I have to know if this is what I’m supposed to be doing.” It took much longer because of that perfectionist mindset that wouldn’t give me the freedom to try right out of school. 

My story is my story. I’m happy still. I think my life still worked out. I ended up where I wanted to be. I still feel blessed. But maybe someone else will be able to get to their destination a little bit sooner if they’re able to let go of some of that perfectionist weight that can keep you down.

As a former educator and now a journalist, what are education journalists getting right and wrong today? And how can we strengthen our coverage and make sure that we’re combating some of these problematic narratives that have become so ingrained over the years?

I know that journalists are working hard, and it’s not always easy. We have deadlines and fewer and fewer resources. I know many of us are doing the best that we can. But I would encourage us to move towards solutions journalism. We are dealing with a public that is weary. They’ve been hearing about problems nonstop. And it’s our job to also provide examples of what is working. Who’s getting it right. And not in a superficial way of “this overachiever managed to do X, Y and Z.” But what risks were taken? What experimentation is happening that’s really inspiring? 

I think it’s our job to highlight those things and also highlight diverse examples of this. Be open to information. Be open to inspiration coming from unexpected places and give people a reason to hope. That is our job as much as it is to point out what is not working. Because I think people who are living it know that a lot of this is not working. So I think that we can do that work to point them towards potential solutions and then hopefully people are inspired to go out and enact it at a grander scale.

Steve Dackin, appointed as the first director of the recast Ohio Department of Education and Workforce, told The 74 in an interview last month that building pathways to careers will be his second biggest priority — just after overseeing Ohio’s shift to the science of reading, which Gov. Mike DeWine and the legislature also mandated last year. 

For Dackin, career education even comes before the difficult task of tackling academic deficits students developed during the pandemic.

“I think a good job is the quickest way out of poverty,” said Dackin, a former local school superintendent and community college administrator. “I just see this as the mission of the agency.”

“First priority is making sure kids can read and write,” he said. “Second priority is making sure that they’re able to be employed and have a path to a good job.”

Dackin, 66, comes to the job with clear strengths, but also with controversy.

He has experience in both school districts and career pathways, having served as superintendent for more than six years of the 7,500-student Reynoldsburg school district near Columbus. Additionally, he has more than seven years connecting students, businesses and Columbus State Community College as that school’s superintendent of school and community partnerships.

Over the last few years, Dackin has also worked with the Governor’s Executive Workforce Board on a research project that looks at how well schools teach students about career opportunities. He said that the project, whose findings could be released in February, will be one guide in his new position.

A former member of Ohio’s State Board of Education, the current board selected him as state superintendent in 2022 to head the old version of the education department. But Dackin, who had a lead role in the search for that post before becoming a candidate, faced ethics complaints and had to step down just three weeks after taking the job.

Since the new director position is now appointed by the governor, the conflict of interest issues no longer apply.

Ohio’s shift to having an appointed director also drew controversy because it takes away control from the state school board, which has some elected members, and gives it to the governor. Some state board members sued to block the change, saying it would violate the rights of voters who elected them, but they failed and the powers of the state board and superintendent are now much more limited.

With those issues cleared, Dackin talked with The 74 about the department’s expanded mission.

The interview has been edited for length and clarity.

The 74: Do you see the mission of this department really changing now that workforce has been added to the name? How much?

Dackin: Yes. I mean, we have workforce in our title. We can’t separate education from workforce. It’s inseparable. And so to have a prepared workforce means that we have to do our due diligence on the preparation side. 

I’ve heard a lot in the last four or five years, from employers about their needs, and you hear everything from ‘I just need people who can pass a drug test.’…that’s a refrain from some… to ‘We can’t find people who have the skill set that I need,’ you know, and ‘We can’t find people who have the employability skills that I need,’ like showing up to work on time and being able to work with people, contribute to the team, some of those things that we know are needed. 

The American High School is amazing to me, how resilient it’s been for 50 years. Think about your own experience in high school. My guess is you experienced a seven or eight-period day where you had classes every 50 minutes and three minutes or four minutes between a class and then went to the next class and went to the next class and, and so on. And high schools look a lot like that still. I think it’s time to take a step back and ask ourselves, ‘Are we getting what we need to have for this new demand of an information-based economy?’ I think that’s a lofty question for a whole lot of people to try to answer.

The 74: Are you watching what Indiana’s doing right now? They’re having a big talk about rethinking and transforming High School and making work experiences a much more central part of high school.

Dackin: Well, I will be now. No, I wasn’t aware of that. And again, I’m 14 days in the job, but I’m always interested in looking at whatever places that are producing real outcomes. Because there are a lot of places doing things, but not many places are producing real outcomes. And again, to me, the ultimate outcome is a good job. 

I think a good job is the quickest way out of poverty… We have so many good jobs in Ohio right now. I just see this as the mission of the agency.

First priority is making sure kids can read or write. Second priority is making sure that they’re able to be employed and have a path to a good job. 

Third thing we’re trying to do is to deal with the accelerated learning issues that we have. You know the pandemic really set a lot…we had some students in the state who weren’t in school for two years. And so there’s still a lag there, around what they experience and where they’re at, and their gaps in learning, mathematics being a really good example of that. We have huge achievement gaps in math, more than even literacy. So we have to think about interventions we need to be doing and, frankly, make sure the department has a role in helping to analyze and research interventions that work and make those available to folks.

And then the fourth priority is none of this happens well if students aren’t safe, or they have challenges in their mental or emotional well-being. I’ve always applauded the governor since his first budget for putting money in and getting the legislature to agree to make dollars available for student wellness. It’s really hard to concentrate and read and write and do arithmetic if you’re dealing with all kinds of emotional or mental health issues.

So these are our four priorities. That’s all I want. Four. And they align with the Governor’s priorities. And I think when you can get really focused on doing a few things but doing better than anybody else, you’ve got a shot at doing something big.

The 74: You were state superintendent briefly under the old system? Do you prefer it this way? Is this really the best way going forward? 

Dackin: Yeah. I think the thing that I liked about this opportunity is that the governor’s focus is the same focus I’ve had my entire career. And it’s the same focus I had even as an appointee on the state board. First and foremost is literacy. We can’t accomplish our workforce goals if kids are not reading at or above grade level as they matriculate through the system. That’s foundational. I think that literacy is almost a right.

He’s put a stake in the ground around the science of reading. We know more now about how kids read and learn how to read than we ever have in the past. Our knowledge about the function of the cognitive processes in young brains, we know more now than ever. For him to say, ‘This is what we’re going to do in Ohio,’ took courage. And it was a visionary step on his part, to get us on the right path toward a more preferred future. 

The 74: Did you make the jump to science reading, when you were at Reynoldsburg?

Dackin: We did the science of reading in Reynoldsburg. We didn’t call it that, but we had the components of the science of reading. 

One of the things we did really well in Reynoldsburg is that we hired really, really, really, really quality teachers and principals. And then we gave them the authority to make decisions that they felt were in the best interests of their kids, relative to the outcomes we set. That was a difference-maker. 

The 74: So what if the professional in the classroom wants to use three-cueing with the kids? (Ohio’s law that requires teachers to use the science of reading approaches banned so-called “cueing” — having young students figure out what a word is through context or pictures — that has been a key part of other reading strategies.)

Dackin: Well, right now, the role of the Department of Education is to enforce the law. And so that’s what I’m gonna do. I’m gonna enforce the law. That’s kind of a nonnegotiable.

The 74: But do you agree with that, that it should be banned, like the state has?

Dackin: I agree with the fact that we have focused on five components of the science of reading that are research-based and have proven results. We felt that when I was a superintendent, and I know districts that do it very well. And so that’s where I plant my flag.

The 74: With this new department, how would you balance how much is straight workforce prep? And how much is just straight education?

Dackin: I don’t think you can separate the two. That’s been one of our challenges, not just Ohio, but across the country. We’ve seen Career Tech as a place that some kids go, and we have general education as a place for other kids to go, and it’s been this kind of separation point. But employers say the skill sets that are needed, and the knowledge base that is needed now in the workforce are a sophisticated set of skills. 

The last couple years, I’ve been working on a project on an issue that I think few people have a fundamental understanding of. The number of kids who enter high school in any given year in Ohio as freshmen…about 135…136,000… between 68 and 70% of those kids never get to a four-year degree In Ohio. It’s a big number.

But we have all these jobs that are posted right now that we can’t fill. And so we need every able-bodied Ohioan to be skilled, ready to take these jobs. We can’t have a stat like that, where three-quarters of the workforce after they get out of high school, are not sure what they’re doing. 

We then have to kind of reverse-engineer this a little bit. And that is, what are they doing while they are in K-12? And how do we ensure that kids are graduating and how do we expand opportunities while we have them in K-12 so that they’re leaving us in K-12 with requisite skills that become employable?

Dackin continued talking about the research project with the Governor’s Executive Workforce Board and how little students are taught about career opportunities.

One thing we do not do well in high schools in this state, and I suspect in many states, we never grab a kid’s heart while they’re in high school. I think it’s time to kind of use the phrase, reverse engineer, the middle school, high school experience so that we can start grabbing kids’ hearts.

They don’t know what they don’t know, and they don’t know about careers, largely.

We found out a couple things. One is most kids were led to believe that their primary opportunities would be either in college or the military. There was little discussion about careers in technology, careers in medicine. So right now they’re at a deficit. If you ask a kid, what do you want to do when you get out of high school, they’re void of much information about what’s available. 

That’s a shame, shame on us as adults. We’ve got to figure that out.

I think our challenge is to make sure that every kid, as they’re going through our K-12 system, their parents have access to labor market data that talks about what the careers are, what the pay is, what it takes to get from point A to point B. So many people don’t know how to navigate the system, because it’s very complex.

The 74: How much do you think that report is going to guide some of your vision for this job going forward? 

Dackin: I think that is one of many blueprints that we can build on. You’ve got to have multiple strategies. And we’ve got to see some pilots out there where we can get real data on what’s happening, real outcome data. One of our challenges in our state is it’s tough to get employability data.

We’ve got (places where) it’s being done pretty well. Our challenge in Ohio is how do we scale that? How do we ensure that it just isn’t the luck of the draw, that a kid happens to be in a place where they have a really well-thought-out system from K-12 to a good job? College may be part of that, maybe not, but how do we scale it?

Choudhury was hired to lead the Maryland Department of Education in July 2021, after spearheading an audacious and much-admired socioeconomic school integration effort in San Antonio. At a moment when the pandemic had turned longstanding inequities into yawning chasms, Maryland was getting a new superintendent of schools whose innovations had already borne fruit. Choudhury, in turn, appeared to be stepping into a job ready-made for a change agent. 

But recently, Choudhury announced he would not seek a second term when his three-year contract ended in June 2024. In July, with the of its chair, the state Board of Education had until 2028. “Full on,” the head of a key House committee told the Washington Post, “they love him.”

In September, the love affair ended. 

While support for reappointing Choudhury appeared to fall apart quickly, controversy had swirled for weeks. A July cited current and former Education Department employees — many of them speaking anonymously — as saying Choudhury had created a “toxic” environment, berating subordinates. Board of Education leaders told the paper they took the allegations very seriously but ultimately rejected the claims.

Shortly after Choudhury’s announcement, the board asked him to remain until next summer as an adviser and appointed Carey Wright — a Baltimore resident who recently retired from a widely lauded run as state superintendent in Mississippi — as interim chief. 

Wright inherits some bright spots: Released in August, showed that while students’ performance in math still lagged, reading proficiency had . Pushing the state’s 24 districts to implement science-backed reading instruction and to train teachers on the new approaches were at the heart of one of Choudhury’s most popular initiatives, a grant program called Maryland Leads. 

The seeds of his focus on equity were sown early. The son of immigrants from Bangladesh, Choudhury grew up acutely aware of public education’s life-changing potential, and the ways in which many are denied opportunity. His grandfather had built the first school in the family’s ancestral village not reserved for children of elites. As a student in high-poverty schools in Los Angeles, Choudhury lived a variation, singled out for college prep classes while friends languished.

Choudhury started as a classroom teacher but quickly was tapped to help the Los Angeles Unified School District’s turnaround efforts. From there, he went to work in the Dallas Independent School District, where he helped to design a program called Accelerating Campus Excellence, which gave top teachers hefty incentives to work in the schools with the biggest challenges. credits the approach with improving student outcomes.

Choudhury then moved to San Antonio, where he created a mold-breaking method for measuring poverty and used it to integrate schools according to socioeconomic factors and to more fairly distribute resources, including top teaching talent. The district’s rapid academic improvements came to the attention of Texas education officials, who modeled new state policies on it. 

Maryland seemed like a natural next landing spot. After , in 2020 a bipartisan coalition of General Assembly members had passed the Blueprint for Maryland’s Future, an ambitious education reform plan that would dramatically boost both school funding and accountability for results. Then-Gov. Larry Hogan, a Republican, vetoed the measure, objecting that lawmakers had not figured out how to fund the 10-year, $4 billion initiative. 

The assembly overrode the veto. Hogan’s successor, Democrat Wes Moore, has earmarked $500 million to fund the blueprint until 2025. What happens after that is unclear. 

Atypically, Maryland’s constitution mandates that its state education agency be politically independent — at least nominally. Governors appoint the Board of Education’s 14 members, who in turn choose the superintendent. In June, with discussion of Choudhury’s next contract underway, Moore appointed six new board members.

The board is not the only entity the superintendent reports to, however. The blueprint — which has the force of law — is also overseen by a newly created Accountability Implementation Board.

In the exit interview that follows, Choudhury declined to specify what ultimately happened to end his tenure. But he addresses some of the challenges he tried to navigate as well as areas where he wishes he had done things differently. This conversation has been edited for length and clarity. 

When you were tapped to be Maryland’s top education official, it must have seemed like a dream job. The hard work of creating bipartisan agreement about a Marshall Plan had already occurred. The resulting Blueprint for Maryland’s Future has the force of law. You inherited a department that’s independent of an elected executive, and districts that seemed eager for your leadership. Why might that not have been enough?

I still believe the opportunity is there. Over a 10-year period, Maryland will significantly increase its per-pupil dollars across the board, plus the dollars that go directly to historically disadvantaged students. But ultimately, as I always say, the money has to land in the right places, and there have to be the right conditions of support and accountability to pull off the big things. Maryland has created the conditions to do it. 

I came in to do that work and to rebuild a department. Both of those at the same time? It’s the impossible-possible task. I believed coming in, and I believe now that I have transitioned out, that Maryland has the ability to show what is possible. But it’s not enough to just have the resources. It’s not enough to rebuild a department. It’s not enough to have a bold leader. You have to also have political will and capital — you have to stay the course. 

Maryland can show what’s possible if we stay on the right course for kids. However, in between all of that are a lot of different things related to adult interests and politics, resistance to pain, the tension between local control and setting a standard for excellence. You have to ultimately have people give you the cover to go bold. Decisionmakers all across the state have to want it and support it in order to realize the promise.

I have heard other change agents talk about the process of building bipartisan agreement as warming up the water. Something that needs to happen before a leader with a vision can be tapped. Do you think the process of passing the blueprint did that?

The blueprint was adopted with a lot of support, but it did have good old-fashioned drama leading up to that. It was vetoed, and then there was an override vote to pass it.

Investing in the children of Maryland, giving educators the very best support and families the best possible education — there is no debate about that. However, there is tension — and it’s out in the open — around the cost and how that is sustained.

How much is enough? At the end of the day, we know adequacy matters. If you’re not going to solve other aspects of society — from housing and economic mobility to many other structural inequities — and you’re going to tell families education will give you the tools to get there, you’ve got to make sure that student spending in historically disadvantaged communities, such as Baltimore City or Caroline County Public Schools, out on the Eastern Shore, have the resources needed to overcome the vertical inequity. Where the challenge is, where the unresolved tension exists is, how do you sustain the cost long term? But also, how do you ensure that there’s no retrenched backsliding? 

I am of the opinion that the blueprint got much closer to adequate, immediately. It’s not perfect, but it is pushing it forward. But again, it is not enough to just put in the resources. For example, we know that adopting high-quality instructional materials and giving teachers the tools to master them is very powerful. However, there’s tensions with that that don’t get solved with a law. It could, but implementing it is a whole other thing. 

That does require a state department of education to figure that out and navigate it. That does require being able to get creative and strategic in how you do that. There was not unanimous consent on being more open to more standardization [while] understanding that we have to give up just doing our own thing. That’s something I faced as I did this.

Unlike other state education leaders, you reported to two appointed boards.

Yes, the state Board of Education and, new as a result of the blueprint, an Accountability Implementation Board. Two governing entities who had approval authority. As the leader, you have to figure out how to work with one and the other, how to ensure that any tensions are resolved, how to bring people together — how to do all those things. Sometimes that is possible. When it’s not possible, you have to figure out how to make it possible. 

This is your fourth post as a change agent. What can you tell us about commonalities that enable change and stymie change?

Let’s start with the commonalities that enable change. You have to have the policy conditions to do great work, but those conditions don’t have to be apples to apples. For example, Texas has one of the stronger literacy laws for teacher training around the science of reading, whereas Maryland does not. However, Maryland does have policy conditions that allowed my team to enable training for staff, which was absolutely critical as part of our recovery.

You’ve got to have buy-in, you have to have a group of talented folks who enjoy impossible-possible challenges. And you’ve got to be able to invest in them and enable them to succeed. The places I have been, I had that. 

Making student-centered decisions requires the cover of decisionmakers, of community engagement organizations and stakeholders. And sometimes even an individual. You may have it coming in, and you’ve got to sustain it as a leader. Otherwise, you’re going to be on some kind of suicide mission. And you’re not going to be able to get the work done. So that matters, big time. 

Now let’s talk about the things that block change. One is not having that cover. Sometimes you have to build toward it, sometimes you just don’t have it. Not having — or losing — that matters. 

Another thing that blocks change is if you lose the ability to fund and support the thing you started. Resources matter. If people work against that or move away from that, then you’re done. 

We have research around that. For example, in Dallas, our turnaround work — Accelerating Campus Excellence — showed that when we invested more, along with making sure the money is in the right places, it transformed low-performing schools in an extraordinary way. When that money was removed, there was a retrench back. 

Your detractors have depicted you as abrasive and sometimes overconfident. Do you think that’s fair?

I am a passionate leader who wears my emotions on my sleeve. I treat people with a great amount of dignity and respect. If someone asked me, what’s your proof of that? My track record. I’ve built amazing teams. People enjoy working with me to change things in the world.

At the same time, I am passionate about making sure the right things happen. When you come into a place and you are told that the status quo is not working for kids, we are failing children, we are not doing enough, you are going to as a leader rub up against the status quo. You’re going to make some people who have overseen that status quo uncomfortable. 

I am not surprised that I have detractors. We had detractors in this work in Dallas. In this country, when there has been a moment of change, when there have not been detractors? I would love to know. I would love to see polling from the Civil Rights era, on our greatest leaders. Pick your moment in history — do they happen without some noise? 

This work is very personal. I’m 100% the product of Title 1 schools. I helped my [immigrant] family navigate filling out forms and other things. Our child care scholarship program … was taking six weeks to get people scholarships. It was very important to me that I set a new standard of excellent customer service. We put in a fast-track application. It has done wonders. We can get people a scholarship within three to four days. We have increased the number of children who are being served by the child care system by almost 40%. 

Look at the data on the rebuilding of the department. It was a place where people used to go to retire and get rehired. It was the place where people — leaders on the ground, teachers, directors — would not come to work. During my time, that completely changed. I brought the best turnaround principal from Baltimore City to be my chief transformation and school improvement officer. Before, someone like that would never come to the job. I got the principal of the year to head up our community schools department.

The leadership of the department reflects the diversity of the children of Maryland. I cut attrition to historic levels, cut the vacancy rate and increased retention to nearly a decade low. And all of that while still wearing my passion on my sleeve. I am very proud of that. 

About the confidence? In this role, for the first time I have found myself for my passion. In an update that I provided to the General Assembly on how things were going with the department as well as to address some of the false claims that were beginning to surface, I found myself having to do that. 

I am not sorry for the high expectations. I am proud of what we pulled off. But I don’t know why I found myself having to apologize. I have ideas why.

What do you want from your leader other than confidence that something is going to work for children? I don’t mean a sense of hubris that is not rooted in evidence-based practices. I am talking about if we are going to do things in the world for kids —train up our teachers when it comes to how to most effectively teach reading, scale up apprenticeships and do it creatively using federal dollars we’re not going to get back — I have to be confident it’s going to work. Is it a perfect science? No, but I have to be a confident leader. 

Let’s talk about Maryland Leads. You used the state’s share of pandemic recovery aid to fund grants to school systems to kickstart their efforts to comply with the blueprint. 

As a state chief, you can get people to do something by inspiring them. You have the bullhorn, you have the ability to call a press conference, issue guidance. You have the ability to incentivize via grant making — especially during the era of American Rescue Plan and ESSER dollars. Third is a mandate: You shall do this. All three are needed ultimately, to get things right.

Ultimately, if you want the work to last beyond you, you have to utilize the first — inspiration. Getting people to want to ensure effective instructional practices, getting local superintendents, getting local boards, to want to organically move toward the right practices is ultimately going to stick. You can make some things happen faster through a mandate, but when the mandate goes away — or the wind blows a different way and the mandate is taken away — is the change actually going to stick? 

And frankly, people need dollars sometimes to pull off what you’re telling them to do. I recently gave a congressional briefing about Maryland Leads. It’s a drop in the bucket when you think about the recurring dollars that school systems have and what the blueprint puts in. However, we designed that drop in a bucket to shift those recurring dollars into the right evidence-based practices. 

Give us some examples. 

There’s no better example than the science of reading. Maryland is not a state with robust literacy laws. It has some level of law that can be worked with, but it is not ultimately enough to get people to where we need them to be. We used our state set-aside to [incentivize] seven strategies, one of which was the science of reading. Others included reimagining the school day and staff recruitment and retention. It wasn’t necessarily a significant amount of money. But I come back to this idea of a drop of money, designed well, can do extraordinary things. 

Baltimore City Superintendent Sonja Santelises is a very strong academic leader who, prior to me coming in, had a priority of shifting the school system toward evidence-based literacy practices and the use of high-quality curricula. They also started supplementing that curricula to ensure that it reflected the students of Baltimore. 

What Maryland Leads enabled her to do is scale their work around coaching. A Rand Corp. study on the use of high-quality instructional materials shows that it’s not enough just to adopt them. Coaching teachers on how to master their use is where you can truly unlock the power. And they had a significant jump in literacy rates coming out of the pandemic, almost 5 percentage points. �ճ󲹳�’s incredible. It’s one of the highest gains in terms of proficiency, as well as growth. 

Prince George’s County also scaled up its adoption of high-quality material and its training and support for teachers. Of the top 50 Maryland schools that made the greatest improvements, especially in literacy, more than half were in Prince George’s County. 

I’m always thinking about sustainability. In Texas, I could only dream of the dollars that Maryland is putting into its education system. In Texas, we had to make the dollar really sweat. Maryland Leads was designed to last beyond ESSER. If you have skin in the game, an initiative is more likely to last. So we told districts we would match their dollars.

I also used the force of law around the blueprint. We had to design a template [outlining] districts’ plans for implementing the blueprint and get the Accountability Implementation Board to adopt it. We asked, what is your high-quality instructional material? Where are you with training your teachers? All of that was us trying, essentially, to use Maryland Leads to supercharge the strategy and then use the blueprint to enshrine it. 

Superintendent Santelises wrote that your work on something called Neighborhood Indicators of Poverty is “the strongest work product ever produced by the Maryland State Department of Education.” What is that, and what will it enable?

I do appreciate Dr. Santelises’ comment, because she knows that if schools were more adequately funded, as well as given tools to leverage that money to ensure it lands in the right places, and the political cover to do it — going back to that cover piece, right? — that she could do even more great things.

When I went to work in San Antonio, Superintendent Pedro Martinez, one of my mentors, was already looking at income. I came in and said, to build a better measure of poverty, you can’t just look at income, you’ve got to look at other factors, like family makeup and home ownership. Our measure ultimately got adopted by the state of Texas. It was used to revamp compensatory funding and bring San Antonio more adequate resources. It took our Title 1 dollars from close to $50 million to close to $80 million. 

It also created something called the teacher incentive allotment that essentially tied teacher placement and impact to pay. If you’re not going to disrupt segregation, then you better make sure that [the most impacted] schools are some of the most expensive and that those teachers are compensated like rock stars. 

One thing that got me really excited about the blueprint, that made me put my hat in for the job, is that to see if there’s a better way to measure poverty, it said the department had to by January 2023. I seized that moment. Based on my team’s work in Texas, we were able to show that there is a much better way to fund our schools and give them adequate resources. Especially students living in abject poverty.

Maryland was already putting significant money into concentration of poverty and compensatory funding. But one of the things we did with that report was show that Baltimore City, as well as some of our rural counties, like Caroline County, were not being given what they should be in order to pull off bigger things quickly. 

We put a model bill at the end of the report: Here’s the way you can enshrine it. And by the way, you should use it not just to give more money to systems, along with another layer of accountability, but also to pay teachers who have the toughest assignments in our state in a differentiated manner. This past legislative session it got introduced. 

If you had it to do over again, are there things you would do differently? Do you have any regrets?

I definitely have reflected on this over the last few weeks, given how fresh my transition is. Yes. I’m into implementation, I like hanging out with my team, thinking through, Okay, we’ve got to pull this off, what’s it going to take? And then monitoring progress. However, as a leader — and I looked at case studies of other leaders — you’ve got to spend some time that is not about the work and the strategy and implementing the details. I could spend more time engaging, talking to people who are power brokers, who have more political capital, who have the ability to ultimately be for or against something and can either work against you or for you. 

I know there are moments where I have to say no, this is not the right decision for kids, or no, we can’t change course here. But at the same time, if I could go back, I would maybe take another moment to think through and be like, Hey, maybe it is okay to adapt the strategy here, but not compromise the student-centered focus that I wanted to keep. 

I would have spent more time explaining the changes. Sometimes, I do 20 things at the same time. You have to if you’re going to pull off 20 things. I had a mandate to implement the blueprint, work collaboratively with two governing entities and rebuild the department — while constantly hearing billions of dollars are going into our education system, we’re failing children, we have to recover from the pandemic. I’m used to moving with urgency. Children deserve that. But I think maybe I could have used my brakes or yellow light and done a little more to explain some things.

I had three years. And I blinked and I was already in my contract renewal phase.

When I first met you, you told me a story about you, as a young person of color identified as gifted in an integrated, high-poverty school, realizing not all your classmates got the same opportunities. That Mohammed, who had that moment as a very young man, has his belief set changed?

That’s an important question. I absolutely have not wavered in my beliefs that the world needs to be changed for kids for the better. �ճ󲹳�’s something that has inspired me ever since I visited the school that my grandfather started in the village [in Bangladesh]. That hasn’t changed. I want to build schools, figuratively and literally, and be on that mission. It gives me purpose. 

However, I did have a moment where I asked myself — especially as I faced the detractors and their attempts to smear my team and my administration, and then ultimately finding myself making the decision to not return — at what cost? Is this worth everything that you have put in? I had that moment. 

Ultimately, my resolve for wanting to stay the course has not changed. However, as someone who sits in the CEO’s seat, you have to be ready to make compromises while still moving forward. Don’t do 10 of something, do five of something. Maybe you have to place an adult interest over students’ interests — but for the greater good of still staying the course on student interest. 

I think the young kid that I was when I first declared that I wanted to be in education had a pure drive. You have to be able to pull this off, because children’s lives matter. Definitely children of color and in poverty — that reflects what happened to me as an individual and what I became. However, if I don’t figure out long term how to better navigate those compromises and still feel like I’m not giving up or selling out, then I should stop. 

I will say it one more time: I believe that I have to learn about the art of compromise. And I can’t tell you what the threshold is. You have to put yourself on that threshold and be like, Yeah, that’s a compromise, but it doesn’t take away from the student-focused goal we have. Or, That’s a compromise that will throw off the work and may potentially also ruin my ability to continue. 

What do you do, Mohammed? I know those moments have to happen throughout a leader’s journey. And I hope that I’m better for what comes next.

, led by researchers at the University of Chicago and New York University, highlights how the scramble to adopt new technologies in schools has served to create an $85 billion industry with significant data security risks for teachers, parents and students. The issue has become particularly pervasive since the pandemic forced students nationwide into remote, online learning. 

Students’ sensitive information is increasingly leaked online following high-profile ransomware attacks and user data monetization is a key business strategy for tech companies, including those that serve the education market, like Google. Yet student privacy is rarely a top consideration when teachers adopt new digital tools, researchers learned in interviews with district technology officials. In fact, schools routinely lack the resources and know-how to assess potential vulnerabilities.

Such a reality could spell trouble: In an analysis of education technologies widely used or endorsed by districts nationwide, researchers discovered privacy risks abound. The analysis relied on , a privacy inspector tool created by the nonprofit news website The Markup which scours websites to uncover data-sharing practices. Those include the use of cookies that track user behaviors to deliver personalized advertisements. Analyzed education tools, they found, make “extensive use of tracking technologies” with potential privacy implications. 

Most alarming to the researchers were the 7.4% that used “session recorders,” a type of tracker that documents a user’s every move. 

“Anyone visiting those sites would have their entire session captured which includes information such as which links they clicked on, what images they hovered over and even data entered into fields but not submitted,” the report notes. “This could include data that users might otherwise consider private such as the autofilling of saved user credentials or social network data.” 

The 74 caught up with report co-author Jake Chanenson, a University of Chicago Ph.D. student, to gain insight into the report’s findings and to understand why he believes that parents and students should be concerned about how ed tech companies collect, store and use their personal data. 

The conversation has been edited for length and clarity. 

Why did remote learning pique your interest in digital privacy and what are the primary implications that worry you? 

Remote learning can be done well but we all had to get to it very quickly without a plan because we all suddenly got thrown at home because of the global pandemic. Suddenly schools had to scramble and find new solutions to reach their students, to educate their students, without being able to test the field, to think critically about it. They really were, with shoestring and gum, trying to keep their classes together. 

Whether you were in school, whether you were at work, whether you were at neither and still just trying to keep in touch with your friends, you were using anything that came your way because that’s what you had to do. I found that really interesting — and a bit concerning. It’s no one’s fault because we don’t understand the ramifications of these technologies and now that we’ve used them a lot of them are here to stay. 

I don’t want to sound like some sort of demonizing figure saying that all tech is bad — that is certainly not the case. It’s merely the fact that sometimes these promises are oversold, and now we have this added element of data privacy. 

When you interact with any of these platforms, tons and tons of student data — from how you interact with it, how well you do on their assignments, when you do it, if you’re a chronic procrastinator, if you’re always getting your work done, if you seem more interested in your art class than your math class. These are all data points collected by these companies and I wanted to know, ‘What is it they’re collecting? What are they doing with it,’ and, specifically for this study, ‘What are schools thinking about in this space if anything at all?’

This study took a two-pronged approach. You conducted surveys with experts in this space and then used technology to identify information that folks might not be aware of. Let’s discuss the surveys first. How did the school administrators and district technology officials you interviewed view privacy issues? 

Lots of them knew that something wasn’t quite up to snuff in their security and privacy practices. 

The best security and privacy practices that I saw in these school districts were entirely because someone, usually in the IT department, had an independent interest in student privacy. They were going above and beyond what their job descriptions required because they cared about the students. 

�ճ󲹳�’s not to imply that school officials don’t care about the kids —they care about them very much — but they’re so busy making sure the lights are on and making sure there are teachers for the classrooms, dealing with discipline issues, dealing with staffing concerns. They’re not necessarily focused on data privacy and security. 

Your research takes a unique approach to show the real-world impacts of education technology on student privacy. You identify that some of these tools raise significant privacy implications. How did you go about that?

We looked at the online websites of educational sites and tried to understand, what are the privacy risks here? What we found is that 7.4% of all these websites had a session recorder, which records everything you do when you’re interacting with a web page. How long you hovered over a certain element, how often you scrolled, what you clicked on and what you didn’t click on. 

�ճ󲹳�’s a scary amount of data collection for something that’s normally an education site. On top of that we found a high prevalence of cookies and other types of trackers that were being sent to third-parties, basically advertising networks, that were taking that data to track these students across the web. As a student, even while I’m doing my work, they’re creating an ad profile of me that not only encompasses who I am as a consumer in my spare time, but who I am as a student inside of school for this more comprehensive picture of who I am to sell me ads. 

That could be upsetting to somebody who thinks that what I’m doing in school is only the business of me and the teacher, my parents and the principal. 

Why would an education technology company use a session recorder? 

We were able to identify that these trackers, like session recorders, were running on these websites, but we don’t have any idea what they’re recording, which is a project that we’re currently working on and trying to understand. 

I can’t make any well-grounded assumptions to what this is being used for, whether it be nefarious or benign. It’s not uncommon for a session recorder to be used for diagnostic information for a technology company if they want to understand how their users use a site so they can improve it. That’s a legitimate use of one of these session recorders, but without knowing what data they collect, it could be that they’re collecting data that isn’t strictly relevant to improving the service or are over-collecting data in the guise of improving the service and retaining it for future use. 

There are, of course, but I won’t speculate on that because I don’t have definitive proof that’s what’s happening. 

Why should people care about districts’ technology procurements? School districts are using a huge swath of digital tools, some from Google and some from tiny tech companies. If school leaders aren’t putting privacy at the forefront of deciding which tools to use, what concerning outcomes can come from that? 

There are several concerning outcomes, the first being that the data these companies collect don’t necessarily sit on their servers. They sometimes are sold to third parties. Some companies state third parties ambiguously and others list out who they are selling it to and why. 

Just on a normative basis, I think that what you do in the classroom shouldn’t be harvested and sold, especially when many of these companies are raking in somewhere between five- and seven-figure contracts to license this technology. It’s not like they don’t have other sources of income, but the things they can take from students can be incredibly alarming: Information about socioemotional behavior, so if I act out in school, if I am in trouble for something that’s happening at home or I’m bullying another student, that data is collected by a specific service and that data is held somewhere. And of course, when you hold data, it’s a security risk. 

There was a big breach in New York City where hundreds of thousands of students had their personal information leaked because a company was holding onto all of this data. It was leaked to hackers who got that data and can do who knows what with it. �ճ󲹳�’s a huge privacy violation. Some of the things they stole in that particular breach were names, birthdays and standard things you can use to commit identity fraud, which is a problem. But it can also be more sensitive stuff, such as [special education] accommodation lists or if you qualify for free lunch. There’s stuff about disability or your economic status, stuff that is all collected by these ed tech companies and held somewhere. 

Learning management systems have incredible amounts of metadata. ‘Are you someone who procrastinates and only finishes an assignment one minute before it’s due? Did you do it early? Are you someone who didn’t do the reading but showed up to class anyway? Are you someone who took 10 times to get this quiz right or did it only take you one time’ 

These data are recorded and are available for teachers to see, but because teachers can see it, it’s sitting on a server somewhere. 

Because they’re being stored somewhere and they are not being deleted regularly and these companies are not following data minimization principles, it’s a potential privacy risk for these students should another breach happen, which we’ve seen happen again and again and again. 

Breaches have affected sensitive student information. In her book Danielle Citron argues for federal rules that would protect intimate privacy as a civil right. Why are such rules needed and how would they work in an educational context? 

There are certain types of information, like nonconsensual disclosures of intimate images, so-called revenge porn. I think you can make a straight analogy for student data. Just as there should be a zone of intimate privacy around your personal intimate life, your sexuality, whatever else, we should have a similar zone around your educational life. 

Education is a space where students should be able to learn and make mistakes, and if you cannot make those mistakes without being recorded, then that can have repercussions for you later. If you’re not perfect on your first try and someone gets a hold of that, I could see that affecting your college admissions or that could affect an employment record. If I am someone who wants to hire you and I have a list of every student in a school that turns in their assignments early and all of these people were either habitually late or always procrastinating then obviously I’m going to be more interested in hiring the worker that turned stuff in early. But what that list might not tell you is that it was one data point in eighth grade and that one of those students when they were in high school finally got on top of their executive dysfunction and started turning things in on time. 

It’s ultimately nobody’s business how you do in the classroom. You have final grades, but those fine-grained data are nobody else’s business but yours and the teacher’s. You have a safe space to learn and grow and make mistakes in the educational environment and to not be penalized for them outside of that classroom.

All significant harms. But then there’s the bottom-line figure that appeared last winter: $28 trillion.

�ճ󲹳�’s , to the children whose academic abilities were set back during the COVID-era, totalling about $70,000 per person over the course of their careers. The figure was reached by Stanford economist Eric Hanushek, based on the cratering eighth-grade math performance measured by last year’s National Assessment of Educational Progress. And it could be permanent if schools don’t do something about those diminished skills.

One of the studying American education, Hanushek has spent over 40 years studying how schools lift kids’ achievement and whether test scores translate into later-life success. A longtime fellow of the conservative Hoover Institution, he won for Education Research in 2021, which brought a $3.9 million award for new projects. He is also deeply involved in some of the biggest ongoing debates in education policy, including whether the achievement gap between rich and poor students .

Above all other issues, Hanushek is tied to the question of whether spending more on schools will consistently result in better student outcomes. He has been both resolutely skeptical of the proposition and influential in the statehouses and courtrooms deciding whether to increase education funding. Over the last decade, a raft of studies have offered new evidence that increasing expenditures on schooling does, in fact, lift achievement — a in a lengthy review released this spring, while still insisting that the amount of dollars expended matter far less than the quality of the interventions they underwrite.

Money is also at the center of what the veteran researcher calls his “simple and complete” fix for COVID-related learning setbacks, detailed in . But rather than paying to lengthen school days or fund tutoring programs, Hanushek advises that districts spend remaining pandemic relief aid on incentives for the best teachers to take on extra students; he also proposes buying out the contracts of their least effective colleagues. 

In a conversation with The 74’s Kevin Mahnken, Hanushek talked about how the most advanced economies reward skill (and punish the lack of it), why he believes voluntary learning initiatives tend to increase achievement gaps and what the United States could do with $28 trillion.

“The cohort that suffered these learning losses isn’t going to be around for much longer,” he said. “We’re graduating 3.5 million of them each year, and they’re going away without any real chance of recovery.”

This conversation was edited for length and clarity.

Can you contextualize actually means? It’s a sum so large as to be almost mystical.

Sure. You know that we had a recession because of the pandemic, when businesses closed. The total cost of that is about 1/15th the same amount, maybe $2 trillion. The best estimates I’ve seen of the effects of the 2008 recession are something like $5 trillion. And if you want a third option, $28 trillion is a little more than one year of America’s GDP. So it’s as if you closed down the economy for a whole year. 

Am I right in thinking about this as essentially a huge number of deferred opportunities for growth, like businesses that don’t expand or innovations that are slower to arrive?

It’s everything about the economy. But a better way to think about it for most people is that everybody who was in school during the pandemic will experience 5–6 percent lower lifetime earnings. It’s almost like a 5 or 6 percent added tax, with this cohort earning less than the cohorts immediately ahead of it and immediately behind it, because they’re just less skilled. Unless we do something about it. 

But how confident are we that these test results are really measuring skills that are important in later life? Do we have proof that there’s an actual relationship between student scores on NAEP or state exams scores and their future economic activity?

Historically, people haven’t looked so much at the effect of test scores or cognitive skills on earnings because we just haven’t had much data. We’ve [Organisation for Economic Co-Operation and Development], and it shows that the U.S. rewards economic skills more than almost any other country on earth.

But consider that in reverse. It also means that the U.S. punishes the lack of skills more than almost any other country on earth. What this is essentially showing is that employers really do pay attention to the skills people have. Those skills determine how well people can adapt to new jobs, and they help determine how capable people are in actually doing their jobs. Nobody objects to the idea that people who are smarter generally earn more. And while there is a lot of variation around that — from NBA players, who often don’t finish their degrees, to college graduates who find themselves driving taxis — that’s the kind of relationship we would expect to see.

Is that connection between demonstrated academic achievement and economic success just a result of the highly knowledge-based economies that prevail in rich, Western countries like the U.S.?

Precisely. One country is Singapore, and Singapore basically doesn’t do anything except for knowledge-based industries.

If it’s so clear that increased educational attainment is linked to better economic prospects, does it worry you that we’ve seen the last few years?

We don’t know if that’s going to last. But in the short run, it’s a potential concern that people aren’t going off to get more skills. Part of it is that in the current economy, it looks like you can get a huge reward from going straight into the labor market after high school. But it just won’t compare with the reward from going to college.

There are variations in the returns [to college]. You can go into some college programs that ultimately don’t pay off, at least if you pay the full tuition. But on average, college graduates are earning something like 75 percent more than high school graduates, and that differential is large enough that people who get fixated on the cost of tuition and debt cost are really making a huge mistake if they don’t go to college. The differential more than compensates for the cost of getting that college degree.

Could you please explain the “simple and complete” way of addressing learning loss?

Every time I mention my preferred strategy, people sort of turn away. [Laughs] People are much happier saying, “Let’s do exactly what we’re doing already, but just a little bit more of it.” And it boils down to lengthening the school day, lengthening the school year, trying some tutoring here and there. But even if you could implement that — which nobody knows how to do — the data suggests that it wouldn’t make up for the kinds of losses that kids have suffered. It’s just not a strong enough treatment.

Something everyone mostly agrees with is that teachers are really important, and that effective teachers are very, very valuable. People start to disagree when you ask, “What do you make of that?” My answer for dealing with the current learning losses of the COVID cohort is to try to get our most effective teachers to just work more intensively by taking on a few more kids. You can, in fact, provide incentives from the existing ESSER money — which will be around for at least another year — and provide them with help in grading, essentially lighten the load and make it possible for them to teach more kids.

The place where everybody stops listening is here: We know that our most ineffective teachers are just harming kids. If we could take some of the ESSER money and buy out the contracts of our least effective teachers, the combination of those things could be enough to make up for the learning loss we’ve seen. 

We’re almost completely back to normal schooling. But the cohort that suffered these learning losses isn’t going to be around for much longer; we’re graduating 3.5 million of them each year, and they’re going away without any real chance of recovery. So we have to do something that’s quick — we can’t wait to hire and train a new group of teachers, or wait to figure out which kinds of instruction might help them the most. We just don’t have the time. But my point is that our current workforce is good enough to make up for this! We have, on average, a really good teaching force, though we don’t use the most effective teachers enough, and we overuse the least effective teachers.

The issue of urgency is obviously critical, but I wonder if it really supports your point. Given the logistical and political difficulties of that kind of approach, it seems much simpler to increase the quantity of instruction students receive — by providing tutoring and lengthening the school year, for instance — than by improving the quality through the strategy you describe.

The problem is that nobody is willing to actually make it mandatory that people stay longer in school. Los Angeles had a voluntary program to try to add four days to the school year, and . But even if they did, what would it mean? Say a quarter of your kids actually show up for two extra days: What do you teach them, and how do you integrate that with their normal classroom instruction? You could, at best, improve their soccer skills. 

Voluntary added days generally expand variation in academic performance because the kids who need [extra schooling] the least are the ones who tend to show up for voluntary learning days. It’s people at the top of the academic scale who take advantage of voluntary activities, and the people at the bottom don’t. That’s why I said before that we don’t know how to implement things like tutoring and supplemental instruction at scale. We have a few examples of it working, but we don’t know how to put it into 100,000 schools.

Does it surprise you that, in the five years since the Janus ruling, the organizing strength of teachers’ unions seems to have risen in much of the country? Teacher pay became something of a national issue during the summer of 2018, and now you see Republican governors excited to announce pay raises.

It’s a huge obstacle that you can’t get schools and teachers’ unions to agree to anything. We have a strike going on in Oakland Public Schools, where the union is trying to wring the last bit of money out of the pandemic; they’ve been offered over 20 percent pay increases over three years, but they don’t think that’s enough. [After nearly two weeks of school closures, on May 16.]

One of my favorite books on my bookshelf is called . It has a 1962 copyright. The thesis of the book is basically that if you pay all teachers the same amount, you’re likely to get either very underpaid math teachers or very overpaid PE teachers; you tend to see the former, and that’s where some teacher shortages come from. It’s a problem that certainly exists, and in my opinion, the biggest shortage is a shortage of highly effective teachers that we would like to keep in.

Do you think there’s something positive in the settlement we’ve reached in the U.S., wherein we hire lots of teachers but have largely deferred salary increases? I’m reminded of written by your frequent collaborator, Ludger Woessmann, which found that students earn better grades and stay in school longer when they have an adult mentor in school — that seems like something that small class sizes would foster, no?

It can be very important to build close relationships [between students and teachers]. The problem is that everything we measure suggests that reducing class size is not the most important thing, and that having an effective teacher in a classroom is so much more important than having a slightly smaller class. 

People get excited if they can see anything positive in the data about smaller classes. But the impact is so small relative to the impact that great teachers have. As you mentioned, teachers are now concerned about low salaries. But has to do with hiring more people too; it’s just hiring more people and paying them more. There are demands for more ancillary people in schools, like counselors and nurses, and they want to put caps on class size as well. So no one’s given up on quantity, which is the thing that unions like. Unions make their money by having more people, so they’re always happy to push for smaller class sizes.

If I could change the subject slightly: We’ve , which radically changed the way it evaluates and pays teachers. It’s much more related to effectiveness in the classroom now than under the traditional salary schedule. The other thing they did was introduce an incentive scheme to get the best teachers, measured by prior performance, to work in the lowest-performing schools in Dallas.

We found two things from this experiment. One is that the most effective teachers were willing to do that for relatively modest average salaries. The second was that once they moved to the lowest-performing schools, the worst schools in Dallas began approaching the citywide average within two years. This is a policy that has been shown to work, and work at scale where you can turn around entire schools.

But the unfortunate thing they did was say, “Oops! Now that these schools are performing well, they aren’t eligible for the program anymore.” They took the incentives away, and the best teachers left because there are lots of easier places to work. And they will if they don’t get paid.

You’ve got on Dallas’s pay-for-performance reform. It reminded me of the debate over Washington, D.C.’s IMPACT teacher evaluation system, which people have said is really hard to replicate, in part because was so fierce.

There was a bit of blowback in Dallas as well. Mike Miles was the superintendent who devised the entire Dallas system, and a somewhat grumpy school board to put it in place. Then, just as it was starting to come together, he left. So there’s no doubt, this is politically difficult.

The question is, are you willing to give up $28 trillion and settle for having the 31st-ranked school system in the world because it’s politically difficult? I’m not somebody who needs to make my living by politics. But it’s clear that the rewards of adopting these policies are so, so large, even if there are also political costs. Someday I hope the teachers’ unions also see that it’s in their interest to make some marginal changes to the old “no differentiation” policy.

I realize that’s just your estimate, and it’s not as though it would be dropped as a lump sum in the national checking account; but if the value of restoring lost learning is anything approaching $28 trillion, it could fund all our K–12 schools many times over.

The cost of the current U.S. education system is about $750 billion, so you’re talking about potentially funding that system for decades with the money that you could get out of this. Frankly, we have to get some people who are willing to lead in this time of crisis.

Are there any useful lessons from the catastrophe of the pandemic — or perhaps technology, including advances in virtual and asynchronous learning — that we might use to improve schools going forward?

The thing I learned was sort of the opposite. 

It became very clear that having a teacher in the classroom is much better than hybrid instruction that only sometimes has a live, in-person teacher. And hybrid instruction, in turn, is better than fully remote instruction. There’s noy doubt that we gained a greater appreciation of the importance of the classroom teacher, even in these kinds of chaotic circumstances. We had other ways of trying to teach, but we couldn’t do away with effective classroom teachers. 

We did mobilize the tech industry to try to improve virtual instruction in a variety of ways, and maybe we’ll come out a bit ahead from that. But I worry that we won’t try to learn from when and where virtual instruction works best, and when and where it doesn’t work. 

Do you think the public sector, including federal entities like the Institute of Education Sciences, needs to take a more active role as a catalyst for breakthrough learning platforms and technology? Given the mixed record of ed-tech generally, I wonder if we actually have reason to be hopeful.

Sure, I like what IES has been doing. The amount of money we’re talking about there is pathetic, really, compared with the size of the problem. We have systematically underplayed any role of research and evaluation in education compared with other industries. But education is the base industry for most of this other stuff that we’re pouring money into.

The most recent NAEP release shows decades’ worth of progress — this time in civics and U.S. history — essentially erased since the beginning of the pandemic. I’m wondering whether you think the gains of the last 25 years or so, often characterized as the “education reform era,” were all that big to begin with.

Reform has been less reformist than many of us would have liked. It hasn’t accomplished what we wanted.

On the latest NAEP release, the thing that I thought was most important is that we really expanded the gaps in scoring. The top end of the scoring distribution did okay in social studies, but the lower-performing students fell further. What we’re seeing just reinforced these gaps, the spread-out distribution. At the bottom end, it seems that some eighth graders don’t even know what the separate branches of government do; they barely know the difference between the legislature and the executive. That’s very worrisome to me because the U.S. has thrived by having a common society. We might be losing some of that, and the polarization we see in our politics can only be heightened by these kinds of results.

The expanding achievement gap, which we’ve seen on other NAEP tests, is really concerning. Forty percent of eighth-graders scored below the NAEP Basic level in U.S. history, for example.

Yeah, and NAEP Basic is really basic. On subject-matter tests like these, kids scoring below that level really don’t know much at all; on math and reading tests, they’re kind of hopeless because they are not likely to be able to go on past eighth-grade knowledge. In the math test, it’s also roughly 40 percent of eighth-graders in the country scoring below Basic. That’s not a position you want to be in.

There’s been an enormous amount of newer research from scholars like and on the effects of education funding on school outcomes, with much of it suggesting that money really does matter. As perhaps the single figure most associated with the opposing view, are you getting ready to wave the white flag?

You get very different effects across these studies, and it’s not well understood when money has a big effect and when it doesn’t. There’s no reason to infer from some of this recent work that we can be assured of a great achievement gain, or a lifetime earnings gain, by simply putting more money into the existing system.

At a certain level, this is largely a political debate because Kirabo Jackson and Jesse Rothstein recognize that how you spend money is also really important. My view is that how you spend money is considerably more important than how much you spend. We’re currently spending something like $17,000 per kid on education, and an extra $300 is not going to make much difference unless you spend that money well. 

I’m reminded of that argued that the positive effects of school finance reforms are mostly driven by states that also adopted test-based accountability.

Yeah, it was very simple and straightforward that if you put more money into systems with good accountability for outcomes, you get much larger results. Part of the problem is that the current federal accountability law, ESSA, is loosening accountability all over the place and . What states have done since 2016 is backing off holding teachers responsible for student outcomes. This has negative effects on learning. 

The effects of spending have been argued endlessly over the last few decades. What are the biggest questions you’d like to see investigated going forward?

One of the developments coming out of the pandemic is that schooling is going to start becoming very different. It’s clear to me that just doing what’s called homeschooling is not going to be the answer, but parents have often looked for something different than what they got during the pandemic and even before the pandemic. You have lots of political fighting over education savings accounts and choice.

I don’t think any of these things is going to be the answer, but understanding the possible choices is important because choices are going to expand for lots of people. We don’t understand where they’re going to go and what the effects of those choices are going to be. 

If states continue to expand school choice, does it become harder to improve policy through the districts? It seems like the lever of traditional public schooling will just move fewer students in the future.

Well, if we had everywhere, we’d still see 80 percent of kids enrolled in traditional public schools. I like having more choice, and I think it’s important. It’s important to improve the charter sector as well. But the traditional public schools are still going to be there for the rest of my lifetime, and probably yours too. So we still have to be concerned about how we operate traditional public schools because they’re the backbone of our economy.

Simultaneously, philanthropist Andrew Carnegie hoped to kick-start the expansion of higher education by donating $10 million to bankroll pensions for college professors. This posed a parallel dilemma: How to decide whether a scholar had put in enough time to earn the annuity?

Thus was born the wonky educational anachronism known as the Carnegie Unit, brainchild of the trustees of the . A certain number of hours spent in a high school classroom added up to a credit, the trustees decided in 1906. A set number of credits earned a diploma. So quantified, the diploma could be used as the entrance ticket to a college or university, where Carnegie Units would add up to a degree — or the right to retire.

Carnegie Units went on to become the central currency of a dizzying number of aspects of education, ranging from what subjects students are exposed to to how states allocate school funds. But it was quickly understood that while the units were good for, say, establishing whether a public school had delivered its pupils enough hours of teaching to earn its taxpayer dollars, it was not particularly helpful at signaling what a student had learned during those hours in class — now, 117 years later, better known as seat time.

Some innovators, like the leaders of the Phoenix Union High School District, are experimenting with ways to leave the Carnegie Unit in the past. Students at PXU City, a Phoenix high school without a building, can create their own personalized educational experience from a menu of 500 options, including classes at any number of high schools, college courses and job training programs throughout the city. 

The experiment came to the attention of Carnegie’s present-day leaders, who are engaged in their own effort to replace their turn-of-the-century units. The person tasked with figuring out how better to quantify what students have learned, and how the schools of the future can help them realize the historical promise of social and economic mobility, is Tim Knowles, the foundation’s president and former director of the University of Chicago Urban Education Institute. 

Knowles recently talked to Beth Hawkins about a pilot project to reimagine seat time that includes the Phoenix district, the possible benefits of freeing teachers from unit-driven bell schedules and how to transform entire school systems. This interview has been edited for length and clarity. 

Tell us about the Carnegie Unit, what it is, how it wove itself into education’s very DNA and why it’s time to step away from it. 

In 1906, when the Carnegie Foundation created the Carnegie Unit, it suggested that a college degree should be 120 credits. Today, it’s 120 credits. It’s become the bedrock currency of the educational economy. It’s infiltrated everything. It’s how we organize high schools and universities, how we think about assessment, it’s instrumental to accreditation, to who gets financial aid and who doesn’t. It defines the daily work of teachers and professors. It is the system.

What it is, fundamentally, is the conflation of time and learning. It’s the suggestion that X number of minutes equals learning. The problem is, that it basically ignores everything we’ve learned in the last 100 years about what knowledge is and how it’s acquired. We’ve had neuroscientists and cognitive psychologists and psychologists and learning scientists come along and say, “People learn through solving real problems, they learn from peers, they learn from mentors, they learn in apprenticeship, they learn from experience.”

In its time, the Carnegie Unit was an incredibly important reform because it standardized an utterly nonstandardized educational sector. But it crept into the core DNA of educational practice and didn’t evolve or adapt in the face of a significant amount of empirical knowledge about how human beings actually learn. That’s problem No. 1. 

No. 2 is that it inhibits educational innovation. Competency- or mastery-based education has existed, arguably, since and . But it’s existed at the edges. It’s never been central. We can all point to schools that are breaking the boundaries of what learning should look like, how it’s organized, how it’s structured. While those examples exist, they’re often led by extraordinary teachers and school leaders. We haven’t figured out how to take it from the margins to the mainstream. That’s a problem.

The third thing is perhaps more existential, and that is the absence of social and economic mobility in our nation. This is not to suggest that education isn’t an essential solution to addressing social and economic mobility, it’s just that it’s not nearly powerful enough an engine for doing so. The Carnegie Unit is, in my view, partly responsible for that. In the 1950s, over 90% of young people would [end up] better off than their parents. That number is basically cut in half now. We’re going in precisely the opposite direction, and underlying that are some really fundamental inequities, which are exacerbated by race and by class. 

If we want to radically increase economic and social mobility, we need to reimagine what learning is, and really take into consideration what we know about the context in which people learn. Young people need to be engaged in much more experiential, hands-on solving of real problems and applied work. 

Why is the Carnegie Foundation the organization to take this on?

It’s been a narrative in the organization and beyond for decades. One of the questions was, what are you going to do about assessment, because if you are going to take on the future of learning, then you have to be thinking about the future of assessment. That led us in the last year to a deep partnership with ETS, which is the largest assessment company on Earth. It’s very good at determining reliability and validity. 

If we believe that learning, wherever it takes place, is important, then in order for that to take root at scale, we need to persuade parents first that the learning their young people are experiencing outside the schoolhouse is valuable. And is legible to the postsecondary sector if you’re applying to college. And legible to employers if you’re going more directly into the workforce. Everybody intuitively knows there’s enormous amounts of learning there. We need tools that can validate that learning. 

We’re going to build assessments to assess the skills, not the disciplinary knowledge, that we know are predictive of success. Things like your ability to collaborate, to communicate, how hard you work, are you persistent, your creative thinking, your critical thinking. The aim with ETS would be to get to the point where every young person in America doesn’t just graduate from high school with a transcript that has grades and attendance and test scores, but a skills transcript as well.

The wonderful thing about Carnegie, it’s got this incredible responsibility to be a place that looks around the corner. It did that in 1906, for really important reasons. It created Pell grants for really important reasons. It established standards for medical schools, engineering, law schools. It’s done these things at certain times in its history that really needed to happen, because there were gaps. And it’s positioned in a way that it can take a slightly longer-term view about where we need to get.

In Phoenix, a driving factor behind the district’s decision to move away from the Carnegie Unit more quickly and widely than it had planned before the pandemic was teenagers. Students who weren’t in high school when COVID hit had no expectation of a bell schedule. 

At the heart of accelerating learning is ensuring young people are leaning in, are engaged, are inspired and are working on problems that they think are actually useful — whether it’s useful for their own trajectories, pursuing a track that is orienting them to a particular profession or sector, or more here and now. One can learn a great deal about democracy by actually practicing it, or identifying an issue that you care about and learning how civically to engage in a way that can draw attention and potentially movement regarding that issue. 

So, yes, engagement is an instrumental variable in all this, and, as you are pointing out, teenagers have already spoken. We know they’re not engaged. There have been some systems around the country that have made marked improvements in high school completion, but there are many where 50, 60 or 70% of students are biding their time. Getting through. If we’re losing 30 or 40% of our young people before they’ve even had a shot, then we’ve got to take a step back and ask what might work better, what we need to do differently. And that’s not a small incremental step, like providing double blocks in math or high-dosage tutoring. There’s something much more fundamental involved in reconsidering how we think about time and learning. 

The other thing about teenagers is that when you create opportunities which are highly engaging, and you enlist their agency in learning, you really just have to get out of the way. Versus in a set of circumstances that may feel to them far more compliance-oriented, where they’re doing seven periods for 40 minutes or 42 minutes between bells with a two-minute passing period, with seven different teachers every day who may have so many students that they can’t even learn their names until the end of October. If you turn that on its head, young people are going to rise and surprise us. 

There was a survey of high school students nationally during the pandemic, and almost to a person they said they wanted to come back to school — not surprisingly. But not all of the time. I don’t think that was a statement about not being interested in learning. I think that was a statement about not wanting only that form of learning all the time. Valuing the community that school creates, valuing the fact that there are some domains of expertise and disciplinary areas where they need to be in classrooms with amazing teachers, but also recognizing that, “Wait, I’ve been learning independently. I’ve been pursuing things I’m passionate about.”

If we could scaffold that systematically with opportunities for apprenticeships, for internships, for community embedded work, I think it’s safe to say not only would we be hewing much more closely to what empirical evidence says is the best way to learn, but we would be in a situation where the young people were much, much more interested and excited about what they were learning.

Let’s talk for a second about the obstacle that is adult time. I’ve talked to so many people in education who say, Yeah, that’s great. But we’d have to fundamentally reorganize how the adults use their time.

We would. By saying we’re taking on the Carnegie Unit, we are not saying we’re going to have eight periods a day in 10th grade and then we’re going to layer on a whole other set of things. So how we organize teacher time, and the role of the teacher, has to fundamentally shift. 

But teacher pipeline issues are real. Schools are struggling to find really exceptional people who want to spend their career teaching. Embedded in rethinking the use of adult time is the opportunity to rethink the role of teachers. There are few people who want to have the same responsibilities on the first day of their professional career as they do on the last day of their 35th year. 

If we could turn the teaching profession into something where you’re teaching in teams, for example, or where you may be teaching in the morning and then advising groups of students through the afternoon as they engage in activities in their communities and with postsecondary institutions, the job could become much more attractive and interesting to a much wider range of young people over time. Adult time is a predicament, but it’s also an opportunity.

You mentioned a skills transcript. That got me thinking about how many people you’re dangerous to if you’re successful. So many things are proxies for whether a person has a skill set. The college degree is a proxy: We assume that because you made it through this filter — which might be meaningless — you are going to be valuable to this endeavor, this institution, this company. But we don’t actually know whether you come with the requisite skills.

Right. We’ve had a very fragmented K-12-to-postsecondary-to-employment path, replete with assumptions. If you go to an elite private or highly selective public college, whether by virtue of where it is geographically or by nature of how you get in, there all kinds of assumptions that you’re going to come with these other things that we care about, in addition to whatever’s on your transcript, like your grades and your test scores. But that’s a pretty crude measure of whether you do. So there is a threat to the established pathways. 

We could credibly determine whether a young person has a set of skills wherever those skills were developed. If I’m living on the south side of Chicago, and I take my two siblings to school every morning, and then I get to my high school on time at 7:30, I do my homework, I perform well in the traditional ways, I participate in afterschool activities and I work, those are skills that that are invisible, or less visible than the proxies you were suggesting. Or whether I was lucky enough to be born in a situation where my parents were taking me to rarefied places every summer, or putting me in rarefied summer camps.

Part of the agenda is to make the education sector a more vital engine for individuals, no matter their backgrounds, to be able to succeed in a post-affirmative action world. A skills transcript would provide elite schools with a different kind of visibility on every kid. It wouldn’t have to have anything to do with race per se, but I would hope it would help make visible the skills and dispositions young people bring, even if they’re growing up in really underresourced places. 

Devil’s advocate. When the pandemic forced schools away from seat time, lots of people said, ‘Hey, wait — maybe we could just have asynchronous learning. I wouldn’t have to report to a building anymore.’ Or the variation we’re hearing a lot about now, the four-day week. In blowing up seat time, temporarily or permanently, did states just leave the barn door open?

The conditions under which they blew up seat time during the pandemic are slightly anomalous. I wouldn’t compare what we’re trying to do to that, because we’re certainly not of the view that people should be socialized in front of a laptop. But I’m sympathetic to the accountability side. Whether we have the existing system or a fundamentally transformed one, it’s going to demand that we know how young people are performing.

None of what I’ve been talking about should suggest we no longer believe in algebra or reading. There’s things that we really do think young people benefit from learning. How they learn those things is an open question. If we are in a period where people are questioning the power of our educational system and asking questions about how we might empower it further, it has to be undergirded by accountability systems that are credible. And fair. Otherwise, you’re right. It could be a slippery slope. 

What are you learning so far?

Our agenda, which we’re working in partnership with XQ on, is in short: establish proofs, create places where this is happening, build evidence for improvement. Develop policy and national discussion about transformative learning opportunities. And then think hard about the postsecondary piece. Unless the work we do in high school is relevant, legible and understandable to postsecondary, it could falter. 

There are learnings from the people who’ve been doing this for a long time, sometimes in quiet opposition to the systems in which they sit, sometimes with some support from the state within which they sit. They are there, and it’s important to recognize and acknowledge that there are educators across the country who’ve been doing this with young people from all kinds of different backgrounds.

One of the [trends] in the educational system at the moment are these things called portraits of a graduate or portraits of learners. They’re everywhere. One of the things we did with ETS was look carefully at all the ones that we could. They’re interesting, because they represent an American consensus about what the purpose of schooling is. They are really focused on skills. Often, they’ve been developed with lots of parent voice and teacher voice and student voice. Red and blue, left and right, communities, in spite of all our polarized hype, are saying there are a set of things that we want for young people. That should make us optimistic, if we can leverage that. 

The other things that that you will hear is, A) they haven’t really made a big difference, and B) we have no way of measuring the things in them. The problem is the Carnegie Unit problem. They haven’t cracked the Carnegie Unit, they haven’t cracked this architecture of learning that we’ve established. We have to do that. We want our young people to be able to think critically, and we don’t really know how to measure that. How do we measure that they’re civically involved? 

Disclosure: The XQ Institute, which has partnered with the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching to explore alternatives to the Carnegie Unit, provides financial support to The 74.

�ճ󲹳�’s the question confronting university administrators, faculty, applicants and their families in the wake of in Students for Fair Admissions, Inc. v. President and Fellows of Harvard College. The 6-3 ruling by the Court’s conservative majority at both Harvard and the University of North Carolina, overturning the decades-old model of affirmative action in higher education.

That system — in the 1978 Regents of the University of California v. Bakke case — allowed schools to include race as a consideration in offering university acceptance, but only as a means of cultivating the benefits of a diverse student body. But after a series of failed legal challenges over the past 20 years appealing to the bench’s increasingly rightward tilt, a group of Asian plaintiffs prevailed in arguing that they were unconstitutionally disadvantaged by affirmative action as currently practiced. 

“Many universities have for too long wrongly concluded that the touchstone of an individual’s identity is not challenges bested, skills built, or lessons learned, but the color of their skin. This Nation’s constitutional history does not tolerate that choice,” wrote Chief Justice John Roberts in the majority opinion. 

But if the status quo of college admissions has been cast aside, a replacement hasn’t yet been offered. According to Georgetown University’s Anthony Carnevale, the future remains murky.

Carnevale is the longtime director of Georgetown’s Center on Education and the Workforce (CEW) and one of America’s most-cited economists on the intersection of schools and the labor market. A former member of multiple federal panels on employment and technology, and a passionate advocate for additional K–12 funding and policy experimentation, he has long pondered the question of what might follow an abrupt end to affirmative action.

His observations and proposals fill published in June, which may help shape colleges’ and policymakers’ response to a new landscape of socioeconomic mobility. If elite schools can no longer act as an access point for historically disadvantaged groups to enter the middle and upper classes, he and his co-authors argue, the logic of broad-based education reform — including both dramatically boosted resources and an overhauled approach to college and career counseling — becomes inescapable.

In an interview with The 74’s Kevin Mahnken, Carnevale discussed the legacy of the Bakke case and multiple generations of racial preferences; the plausibility of class-based selection metrics replacing the vanished system; and the future of a higher education sector that could increasingly come to be seen as elitist. While lamenting the end of affirmative action as we knew it, he argues that colleges should step up efforts to become truly egalitarian.

“One of the problems for elite colleges is that they’re going to become unpopular because everyone is going to see them as what they are: institutions that preserve elites,” he said. “If you’re an elite college president, that’s a problem you have to deal with.”

This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

The 74: What’s your perspective on this ruling and the legacy of race-conscious admissions?

Basically, affirmative action has been a Band-Aid that’s been used by politicians and the rest of us, so that we have a little racial access to elite colleges. And it’s stopped us from truly reforming education. Now the Band-Aid has been ripped off, and race is a gushing wound in America.

In the end, what disgusts me most about this outcome is that they’re demanding that minority applicants humiliate themselves. The best way for a minority to get into Harvard now — it’s allowed in this opinion — is to write an essay about the hardship you’ve suffered; that your parents abused you, that your neighborhood abused you, that you got beaten up going to school every day, and that was good for your character. I find that humiliating, to turn on everyone you know and care about so that you can get into Harvard. Telling your story in this way is kind of like racial porn: “Let’s see who’s got the sorriest story to tell, and we’ll let them in!” 

There are definitely going to be fewer African American, Latino, and Native American people on campus, no doubt about it. That’s what’s going to happen here. The question is, how does everybody respond?

How do you think they’ll respond? Are college admissions officers freaking out right now?

I’m not sure about “freaking out.” I go to meetings of college officials where this topic is the center of the discussion, and people basically don’t know what they’re going to do. In one of those meetings, a lawyer opened the conversation by saying, “The first question you have to answer is, do you want to get sued?” I thought, “Boy, that’s a good question.”

If you want to make your name in higher education, you can disobey this ruling and let them sue you. If you’re Harvard or Georgetown, and slaves helped build the buildings, maybe you should do that and make a point. But I don’t see any way out of this because the anti-preferences side is committed, and not all of them are racists — a lot of them are just idealists. They’re well-funded, they’re well-organized and they’re always three steps ahead. They’re already changes to Gifted and Talented programs, and if anyone’s wondering whether they’ll persist [in those challenges], I think the answer is yes.

If I were as rich as Harvard, I might simply disobey the ruling. What are they going to do? They’re like the pope — they have no army. Maybe they’ll sue you.

Deliberately contravening a Supreme Court order seems incredibly risky, though. I wonder if universities are entering a particularly dangerous period with respect to the law and public opinion.

It is risky because people’s feelings are easily aroused on this issue. One of the things that will happen is that the ACE [the American Council on Education, a nonprofit advocacy group representing 1,700 institutions of higher education] will take a beating. 

I think the [legislation re-introduced this spring, which aims to modernize data collection from universities and give families a fuller picture of schools’ enrollment, completion, and post-completion earnings statistics] will pass when there’s an opening for it. It has strong, bipartisan support, and one of the things you can do to whack higher education is to make them more transparent in terms of their employment and earnings effects. There’s also a push for expanding funding for workforce training, so we’re going to get transparency on degrees and accountability on training. All of that stuff will move now.

I worked on the Hill a long time, and higher education annoys politicians because they think it’s arrogant and ungrateful. Higher education leadership tried to stop the GI Bill, and they lost. They tried to stop student aid because they wanted that money to go to institutions, and they lost again. They lose at every turn when it comes to issues going beyond higher education. Whacking the elites is a common American sport that appeals to both parties for different reasons. 

So if I’m a lobbyist for higher education, I’m looking for another job.

What has been the final legacy of race-conscious standards of college admission since the Bakke case?

The importance of Bakke was that it saved race-conscious affirmative action just in time. There were questions even then about whether it could survive, and it’s . 

If you ask the American public straight-up, “Do you agree that we should give racial preferences in admissions to selective colleges,” a majority will say no — and that includes a majority of African Americans, Latinos, etc. If you ask them, “Do you think there are fundamental problems in the American system that are racist and need attention,” they’ll say yes. But if you give them anything specific, they’ll reject it.

So Bakke saved the day by deferring to the expertise of educators, the notion being that educators understood higher education better than judges do. What has now happened is that the deference is over, and they’re no longer going to defer to American education institutions on race. The argument is that race is too much; even if diversity is a good thing, we can’t base admissions decisions on it because that would be racist. 

Could there be any replacement measures for racial preferences? 

The courts have been chipping away at preferences in admissions for a long time, and we’re now at the point where they’re saying it’s the end. But it’s not clear that it is. In many people’s judgment — lawyers and others — courts will begin to defer to class instead. Many decent people argue that the real issue of concern here, across all our diverse peoples, is class. We believe strongly in striving and Horatio Alger, and we want to reward that. The polls make clear that the public still believes that, and it’s part of our culture. 

The classic story is Poor Kid Makes Good. Everybody likes that, you want to give that kid a break. But for some reason, we don’t recognize the connection of race to American history and the disadvantages that are still there. It’s a failure to deal with American racism, and it has been since Bakke. The hope among some people is that we’ll use class as a proxy for race, but class and race are not the same thing. They are two very different forces in disadvantaging people’s lives, though a lot of people notice that they often go together. 

We’ve done a over the years and discovered that, no, you don’t also get race when you screen for class. You can claw back a bit of the racial diversity you had before affirmative action was banned, but not much of it.

Nevertheless, a lot of people are celebrating a potential switch to class-based affirmative action, saying, “Finally, going to Harvard isn’t just going to be for rich minority kids anymore.” The truth is, it never was. Most of the African Americans and Latinos who go to the top 193 schools are from the bottom half of the income distribution. A lot of them aren’t poor in the classic sense, but they’re not a bunch of rich kids. 

The thing people don’t talk about when it comes to class-based admissions is this: A basic problem for people who are poor is, obviously, that they don’t have money. And with the exception of places that are filthy rich, like Harvard and Yale — they can do whatever they want, and their concern is prestige rather than money — colleges just can’t afford class-conscious affirmative action. There have been efforts, but what people forget about colleges, whether they’re selective or not, is that they’re businesses. What they’re always trying to do is find as many kids who can pay full tuition as possible, and if they’re lucky, more than 50 percent of your families will do that.

There’s a bargaining process that every middle-class family is familiar with, where families visit eight colleges and strike the best bargain they can within their kids’ preferences. The colleges will give them “merit aid,” but what it is is a bargain. You get all the full-pay parents you can get, and you haggle with the parents you have to haggle with. Then, whatever you’ve got left over, you can use it for athletes, legacies, the trombone player you need in the band. But you really don’t have room for many poor kids. 

You might say to these schools, “You’ve got an endowment of something like $2 billion. How the hell can you not afford it?” Well, if a college president takes money out of the endowment, the alumni are going to get him fired. 

How did this whole focus on diversity get started?

As a practical matter, this has always been about white kids. James Conant, who was the president of Harvard after World War II, determined that we needed 5 percent of kids to go to college. He that we should build a certain kind of high school nationwide, the “comprehensive” high school. It was comprehensive because it offered a college pathway to a small share of the kids; it offered vocational education, mostly for boys; and it offered home economics and typing for women. 

But one of the big moments in the history of education came in 1983. After A Nation at Risk, we decided to do away with the comprehensive high school and provide every American child a full academic education through high school. And the real political reason behind that reform was the civil rights movement, the women’s liberation movement, the disability movement. Basically, anti-tracking sentiment killed the comprehensive high school and, in the end, created an academic curriculum that assumed everyone would go to college. Since Obama, the battle cry has been to make every kid college- and career-ready, but of course, high schools don’t. A lot more kids are graduating high school and going to college, a lot of them are dropping out, and a lot of the kids who don’t make it are the ones you’d figure wouldn’t make it. 

Underneath all this, there’s a fundamental shift in the relationship between education and the economy. We needed an elite to run our military, our businesses, every institution in American life, and most of these people were going to be white males. We realized that if you’re going to run a diverse economy and be the global leader in a diverse world, you need to have some understanding of demographic diversity. The reason we did affirmative action was for them — they needed it! If you’re going to run a company in America, you need to have a diverse workforce, or Reverend Al’s going to show up. 

The way this will work out is that employers will need to have diversity in their leadership. They’ve got to “look like America,” as Bill Clinton used to say. So irrespective of what the court’s done, they’ll go to UMass instead of Harvard to recruit, and they’ll find plenty of talented minorities there. They’re serious about this, and they have no choice — you can’t run a company with an all-white leadership team. 

What about the political consequences?

It will be hell for the Democratic Party. The Supreme Court has effectively put a Band-Aid on racism for years, and now we’re ripping it off. If minorities are a core part of your coalition, you’ve got to come up with something for them. 

Joe Biden’s answer is: We’re going to go back and do what we should have done in the first place. We’re going to have preschool for everyone, we’re going to increase spending for Title I, we’re going to increase funding for low-income schools, and we’re going to make community college free. In other words, now that you can’t just mess around with the elite schools, you’ve got to focus on the whole damn system. That’s not very satisfying because you’re talking about 40 years of work. There’s going to be much more focus on making the education system produce minority elites who aren’t from rich families. 

This changes the conversation on education reform, which has run out of gas at the K–12 level. That discussion is about to get revived because there’s nothing else to do except go back to the beginning and get it right.

That sounds refreshing, but also potentially impossible.

In the end, K–12 has caused this problem, so we’ve got to go back to court cases in the states. There have been a lot of those, and they’ve been reasonably successful over the last few decades. But it’s a big, big deal. Politically, it’s going to be awful because what you’re talking about, in part, is screwing around with the local control of schools. 

The education system is now the primary pathway to a good job in America. That wasn’t true back when I was young. If you had an uncle working at Chrysler, he could get you in. 

You didn’t need to go to college; truthfully, you should drop out of high school instead of waiting. But in all the research — OECD [the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development] was the first organization to start saying this, in the ’90s — the education system is now the primary institution that ensures the reproduction of advantage from one generation to the next. It’s a machine where you go to a good grade school, a good high school, a good college, and you get work-based learning and internships. Then you marry a college graduate, move to a neighborhood with good schools and the whole thing starts right over again. 

The thing is, it’s hard to argue with. And if we weren’t a diverse nation, it would be an ideal system. But we are a diverse nation, and diversity clearly matters in terms of who wins. Both Republicans and Democrats have tried to reform the K–12 system, and they did good things, but it wasn’t nearly enough. 

What I’m hearing is that this change to college admissions is occurring in an economy with an increasingly ossified relationship between higher education and success in life.

The endgame now is much clearer than it used to be. According to , which run out to 2031, we’re going to have 171 million jobs. Forty percent will require a B.A. or more, and about three-quarters of those jobs will be good jobs. Meanwhile, 30 percent of all jobs will be middle-skilled, and maybe 40 percent of those jobs will be high-paying and secure. And then there’ll be jobs for high schoolers, only about 20 percent of which will be good jobs — largely . 

That said, there’s still quite a bit of variability. That’s why, in the United States, 40 percent of people with B.A.s make more than people with graduate degrees, and 30 percent of people with A.A.s make more than people with B.A.s. It’s a system, more and more, where what you study really matters. If you go to a community college and learn about HVAC, you’re going to get a good job. There’s movement here.

Why wasn’t affirmative action ever popular? You mentioned the fact that polling around it is terrible, but it was also striking that a ballot measure to bring back race-conscious admissions failed — in , of all places — a few years back.

Think about it: Every family has that guy — in my family, it’s a couple of immigrants — who came over and worked hard with a pick and shovel, and by the third generation, we all went to college. Everybody’s got that story about themselves and their families, and we’re almost neurotically tied to hard work and individual success. The idea that somebody who worked less hard or was less qualified could get the job over my grandfather, which they did, was anathema. The striving, the upward mobility, is what we reward.

Now, if you recognize racism in America, you ought to question that perspective somewhat. That is, in America, there were people who weren’t allowed to strive. But it’s a tough American problem because it creates the cultural contradiction of rewarding people based on the color of their skin. You put that to the average guy in a bar, he’ll say, “Hell no! Whoever works the hardest and does his homework should get the job.” To my mind, it’s a very superficial understanding of the United States and its history, but we are who we are. 

If I’m a Republican, I’m standing up to make a righteous speech about how the people who deserve advantages are now going to get them. Even if you look at Democrats, they tend to agree with that, so you’ve got to find a Plan B. I’ve worked for a lot of politicians, and boy were they happy that the Supreme Court handled abortion and affirmative action. Now it’s falling into their laps.

If you’re a Democrat, the abortion ruling last year was very advantageous. On affirmative action, not so great.

Is it possible that colleges will effectively ignore this ruling? They can just jettison the use of admissions exams, which were a big part of the evidence in this case, and admit whomever they like, right?

If you look at the data, test-optional [admissions] has increased the recruitment of high-income kids. White kids. If you take the test away, colleges and universities can admit more legacies, the quantity of whom is growing all the time. After this decision, they can admit anyone — except African Americans and Latinos. 

In an ideal world, if you’re talking to a student who wants to go to your college, you should be talking about the whole kid, not just their grades. There’s something to holistic admissions. But it also frees up colleges to do whatever they want, and what they want is not to admit poor kids. The flip side is that in American politics, elitism is not a good look. Americans don’t like elites, even if they themselves are elites. There are in Congress that would prevent colleges from admitting legacies. That won’t go anywhere, but we’ll get transparency on legacies; they’re going to have to report to the Department of Education how many legacies and donor kids are in their freshman classes. You can call it grievance, or revenge politics, but it’s going to happen. 

One of the problems for elite colleges is that they’re going to become unpopular because everyone is going to see them as what they are: institutions that preserve elites. If you’re an elite college president, that’s a problem you have to deal with. If you don’t have any African American or Latino students on campus, people aren’t going to like it. Resentment politics might become stronger in higher education because the class differences and race differences will get even more real.

Class has always been real — elite colleges have always done better with race than with class. If you walk around on a college campus, you can’t tell what a poor kid looks like. But you’ve got a much better chance of bumping into an African American or Latino kid than a poor kid on an elite college campus. They just don’t go there.

Combined with the decision to overturn the Biden administration’s student debt forgiveness program, we’ve now seen big reversals for universities as engines of social and racial equality. It seems like higher education will increasingly come under some skepticism from the political realm.

Yeah. We’re going to get a big emphasis on training and career education because it’s a program that can reach the working class in a way that Harvard and a lot of four-year schools never could. The Democrats need it to shore up their working-class voters, and the Republicans need it to retain white working-class voters as well.

So higher education is going to get some competition from training. That’s good for two-year institutions, but not four-year institutions. now allow you to get bachelor’s degrees at community colleges. Higher education is being rebuilt, in other words. Pretty soon we’ll have a mandate to force higher education institutions to tell their applicants what happened to all the other students who took the program they’re in, whether they got a job, and how much money they made. The data is there for that.

Transparency and accountability is about to come to higher education. You can’t stop it now.

Is it possible this judgment will affect a school like Harvard much more than one like UNC? My guess would be that the types of students who are currently benefiting from racial preferences at the most selective institutions will just apply, and gain acceptance to, slightly less selective institutions. But the more elite the institution, the more challenging it could be to find top nonwhite students.

Yeah, it’s not a choice for these kids between Yale and jail. It’s a choice between Yale and Dartmouth, or Colby, or Bates. But it should change the demographics at the top, say, 40 institutions, and people will be pissed off about it. The newspapers will write headlines about the shrinking number of minorities enrolled at their local colleges, and that will get noticed politically. The decline in the number and shares of minorities at elite colleges will be a constant topic. The people who fund me already want me to get in and start tracking this.

Did affirmative action save America from racism? No, that’s pretty clear. But it allowed elites to operate in a way that made them seem like they were progressive and honoring America’s racial history. So the reputational effects are real. Parents are going to want their kids to go to diverse schools, and there might not be many.

How can this persistently be so? How is it that children are so thoroughly, exhaustingly curious … but so many schools feel that they need to cajole, coax, even trick their students into learning? 

Perhaps the problem stems from a misunderstanding of how human curiosity works. In their new book, , co-authors — and identical twins — American University associate professor of philosophy Perry Zurn and University of Pennsylvania professor of bioengineering, physics and astronomy Dani S. Bassett offer a reframing that could help educators dissolve their frustrating paradox. The book is an outline of curiosity as relational, as a connecting function instead of the more traditional view, what Zurn and Bassett call an “acquisition” function.

Clearly that has implications for school, other learning settings, and curricula — for, as they put it, “the architecture of what is learned and the arrangement of learners in the process.” 

This article has been edited for clarity and length.

The 74: I’m wondering just as best you can, can you describe relational curiosity for a layperson? What does it mean to compare curiosity to edgework?

Dani S. Bassett: So for a long time, curiosity has been studied as information-seeking in the sciences. Neuroscientists are particularly interested in understanding what is happening in the brain when people are curious. One of the current challenges is that we have trouble figuring out which piece of the brain is related to curiosity specifically versus motivation, attention, or, say, excitement about particular kinds of information. There are so many sub-processes in the mind and in the brain that are used in the process of curiosity that it is very difficult to figure out what it is we are actually studying.

Perry Zurn: Meanwhile, there’s a debate in educational theory about motivation versus interest, for example, and which one is actually the thing that’s more aligned with curiosity, and therefore with learning — hopefully. So there’s just a lot of stuff that we assume is related, but how it’s related isn’t clear.

I’m trained in philosophy. One thing I notice when I read over philosophical theories of curiosity, is that typically curiosity is considered (much like in the sciences) on an acquisitional model: If I want to know something, I want to gain knowledge of that thing. I want to acquire knowledge, facility or skill with that thing. This characterization appears over and over again, and there’s some usefulness to it? I want my kid to learn their letters, their numbers. You acquire, you gain a facility with these very specific tools or symbols.

So the characterization is useful, but it’s really limited. What we argue in the book is that what’s more fundamental to understanding how curiosity works is not its capacity to acquire any one piece of information, but rather to connect information that we currently have with information that’s new, or to make connections between pieces of information we already have.

In the book you explore the implications that this reconceptualization of curiosity has for reimagining education. What are some concrete ideas that teachers, schools, and policymakers can use to facilitate this kind of relational curiosity?

Zurn: We write about styles of curiosity extensively in the book. There’s a presumption that curiosity looks one particular way in a classroom. Someone curious asks a lot of questions. They might sit at the front if they have the chance. They maintain eye contact and seem eager, etc. But this image of curiosity really doesn’t do justice to all the ways in which curiosity actually is expressed in humans. We need a much larger palette of curious behaviors that educators can recognize and encourage in their students.

I think this is increasingly relevant given the rise of anxiety and depression in our country and among our students. But that’s just one reason. Students with learning differences and neuro-atypicalities fill our classrooms with all kinds of different curious behaviors. Thinking about styles of curiosity can help us better understand and support all of those students.

Sure. So it’s a case against tracking and for educators attentive to diversity and aiming for personalized learning opportunities. And, of course, the big question is: How do you do that structurally? What’s the lever you pull to shift the mindsets and behaviors of millions of teachers?

Bassett: I think there is also a place for changing the way that we structure textbooks or classroom materials, because I think those materials themselves are emphasizing or supporting certain kinds of curiosity. They’re also emphasizing certain kinds of knowledge, and often it’s not the connective knowledge that one could emphasize.

Instead, they frame learning like building a wall of bricks. You have this piece of information that you add onto this piece and then you add on this piece, and then you stack them just so until you have a wall.

Alternative materials would try to pull in links that help expand the child’s mind in new and different ways, to stretch them to build different kinds of knowledge architectures. So I do think that there may be a place for altering the education of teachers, but we also need to change the materials that you give them.

You each have young children, right? How are you connecting your work with that work, that joy, that fulfillment of raising a kid? You can’t write a book about curiosity and also spend time with the toddler without seeing the links, right?

Bassett: So my kids are 11 and 8, both in elementary school. For me, it’s taken a while to recognize what it is that they are most excited about reading, and put aside my own preconceptions about what good literature is. In the book, we emphasize that we need to notice and follow what the child is desiring and how the child’s mind wants to move. I’ve had to stretch myself to engage certain reading materials I wasn’t expecting to.

You’re talking about , right?

Bassett: [laughs] Yes. And . And . And .

Zurn: I have a toddler and we’re currently touring preschools. It’s terrifying how some of them are super gadget-focused. They’re putting each kid in front of an individual iPad screen at their little individual desk — and for hours. And then there’s the complete opposite: your kid plays outside, with other kids, for eight hours a day with very little direction. Kids just explore their bodies and the world and each other. 

Dani and I were homeschooled. We were given immense freedom to direct our education and follow our interests and much of our learning happened in the great outdoors. 

When I think about my kid, I want that connective approach to curiosity. I want education to be individualized, but not individual. I want it to be attuned to the individual differences of each student, but not to create isolated learners — isolated from each other, from themselves, and from the natural world around them. �ճ󲹳�’s what I’m looking for.

[Speaking of the connective approach to curiosity], it isn’t as though there’s a truth, a fact of the matter out there that we didn’t know until we got curious and went out and got it for our storehouse of facts. Rather, it’s that we have a series of knowledge networks that we wander through life with that work more or less well, but they’re clearly not perfect. They’re just good enough to get through the day… until we encounter something new that prompts us to add, update and revise, right?

Zurn: Right. Curiosity becomes this capacity to connect, and in a greater sense to build knowledge architectures, those ways that all of our knowledge hangs together in our head in some way. And those architectures are unique to each one of us, because each of us knows different things, but they also tend to be socially curated. They depend on where you live, both the country you live in, but also your specific neighborhood, even who you hang out with.

You will know or believe you know a certain set of things, and they will constitute the stars in your sky, the constellations around which you start to navigate your world.

You have those preconceptions, those habits of mind that you use to make sense of things, and then — suddenly, inevitably — they don’t work to make full sense of something.

Zurn: Right. So it’s important to think about the flexibility of our knowledge networks. How do they grow? How do they move? How do they change? How do they respond? How are they responsive?

Bassett: My background is in physics and in physics, you can build different sorts of structures that have different functions. Compare the Eiffel Tower and a nearby telecommunications tower. If you squint your eyes, those two things look similar. But if you think about the actual pattern of the scaffold, they’re really different. And the differences in the scaffold impact how flexible or rigid the system is, and also how much space it takes up in the physical world.

Now, take those ideas back into the mind. What network structures could we build in our minds that are relatively rigid versus more flexible? Some folks have knowledge networks that make it feel like the world is more rigid than it perhaps is. Others build networks with some gaps or holes, with more morphing as they move through life. If you hold the connections between ideas more tenuously, understanding with some intellectual humility that there’s more that you don’t know … then you’re allowing for these spaces that can then change with you as you grow.

Zurn: So how do we facilitate flexible learning among our students? We don’t want to say, “Here’s how it all works,” or, “This is the stuff you have to know,” and “It’s always been this way.” No. We want to show the stories about how we’ve thought about this differently, how it’s changed, what are some of the ongoing questions. To show how we hold the tension between something that we’re learning now, whether it’s in math, the social sciences, or art history, with another perspective from another region of the globe, for example, or with other mythologies about what the world is and how it works.

A lot of educators talk about how important it is to fail, and for failure to be OK. Well, in a similar way, I think part of facilitating learning is facilitating a familiarity and a comfort with unlearning, with realizing, “Oh, I don’t think I think that anymore. In fact, I have a totally different question now.” �ճ󲹳�’s a part of what it is to learn! It’s that moment of transformation, where the way in which everything hung together for you just fell apart. It can be scary and hard! But if you can get comfortable with that, I think, it has great implications for your learning in general.

And for our social and political context these days! Where so many folks dig in their heels and refuse to consider ways of seeing the world differently, or the history of the Earth differently.

There must be a social aspect of relational curiosity, right? That is, curiosity isn’t just about investigating our relationship to the past, but also about exploring how “here’s how it all works” is also embedded in networks of power right here and now.

Bassett: When we are curious we are often curious with another person or about another person or someone else is supporting our curiosity or policing our curiosity. The connection between two people is very relevant for understanding our personal experiences of curiosity. The same is true for students in the classroom.

But that’s just the start. It’s not just about interactions between two people. It’s about broader social networks — inside the classroom, in our lives, at home — that impinge upon, or support, or contribute to, or change the kind of curiosity that we engage in. Think of it like mentoring: we see a kind of curiosity in somebody else. We watch their mind move from idea to idea. We watch how they ask questions, and we think, “Oh, I want to think that way.”

The more kinds of curiosity that a person can observe through their social network, the more they can pull the bits that they like, and that they want to emulate. That can create, I think, a richer experience for students and adults alike.

Zurn: I like to talk about curiosity “formations.” Curiosity takes particular shapes: how we come up with a question, why we think it is justifiable, what kind of methods we pursue in order to answer it, and then what we think it may be useful for or contribute to. How you answer those questions will show you the shape or the contours or the formation of your curiosity.

Think about the ways in which we teach students to write essays — the really basic kind, the five-paragraph essay. This is how you pose a question, this is how you fill out an answer to it, this is how you rehash what you’ve shown in the writing.

Or how to solve or first formulate specific algebraic equations. How we ask the questions hints at how we’ll unravel the answers. We are constantly functioning within these different curiosity formations, and many of them are inherited in some way. Typically that’s because they have been especially useful.

But then it gets sticky. Useful for whom? A lot of times it’s for most humans in a particular geographical region. But also for those who’ve had the upper hand socially and have rewritten history to serve their ends. For instance, English itself didn’t just drop from the sky. It’s developed amidst a lot of linguistic policing over time.

So, we have to gain facility with those inherited forms of curiosity in order to succeed in the world socially, but we also need to be critical of them. That’s part of how we can break the fields open, and anyone of any age can do that.

As predicted four years ago by the state’s ed insiders, Education Commissioner Mike Morath’s appointed superintendent — former Dallas Independent School District chief Mike Miles — has revealed plans involving turnaround strategies that have worked elsewhere in the state. These include using big pay hikes to restaff the district’s most challenged schools with top talent and upgrading the skills of the principals they report to. It’s exactly what one side wanted and the other feared.  

Overshadowed by the political scrum, though, are the roots of the 2015 law that requires Morath to intervene when a district repeatedly fails to address chronically underperforming schools. The legislation, House Bill 1842, was, in fact, written by Harold Dutton Jr., a Black Democrat who for almost 30 years has represented a district that is home to several schools that he and others say Houston has neglected for years.

Dutton is a graduate of one of the schools, Phillis Wheatley High School, named for an enslaved woman who became the first published African American poet. Opened in 1927, the school at the time was one of the largest Black high schools in the country, in part because Houston’s white civic leadership was willing to lavish it with resources in an effort to prove that racially separate schools could be equal — then the law of the land.

As he recounts in this new 74 Interview, Dutton grew up a proud product of this legacy, only to realize — as a lawmaker frustrated with the stalemates that plague education policy — that his beloved Wheatley was failing his constituents’ children. Every year since 1930, his alma mater has chosen a high-achieving student — typically a senior — to serve as that year’s Miss Wheatley. In 2000, Dutton was trying to find all these distinguished alums so he could invite them to an event when he had the heartbreaking epiphany that fueled his advocacy.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity. 

The 74: What prompted you to author House Bill 1842?

Harold Dutton Jr.: When I got to the legislature, one of the things I wanted to do was be on the public education committee. I had always thought of Houston as a sort of education bastion, particularly in terms of Wheatley High School, which I attended and graduated from. I just wanted to make sure they were all right. 

Along about the year 2000, I sponsored an event for my high school for its 75th anniversary called the Purple and White Gala to recognize and honor all of the Miss Wheatlies that had come through at that time. I got all their pictures and their bios. I went around trying to find them and then communicate with them.

What I noticed was that the early Miss Wheatleys all had great accomplishments. The first Miss Wheatley was also the first Miss Prairie View A&M University. We had one who was an actress. There were all kinds of all kinds of professions. We even had a Miss Wheatley who had been a part of the moonshot at NASA. 

But as I put all their bios and pictures on the wall, and as I got to the late ‘80s, I could see a total decline in the education accomplishments of the Miss Wheatlies. I found one who was working at McDonald’s. That shocked me.

It was a beautiful event. But afterward, I started taking a look at all of the schools in my district. I realized there had been a huge decline in student outcomes and achievements. 

There’s another high school in my district, Kashmere High School. I found that Kashmere students never pass the standardized test because they never did well on the math portion. I called the superintendent of HISD at the time. I asked him, ‘What’s wrong with northeast Houston education? And in particular, what’s wrong with Kashmere?’ 

He told me students didn’t do well on the math portion of the test. I said, ‘I know that — but why don’t they do well?’ He said he didn’t know. I said, ‘Well, I do.’ I took a look at whether Kashmere students had the benefit of a certified math teacher. What I found was that they hadn’t had one in 20-odd years.

I went to the school board members on the west side of town and said, ‘This is crazy. Why don’t you help me do something about it?’ They said, ‘Why don’t you go and talk to your own school board member? I don’t represent [that school].’ I said, ‘No, you represent HISD — you got elected in your area. They insisted this was a problem that I had to take up with my own school board member.

In Houston, we have nine single-member districts where school board members get elected. What had happened was the school board members had become territorial, to the extent that they didn’t recognize that a problem outside their district was still a problem they needed to help resolve.

I went to him and said, ‘I got to figure out some way for the school board members to have skin in the game about all the schools. I need to put an amendment on your bill that says that if you have a campus in your school district that is failing, your whole school district is failing and the state could come in and take over.’

Now, some [lawmakers] asked me, ‘Why would you do that, when one school is the cause?’ I said, ‘Think about it this way: If child protective services comes to your house because one of your children is alleged to have been abused, they don’t leave the other four children. They take everybody.’ 

This — this is a form of child abuse. To the extent that we’ve had children go on and on and on in a failing school.

This wasn’t my first attempt at trying to change the situation. The first thing I did was sponsor a bill requiring HISD to be divided into four parts. Each part was going to have its own superintendent, because I thought having the superintendent closest to us would get us to where we needed to be. Well, that bill didn’t pass. 

I started researching again and came up with another bill that said we were going to create what was called an opportunity school district in Texas. It would be a school district that would take all of the low-performing schools, all the failing schools, put them in this district and the state would run it. We would fix the schools up and give them back to the district they came from. That didn’t pass. 

I kept at it. The [2015 takeover] bill passed, and so my amendment passed. Everybody was for it. The teacher groups, the NAACP, everybody. I think they were thinking like I was: No school district would let a campus fail for five consecutive school years. That just wasn’t going to happen.

But yet, in 2019, that’s what happened. Not at Kashmere, but at Wheatley. The schools in north Houston, they were all suffering. The children there were being shortchanged by the school district. 

Now, having said all that, HISD has always had its problems. I remember when Brown v. Board of Education was enacted in 1954. I was in elementary school. That Supreme Court decision said, ‘You should eliminate this by all deliberate speed.’ I don’t know if ‘all deliberate speed’ means as slow as you can, but by the time HISD implemented it, I was in college. So here we are. 

One of the things people said to me was, ‘We don’t know if it’s going to be better.’ Let me tell you something. I had a premonition one night when I was watching television, and it was all about slavery. Some of the slaves had gone into a room one night, and they were planning to escape. They went and woke this one slave up and said, ‘Come on and put your clothes on, it’s time to go.’ He said, ‘Where are we going?’ And the other slave said, ‘We’re going to freedom. While I can’t say 100% for sure that it’s going to be better, I can tell you, I’m 100% sure that we can’t stay where we are.’ 

From my perspective, this is offering a better outcome for students and families, particularly in north Houston. HISD could have done a number of things to eliminate failing schools. 

Do you think that Wheatley and Kashmere should stay open?

Absolutely. I don’t think ever we want to look at closing schools. 

Wheatley has a distinction that probably no other school in the state has. It was one of the schools that at one time in the not-too-distant past had three alumni serving in the Texas House of Representatives at the same time. It was a school where at one time we had a sitting congressman. We had a sitting county commissioner. We had a sitting state school board member. We had a sitting local school board member and we had a state representative.

All from that school alumni.

The challenges we face now in terms of getting it back? I don’t think we meet those by closing the school. I think we meet those by giving these children what they need. 

I heard one comment that offended me to no end: that these are poor children. And I said, ‘What the heck does that have to do with learning?’ Because I can tell you, we were not poor, we were po. We couldn’t afford the ‘o’ or the ‘n.’ And yet we learned.

This is the school where Barbara Jordan graduated. It’s the school where my good friend who just ended a term as president of Prairie View graduated. The former president of Brown University was a Wheatley graduate. The Jazz Crusaders all came from Wheatley. 

That’s why I’m hopeful that we’re headed to a place where these kids will get what they need in terms of the resources and we’ll move on. And all the noise we hear today will be growing pains.

Are you troubled by the current conversation about the takeover?

No. I anticipated there will be some people who didn’t understand that while I might be inclined to agree with them insofar as not wanting the state to take over, I’m more upset at failing schools. I’m more upset at denying students a future if they don’t get an education.

But I understand that there’ll be some people who will be against this. When you think about the past, whenever there was a change for the better, there was always — you can go back as far as Moses leading the Israelites out of Egypt — there was people complaining about it. And thinking that they should go back to Egypt.

That’s kind of what this is. There’s some people who think we need to go back.

Almost every community of any size has a Wheatley, a beacon of excellence, beloved by its community, where the names of the alums are on the tip of your tongue. Yet expectations at some point slid, as did resources and accountability.

That’s the biggest problem — the low expectations.

When I first moved to New York, I wanted to go see Reverend Ike. I can never forget, when I got there, the title of his sermon that Sunday was, ‘The only thing wrong with poor people is they ain’t got no money.’

I thought about that. What is that supposed to mean in terms of education? In terms of education, it shouldn’t mean anything. We should educate those students so that somehow or other what God put in them we get the benefit of, because we educated them.

There are too many people, particularly Black males, standing around on corners who we didn’t educate. We don’t enjoy the benefits of what God put in that person.

The report, released Tuesday morning by Stanford University’s Center for Research on Education Outcomes, provides perhaps the most thorough perspective available of the landscape of charter schooling, which has grown significantly in recent years.

Macke Raymond, CREDO’s founder and director, said that the report sketched a picture of continuous improvement for the charter sector over the last 15 years. The center’s first national analysis, issued in 2009, showed charters under-performing traditional schools in both core subjects; in a 2013 follow-up, they slightly bested traditional schools in English while still lagging in math. That movement represents a modest silver lining for American education, she said, after a prolonged period during which learning — as measured by standardized tests like the National Assessment of Educational Progress — largely stagnated even before the pandemic. 

“When you compare [our findings with] the results of NAEP — which, over an equivalent period, have completely flatlined — what you’re looking at is really the only story in U.S. education policy where we’ve been able to create a set of conditions such that schools actually do get better,” Raymond argued.

The new study focuses on charter school performance in 29 states, as well as Washington, D.C., and New York City, incorporating standardized test scores between 2015 and 2019. All told, over 80 percent of tested public school students were included in CREDO’s data set. More than 1.8 million charter students were each paired with a “virtual twin” (i.e., a nearby pupil possessing similar demographic traits and prior test scores) enrolled at the district school that the charter student otherwise would have attended.

The research team calculated that charter school students gained the equivalent of an additional 16 days of learning (based on a traditional 180-day school calendar) in English compared with similar kids at district schools. Their six-day edge in math was smaller, though still considered statistically significant.

But even those averages, comprising millions of student measurements across the country, contain significant variation. Black students attending charter schools gained 35 days of growth in reading and 29 days in math — as if they’d attended school for an extra 1.5 months over a single school year. Hispanics enjoyed 30 extra days of reading and 19 in math. By comparison, white and multiracial students lost the equivalent 24 days of annual math learning in charter schools. 

Smaller sub-groups experienced similar divergences. Poor students saw much higher gains in charters than in traditional public schools (23 extra days of reading growth, 17 extra days in math), as did English learners (six extra days of reading, eight in math); students with overlapping designations (such as both African American and low-income, or both Hispanic and English learner), also made considerable strides

By contrast, special education students were seriously stymied, losing 13 days of reading growth and 14 days of math at charter schools relative to kids receiving special education outside of charters. Raymond called that inequity one of the few sore spots revealed by the study, adding that charter schools should be “taken to task” for the collective failure.

“With the exception of very few charter schools that specialize in particular kinds of special education, the sector has basically thrown up their hands and said, ‘This isn’t our job,’” she said.

Even among charters, some types tend to yield better results than others. Specifically, those grouped within a charter management organization (CMO) — a network, either non- or for-profit, that operates multiple schools, such as the well-known KIPP or Success Academy organizations — provide 27 extra days of instruction in reading, and 23 extra days in math, than traditional schools. Stand-alone charters, which encompass roughly two-thirds of all charter schools, generate 10 extra days of reading growth and negative-three days of growth in math.

Douglas Harris, an economics professor at Tulane University the impact of charter schools on surrounding public school districts, said that the results of the CREDO report largely dovetailed with those of in New Orleans and elsewhere. He also said that the especially impressive findings from CMO-affiliated schools were somewhat predictable given that many cities and states only consider top-performing charter schools as candidates for replication.

“Some of this is kind of mechanical — not in a bad way, it’s just how the sector operates. If you’re a stand-alone, and you do well, you can open another school,” Harris said. “Then you become a CMO, and they’re better because they were selected to build on their own success. That’s a positive aspect of the charter model.”

Even more distinctive was the dividing line between what might be deemed “traditional” charters and those offering instruction virtually, which had already earned an ugly reputation for low academic quality even before the pandemic began. The popularity of the virtual charter sector has grown substantially since the emergence of COVID — by the Network for Public Education found that fully or mostly online programs enrolled 13 percent of all charter students during the 2020–21 school year — even as they delivered a staggering 124 fewer days of math growth than traditional public schools, along with 58 fewer days of growth in English.

If virtual initiatives were excluded from the national sample, the average charter school advantage would jump from 16 extra days of reading instruction to 21, and from 6 extra days of math instruction to 14. 

Martin West, the academic dean at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, called the report “easily the most comprehensive analysis of charter school performance to date” and echoed concerns about the performance of virtual charter schools.

“The results continue to raise questions about the regulatory environment for virtual charter schools, whose results drag down the overall performance of the broader sector,” West said. “These schools may provide an essential option for students for whom in-person learning truly isn’t possible, but state policymakers should look carefully at who is attending these schools and how well they are being served.”

An additional state-by-state analysis showed that individual jurisdictions have built particularly effective charter school sectors. Across New York State, charter students receive the equivalent of 75 extra days of growth in reading, and 73 extra days in math, compared with demographically similar students at district schools. Massachusetts (41 extra days in both subjects), Maryland (37 extra days in both subjects), Tennessee (34 extra days of reading and 39 in math), and Rhode Island (90 extra days of reading and 88 in math) offered similarly impressive statewide results. Charter school students only experienced significantly weaker reading growth in one state, Oregon.

An additional lesson came with respect to new charter entrants versus existing options. New schools opened by existing CMOs tended to outpace their district competitors, but also to be out-performed themselves by older schools within their own CMO.

“The new schools that have come in since the second study are strong, but they’re not as strong,” Raymond observed. “So it’s not that new schools are coming in and kicking butt and dragging the sector along with them. It’s that, over this period, individual schools around the country are making incremental changes that lead to this trajectory of upward performance.”