By James Pethokoukis and Frederick M. Hess

As the spring semester
comes to a close, America’s school-aged kids are once again heading into the
summer after a school year of disruptions and disappointments. Restrictions
have loosened and normal, in-person instruction has resumed for many kids. Yet
the learning loss from two years of on-and-off remote schooling remains.
Exactly how bad is the situation? And what education reforms will help us
improve outcomes for the next generation? To answer those questions, I’m joined
today by Rick Hess.

Rick is my colleague
at the American Enterprise Institute, where he is a senior fellow and director
of Education Policy Studies. Among Rick’s recent work on K–12 and higher
education issues is “Education After the Pandemic,” written for the winter 2022
issue of National Affairs.

What follows is a
lightly edited transcript of our conversation, including brief portions that
were cut from the original podcast. You can download the episode here, and don’t forget to subscribe to my podcast on iTunes or Stitcher. Tell your friends, leave a review.

Pethokoukis: How severe have the negative effects of this
pandemic been on K–12 education, and how sticky do we think those effects are
going to be?

Hess: The effects are
devastating. We’ve seen kids lose probably (it depends on how you tally this
up) somewhere between a half to a full year of academic learning. We’ve seen
massive health and psychological effects. We know that attempted suicide is
through the roof; reports of loneliness and isolation. Nobody’s been keeping an
eye on kids in abusive situations. So it’s not only massively negative academic
effects but also social and emotional. No one is surprised the effects are
amplified for the most vulnerable kids. If you are in a high-poverty community,
if you are in a run-down apartment rather than a home with space to spread out
your computer and play in the yard, it’s no great surprise that those kids
suffered more, both academically and socially.

When I would talk, whether I was on social media or elsewhere, about education loss, the answer I got was, “Well, it’s more important to keep these kids healthy, and then we’ll just sort of tutor them up or coach them up afterwards.” There was a big story in the New York Times about the cost of these school closures, and they addressed the issue of tutoring these kids and catching them up for that lost time. There was a quote from an education department official: “I’m afraid that while school agencies are planning a range of activities for catch-up, their plans are just not commensurate with the losses.” Not shocking. What are we doing to catch these kids up? Or is that really ever going to happen?

No, it’s not going to happen. We have no idea how to catch these kids up. I mean, we’ve been trying really hard to reform American education certainly since A Nation At Risk 39 years ago, arguably for at least a half century. Look, it’s not like somebody has the right answers, and in some school of education somewhere they’ve got them locked away in the closet, and now we’re finally going to crack them out. The reality is, we don’t have any good solutions to help kids catch up. In fact, the solutions we have that are the most promising are the ones that are right now under attack from the education establishment. We have seen charter schools launched which used really crazy strategies. They set high expectations. They expect kids to work hard. They extended the school day. They were very diligent about who they hired, and those same schools are now rapidly retreating from the things that made them successful.

So, what are we doing? Well, we put more than $200 billion through COVID emergency funds into K–12 education. As our colleague Nat Malkus has reported, most of that money has not yet been spent. What are school districts doing with it? Well, they’re using it to give teachers bonuses. They’re at the collective bargaining table, and they’re giving unions larger raises than they would’ve. They are adding more bodies across the board, although they don’t know what they’re going to do with those bodies when these funds run out.

Look, we’ve been trying to tutor kids for the better part of what, three millennia? I believe these guys Plato and Socrates had some thoughts on the value of tutoring. It’s great. It’s powerful. Roland Fryer’s work documenting some of this in Boston charter schools was used by the Houston School District in the early part of the last decade to try to drive improvement. The problem with tutoring is that it’s hard to find enough good tutors. It’s hard to keep the tutors you’ve got. It’s hard to train the tutors to be effective. It’s hard to match the kids with tutors that work. The tutoring is swell, but the idea that somebody’s got this recipe that’s going to get these kids where they need to be is, I think, wishful thinking

We would need a lot of tutors, right?

A lot.

There’s a lot of kids, right?

So they had this thing called Apollo 20. Houston had this terrific superintendent years ago named Terry Greer. He met Roland Fryer, who did this wonderful work on this up at Harvard. They built Apollo, like the moon launch. I think it was in fifth grade and ninth grade. They decided to do targeted tutoring. I think tutors were working two on one, three on one with kids, just in fifth and ninth grade, just selected schools. They still needed hundreds of tutors, and the problem is that in order to afford these tutors, you can’t pay that much, because you need hundreds of these guys.

Right.

So, they were paying
something like $20,000 or $24,000 a year, and you were mostly getting graduate
students or retirees. Even so, they were losing more than 50 percent of their
tutors a year. So the idea that in a place like Birmingham, Alabama, or New
York City you’re going to just find thousands or tens of thousands of tutors
who are going to line up, get trained, show up, do their job reliably for a
year or two years or three years? Even if we had the recipe to help make this
tutoring successful, the logistics of it are really remarkably tough.

Alternatives to traditional schooling—whether it’s
homeschooling, you mentioned charter schools, or remote learning—have we
learned things about these alternatives that we didn’t know before or cemented
previous beliefs that we weren’t sure about? What did we learn about these
alternatives?

I think that mostly
everything that we thought was true is even more true than we thought. Remote
learning is great for some kids. If you get bullied in school or you’re
frustrated waiting for everybody else to figure out the math problem, remote
learning we knew could be fantastic for those kids. And we’ve seen that a lot
of kids love it. We know that a lot of families feel disconnected from their
kids’ educations. They feel like schools don’t do a good job of partnering with
them or inviting them in. They feel like they don’t know what happens at
school. Once parents were able to look over the kids’ shoulder when they were
Zooming at the kitchen table, we heard this in spades. We also know that remote
learning generally stinks.

After a year-and-a-half
of Zoom in a room (more in some places like Los Angeles or New York where
Democrats were just refusing to reopen schools), we’ve seen just how incredibly
awful this is for engaging kids, for keeping them feeling valued, part of a
classroom environment. You’re a guy who writes all the time, so I don’t have to
explain this to you: This is not an indictment of the technology. The idea that
we can sit here and talk to each other across tens or hundreds of thousands of
miles is remarkable. The idea that a kid can get tutored by somebody with a PhD
in Tokyo or Beijing in a world language or in calculus is an unbelievable
learning tool. The problem is not with the power of this technology. The
problem is that what we have done is basically taken boring, rote, ineffectual
classroom environments, and tried to throw them up online. And it turned out
they were even more boring and worse online than they were when kids were
disengaged in class.

You’ve written about
this a bunch: The power of tech is always in the way it lets us rethink and
revisit our organizing assumptions about how work gets done. One of the big
problems with schooling is that we haven’t done that. Instead, from radios to
TVs to Chromebooks, we’ve tried to slather it on top of the things that we’re
used to doing, and then we’re constantly surprised that it hasn’t made much of
a difference.

Could remote schooling realistically have been better,
or was it pretty much inevitable given how sudden the pandemic was in the
beginning?

Both. March to June
2020 was going to be a train wreck. Only 5 percent of teacher preparation
programs in the US have teachers do any training in virtual environments.
Teachers aren’t prepared for this. School districts don’t know what they’re
doing. A lot of the tech is glitchy and frustrating, because it’s bought
because it seems promising, not because it’s workable. This was always going to
be a problem. But school districts then had a good five or six months before
September 2020. You could have imagined a story where a lot of these folks
rolled up their sleeves, were working 16-hour days, working with software
developers to build dynamic, engaging online modules, where they were training
their teachers intensely. That just didn’t happen. It did in a couple of
places; Eva Moskowitz’s Success Charter School network was remarkable at this.
Some of the learning pods that we saw emerge I think were so promising because
they took stuff like the Khan Academy online backbone. Then you had people who
were really interested and interesting, working to build kind of intimate learning
environments around it.

But that wasn’t what school districts did. What they did was they tried to take kind of the organizational routines of, “We have this many kids and this much time, and we kind of run things like we know how to run things and throw it up online.” By September 2020, not even half of teachers had gotten any additional training in remote teaching in that prior six months. So most teachers came into that environment not knowing what they were expected to do. Even good teachers in classroom environments have frequently complained that the things they’re good at don’t translate.

Oftentimes teachers in
classrooms are good because they know how to put a hand on a shoulder. They
know how to look a kid in the eye. Those skills don’t translate the same way
online. There are other skills that are useful online, but we didn’t do much to
help teachers acquire or master them. I think what happened was that this was
always going to be rough. The decision to close schools as long as we did I think
is widely recognized now as a profound mistake, and it put educational leaders
and teachers behind the eight ball. I don’t think you can blame teachers for
any of this. I think they were put in an impossible situation and did what they
could. But I do think a lot of the policymakers and educational leaders really
need to take ownership, that they could have done far better than they did, and
they didn’t.

A couple of minutes ago, you said—and I certainly found
this in my own experience—that one silver lining is that parents really got a kind
of granular look at what went on in a classroom: how the teachers taught, how
their kids reacted. You did learn a lot. Is that kind of new knowledge or
revelation for parents going to change the politics of reform at all going
forward?

I think it already
has. I mean, I think a lot of what we’ve seen as far as the heated fights over
masking, over critical race theory, and especially over gender identity—a lot
of the stuff relating to, say, gender and race, not masking, has been playing
out in schools over the last seven or eight years. I was writing about this
stuff in 2016 and 2017, as was our colleague Robert Pondiscio. But a lot of it
was just off the radar. Parents didn’t have as much visibility into what was
happening in schools and classrooms. I think one of the things we’re seeing is
that some of the fights are so heated because some of what’s been happening
under the surface is now newly visible and parents are speaking to that. So I
think that’s one thing.

I think the second way
it changes is . . . look, I heard two polar opposite reactions from parents
when they were writing me, especially for the first, say, six months of the
pandemic. One response was, “I had no idea how hard our teachers work. Boy,
they’re juggling 25 kids. I can’t get my kid to sit still, so I don’t know how
they do it with 25.” The other response I heard was, “What the hell do teachers
do all day? I send my kid to school for six-and-a-half hours a day, and it
looks to me like they’re only doing 35 minutes of work, and on these
asynchronous days, I’m not even sure they got 35 minutes in.” I think both of
these reactions show that parents feel like they don’t have a real good grip on
what kids are actually doing all day when they’re kind of out of sight. I
suspect (and we’ll find out if I’m right) that when we talk about these highfalutin
reforms, we spent so much time on over the last 20 years on things like teacher
evaluation systems, but I think those are going to resonate a lot less.

I think what parents
are going to want to hear about is, what is this going to affect that my kid
does all day? So questions of, like, how much time there is for arts or for
language, or what kind of reading and math programs we’re using, I think are
going to feel more salient than they have for a while.

People complain about Congress, but they generally
like their own Congressman. And they are concerned about American
education, but they think their local schools are probably doing a good job. Do
you think those warm feelings toward local schools are waning? Are parents
becoming more willing to consider local school reforms?

I think that’s right.
I mean, exactly right. Historically, the polling has been that 75 percent of
parents give their kid’s school an A or a B, but only about 35 or 40 percent
give the nation’s schools an A or a B. So it’s Congress and my congressperson—exactly
the same thing. One of the things that’s been surprising is how much that is
held up through the pandemic. Even parents who were really frustrated the
schools were closed, kept saying they still kind of liked their kids’ school.
But I think two things have happened that might matter a lot. One is a lot of
suburban parents who bought their house and paid a premium to be by their
school were suddenly frustrated, because one of the things they counted on as a
given was that their schools would be there for them. So I think you’ve seen
that in some of the new dynamics around school choice, that choice is now
appealing to folks for whom it was previously not personally relevant. It was
more of an abstraction.

Then the second thing
that’s gone on is, as families have experimented during the pandemic with online
supplemental learning or learning pods, it turns out that post-pandemic, 60-plus
percent of parents say they’d like to have their kid at home at least one day a
week. For parents with children with special needs, it’s even higher. This kind
of makes sense, right? Like, it turns out that parents didn’t like having
schools say, “We’re closed. It’s your problem.” But I have heard from enormous
numbers of parents who say, “You know what? I like having some of this
interaction, if I could do it just on Wednesday or just on a half day.”

So, I think one of the
things that’s happened in the school choice conversation is school choice is a
good solution if you don’t like your school and you’re trying to get out of it.
So, again, that’s the 15 percent of parents who give their kids’ school a D or
an F. But if what you want is more support, more option, the chance this hybrid
model where your kid is home a little bit but mostly at school—that’s not about
school choice. That’s about educational options. That’s education savings
accounts. That’s course choice. And what you’ve seen, I think, is enormous interest
in expanding the palette of options. That’s why in the last couple of years
you’ve just seen a flood of choice-related legislation, that’s not just charter
schooling and school vouchers, but that’s really opening the door to some of
this other kind of stuff.

Do you think that for people right of center, conservative parents, their thinking about education sort of stops at school choice? We’ll just let kids go where they want, and then that’s education reform? Because when I was reading through your great recent National Affairs article, one conclusion I drew was that matters, but we just don’t want to have those schools doing the exact same thing more or less as the local public school. I imagine one concern about all this money flowing into schools—and you sort of alluded to that earlier—is that they’re just going to spend more money doing the exact same thing. Teachers doing the same thing, but maybe they’ll be better paid. Maybe, they’ll use technology exactly the same way, but maybe instead of Chromebooks, all the kids will get Macs. I don’t know.

Could you talk about what we should be doing
differently in terms of who becomes a teacher and what teachers spend their
time doing?

One problem with the
fact that public schooling is always bailed out when times are tough is that
you never have to make hard choices. Sometimes we don’t add as many staff, but
we never actually ask public schools to change what they’re doing. Look, with
teaching, an easy way to think about this is if you go to your local elementary
(and frankly, it can be a charter, a district school, or a private school) and
you say to the principal, “Hey, can we visit your best fourth grade reading
teacher?” you’ll go and watch them, and they’ll teach reading for 90
minutes, math for 90 minutes, and she’ll spend 60 minutes loading and unloading
kids on buses, and 40 minutes watching kids eat lunch. You say, “Let’s go
look at your worst reading teacher.” It’s the same thing.

Go to your local hospital. Look for some kind of cardiovascular surgeon who’s about to cut a kid open, about to operate on somebody, and she starts peeling off her gloves at 90 minutes. You say, “Doc, what’s up?” She says, “Hey, it’s my time to push the Jell-O cart, but don’t worry. The worst cardiovascular surgeon in the state’s going to take it from here.” That’s an insane way to use scarce talent. So the problem is that we’ve got a teaching profession which made a lot of sense when Horace Mann was building out the common school in the 1840s, but which basically we need three-and-a-half million teachers all doing a whole mix of activities, some of which make a big difference for kids, some of which are a complete waste of their time. Some of these activities teachers are good at; some they’re not good at. And nothing in the way we organize the work, assign teachers to kids, compensate teachers, is reflective in any way of which stuff we think is important or of which teachers are good at the stuff that’s important.

If you look at a law
firm, you look at an architecture firm, you look at a think tank, instead,
there’s a concerted effort to say, “All right, which of these tasks are
really impactful?” For instance, every principal you talk to will tell you that
teaching kids basic literacy skills and phonics and stuff. It’s crucial. You
can’t get anywhere with kids unless you’ve got strong teachers working with
them. So if you’ve got one or two strong teachers and you’ve got three other
teachers in first grade, it would only make sense that you’re rethinking how you
organize your teachers as a team where the teachers who are doing the most
important work are shouldering that, not for the kids lucky enough to get
assigned to their class but for all kids.

Then those are the
teachers you can’t afford to lose. So instead of everybody making $67,000 a
year, those teachers are making a buck and a quarter, and other teachers are
making less. And if you lose them, it’s a shame, just like if you lose an RN.
But on the other hand, it’s a whole lot easier to replace an RN than it is that
cardiovascular surgeon. So what this argues for is the need to think
differently about staffing requirements, contracts, teacher record
requirements, the whole assemblage of stuff that has built up around how we use
adults in schools.

If we’re going to start specializing a bit, might you
have to have just more teachers to fill these specialized roles, if one teacher
isn’t going to do soup to nuts everything? And probably more extra staff, too?

There are a whole bunch of ways you can tell these stories, and I’m much more interested in the people on the ground, figuring out what works given their talent and their kids’ needs, than in those of us who sit in DC office buildings trying to spew solutions. But also, this is where the technology comes in. There’s this outfit that I talked about in the piece we’re chatting about, called New Classrooms. Joel Rose launched it when Joel Klein was chancellor in New York. What they do is they say, “Look, most fifth grade math runs the way you used to play an LP if you bought an album in the 1970s: You put the needle on the first one, and you play it through. So kids show up day one in school, there’s a scope and sequence, and teachers teach you this stuff for a day-and-a-half and then that stuff. If the kid didn’t learn it, the teacher tries to catch them up; and if kids are absent, they miss important lessons. They said, “Wait a minute, there’s this thing called digital music! Why don’t we test kids before the year starts? We say there’s 73 learning objectives in fifth grade math. If a kid already knows 24 of them, why waste their time? Let’s start them on the ones they don’t know.” Now, if you’re going to do this with, say, five teachers and 150 kids, obviously, you can’t have five teachers each customizing a lesson every day. We talk like it’s feasible (we call differentiated instruction in education), but I can tell you, as an old school teacher, there’s no way you actually do it.

So what they say
instead is, “Wait a minute. We’ve got all of these new learning tools at
our disposal. We’ve got these one-on-one computer tutorials where artificial
intelligence is actually really good at teaching some of these math functions.
We’ve got some teachers who are really strong at large group instructions. We
can loop in some of these tutors in very specific targeted ways to support kids
with specific challenges.” So then the argument here is actually that you
don’t probably need to add staff. What you need to do is unpack the teaching
job in a way that you can hand parts of it off to those tutors, parts of it off
to computer-assisted instruction. The teachers are spending a much higher
percentage of their time doing things that actually change kids’ lives, instead
of shuffling their way through the daily routine.

Would it be helpful to change how we recruit teachers?
The study I often see is out of one of the Scandinavian countries, where most
of their teachers come from the top of the class. Many of our teachers don’t
come from the top of the class, and an easy solution is, well, let’s just
recruit our best kids. Of course, we have a lot of students here that might
mean taking like all the college graduates from the top 100 colleges. But can
we recruit more teachers from better schools, as well as make it easier for
mid-career professionals to become teachers?

Yeah. Again, part of
the problem here is that we’ve got a model that used to make sense. It just
doesn’t make sense. If public schools were a car company, they’d be GM. If they
were in airline, they’d be PWA. I mean, what they’re doing worked really well .
. . in like 1937. It used to be, as late as the 1950s, over half of
college-educated women became teachers, because no other avenues were open to
them. Trying to recruit somebody in the 1950s and saying, “Hey, I’ve got a
job you can do for the next 30 years,” was appealing. Today, only about 15
percent of college-educated women become teachers, and nobody who comes out of
college wants to do the same job for another 20 or 50. We talk endlessly about
this shortage of teachers. There’s a shortage of people who want to do the job
the way we’ve configured the job.

Who wants to teach? Well
today, lots of people who have had successful first careers, have some money in
the bank, and if they change it, if they change at age 45 or 50, they’ve got
another 15 or 20 years in them in a lot of cases. They’re mature adults. They
could make fabulous teachers, but not only do we make them jump through hoops
and Mickey Mouse coursework to get certified to teach, but then we start them
at the bottom of the pay scale. It’s both frustrating and insulting. So, yeah,
partly we need to absolutely reimagine what it means to come into education as
a mid-career adult in the 21st century. The other part of this, though, is we
have three-and-a-half million teachers. That’s one out of every 10 working
adults with a college degree. We just have too many people. We need 300,000
teachers a year just to plug attrition. All of the nation’s selective colleges
combined don’t graduate 300,000 people a year.

So we can get no
lawyers, no engineers, no accountants, no doctors, and we still wouldn’t get enough teachers. The other way to think about
this is that 50 years ago we had twice as many kids per teachers as we have
today. In other words, we’ve hired teachers twice as fast as we’ve added
students over the last 45 years. Today, we have a student teacher ratio of
13-and-a-half to one. Now, that doesn’t mean you see an average class size of
13-and-a-half to one, because how we’re using teachers, but we have a teacher
for every 13-and-a-half kids. If we had kept the same student-to-teacher ratio
we had 45 years ago, and had used all those additional dollars to pay teachers
rather than to double the number of teachers, average teacher pay today would
be about $135,000. That would be median teacher pay: about $135,000.

I think we would find
it enormously easier to attract talented folks, and we also would find it much
easier to be conscious about quality in the selection and hiring and induction
process. So partly what we’re suffering for is that we have made this insane
investment, this huge investment in quantity over quality. Then we ask,
“How do you get an enormous quantity of quality?” Partly by making
that the question, we’ve made it so that there are no practical answers. We
have to rethink what we’re trying to do.

If someone had a big pot of money, and they wanted to
give it to their local school, and they wanted them to spend it on technology,
what would you advise that school to do? Make sure all the kids have the latest
Apple notebooks? A giant, flat-screen in every classroom? What would you advise
those schools to spend that money, if they had to spend it on technology?

I would say,
“Look, let’s take a lesson. We’ve had one learning technology I know of
which has actually transformed education. It’s about five centuries old.
Gutenberg dreamed it up. It’s called the book. Before that, you had to be real
close to your teacher so they could say stuff to you. Once we had this book,
you could learn from anywhere or anybody, anywhere around the world. And you
could learn whether or not you were in school. In fact, the book flipped the
classroom, because now you could learn your lessons at home, and show up and
talk. That was profound and transformative. So the ways that technology can
change the game is it can change who kids learn from, how kids can learn and have
relationship with teachers.

The best model I’ve
seen of this is a really good high school football program. You go in, and you
see suddenly coaches have preloaded all the plays on the iPad, so that instead
of spending five minutes hand-drawing 22 Xs and Os, and then erasing and then
do it again, they can kind of walk kids through it, and the arrows and Xs are
moving. If the cornerback is having trouble with foot placement, an assistant
coach pulls out an iPhone, takes a quick video, and then they’re looking at it
in real time. Think about the last time you heard about your kid’s teacher
pulling out an iPhone, doing a quick video of your kid doing a presentation,
and then having that debrief with the kids. It’s not about new technologies.
It’s about, what are we doing with these things?

So what would I do? I
would tell them first to figure out what it is teachers do with their time all
day. Figure out which of these things are really making a difference in
children’s lives, and which of these things are routine. Of the routine things,
figure out which we can offload to tech. Of the things that are valuable,
figure out where tech can augment how they’re explaining it, or showing it, or
giving kids feedback. And then make sure you’re investing in helping teachers
get easy-to-use, non-glitchy stuff that lets them do that.

Rick, thanks for coming on the podcast. It’s been
great.

It’s been a pleasure, man. Thanks for having me.

The post Combating Learning Loss after the Pandemic: My Long-Read Q&A with Rick Hess appeared first on American Enterprise Institute – AEI.