On October 3rd, Executive Interview Editor Kathryn Short had a chance to sit down with Rick Hess, Resident Scholar and Director of Education Policy Studies at the American Enterprise Institute (AEI). In this interview with The Review, he discussed his views on education policy and its role in making a competitive American workforce in a global economy.
GPPReview: The first central question we had was around the reauthorization of ESEA [Elementary and Secondary Education Act, also known as No Child Left Behind], the markup for which is scheduled for Oct. 18th. If you could have a dream list of top three changes you’d like to see that you believe would make America’s workforce more competitive, what would those be?
Rick Hess: Well, I don’t know that there’s a direct link between changing ESEA and making the workforce competitive. I mean, I think there are changes that would make it a better law. I don’t know how direct an impact, if any impact, those would have on the workforce. I would like to see us move away from level-based determinations of AYP, I’d like to see us move away from federally dictated remedies, and I’d like to see us do away with the Highly Qualified Teacher language.
GPPR: Do you think there’s any federal program that has a direct link to making the workforce competitive? Grant programs, for example?
RH: I think the biggest link is restrictions on H1-B Visas [US Work Permit Visas]. I mean, that’s federal law that affects the workforce.
GPPR: A big buzzword at the moment is “college and career ready.” What role do you think career education is going to play in the next few decades of education policy?
RH: Well it tends to be cyclical. I mean, we used to call it “vocational education.” And now we call it “career education”, and it’s not clear if it’s the same thing or not, because nobody is sure what “career education” means. Which is why it’s a good political word. But yeah, I think we’ll at least talk about it, at least for the next decade. I think we’ve long wanted to figure out how to give people skills that will make graduates productive. And it’s not that we haven’t been trying, it’s that we don’t know how to do it. And using a new buzzword for it doesn’t mean that we know how to do it or can make it any easier to do.
GPPR: Now looking at your piece about for-profit colleges and the conflict between the goals of creating jobs and the goals of regulating for-profits. How do you think about handling the balance between funding community colleges and putting money into the private sector to encourage things like for-profits?
RH: For me, the answer is that you want a level playing field. Let’s be honest, for-profits have unique weaknesses. They have a heightened incentive to rip off students, a heightened incentive to cut corners. But those are the flipside of the fact that they also have incentives to grow and to grow rapidly to serve more students. And they also have incentives to use technology and tools to slash costs. So the good and the bad of for-profits are the two sides of the same coin. And rather than imagine that somehow community colleges are good and for-profits are dubious, let’s instead recognize that while it’s true community colleges don’t have the same incentives to take advantage of students, the flipside of that is that they have been lethargic, they’ve been much lousier at responding to student need, they’ve been much less inclined to create space and seats for new students, and they’ve done a much lousier job of trying to drive down their costs. And one thing to keep in mind is that a lot of people talk about community colleges only costing $600 per year, but that’s just what the tuition costs. The state subsidies mean that the actual average cost per student is about $10,000 per year. So it’s important to keep in mind that the sticker price is not the true cost of community college.
GPPR: The New York Times recently published a piece saying that enrollment in graduate school is on a decline. At one point we thought that we were going to see a skyrocketing in enrollment in higher education, that eventually require everyone to have a PhD to get a job. Do you think we’re seeing that level off now or is this just a fluke of the economy?
RH: I think there’s room for people who are well-trained. A huge amount of graduate education is not necessarily people receiving a high amount of training. A lot of it is networking. I’m not sure that the real problem is that we don’t have as many people with MPPs. Or law degrees. Or business degrees. I don’t think what they’re talking about is PhDs in biochemicals or advanced degrees in engineering. But all advanced degrees are not equally relevant in improving our quality of life. I’m not sure that it’s a problem if we don’t have as many lawyers as we used to have.
GPPR: Well, connected to that, there have been these conflicting narratives about the need for well-rounded students, arts and music education and extracurriculars. On the other hand, we have a huge amount of money poured into STEM initiatives. To what extent do you think that those STEM initiatives are worthwhile, versus the well-rounded student efforts?
RH: I think all of our funding has gone into literacy and numeracy, with an eye to driving up the least proficient children. The research on this is complex – there is some evidence that developing second language skills is beneficial when it comes to mastering math. And there’s at least some interesting suggestive research that developing eye-motor skills is conducive to developing math skills. To some extent, there are trade-offs. But part of it is that we have marginalized all of this stuff, especially for low-proficient students, and I think we need to do a better job of spreading our bets.
GPPR: We often like to compare ourselves to countries like Korea and Finland and Canada in terms of education, and the obvious problem is that we are demographically so different from them. Is that comparison still helpful, or harmful, or is there a more apt comparison we should be making?
RH: It’s of limited utility: the demographics are so different, and the countries we often compare ourselves to, like Finland and Singapore, have the population of Connecticut. These kinds of comparisons also ignore all of the historical American strengths. We have a Federal system, one of the more convoluted Federal systems in the world, which has served as a very helpful check on central government, which has created room for substantial variability in a nation of states. We have historically had a more dynamic private sector than most of these nations we’re talking about. So what’s interesting is that when these McKinsey-ites we’re talking about suggest we need to become more like these countries, that’s swell, except that to become more like them means costs as well as benefits. The other way to go is to think about, what are solutions that draw on American strengths: diversity, heterogeneity, dynamism, limited federal government? That strikes me as the more entrepreneurial model, one with a stronger for-profit role which welcomes creative problem solving and technology. And it’s true that it’s not the path that many of these other nations have taken, but it’s also true that these other nations have looked quite different from America for the entirety of America’s existence. And that seems to have worked out okay for us.
GPPR: Looking at the idea of technology and schools, there were a series of articles on how many schools are introducing iPads as a solution to textbook replacement and calculator costs and as a new learning tool, and then just recently, The Times ran another piece about how all of our investments in technology in education are not paying off in the way we’d like to see them. You are a big proponent of virtual and hybrid schools – what role do you think technology should and will play in creating a competitive workforce?
RH: Technology is a tool. When you spend a whole lot of money to go out and buy iPads or buy laptops and assign them to kids and just tell teachers, “okay, now make good use of them”, it’s hardly shocking that they don’t make good use of them. On the other hand, that’s kind of true in any organization. When Southwest and JetBlue were redesigning themselves around new contracts and new models and new technologies, it’s not like it was some big secret. It’s not like TWA or PanAm couldn’t find out what they were doing. It’s that large, established organizations have trouble mimicking new technologies because they have, in their DNA, ways of doing business. There are cases, if you look at School of One, if you look at Rocketship, I think there are delivery models which have been made around new technologies and tools, and there you can expect to see real benefits around growth productivity and effectiveness. But the idea that if you go sprinkle new technology around old schools like fairy dust and just expect magic to happen, you’ll be waiting a long time.
GPPR: The American public seems to be of two minds in discussing education policy. On the one hand, Obama claims investing in education is part of the economic recovery, as a jobs creation effort. On the other hand, there’s a total unwillingness to put a cost-benefit analysis on closing the achievement gap. How do we resolve that dichotomy, or do we even need to?
RH: If Obama is suggesting that investing in education is a jobs creation strategy in the short-term, it’s just not true. Job re-training for adult working may have an impact on employment in the next three months or a year. But improving K-12 education will at best have an impact on the job market in the 2020s. To suggest otherwise is to be peddling snake oil rather than policy solutions. Costs and benefits – efforts to close the achievement gap – I think there have been efforts to put a dollar sign on this, and they’ve been over-selling like crazy. McKinsey is guilty of issuing these reports that say “if you raise the lowest achievers up to x, you can extrapolate these enormous gains”, gains they suggest will automatically flow. One of the consequences of this rhetoric is that we pay zero attention to the costs of addressing the achievement gap in terms of the kids who were already proficient. There has been an effort to try to say that we have to close the achievement gap because otherwise we’re leaving money on the table. But I don’t think there’s been a willingness to acknowledge that closing the achievement gap has its tradeoffs, its costs. People who are advocates of focusing on the achievement gap tend to dismiss their critics as either ill-informed, or as potentially racist. And that is a terrific strategy if your goal is to stifle opposition or criticism.
GPPR: I wanted to ask you also about a slightly different achievement gap: the gender gap. There’s been a lot of talk lately about the “end of men”, the loss of classically “male jobs”. A lot of people put this back to the idea that elementary schools are no longer “male friendly”. Do you think this is a valid claim, and it will affect our global competitiveness?
RH: It is certainly an issue. When I look at the data on college attendance and arrests, I think it’s clear that men are doing horribly. I mean, we talked about racial achievement gaps, for instance. It’s much more a problem of dismal performance among African-American men, than it is among African-American women. So sure, I think the gender issue is a real one. Often we still talk about women as the disadvantaged minority, when in reality, at this point, it’s men, more often than not, who are at the disadvantage. I think efforts to create school environments and programs that support young men have run into a thicket of opposition. Just recently I read a Science Magazine article by a number of experts who tried to argue the right lens for thinking about single-sex schooling is racial segregation. Even though racial segregation was about members of an advantaged race using segregation to oppress members of the other. And single-sex schooling is about parents parents making voluntary choices for the best education of their child.
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