Debating Education Funding Policy | Policy

0:00 great students I know you guys are really great students so like I said on the top left we’ve got the area for questions and the top right we’ve got the areas just talk to each other talk about what dr. Malthus was talking about you guys know the drill so we also want to explain a little bit about how the format for tonight is so we’ve got 40 minutes of dr. Mathis talking about the policy resolution and then we also have 20 minutes afterwards for a Q&A session you can either give your questions ask a question to be able to devote all the time and attention to those so now just to introduce dr. melfi’s himself dr. Neff Malthus was a resident scholar and she’s the deputy director of the education policy at the American Enterprise Institute AEI for short he specializes in K through 12 education there he specifically works on applying quantitative data to education policy and his work focuses on school finance chart finance charter schools school choice in the future of standardized testing he has a PhD in education policy and leadership from the University of Maryland College Park and a BA in historical studies from Covenant College so he is definitely the most qualified to talk to you guys about this topic on education policy and I’m going to go ahead and let him take it away he can go

1:31 ahead and start and I will be seeing you guys again the right end of the webinar for a quick survey hi I’m not Malchus nice to be with you tonight I trust everyone can hear me and if you can’t let me know in one of the text boxes so tonight I’m going to talk about the federal role in financing and regulating elementary and secondary education like Maddy said I’m the deputy director here at Education Policy Studies at the American Enterprise Institute my approach tonight is not to convince but to sort of give you the lay of the land and hopefully some perspective that will help in formulating an understanding and anticipating arguments about whether to increase or decrease the federal role in US education so tonight on the webinar I’m sort of have the lay out first just when I kind of go over the basic structure of US education finance and regulation I sort of start out sort of at a point of stasis right around the year 2000 and lay out sort of where things were it’s gonna be oversimplified for reasons that I’m going to explain

3:04 and then I’m going to go into a sort of a recent history so basically since 2000 the history of the federal role and there’s been a lot of action in the past 16 or 17 years up and down and I’m gonna focus sort of on the interplay of funding and regulation so I could have focused one or the other but actually they they work in tandem with each other and there’s sort of a push and pull that’s sort of important to understand and then we’ll kind of get into questions about the pluses and minuses of increasing the federal role and I have sort of three questions that I would I would suggest you orient your thinking about put it into concrete terms so when you say well the federal role in regulation our funding needs to be increased to what purpose to what end do you think that change should happen and whatever that aim is whatever that problem definition step that you you have and consider before you go all in and say yes the federal role is appropriate or not what really is the right level of government and in American education that’s a particular say lien question and then finally even if you’re still convinced one way or the other it’s important to think through the consequences of federal action of increasing the role and at the same time of inaction so that’s so the basic

4:36 structure of US education is still the same although it’s gone through some shifts over the past 20 years that are notable prior to that first of all it’s important to realize we have a federalist education system what that means is that is literally state led states have the constitutional responsibility to provide education to their residents and the federal government does not there’s a court case Supreme Court in 1973 the Rodriguez case that was sort of the linchpin on this then it was a five-to-four decision that essentially ruled that there is no federal right to education and that it is a state role under the Constitution that’s still being debated whether that was right and it’s it’s important to recognize that one justice is the key tipping point in that momentous decision and then we’ve had some traditional regulatory roles that sort of filter down from that there’s there’s sort of a subsidiarity here where the federal government has typically played a supplementary and relatively small role this was definitely the case in in the years before 2001 and state actually played a relatively supplementary role as well it was the local school boards

6:07 and school districts that took the primary response ability from the states in every state except Hawaii which is a single district and those districts has a primary role vote to raise funding and to regulate the site what was to be taught how things were to be run who went to what schools states had a fairly small role early in the 20th century that local role was overwhelmingly dominant in the 20s 30s and 40s and the state role increased over time part of this is that state role in the evolution really comes from the financing system so local districts finance education primarily through property taxes this is pretty important because if you live in an area that has a lot of high property values an urban city or a suburban area that has high value properties well it’s actually pretty easy to raise money because you just have a big tax base and so you can even have relatively low taxes and still have plenty of money to run an education system if you have a poor property tax base you just don’t have that much property well then you either need high taxes or you have to go with a relatively lowly funded education system and this sort of grates against notions of fairness and equity for

7:37 people who are living in these poor or wealthy or more or less advantaged areas so states had an increasing role through lawsuits and different funding strategies to actually supplement those and they would take state dollars primarily gained and this differs across the states by income and sales taxes and used a much smaller proportion of those but they would send money to districts and still do and they tend to send more money to less wealthy districts to supplement their ability to fund education and then wealthier districts tend to get less funding that is sort of an oversimplification but that has been sort of the state role and the federal government of course gets primarily funded through income taxes and has supplement in particular needs so if we look here see if I can get these controls straight we can see sort of how this funding works out now I’m gonna take you through a couple of these graphs so you can see important ways to use evidence in these debates these are billions of dollars in revenue for the nation as a whole spent on k-12 education from 1992 to 2014 and so the first thing that you can notice is that the local share is large about 45% throughout this period the state share is about equal again this is

9:07 average so it differs for some states than others and then across the board the federal share is actually pretty small at about 10% so you have a forty five percent forty five percent ten percent cut and the federal role is you know pretty small now one thing that’s important to do you can look at these numbers and if you want to talk about the historical changes in funding an important thing to realize is that these are real dollars so why it says you know are these are not real dollars these are nominal dollars so where it says about two hundred and seventy five billion dollars in 1992 was spent on education that’s 1992 dollars not adjusted for inflation so we look at the next thing we can see that the growth gets much smaller when you actually use real dollars so here we just adjusted those 1992 dollars to be at their equal value in 2016 and across the board they’re all adjusted so that you know it’s apples to apples so what we see is that the increase in funding is actually not as great as it appears to be with nominal dollars because we’re using 2016 dollars but the relative share stayed the same of course that doesn’t tell the whole story because that’s just overall spending and usually it’s better to look at per pupil dollars to figure out where those changes go and so right here we’re looking at real dollar changes from about 400 to 600 and change billion dollars over this time period but when you adjust it for pew per pupil amounts

10:38 you can see that the change is actually from about ninety six hundred dollars to a little over twelve so we’re talking in the first it looked like the funding doubled in the second it looked like it went up by a third here we’re saying well it looks like it went up by +6 this is important for a number of reasons we can see that overall expenditures have increased that the shares have remained relatively consistent over time but that’s the increase in real dollars per pupil is not as great as you might expect a couple other things to notice here what happened in about 2007 2008 the Great Recession you can see that funding for education sort of plateaued and then dipped this is sort of the first time if you go way way back on that access or that way if in the orientation of this camera and so there has been growth and there has been this dip there’s also a marked increase there from about 2009 to 2011 and federal dollars that was primarily one-time stimulus response so that was raised at the top and other stimulus dollars that the federal government put in to combat the recession so that gives you a little sort of lay of the land in understanding how finance has increased know one thing I want to do is we look at that increase I want to implore you to be aware of oversimplification of these numbers so

12:08 this is a chart that I’ve seen some times and what you see here is the blue line is this estimated on average across the nation an inflation adjusted per pupil cost of their entire education for you know K through 12 then you see it’s going up with a bunch it’s gone off almost a hundred percent since 1970 that’s a big increase and then these lines at the bottom are test scores and you see they’ve been relatively flat and so some folks will say hey you know more money is just totally wasted there’s no reason to put it in and I want to caution you against oversimplifying these things the increase is the increases that we see some of it is certainly inefficiency if it can be argued that it’s wasteful however schools do a lot more now than they did in nineteen seventy today schools provide a great deal more education for special education students more specialized care more services for English language learners more wraparound services a lot of expensive things that we hung on our schools that we’ve asked them to do administration costs have also gone up but you can’t say that the increase in that spending was primarily focused on increasing students scores and so the lack of a relationship there I think you need to be careful when you’re looking around to do research on this stuff to interpret simplified graphs as if they

13:41 should be well every dollar we spend should increase some percentage of students scores so let’s talk a little bit about the history of the federal role again in before No Child Left Behind pre 2001 the federal government’s primary role you know they had a bunch of smaller programs but the big two were title 1 which is dollars for poor students and concentrated poverty areas and I DEA which is the special education funds from the individuals with Disabilities Education Act and those were the two big buckets of spending and there were a lot of rules about who could use the money and how but there wasn’t much accountability to it so in 2001 the Bush administration oh my life has gone out but that’s the cost of staying late I suppose in 2001 the Bush administration passed or signed No Child Left Behind into law and part of the logic behind this law was wow we have been spending a lot of money from the federal government and we don’t know what we’re getting for it so we need some accountability if states are going to take these dollars if localities are going to use these dollars we’re gonna have to make sure that they become increasingly focused on getting students the outcomes today that we need and so they put a lot of federal pressure they instituted requirements for every state to develop and test every student in grades three through eight and one

15:12 high school they had requirements on teacher quality and qualifications on persistently failing schools and what states had to do to turnaround schools that have their low-performing for year after year and how do we assess those schools well we use those test scores that we mentioned earlier there’s sort of a whole raft of things that came with No Child Left Behind and a lot of people had complained about it that it was what they call an unfunded mandate so on one logic we the logic of No Child Left Behind was what we’ve been giving you money we continued to give you money we have not been asking you for these accountability measures so you’ve always been getting the money up now we’re bringing on some accountability and a lot of the folks that sort of push back against this have said well yes but we were working hard and then you increase these requirements a bunch of requirements and didn’t give us funding so it actually may have reduced our capacity there’s arguments both ways one of the things that No Child Left Behind did was it set up some of well with some ostentatiously higher or ridiculously high targets so it said you know states can come up with their tests but they have to define what proficiency is in their state so we give the states and flexibility but you have to tell us how what percentage of your students are

16:43 proficient and the goal was by 2014 everyone in the state had to be proficient 100% well history of Education should teach us that getting everyone above a relatively high standard is difficult to do at best and I think a lot of the logic in the law was that it would be sort of reauthorized and some of those really punitive problems would be legislated away of course hindsight is 20/20 Congress was not very responsive and in the Obama administration a lot of these schools in the nation a lot of schools that folks thought well these aren’t schools we’re getting caught up in these No Child Left Behind consequences they were being labeled as failing for what some people thought were inadequate reasons and so the Obama Department of Education and the Obama administration was was frustrated and thought that we needed to do something for state states were complaining Congress was inactive so the they set up this way to give waivers to States saying well you don’t actually have to follow though Child Left Behind waivers because the Department of Education is the regulatory body in charge of it now they saw this as a great opportunity to actually get a lot of their favored policies implemented and so they said we

18:14 will give you a waiver but there’s a there’s a quid pro quo here and the quid pro quo is that if you apply for the waiver and you Institute data systems and you change your tests and you introduce new standards for your education system and a list of other things well then you’re more likely to get these waivers and by doing that it negotiated a lot of states into doing a bunch of things at once that they probably otherwise would not have done so another thing happened in the Obama administration that was a Great Recession and as I mentioned before the response of the federal government was to put stimulus money out and to get it into the economy quickly and state education funds were lower so the Obama administration said well you know we will we need to invest in schools and at the same time we will invest but we will give them incentives again to do what the federal government thinks that we should do so these were things again like many of the things that you heard about No Child Left Behind waivers why don’t you update your standards and this became a lot of the wind in the sails of what became to be the Common Core State Standards which spread to 44 State and you might have heard about they they became somewhat controversial a whole raft of new assessments that

19:47 came with the common core standards the additional use of test scores student test scores to evaluate teachers and a number of things that had to be implemented not only at all but many of them at the same time so there was a lot of impetus from the federal government not by forcing states but through incentives to do what the federal government thought best many of these might have been great ideas all of them at once code came because they all is it once we’re sort of particularly difficult to pull off and again while the race to the top did come with funding the No Child Left Behind waivers there’s not so depending on which parts you’re talking about there the regulation has increased over time again sort of based on this No Child Left Behind logic that the federal government is investing in now we need some accountability so in 2015 in the towards the end of the Obama administration a new law was passed that reauthorized No Child Left Behind and this is called – every student succeeds Act or essa President Obama referred to it as a Christmas miracle in December of 2015 in large part because Congress was not particularly productive and was sort of dead light

21:18 deadlocked but a lot of the states were still suffering from not only the No Child Left Behind consequences but also from the pressure that came from the No Child Left Behind waivers and race to the top and these pushes from the federal government through incentives not through laws that maybe they were a lot of states were really frustrated with it a lot of Republicans were howling about the Obama administration’s overreach into education again and a federalist system particularly a can for conservatives I said you know this is federal overreach federal overreach not only through the and even where it’s not through the legislature but through the administration so the passage of SS really dialed back a lot of the pressures from No Child Left Behind and pressures from the Obama administration’s work to race to the top and the waivers to No Child Left Behind and it focused on returning authority to the states the state receives this Authority and it’s a lot of the intent push back that authority came from repeatedly in the law it said the secretary meaning the Secretary of Education shall not usually it says the Secretary shall but this time is shall not do this and shall not do that so

22:49 some of the takeaways from this history is first to understand the federal role is really just coming off an apex right we are just being since 2015 are peeling back some of this federal role and you should also notice that the funding and the regulation which were once amount of time were fairly loosely connected are now much more in meshed in the rural regulation that had come up with was tied to more or less static funding the federal role also grows the state’s role so prior to No Child Left Behind locals were really in primary control in most states now the pendulum swung towards the federal government and the state and now it is centered much more with the state so the state is still more powerful than it than it was in most cases another thing just to notice about this is that regulatory creep can be really natural right so you can find that the federal government as it increases its power it doesn’t say oh well you know this is good we’re we’re good here we’re satisfied typically in the long term you get regulatory creep that continues and that’s something to be watchful for okay so now we’re getting sort of back to the the key phrase here the United States federal government should substantially increase its funding and/or regulation of pre-k through Grade twelve education in the US and so again

24:21 I’m going to go through these sort of three points what the thing I want to push you to do is get concrete because to just say well the federal government should spend more money is not a very astute statement I would say that you’d need to say to what end what purpose is the proposed change in the federal government’s role and also what is the the benefit of stasis a second question what is the right level of government if you’re looking to change for a given purpose and what are the consequences of action or inaction on those points let me just put another sort of pin in the idea that this government policy is a it can be a blunt tool particularly the further removed you are from the implementation of a given policy on the ground so this is certainly the case when you have a hundred thousand public schools across the nation the question should be well you know should it be the local district that makes consequential decisions should it be the state capital can the Department of Education over here in Washington DC on Maryland Avenue can they really be expected to effectively achieve the purposes however well-intentioned that they seek to so what’s the purpose of the proposed change and I would say that it’s important to define why you think the federal government should increase again most funding comes from states and local

25:53 authorities I’ll talk a little bit about that subsidiarity of it more in a moment but there are some good reasons to think well maybe there are investments that are worthwhile so you could say well we need more pre-kindergarten we have almost universal K across the states but we know that early childhood learning can greatly affect later outcomes particularly for disadvantaged students so the bang for your buck might be the highest with pre-k so you know perhaps we have an insufficient pre-k and perhaps we want to increase it you can think through a number of other things here Career and Technical Education for a long period we’ve focused on this sort of college for all ideas that students going through high school just need to go to college it fits for everyone and that’s increasingly being peeled back Career and Technical Education may need some investments okay another one is to improve teacher quality right we know that teachers can be the most important school-based input for student learning so maybe we need to invest in the quality of our teachers we need to pay them more give higher tests forgive their loans their student loans but there’s a number of ways to approach that so you know that that could be a reasonable purpose another one is persistently failing schools there are schools that fail students a lot of students and fail to graduate high percentages of students and they don’t do this for one year they’ll do it for a year after year after year they’ll do it

27:26 for an entire academic generation of students you know but the time it takes one student to go K through 12 that school will continue to fail students throughout so yeah maybe we we have some serious purposes some serious things that need addressing well then the question needs to become well what’s the right level of government to address that and there’s an there’s any better way to ask that question it’s not who can do it but who can do this well so this is a key argument that I think you need to deal with when you talk about increasing the federal role who can make change in schools and do it effectively do it well so subsidiarity is this idea that you know the federal government actually doesn’t devolve power over education to States because we have a federalist system where states have the role to provide education but it sort of acts like that because it uses this power of the purse of it it’s 10% that it contributes it says well if you want to do these it’s going to keep getting this money you need to perform to our specifications and so it actually has a lot of shaping effect and then of course particularly in the 20th century states gave a lot of the authority to locals said well you local governments you should be in charge because you you know what kids should learn you know your communities on the ground we’re going to trust you to make good decisions and of

28:57 course those locals they are nearest now part of that that works very well as long as you can trust all local districts to invest enough money to do enough quality control to make sure that all students poor students immigrant students minority students are given that not only the same amount of resources but adequate resources and these don’t always play out so there’s some tug and soul with subsidiarity but it’s important to realize that you can also have some problems so a quick couple of examples that I won’t go through all these I’ll just go through the Common Core testing consortia and because it’s a great example of how pushing too hard from on high can actually backfire so with the race to the top grants and No Child Left Behind waivers part of the changes that were incentivized where well you should come up with new standards and those new standards well if you’re going to come up with new standards and you have to do tests you need to change the tests so what the government the federal government did was it sponsored these two things and said okay States you just get together we’ll give you a big bunch of money and you come up with a couple of tests that you’ll share together and so they came up with two consortia tests that were Common Core aligned they’re going to be better tests than ever they were gonna be cheaper because a bunch of states were putting it together great idea really great I you know lots of good reasons to do this

30:29 so what happened in the down flow of these good intentions unfortunately was Common Core became a politically charged hot potato and these tests that were adopted they were fairly good tests you could bicker about them but it wasn’t as much quality as it was a big deal to get rid of your standards and re structure your whole education system but it wasn’t that big of a deal comparatively just to get rid of the test so people said in a number of states well we hate the Common Core but we can’t get rid of the Common Core because that’s a big deal but we can get rid of these tests so there are a bunch of states that even though they’re supposed to be marking their students progress and their schools progress with these tests they’ve changed the tests some of them more than once Missouri had four tests in four years it’s pretty hard to track your scores when you change the test four years in a row so you know this is one of those things where a great idea on high doesn’t necessarily get the buy-in and implementation at the local level and in a federalist education system you can really be set back another thing just to be measured on all these things that I want you to be aware of or at least be wary of is the idea of what’s measured gets managed so one of the big complaints that’s really happened since No Child Left Behind is we just focus too much on tests now tests are useful

31:59 there’s no doubt about it i I think tests are very useful I think well done they can help us make sure that we’re reaching high levels of achievement they were not leaving some students behind and that we’re assessing what kids really need to know however when you put a lot of importance in a system on reading and math scores then you’re going to get a system that focuses on reading and math scores there’s a number of other aspects of learning that may get short shrift that you know may slyly be just shortchanged and you know it’s a concern so again when I say you know what is the right level of government it’s important also to be sure that what we want to improve doesn’t necessarily displace a number of other important things so this is where we sort of you know there’s sort of a transition to what is the consequences of action and it’s I think it’s important also to say in action the common core and a couple of those other things and if you’re particularly interested in one of these two what is it other two that I had here teacher evaluation or school improvement grants if you’re interested in those we can talk about them maybe in the QA but those unintended consequences are more likely the more distance you have right so what are the consequences well I think about this the game of telephone right you did this in grade school unsure where the first person in the class whispered to the second person the

33:29 sentence and you went around the room and by the time you got to the other side I took my dog for a walk turn turns into the car went to the moon you know it doesn’t doesn’t make sense those translation problems are definitely what can happen when the federal government tells States what to do in the States tell districts what to do particularly when the states don’t necessarily want to do what the federal government wants them to do and when the local districts don’t necessarily want to do what the states want them to do or what the federal government wants to do so action has some unintended consequences and it’s important to look to those on the flip side you can argue with the other way that inaction has actually some pretty predictable and very undesirable consequences so there’s some there’s some stark problems and realities in our education system we do have achievement gaps that have been going on for a long time and that any any political persuasion or any reasonable person should not be happy with so poor people just do worse in our education system and benefit less from it than wealthier people minorities black Hispanic American Indian students tend to do much worse than white students regularly Asian students tend to do better and of course those are sort of gross race groups but those achievement gaps by most perspectives are unacceptable and we need to do something about them doing nothing or

35:01 just trusting that all localities will effectively address them is not necessarily a wise path there’s also just under preparedness our school system even despite the inequalities I may just not be that effective compared to what we need to do if we want to be competitive in a 21st century economy it may be that we need to increase our education systems demand and productivity to keep up with a knowledge economy and then there’s just structural inequalities so this has less to do with achievement gaps and more to do with sort of the reproduction of economic inequality that can happen that are sort of based on those achievement gaps but I’m talking less about differences in test scores which are important but they’re only so important it’s probably much more important that lifetime earnings differ graduation entry – and graduation from college differ your likelihood of sort of getting married differs these education attainment things are associated with everything from your likelihood to be obese to your likelihood to be happy married and not be divorced later in life so the the down flow of a ineffective education system deserves attention so just being inactive is not necessarily any better than trying to be prudent and do nothing so this sort of

36:34 returns us to this question right the United States federal government should substantially increase its funding and/or regulation of pre k-12 education in the United States I think one could argue either side of this right we’ve seen some examples I touched them briefly on some problems that have come from federal intervention I don’t know about federal funding but it certainly tends to bring regulation with it that needs to be carefully dealt with on the other hand you know inaction has problems as well so I’d encourage you when you argue either side to argue it in the context of the facts on the ground and concretely that think about what you believe the education should system should do and try and match your solution to the problems that you’ve defined not just say that money will solve a bunch of problems there’s a another debate about whether just adding money is solves problems I think I’m not gonna get into that here that the large part is well just sending more money can can actually not be that effective and so it’s important how we do things so it’s important to be concrete and not just say well you know more money will increase test scores and give us everything that we want there is a zero-sum game there with the federal budget and that we have and especially the fact that if we increase the federal

38:06 budget you have to spread it across a hundred thousand different schools so if you spend an extra million dollars you just gave every school ten bucks it’s not going to get you very far and then finally just avoid the naivete that comes with simple ideas like well if we you know we just we don’t spend enough money so if we just increase the federal share by a hundred percent we get a ten percent increase in spending and that and we’d be at shangri-la those arguments are foolish and destined not only in our debates and not get you very far but they are gonna run into bad politics and bad policy so you could argue either side you guys are the debaters so I’d encourage you to make some quality arguments I’ve got I got about 17 minutes 15 minutes I’m happy to go over anything answer some questions let me know what you think okay so joseph has this question what’s a good way to measure student success that’s a good question certainly unsettled the the knee-jerk reaction is well let’s look to student test scores so I’ll talk about test scores for a minute test scores are good proxy for a good sort of way to view how the education system is performing and

39:40 high test scores sort of are correlated to lots of good things higher salaries higher earning potential like I said you know lower likelihood to be obese to die early to be addicted to drugs to just a wide variety of sort of surprising things you can actually be skinnier on average if you to get more education I don’t know if that’s a causal relationship but it but it’s there now how do we measure those things at the school level is a very tricky question you can just say well you know what’s the what the average test score in the school for eighth graders that’s what I want to know know know how good this school is well then you may find out about how good the school is you might actually find out that the kids that end up going to that school are just wealthier and so they’re more likely to do better on tests to begin with you could find in fact if you just look at the average test score in school that those schools are getting better students to start with even though they’re not moving them further down the field so for a lot of reasons we want to use what’s called value-added scores and that sort of tries to measure through some statistical magic which is arguable but well intentioned to figure out how much progress we’ve made so you could think about absolute scores or progress you can also think about other ways to measure student readiness for college or careers we do that through test scores you can also just look if you have the

41:11 data how many students are employed down the ride down the line how many go to college how many finished college on time you can also look at sort of how well a high school performance by how many of their students they managed to graduate it’s important to keep your eye on the fact that a lot of these things if you put up the pie chart where you just look at how much of the variation the pie chart was my face in it how much of the variation in student performance is due to different things well that’s where things sort of get tricky right do we think it all has to do with the school we know it doesn’t lots of family characteristics go into that a lot of things that schools can’t control and so it’s important to associate differences in student outcomes with the things that schools do and the things that schools are either unable to do or are not intended to do I hope that gets at your question Dalton says what is my opinion on the possibility of educational field trips to alleviate the issues seen in our education system that is interesting there’s a guy Jay green down at the University of Arkansas who has done some work on field trips and he has found he just came out with another paper the other day found that plays that students attend live plays can at least in this experimental set up actually cause higher levels of sort of pro-social

42:43 behavior and empathetic thinking and also reasoning about the play for students who go to them students who just stayed in school scored lower on these measures and students who actually went to a movie which was not a live performance didn’t do any better either so he also has some other things where he’s explored whether going to art museums can help and I I think those are important things let’s think about what they do I think field trips can expose students particularly disadvantaged students to experiences they might not otherwise have there’s a lot to be said about that the question is if we engage in these activities you know what are we replacing when we do that so for some students we’re replacing seat time in school and we have some that can be spent to that but how much is why is this important question and if we’re spanning some money that we otherwise would not spend on those things you know what is the best opportunity cost for that that might those are good questions now you ask a particular form of this question which was not are they valuable but what’s the possibility that they could alleviate the issues again I’m gonna push you to get specific what issues you’re talking about I think it can close some opportunity gaps it can open up some opportunities particularly for students who are not exposed to certain educational field trips are they going to solve the major problems in our system maybe not or they do they help us

44:16 sort of keep the focus on what the central purposes of education are other than sort of narrow reading and math scores that we so often focus on they certainly could do I think the education system needs further regulation in order to achieve better student results you know if I knew what the education system needed I would be hammering away at it and I have some some ideas on things that can improve the question is what do you mean by regulation so if it is well the federal government could institute a couple of regulations it’s going to fix things across the land I think that is a pretty tall order I think that the federal government has limited ability to identify one simple problem across our entire nation that will really help alleviate the problems in our schools because I don’t think it’s a problem I think there are problems so I also think you know I’ve told you about this sort of problem and how things get changed as they roll down from the federal level all the way down to you know 100,000 schools so I think that those things are tricky that’s it I don’t think the federal government is incapable of

45:49 helping I think that the best thing to do however is to tread carefully look to increase the capacity of local schools to do good things and to deliver on promises to do research on what is working in other places and share that and the government does do that I think it should continue to and I think it should try and empower states which are a little closer to the problem to sort of roll down their capacity you know we’ve made a big bet here with essa really we have swung back some of the federal authority to the states and that is a good thing and in my mind but it does assume that states have the ability to look at the problems that they see in their state and effectively remediate them I’m not I’m just not sure that all states have the capacity to really fix their schools that doesn’t mean the federal government does but it raises the question of if not them and maybe some states aren’t capable of doing it so who’s gonna rise to the challenge let’s see Joseph said should local governments have any stake in education reform not exactly sure what you mean Joseph so if you want to rephrase that that might get me a little closer to it I mean they definitely have a stake in it local

47:21 government spend you know their first line item in their budgets almost across the board is education they also directly run it schools are often the largest employer of local governments are the the largest employment sector in local governments it’s a big issue in elections if they don’t have a stake in it I think or if somehow that the local stake was tried to be removed I think we’d we’d need a revolution not a reform to do that so I see you’re typing here yeah I can’t local governments you know they do we get to a capacity issue here right so you can have a lot of experimentation and so forth but if you look over local governments the there’s a question about whether they have the expertise right so I think local governments have the ability to sort of demand that experts get results and that they can carefully they can do well by carefully demanding that we bring in people with the expertise to effectively educate students whether they are all whether they all have the capacity to get the results those that we need and

48:52 ask of complicated education systems is a tough question I mean I think there’s a bunch of local governments who under fund education and would do far better to pay more in taxes and invest more in their students so now as far as what the effects of that are if you know the states come in and add regulations on top of them again you know I see that there’s serious problems that can result in that there are ways where you know top-down reforms can actually send us backwards they can tie the hands of locals they can increase sort of red tape they can increase the requirements of what people have to do I’ll give you a quick I’ll give you a quick just explanation of this quandary something I’m interested in you know there’s a big problem with suspension the federal government is upset about suspensions overall suspensions also raise differences in suspensions and sort of the the current reform idea is restorative justice this is where instead of suspending students in kids we have these restorative justice meetings or restorative circles we have a bunch of students and some teachers sort of talk through issues that arise there’s a lot to like about this I really think it can have some positives the question is is that when we say well you know now the state of Maryland is going to do restorative justice and then you ask

50:25 these schools across the state to institute these programs that they don’t really understand and you don’t give them the additional resources to do what you’re asking them to do then you’re actually saying well I want you to spend more time sitting in seats talking with more people about about behavior and about the rules and the relationships in the classroom well it can be a zero-sum game if you don’t put more capacity in there for them to manage these systems and so what you’re actually doing is you’re saying let’s spend more of students time and teachers time an unknown amount on these restorative justice practices and pull them away from other things again a well intentioned reform do I think it can be problematic I’m worried about that one and how well it’s going to be implemented anyone else I can wait you out I know your name’s Erik Johnson you must have a question you’re right there in the participant list Kimberly Lauren anyone

51:56 you’re welcome it was my pleasure in that case thank you so much that for speaking to us I know I learned a lot I really appreciate you taking the time out of your day to help us out and to help us learn a little bit more about the United States education system so that being said I’m going to go ahead and flip to the survey screen that um for all the participants if you just want to go ahead and fill this out to the best of your ability just give us your opinions and