Rick: Hey, I'm Rick Hess, director of education policy studies here at AEI.
Delighted today to have a conversation with my long time friend and colleague, Checker
Finn, about the Every Student Succeeds Act, about school reform, and about places where
school reformers maybe have sometimes stumbled and can do better.
Checker: Well, how long do we have?
Those are big topics.
Rick: Big question.
You know, Checker, let's start with Every Student Succeeds Act.
You've been involved in these questions and these challenges, really, I think you were
you in...were you in graduate school or close to it?
Checker: I was a senior in college when Lyndon Johnson proposed the Elementary and Secondary
Education Act and it inspired me.
It arguably shaped my career direction.
Rick: Now, that's either inspiring or disheartening, a piece of federal...
What about that spoke to you?
What was so significant about it?
Checker: At age 21 or so, I was...I wanted to save the world.
I was a social reformer.
I wanted to end misery, end poverty, end illiteracy, and ignorance.
And Johnson said that better education for poor kids would end poverty, and that struck
me as a very good thing to be part of.
Besides that, I didn't wanna join my father's law firm.
Rick: So when you got inspired, what did you do back in '65?
Checker: Well, two things.
One is I enrolled in the Graduate School of Education immediately, into what became a
MIT program and then a doctorate in education policy.
And the other thing was I started volunteering in the war on poverty in as it happened, Cambridge,
Massachusetts, attempting to help the Community Action Program get organized in the community,
which is another long story, not a lot to do with education, but it was pretty frustrating.
Rick: So, I mean...so from that vantage point, so we have 50 years after the passage of ESEA.
We just saw, you know, President Obama sign the Every Student Succeeds Act.
What are the big similarities or differences as far as these two landmark pieces of legislation?
Checker: Well of course, Every Student Succeeds is about the, I think, seventh iteration of
the Elementary Secondary Education Act, No Child Left Behind, having been the previous
one.
And so there been about 7, and they've every 5, or 6, or 7, or 8, or in this case, 14 years,
Congress gets around to updating it and trying to fix what went wrong the last time around.
So this was a big fix because the last time around we had a whole lot of federal government
dictated requirements laid on states and districts, and that produced not very good results and
a lotta backlash, and a lot of other things contributed to the backlash.
And so Every Student Succeeds is in significant part moving the pendulum back toward where
it was about 20 years ago, which is to give states more say over how they're gonna educate
their disadvantaged kids and a bunch of other things that the federal government had edged
into using NCLB/ESEA as its lever.
Rick: You know, NCLB, No Child Left Behind is hugely unpopular.
Well, what was usually unpopular two years ago?
Checker: Somebody called it a tainted brand, I believe.
Rick: But back in 2001, right, it had close to 400 votes in the House of Representatives.
It had 90 votes in the Senate just like with the SSA, it seemed hugely popular at the time...
Checker: It was, at the time.
Rick: What did NCLB get wrong and how come we didn't see it when it was getting 'em wrong?
Checker: Every single iteration of ESEA has had a somewhat similar history, has been popular
at the time, and didn't get everything right, and led to unintended consequences, and lead
to need for further mid-course corrections, or in this case, some rollbacks, and further
tweaks, and incidentally, additional regulations in other spheres because the political compromises
that have dictated every one of these cycles have included some give and some take from
left and right between sorta state and local freedom, and parent choice on the one hand,
and federal government knows best on the other hand.
But keep in mind as well that the scope of this law has widened from a 30 page statute
in 1965 to about 1,000 today, and it swept up into it all kinds of things that were never
there at the beginning.
I mean, education for English Language Learners, for example, has been added to the elementary
secondary education, and scads of little programs intended to promote this reform, or alter
that behavior, or so forth.
So every one of these has produced unhappiness as well as happiness left and right, and has
produced unintended consequences big time.
I mean, I think the best known example from NCLB was its solemn declaration that every
child in America would be proficient in reading and math by the year 2014.
That was understandable at the time, okay, and produced all kinds of negative consequences.
And ESSA has to some extent, tried to undo those negatives.
Rick: Now, let's talk about the...and it says in 2001, Congress said 100% of kids will be
proficiency in reading and math by 2014.
Well, we talk a lot about moonshots in education and...what's the, I guess, the upside of that's
obvious, "Hey, it's good.
We want all our children to learn."
Checker: High expectations for everybody.
Rick: So what are the downsides and why do we wind up in this funny place?
Checker: Well in that case, I think there were two big downsides.
One was most educators immediately dismissed it as a pipe dream up high in the sky.
We know our kids, 100% of them are not going to be proficient by any reasonable definition
of proficient, by anything like 2014.
So the first was educators said, "Pa, [SP] we can ignore this.
It's not gonna happen."
The other was that States policymakers elected officials wanting to maximize the number of
kids who are deemed to be proficient, tended to define proficiency down and set a low bar
so that more kids would be over it.
Well, politically understandable, but if your big macro problem is kids achieving not enough,
to lower the bar that they have to clear in the name of getting more of them over it is
an unintended consequence that I think is indeed negative.
Rick: So if educators said, "Pa, this isn't serious," how come it's felt like NCLB had
such an impact on school practice?
[inaudible 00:06:35] so much complaint about overtesting?
Checker: Because it hinged everything on test scores and in just two subjects, and it judged
schools according to how many kids basically passed those tests every year in those two
subjects.
That led to a lot of emphasis on test prep and it led to a fair amount of neglect of
other subjects.
And so it both narrowed the curriculum and caused, I'm gonna say, less imaginative teachers
to...and teachers with tougher kids to teach to use more and more of the year just getting
'em ready for the test.
And the tests at that time weren't very good either, so getting 'em ready meant a lotta
drill and kill.
Rick: So how...from where you sit, how does the Every Student Succeeds Act try to improve
upon or fix the things that we may have got wrong in NCLB?
Checker: Mostly by saying, "States, it's up to you.
You define how many kids are gonna be proficient.
You define proficiency.
You define what's the deadline, the timeline for all of this happening, and you figure
out how to do it.
Yes, you'll still have to test every year, and the tests will still have to be in reading
and math, but we're not gonna tell you how many kids have to pass them, and we're not
gonna tell you...we just tell you have to set goals and you have to be measured against
your own goals."
Rick: Now, you're currently vice president of the Maryland State Board of Educations.
Checker: Yes, this is my punishment for having lived this long.
Rick: So you were busy trying to help Maryland transition to these new set of norms and rules.
As...you know, I think many observers say, "Well gosh, can we trust the states to do
this well?
Are state's gonna make sure that every child is actually learning?"
Isn't this why we need Washington to keep a firmer hand?
How are your experiences?
What have been your thinking on that?
Checker: Telling bit of information arose just the other day at a state board meeting,
when we were presented the results of a wide-ranging survey around the state, in which so-called
stakeholders, educators, parents, and others were asked, "Do you believe that 100% proficiency
should be the state's goal?"
And the overwhelming majority said, "No."
And then they asked, "So, if we had to set a percentage of proficient, what should be
the state's goal?"
And the range was basically from 65% to 75% of kids, which is to say apparently the majority
Marylanders participating in this survey would be satisfied if two-thirds or three-quarters
of the kids in Maryland were proficient by some unknown date in the future.
Well, that's problematic in various ways.
If you believe that all kids can learn, that all kids should be held to a high standard,
that everybody should go to college, and a lotta groups do, a lotta people do, then you're
gonna say the stakeholders in Maryland are benighted troglodytes who think that a quarter
of the kids should be dispensed with.
Well, or are they realists who know that pie in the sky isn't...can ever be pie on the
table?
I don't know.
This is something that the state board is struggling with, the bureaucracy is struggling
with, and we are in the middle of trying to figure out the ESSA plan for Maryland.
Rick: Did ESSA get the balance right?
Did ESSA go too far in pushing power to the states, did it not go far enough?
Checker: Well I hear that Rick Hess and a colleague have recently published a book that
is devoted entirely, almost, to this question, of probing ESSA for its strengths and its
weaknesses.
It's a very good book and it finds many strengths and many weaknesses in ESSA, some unexpected
constraints that are there on states.
The Maryland State Board just stumbled upon one the other day that we hadn't known was
there.
But also a lotta freedom which incidentally states often find scary, means they suddenly
are in charge of how many kids should be proficient, and how do we explain that to the voters,
and the interest groups, and the factions, and so forth, that are gonna accuse us of
a civil rights violation, for example, if we don't say 100%?
Rick: You know, in the aforementioned book, you wrote a remarkable chapter talking about
these...the evolution of the ESEA over time...
Checker: And my love-hate relationship with it.
Rick: I think it might be interesting for viewers, this love-hate relationship.
Could you explain?
Checker: Well, in the chapter, I explain that in many cases, my heart and my head were going
in opposite directions.
My head was saying that such and such is not going to work and my heart was saying, "God,
I wish it would work."
And the upshot was that sometimes when they tighten the screws on...in the federal law,
I was saying, "Good, that'll make it work because it needs to work, because the kids
deserve it."
And they do.
My head was saying, "This is another exercise in big government futility and there is no
evidence that it's going to work."
And so I guess depending on whether my head was in charge or my heart was in charge on
Wednesday afternoon, would be...would define what I wrote about that particular iteration
of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act.
It was impossible, let me say, to reconcile what I think would be good for kids in America,
if it could happen, with my sense of, what can the federal government make happen?
Rick: And given that tension, are you...do you find yourself pretty much in the same
heart-head tension today that you were when No Child Left Behind was passed, or has it
changed?
Checker: My head has swollen and my heart has shrunk, which is to say I still do believe
that the country needs and would be better off if, but I've seen too many iterations
of unintended consequences of the big government overreached actually causing damage that it
didn't intend to cause.
And I wish I had greater confidence in the field doing right by all kids so that it didn't
need to be prodded by the feds, and measured by the feds, and reported to the feds.
But my head is now telling me that nobody can be entirely trusted, at least in the traditional
system to do right by kids, which is part of what's brought me more and more toward
alternatives to the traditional system and toward empowering parents, as in most cases,
the only ones who really care above all about their kids.
Rick: You know, you wrote a book 30 years ago, give or take, now called "We Must Take
Charge", and one of the themes was that parents and citizens needed to be more assertive when
it came to improving schools.
Over...I mean, over the course of your career, what are the things that stand out in your
mind as far as the shift in that question of empowering parents and the role that parents
play in driving these policies?
Checker: Well, the good news is that what we call school choice in its many forms has
become basically an accepted premise in American education, and we're now arguing about which
kinds of choices for how many kids, in which places, under which rules.
But we no longer take for granted as we did when I was a kid in school in Ohio in the
'50s, that you go to your assigned neighborhood district-operated school, unless you're Catholic
or very rich, which were the only two real exceptions in those days.
Today we kinda take for granted as a society that the government doesn't have the right
to assign you to a school, that your parents should be able to choose schools, and now
we worry about, are the schools they're choosing any good?
Are they...to whom are they accountable?
For what should this range of schools be?
Include private schools, virtual schools, homes schools, other kinds of schools.
So we argue a lot about the fine print, but I think the concept of parent empowerment
to make some choices for their kids is pretty widespread now.
Hey everyone! Thanks for watching part number one of this series
on school reform from ESEA to ESSA.
If you enjoyed what you saw, remember to like the video or leave us a comment.
And if you want to see more, check out part number two.