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[Music] if the learning environment is not safe and reasonably calm people can't learn I mean if you're a child do you want to go to school if you're going to be attacked with a knife or beaten up in a classroom or that probably the school yard or on your way to school if you're a teacher do you want to disrupt its class I mean a disruptive student in a disruptive classroom cannot learn cannot learn we know this from large number of studies [Music] my guest today is Williamson Evers an expert on education policy dr. Evers had at the Trump pants transitions agency review for the US Department of Education he is now a senior fellow and director of the Center on educational excellence at the independent Institute his articles have appeared in such publications as Education Week New York Times Wall Street Journal Los Angeles Times and Christian Science Monitor and he's the past member of the Editorial Board of Education next today we're going to talk about the state of public education in California bill welcome on the show pleasure to be here bill before we get into discussing education I want to learn about how you got into this space well many years ago my children were going through the public schools and my son was having problems with reading and the teacher was gonna maybe put him in a lower achievement group so I started what grades I seen this was like first grade you know that's when you learn to read so I got concerned about that and and when I was growing up they had the they were changing over from phonics to looks a which is similar to what they do today with whole language and so I had remembered my mother teaching us from why Johnny can't read about phonics and how to do word attack and how to break apart the sounds and words and so forth so I kind of helped my son a little bit but he caught on to that all right so then in about third grade he was telling me about his math homework and that maybe he was going to be put in an advanced thing of mathematics and so he told me well they don't really care if you get the right answer and you know what they want is some explanation some story of how you did your work and so forth with you know care that much about the right answer and that rang alarm bells for me because you know when you think about it if people get the right answer the rocket will not go up right the bridge will fall down getting the right answer is pretty important and I'm not saying that you know knowing how to go about the problem is not important it is but you know to denigrate the importance of the right answer it seemed to me to be bad so I started reading about the controversies in math instruction and that's how I got really involved and I was a major figure in the math wars in the mid 1990s in California and nationally and so what did you do next well so I got I got involved and I organized with some other parents obviously a group in caliph in in palo alto california called hold and it was a pro solid math pro content-rich instruction in math and because the internet as an organizing tool was just coming into being we were able to mobilize and get hundreds of people to come to school board meetings and so forth so this came to the attention of some politicians in Sacramento and so the I went and testified up there and I got to know a few people and I got appointed by Governor Pete Wilson to be on the California State academic standards Commission so what was so you saw your child you saw his math and you saw this problem in math right how did that motivate you to do what you did afterwards well you know doing well I mean my my children have both done well my son went to University of California at San Diego my daughter went to Yale their high achieving students and you know I of course care their success and you know I'm I'm a PhD myself so you know I think learning is really important and a pathway to doing interesting things and life important thing so so I got from being this parent activist I got sucked into the Standards Commission in California and then George W Bush was running for president and I got into his advisory group in education he already knew a lot because he'd been the governor of Texas and very education focused but I was in his advisory group and I was in the advisory group for his transition and then I ran the schools in Iraq so they were looking for somebody they could do that and they called me up one day this is the Pentagon he head Oh let's go and so they said would you like to go and run the schools and Iraq so I did I did that from July through December of 2000 oh three and and I came back and in the latter part of the Bush administration I was Assistant Secretary of Education for planning policy about and policy evaluation you know so in the US Department of Education in Washington DC and you helped this had ministration is yes I so so before Trump was elected so beginning after the nomination there's a transition team that goes in place and I headed the transition team for the US Department of Education and then after and so we made proposals of what we look we looked at everything that had been going on under Obama and even a little farther back what needed to be fixed what were policy areas that needed attention and so then when the Trump got elected so that's November but he doesn't get inaugurated till January so I continued to work and we interviewed the people in the Department of because even though I had been in it and some of my colleagues in the transition had been in it we didn't know the details of what had been changed and so we had to give a package to the incoming Secretary of Education of what were the policy areas and what were sort of the details of structure and management and budget that needed to be looked at by her so she can make decisions in an informed way so you have a very interesting perspective being a policy maker you have been a parent you're being an activist and from your perspective how's the trend of Education going in California over the last few decades well I think it's really not going too well so under Pete Wilson as governor and under gray Davis as governor we were making pretty good improvement and then one sign of this was that we had two thirds of the children in algebra in 8th grade so this is what high-performing countries do internationally so you know Taiwan and South Korea and so forth I mean they may have doubled into 70s already the 80s know this is in the 90s and I was ok yeah and early 2000 so it's it it's just falling apart so Schwarzenegger his hard was often in the right place but he also he wanted big box office he he paid attention to popularity things that were not necessarily aligned with what would really be best for the children and I mean all politicians do this a whole class size controversy is parents loving small classes and the science saying that's not really the important thing the important thing is good teachers but anyway I'm getting this assigned so Schwarzenegger wanted to get in on the Common Core bandwagon and so I was on the California State Academic Standards Commission that reviewed that and we we went through it line by line this was an asset of national academic content standards lists for each grade what the children are going to learn in this case in math and English and so I you know there were a lot of tiny problems in the English standard they weren't too bad but the math standards were filled with things that were missing so we had all these kids two-thirds of them in Algebra one eighth grade but Common Core has Algebra one and ninth grade so that's going backwards essentially and it means it's it's problematic I mean first of all it harmed all those children that you know to succeed at the level of international high performance but it also means if you're trying to get it to a selective college you're not on track to take maybe your BC calculus and your senior year because you can't happen of years so you know it's just hugely problematic and it hasn't resulted in any improvements I mean we have the national nape scores and we have the Common Core aligned smarter balanced scores and there's no improvement in California it's you know it's it's just in flat or declining and slightly or something like that it's not going up that promised us that it would be going up they promised college and career ready students at the end of 12th grade and you have written quite a lot on on issues with education but about classroom discipline you've talked a lot about that I have and you know this is a foundational thing if the learning environment is not safe and reasonably calm people can't learn I mean if you're a child do you want to go to school if you're going to be attacked with a knife or beaten up in the classroom that probably the school yard or on your way to school if you're a teacher do you want to disrupt its class I mean I've disrupted a student in a disruptive classroom cannot learn cannot learn we know this from a large number of studies so we have we have a problem that both California and at the national level apparent and policies that have undermined a normal amount of discipline on camp on school campuses so in the Obama years the administration looked at a number of suspensions and decided oh there's too many people being suspended so we're gonna roll back suspensions and this idea was also present in California so if you if you start doing that it relaxes discipline it makes laxness and discipline throughout the whole system and so we have this situation where they had a substitute for an alternative to suspension that they call restorative justice and restorative justice and in principle it's not a bad idea to be for restoring the previously normal situation I mean to some extent our judicial system tries to rectify things tries to put people back to where they were before and to punish people Japan is extremely oriented and its penal system and it's a criminal justice system toward restorative justice you you're the criminal you stole something you have to get it back the amount you have to give back an additional amount to compensate the person for the pain and suffering and terror and scared us of being burglarized or robbed or whatever and you have to apologize you have to try and make right the psychological situation other person so you know it could really be against that in the abstract but in a school setting it doesn't really work as well the children don't really have a lot of possessions that they really own that they could rectify and so you know and at home if you get into parents paying off for their children's bad behavior then that's not really the right it's not really just and it's not really the right incentive for the kid it just becomes a spoiled gift so we don't really want to look forward to that so since it doesn't really work as well as it does for the adult criminal justice system and what is it so how did so I'm going to tell you how much I so the the operational meaning of this restorative justice is they sit in peace circles so these are just circles of grown-ups and children and they talk and it becomes a strange psycho drama the Cascade of apologies and what are your feelings and what are my feelings and are you angry and there's your anger over and you know it's just hours of this and so so this doesn't really work okay in terms of getting the schools to be safe and getting the classrooms to be suitable for learning and so so max Eden who's a researcher at the Manhattan Institute has looked into all the studies that have looked at the cities that have this is very very popular and it's popular throughout California and it was pushed by the Obama people and it hasn't worked it just said sort of discipline kids yeah you put them through this process right instead of go to the principal's office stay late after school you're suspended instead you do this talk fest and do they do it based on certain racial ratios or certain right so one of the one of the concerns about these suspensions was that some number of blacks and numbers of Latinos were being suspended but you know really criminal justice should be on an individual basis we're not indict erases one conduct writing in dining people who speak some language we are trying to rectify wrongs done by some individual and that's how it should be at school too so yes the Obama people were obsessed by race and my you know dreams of equality that they had and so forth but the important thing is to have a safe school to have a classroom where the teacher can teach without endless disruption and distraction and to punish the kids that are misbehaving and you know if that just has to be the way it is now let's switch gears a little bit then go to math okay so you started with math that's what threw my idea into this oh yeah how are we doing with math in Category well as I said as way so I mentioned Common Core and I mentioned that before Common Core we've gotten 2/3 of the kids in algebra 1 by 8th grade and that was similar to what high-performing countries were doing and and so some have some differences I mean they might take part of algebra in 8th grade and part of geometry in eighth grade and part of algebra and part of geometry in ninth grade so but still what it amounted to is by the end of ninth grade they had completed algebra 1 and geometry in these foreign countries so this is what we should be aspiring to and this is what the kids are capable of providing they have the preceding years building up to that so we lost all that with Common Core and we have these nape national test results and we have these common core related smarter balanced test results that show there's been no improvement so as I mentioned also when I first was talking about common core the slogan of common core is college and career-ready okay so that they're saying is when you finish high school you're ready to go take a job skilled job challenging job you're ready to go into higher education could be Community College could be California State University system could be a research university system of University of California whatever it is you're supposed to be ready for this now so the colleges had of course before all this had remedial classes because in fact when the kids went imagine you're a kid and you are in a rough area of Los Angeles growing up you didn't have Jaime Escalante as your math teacher you had some other person maybe well-meaning but just not that great a teacher and so now you're at Cal State Northridge ok you don't know enough math to take a college math class or to take a science class or an engineering class so what is to be done well what the colleges did is they had remedial classes these were not credit-bearing you didn't get college credit because this was high school work this is work you should've in high school okay but you hadn't done it so but they were providing it because you know they thought you were capable of doing their work but you needed some prep okay so the administrators and again we have some of this concern about race and equality and whatever but you know these are all individual students coming in there and it's not some race coming in okay its students I want to get a good life and learn what they need all right so we have these children there and they don't know enough so they have these classes but the administrators are looking at and they have their agenda so they want people graduating on time you know they under pressure the budget is challenged by people hanging around a long time it looks bad people are not prepared so they decided well we'll do this we'll take these remedial classes and we'll take a first-year math club do math we'll take a first-year math class and we'll combine it so these kids are kids that would fail in a regular math class okay they're not ready and you're gonna make them to two years to you guys right now a lot of work in one year but in Tallaght credit-bearing so it advances them toward graduating on time well this is not gonna work okay so now let's put ourselves in the mind of a math professor your professor Joe Smith and you're getting these kids in that you know you're an engineering professor your chemistry professor you're a math professor the kids are coming in they're not ready okay so you complain you say let's add another class in k-12 we work well let's require in order to get into CSU but they have another class okay all right so now you're an administrator in the gauge wealth system and you've promising that these kids are college ready but they're not so you need to have another class but you don't have teachers for you know algebra 2 and to do a quick fix so they make consumer math checkbook math this is the lowest-level mat this is like not alder but not geometry not drink not the tree it's how to balance a checkbook it's how to manage your household budget and this is what we spent the 1990s getting rid of so that we could have kids getting at the house for one and eighth grade so this is a horrible regression that we're seeing here and of course the professors are apoplectic because the students are not prepared and this is a good segue into testing and accountability how's that working and in the current system well it's not working all that well so we have so we spent the federal government spent 170 million dollars creating a test called the smarter balanced national test that's common core aligned in California affiliated with that and uses that so there's two the two aspects the computer-based test so you have to have perfect computers because under the idea of standardized testing is every kid it takes a test doesn't under the same standard conditions you also don't want to have computers that you can somehow look up the answer on that computer they have to have all that perfect then there's something obviously weird about the scoring normally with standardized tests the grades go up slightly about two percent over the years and this is because no know that the whole system that all is teachers the school's get used to the test so we know I'm not talking here about teachers copying the test materials and giving them giving the answer so the students are changing answers of problems with an accord I'm just talking about normal everybody following the rules they still tend to slightly go up the problem is with smarter balanced they've been jumpy they've been flat they've been down up and that and instead of the kind of a steady track which is what you would normally expect so this means something is going wrong with the scoring and it's probably because there's sort of two different explanations of this so when I think is probably right is that they put new items in every year it's not the same test over here and they're supposed to calibrate the scores back to the previous test so that it's equivalent in difficulty okay but they may not have done that properly and that would explain the flatness and the jumpiness and non-regular pattern there's another possible explanation and that is in Common Core there's a lot of fuzzy things learn the conceptual understanding do all these roundabout methods and so forth and many of these things are not really measurable like the right answer is measurable and the teachers may have been emphasizing these aspects to the neglect of right answer and so that may be causing the thing to jump right now we're talking about a lot about Common Core I wanted to know how is it impacting how is this Common Core impacting the gifted students well I wasn't I'm not so much concerned about that although it would hold the bass for example in math as another thing that's going on with the gifted students so we spend a lot of time and energy helping the kids that are behind the ones with the most challenges I I think that's fine that we spend a lot of work on that but we shouldn't neglect the high achieving students the ones with huge potential to be great scientists and inventors are they getting neglected in the city well they are but there's another weird unexpected consequence of something that's going on in California and that is at the state level they're changing the start time of school for high for our high school students so you know instead of 8 or 7:30 in the morning it's later now you could say all right what's that what's the importance of that the problem is if you have kids in gifted programs if you have schools in International Baccalaureate these programs take a lot of time and if you have these late start times there's not enough time in the school day to help these advanced students these students these talented students and our state needs them our countries and the world needs them these are the you know it's champions of tomorrow and if we don't give them an opportunity and they're not going to fulfill well and what about the ethnic studies in the schools so there's been a fad nationally of ethnic studies or different pet nationalities in different states but California gotten on the bandwagon on this so last July I had a column in The Wall Street Journal called the title was California wants to teach her children that capitalism is racist and it was about the curriculum and proposed model curriculum for California and this cop this curriculum had been put together by some k12 teachers who were already doing ethnic studies some of the cities already had this and some higher education some college level professors who teach at least uh DS and it's full of jargon so sis hetero patriarchy in a pamphlet and a pantless films of color all sorts of just inside baseball language that's not really friendly to the average teach Hertz parents certainly have no idea what's being talked about so there was that and then there's another very troubling aspect is in its instead of a straightforward account of history of a situation of a different ethnic groups that you might think I my studies and instead of that you have victimhood so you're teaching it you're a student in one of these classes and let's say it's your you're a black let's say it's your ethnic group that's being talked about instead of the inventors the entrepreneurs the scientists that have your same ethnic background it's every bad thing that was ever done to Black's ok so instead of looking and of course some of this should be taught but it's a balanced account and so and let's say you're not a black but you're in that same class you're a Latino why am I having to list oh all this parade about that that group you know and why is it only identity politics its identity politics out you know just defined the Mac alright so so and well so it's pitting groups against each other particularly in the case of Jews and Arabs so it really neglected curriculum neglects anti-semitism and what is worse than mass murder of people and the Holocaust and mid twentieth century and is a really downplayed and you know and all the things that have been done to Jesus and you know I'm not saying that nothing bad has ever happened to Arabs worse that's not the case but it's really put together in a way that causes foster fricked yeah yeah so that that wasn't really good then the economics was just Marxist socialist communist economics I mean it's all about the capital is taking the surplus value this is a mark this technical term of the workers of the proletariat this is and it's the labor theory of value which you know it's been out of scientific economics since the 1880s I mean it's not scientific economics but they're teaching the kids as if this is a reality of economic science so it's the whole thing was bad and I mean the ridiculous point where they're claiming that the Arabian Nights is anti-arab so these are folktales passed down was coming up with these these these are these professors and they and these k-12 teachers that were in this committee that wrote this and you know I mean think of the Arabian Nights think of Aladdin and lamp and the genie think of magic carpets think of the evil Vizier switch are kind of Prime Minister's princesses all this stuff these are Arab stories how can Arab stories be anti Arab people have some kind of there's kind of strange in the head so so that's really that so they there was a big one that this was revealed in the middle of last summer I wrote this various other people wrote things including Jewish groups protesting what was me then to then the and and so normally in school reform things take forever and it's impossible to change anything very difficult don't be despairing on that's saying sub dives it feels like it's a big job this turned around very quickly so within a few weeks the State Department of Education withdrew this ethnic studies model curriculum the and they said they're gonna redo it so there's some sort of division within their ranks the State Board of Education which is appointed by the governor and confirmed by the state Senate they said they were gonna completely revamp it the State Superintendent of Education Tony Thurman said no now we'll just add something about what's happened to the Jews in history and we'll leave all the rest basically so and we really dodged a bullet here because the state legislature was about to make this compulsory for graduation to take nice force and when they saw the controversy a potato we so think about from the standpoint of a legislature I want to be stuck with this right I want to answer questions about this think about it from the point of view of governor Newsom he wants to be President the United States he doesn't want to be sucked into this so they all step back from this now let's look into charter schools okay we're talking about public schools yeah at this stage and charter schools are the only competition besides the private schools right for for average people like you know charter schools are the only competition to the public schools well there are somewhat inexpensive private schools too so if you go to religiously affiliated schools they might have a cut tuition but you're right so so charter schools are a kind of public school but the rulebook has been thrown out so there's a many volumes many many volumes there's a condensed version of the of the education goes like this day and there's many volumes okay so in the charter school that's all thrown out except for a few things you now have racial discrimination you have to have safety and health fire things like that okay so essentially though in terms of hiring and how run things the school has autonomy on this and so you know not every charter school works great but in general they are an improvement plus if they're not successful they can retire from the scene whereas a bad public school and low-performing public school it definitely doesn't go away it's not shut down so you can shut down or it can just wither away a charter school that's not working now they're there they're a very advantageous choice for parents you have to understand that something bad happened recently so there was a bill that passed the state legislature signed by the governor 15:05 a B 1505 and it said that so charter schools have to come into existence and they have to be authorized by somebody so it's a local school board it's the County School Board is the State Board of Education and also they have to renew their charter their charter lasts for a limited number of years so this law said if this charter school is duplicating the kind of program that the regular public schools are doing they can disallow the charter for that and that it's not really a good thing because think of you're a parent you don't want maybe you don't want some very innovative or art centric charter school or something hey just wanted regular public school but one that's working okay so a charter school could be one with a similar kind of offerings as a regular public school let's just do it better what's wrong with that I mean that's what many people would view that as a great thing and so that was a way that they could repeat so generally of course that these are the this local school boards don't like charter schools it's competition right it's competition and they are paid on the daily attendance in their schools so if the day if this kid is going to another school that school gets charter school gets the daily and then that's money so they they are excited that so this gets into the money thing so you know the other aspect of the law was that if a school district feels it's in financial difficulty it can say well these schools are a financial threat to us we disallow it on that basis that used to be against the law they could not use the fiscal impact the financial impact of charter school as a reason to not have done it not authorized them yeah so what is just seeing aspect of all this is a State Senator John Morlock here in California did an analysis quite recently and he said the fiscal impact financial impact on local school districts is minimal it's so small it's not noticeable the real problems they have in their own mismanagement their own floundering their high pension costs they're spending an administrative blow there whatever those are where they're spending the money not having efficient janitorial and gardening services there's many things that school districts don't do well so anyway so that's that's kind of the story on charter schools now with all that they discussed today if there is one or two advice that you could give parents what would you what would you what would you tell them or what advice you could give us right well I would say the thing is if you have a complaint you should make a complaint through channels but you you you might be told as I personally was told and as many other people I don't we're told oh you're the only person me but someplace right it's sort of a standard bureaucratic response don't believe that talk to your friends in this among the parents see if other people have this and then get working honest generally the PTAs are not the vehicle for this the PTAs are too you tied into a school establishment and the teachers union I'm not saying don't bring this the attention of people and a PTA meeting or something I'm just saying organize independently of the PTA to rectify this and if it's really serious we have a law in California called the parent revolution law and it says you can you the parents can get organized and change a school into a charter school and that's been done and the schools improved so it's a worthwhile thing bill thank you that was great thank you all right my pleasure it was a delightful thing to do this [Music]