EdFix Episode 26: What is the Matter with America's Schools?

Transcript

ROBERT HAUSER:
These schools are operated in a way in which everything is done right.

MICHAEL J. FEUER:
Welcome to EdFix, your source for insights about the promise and practice of education. I'm Michael Feuer, your host, I'm the Dean of the Graduate School of Education and Human Development at GW. And it's a very special pleasure for me today to introduce Dr. Robert Hauser. Bob Hauser is currently the executive officer of the American Philosophical Society. Bob was for many years and continues to be involved in the National Academy of Sciences, engineering, and medicine, where he is an elected member, but also had the pleasure of serving as the executive director of the division of behavioral and social sciences and education. And in his spare time has continued to be a professor of sociology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where among other things, he is known for his stunningly important work with the Wisconsin Longitudinal Study, which has essentially followed the lives of more than 10,000 high school graduates, and is a source of information all about bio-social conditions, health, retirement, social mobility, and the like. Bob, welcome to EdFix.

ROBERT HAUSER:
Thank you. That introduction is all too kind, Michael.

MICHAEL J. FEUER:
Let's get into this a little bit. First of all, the American Philosophical Society - what's a nice guy like you doing hanging around with philosophers after all?

ROBERT HAUSER:
Well, the American Philosophical Society has precious little to do with philosophy as we understand it. You might think of it as... The closest thing we have to it nowadays is, think about PhD doctor philosophy, which really covers any possible field. And that's what Ben Franklin had in mind when he founded the society in 1743. He was interested in everything, in promoting useful knowledge about every conceivable line of human endeavor. The society was founded by Franklin on the model of the Royal Society in England, and Franklin thought that colonial America had reached a stage of development where it too should have its own version of the Royal Society though without the Royal trappings.

MICHAEL J. FEUER:
Is it fair to say that it set America on a course of a very special set of relationship between the scientific community writ large and the government and the people?

ROBERT HAUSER:
Right. One could argue that in some sense, the society was the 18th century equivalent of the National Academy of Sciences. Recall that during the late 18th century, Philadelphia was the capital of the nation. And actually the person who really created the relationship between the society and the nation - federal government - was Thomas Jefferson. Jefferson was president of the American Philosophical Society during most of the period when he was either vice president or president of the United States. And he initiated a number of activities in collaboration with the federal government when he was in those dual roles. For example, the biggest one was the Lewis and Clark expedition, which he commissioned while he was president of the United States. And in fact, Lewis and Clark were sent to Philadelphia to be equipped by among others, the physician of Benjamin Rush, and to obtain other kinds of instruction and goods. And now the library of the society holds the original copies of the journals of Lewis and Clark, among many other wonderful items.

MICHAEL J. FEUER:
To what extent, from your experience, is the American version of these sometimes fraught but otherwise very mutually reinforcing relations between science and government, first of all, special on the world scene? And then I'm going to ask you to reflect on whether what we've learned about the American ideal of respect for science is today in a somewhat fragile condition?

ROBERT HAUSER:
That's a tough set of questions. The relationship with between the society and government just died off after Jefferson's reign, but the society went on to excel in other ways. But the relationship between science and government, I think you know, has always been fraught. The National Academy of Sciences was created during the civil war at a time when, had the south been represented in the Congress, it probably would not have been created. And in fact, one of the lucky accidents of the creation of the National Academy of Sciences was that it received no federal appropriation. Had the NAS been dependent on the Congress for its continued existence, it probably would've been wiped out many, many decades ago because there is this tension between the interests of politicians and politics and the ideas and ideals and findings of the scientific community.

MICHAEL J. FEUER:
I want to pivot to your work on, let's just say, social demography. For some people listening to this, they may not be familiar with the phrase "social demographer," but you are one, Bob. And I would love to kind of entice our listeners to learn more about that by hearing you say some things about what we learn from the rigorous study inquiry into social mobility, stratification, equality and inequality. I know this is asking you to essentially stand on one leg and summarize your life's work in a minute, but give it a shot.

ROBERT HAUSER:
Well, let me talk about social mobility because that's what I've worked on most. And there has been a kind of a cycle of belief in this country that social mobility has ended, or social mobility has declined, that opportunity no longer exists in our society and so forth. And that certainly has been reinforced of late by the condition of minorities, people of color in this country. And what scientific inquiry into the conditions and trends of social mobility across generations and also within working life has shown is that, that's simply is not the case. To be sure, there are correlations, links, causal relationships, if you like, between people's places of origin and where they end up, but they are by no means determining and never have been. And that's really the major lesson of the whole line of working in which I have been engaged or was engaged in the course of my career.

ROBERT HAUSER:
Now, I will say something in modification of that, which is that I think the latest evidence shows that there is somewhat less social mobility. That is to say there are somewhat stronger links between social positions across generations than I had thought and purported to find in the course of my own investigations. But that still does not negate the general point that there has been and continues to be a great deal of social mobility in the United States. What has changed is that the opportunities towards the top have not expanded as they once did, say in the decades immediately following World War II ,so that the chances of a son or daughter to exceed the social and economic positions of their parents are not as great as they once were. But still the connections, the correlation between positions across generations, remains rather loose.

MICHAEL J. FEUER:
I want to turn now to where we are in terms of education, public education, and the big debates about the condition of American schooling and the condition of American students who are participating in our somewhat chaotic form of education. Your most recent paper makes I think a very significant argument that, on average, compared to other countries, we're doing pretty well. Which by the way, I think will also come as a surprise to people who read only the headlines about how national security, the future of the middle class, our economic competitiveness is all going to, coin of phrase, to hell in the end basket of poor education. But your paper makes an equally or even more significant argument that the average isn't as important as the variance.

ROBERT HAUSER:
Okay. Let me start with two points. The first is that, while reports from the National Academy of Sciences and federal agencies often kind of disappear shortly after they've been issued, that has not been the case with a report that was issued in 1983, which claimed that the American public educational system was absolutely a mess. And that has kind of been sustained in public opinion for close to 40 years. "A Nation at Risk" was the name of that report. It turns out to have been wrong. Its findings were based largely on the secular in scores on the Scholastic Aptitude Test. And it turned out that the major reason that those scores were declining was because low scoring groups were increasingly inclined, in an era of increasing opportunity, to take the test. And if you disaggregated the test results by socioeconomic status, or by race ethnicity, it turned out that during this period, scores were increasing within each of the subgroups.

ROBERT HAUSER:
So there was a kind of a fallacy of composition that was bought in that report that failed to notice that the changing makeup of test takers was the reason for the test score decline, and that it actually was a period of improvement in test scores, to the extent that they add any value at all. So that's the first point. The second point is that, in recent years, there have been continuing complaints about the quality of education. I was particularly peeved by some of the public statements of our former Secretary of Education, Betsy DeVos. And the notion was that the United States was mediocre. Well, I don't know what you mean by mediocre. On these international test comparisons, we would usually end up in the top third of the ranks and various areas of academic achievement, but we were not at the top.

ROBERT HAUSER:
And then on the other hand, whenever major test large scale assessment results came out, people would complain about the test score gap, about the fact that Blacks and Hispanics scored less well than non-Hispanic, whites and Asians. And there was a disconnect between those two sets of findings because nobody ever really looked at the international comparisons taking into account these different population groups within the United States. And fortunately, in sort of the back of the book so to speak, in some fairly obscure Education Department websites, it was possible to look separately at the performance of minority and majority groups, high scoring, and low scoring groups on these international comparisons. And the major international comparisons by the way, are PISA, the Program for International Scholastic Assessment. And TIMSS, The International Mathematics and Science Studies, which are conducted periodically in any number of nations.

ROBERT HAUSER:
So it turns out if you look, say at non-Hispanic whites and Asians, they score rather highly, pretty much at the same level as places like Finland and the Southeast Asian city states whose high achievement is lauded by everybody. So we are, or at least certain parts of our population, are world class, or close to it. The problem, and the reason why the U.S. lags in those international comparisons, is because of the test score gap. So if we want to look good in these international comparisons - and I'll tell you that I'm not really sure exactly how important that is to the future of American society - but if we want to look good in those international comparisons, then we should address the test score gap. It's that simple. So then the next question is, could we do it? That's important because if you don't ... Well, first of all, there's a kind of an intermediate question, which is, does socio-economic status account for these test score differentials?

ROBERT HAUSER:
To what extent does it explain the test score gap? And it turns out that you can explain about half the test score gap between Hispanics and non-Hispanic whites by their different socio-economic origins. So that's kind of good news. But in the case of Blacks versus non-Hispanic whites, you can explain only about 30% of the difference. So there is still a real differential in test scores that has not been addressed and cannot be explained by kind of obvious social conditions. So then the question becomes, well, let's see if there are some examples of cases where those differentials, if they don't disappear, are hugely ameliorated by the way in which schools operate? And so I started looking for a place where there was a reasonably large scale example of sustained improvement in the educational performance and the test scores of Blacks and Hispanics relative to whites and Asians.

ROBERT HAUSER:
And it turns out that there is such an example. It's a set of schools run by something called the Department of Defense Education Agency, which provides K to 12 schooling for the children of parents in the military, not only in the United States, but across the globe. And what's nice about this particular set of schools is that they are actually recognized as a separate reporting entity in the National Assessment of Educational Progress, the large scale assessment scheme that has existed in this country on a sample basis since around 1970. So one can look at trends and differentials, comparing the students in these schools at multiple grade levels across time with those in other public schools or in all schools, K12 in the United States. And it turns out that the test score differentials are reduced by something on the order of half by those schools.

ROBERT HAUSER:
And that's remarkable! If you look at evaluations of social programs, people practically hold parades for reductions and differentials that are much smaller than that. So this is an absolutely huge, impressive success. And then one has to ask, how do they do it? What do they do? And the answer is, I think, there is no magic bullet. There is no one thing. These schools are operated in a way in which everything is done right, or nearly everything is done right. First of all, the military is a command and control system. Parents are not allowed to ignore the educational problems of their children. They can be brought in on order to address those problems. And secondly, there is a set of wraparound services, social services, mental health services, health services, everything is available through the schools that a student might need.

ROBERT HAUSER:
And then the schools actually are managed very effectively. They are unionized, but the relationship between management and teachers is really good. And then finally, students are tested, with a possible exception of the National Assessment of Educational Progress, only for diagnostic purposes. Tests are much less extensively used in those Department of Defense schools than in a public education general. And they're great success. So then the question is, is there a way of bringing the characteristics of that school's system into widespread use? There is one model for that that I pointed out in my paper, and I don't know that it will work because it's not clear that it has been fully established anywhere, but that is an idea called community schools, in which wraparound services, extensive educational diagnostics and assistance and so forth, and parental involvement become the norm.

ROBERT HAUSER:
It's not clear that can be done at the scale of our public educational system, but it might be worth a serious try. I'll say more about the effectiveness of these schools, which is that everybody does well. Not only are the differentials smaller, but everybody does better than in public schools systems. And so you really get the impression that this kind of organization works. And I will say that there are some disadvantages to the situation of the students in the Department of Defense Education Agency schools as well, because military personnel are moved around very rapidly. So the children who experience education in these schools may move six to nine times during the period that they are in K12 education. It's remarkable. And yet the uniformity of this system basically prevents that from becoming a serious problem for their educational achievement.

MICHAEL J. FEUER:
I'm pivoting here to another thing that I know you have worked on over the years, which is, and you alluded to it in what you were telling us about this paper, and that is, on the value of the test data that we rely on for any of these comparisons. What's your sense of where we are in the world of testing?

ROBERT HAUSER:
Well, I think it's unfortunate that we rely so heavily on test scores as indicators of the quality of our educational systems. And I hope that my work in this paper does not add more steam to the admiration of test scores as a be all and end all. I can think of other indicators of educational accomplishment that are much, I think, much more important than test scores. People don't pay enough attention to grades in school, perhaps because they're not standardized in the way that test performance can be standardized, but they're extremely important. One of the things that we learned from the Wisconsin Longitudinal Study for example, was in following the effects of high school test scores and high school grades on mortality of these 1957 high school graduates up to the age of 70. And it turned out that the effect of high school grades, rank in high school class was what we measured, was far larger than that of test scores.

ROBERT HAUSER:
And so then we had to ask why on earth would that be? And that's because those high school ranks really represented a kind of accumulative measure of behavior over a period of time, where there were certain kinds of normative demands. Doing the right thing, in the right way, repeatedly, regardless of other circumstances. And kind of behavior contributed to longevity. Looking both ways when you cross the street, so to speak. Not driving your pickup truck into a tree. Those kinds of things really matter. And they are well represented by grades. So that in some way is a terribly important and somewhat neglected measure. And the other one that I really care about, and that's loomed large in my own research, has been just how far do you go in school? What are your educational credentials? Did you graduate from high school?

ROBERT HAUSER:
Did you attend college? Did you graduate from college? Did you go to graduate school or professional school? Those kinds of accomplishments represent much more than test scores. They represent perseverance. They represent determination. They represent ambition and they pay off in the job market and in civic life and in all sorts of ways across the life course. And really one should look at that kind of measure with great care. Right now, I think one of the big concerns is the fact that men don't seem to be attending college at the same rates that they used to, that I think is a terribly serious concern, a real serious social problem.

MICHAEL J. FEUER:
I think it would be nice to hear a little bit about where you came from and what got you into this line of work.

ROBERT HAUSER:
I think that one of the observations that I would make about myself and practically everybody, is that what you work on, what you believe, what you claim to find, always has elements of biography in it. My grandparents immigrated to the United States early in the last century. They were poor Jews from Poland, I won't say Polish Jews because there is no such thing. And they invested heavily in education. For example, my dad and his siblings, all ended up with college educations. My dad didn't quite finish a PhD, but his big brother did, Phil Hauser. And he was quite a prominent statistician, sociologist and demographer and fellow member of the American Philosophical Society. So my family has always had a very, very strong belief in the value of education.

ROBERT HAUSER:
Now, how did I get into this? My story about this, which is not all together fanciful, is that I was a bit of a rotten kid and a rebel and all of those things. And my mother was terribly afraid that I would drop out. In fact, I did in some sense, legally drop out of high school because I skipped my senior year and my parents got rid of me by sending me to the University of Chicago without a high school diploma. Mom was just terrified that I was going to drop out. So I always stayed in school and that's how I became an academic. It was such a comfortable environment that I never wanted to leave it.

MICHAEL J. FEUER:
This has been yet another truly wonderful opportunity. Bob, I want to thank you for being with me and being with us today. You know it's called the promise and practice of education. And I think what you've heard from Bob Hauser today is a lot about the importance of the continuing promise and the fragility and the obstacles to the improvement of practice. But that's what keeps us in this business. And as long as we have dedicated folks, both in terms of bringing good research to bear on these problems and a good set of passions about their importance. And let's not forget that with every one of Bob's technical advantages, comes a huge heart in the spirit of trying to make the world a better place.

ROBERT HAUSER:
Well, thank you. I hope that that's true. I've really enjoyed this conversation.

MICHAEL J. FEUER:
If you enjoyed this episode, tune into other of our EdFix episodes, where you can get on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, iHeartRadio, Player FM, or wherever you choose to listen to your podcast. And we do have a website, edfixpodcast.com. And again, a huge thank you to Bob Hauser, with best wishes to stay healthy and continue in your upward mobility towards solving our country's biggest problems.

ROBERT HAUSER:
Thanks much to you, Michael. I've enjoyed this a lot.

EdFix: A Podcast About the Promise and Practice of Education

Hosted by Michael Feuer, Dean of GW's Graduate School of Education and Human Development (GSEHD), EdFix highlights the effective strategies and provocative ideas of researchers, practitioners and policymakers on how to improve our education system. Listen in as Dean Feuer connects their worlds to take on some of education's most complex issues.

From preschool to postsecondary, get your fix with EdFix!

Subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, iHeartRADIO, Google Podcasts, YouTube, or wherever you listen to podcasts.