EdFix Episode 42: Who Should Run America’s Schools? The Federal-State Tug of War

Transcript

MICHAEL J. FEUER:
This is EdFix, your source for insights about the promise and practice of the ever-changing world of education as we have known it. It's a pleasure to be your host. Again, I'm Michael Feuer, I'm the Dean of the Graduate School of Education and Human Development at George Washington University. I have a great pleasure to introduce two very special guests today, Denise Forte and Andy Rotherham.

First of all, thank you both in advance and welcome to EdFix. Denise Forte is the president and CEO of the Education Trust, one of our most hallowed national nonprofits committed to policies and practices, primarily oriented to dismantle racial and economic barriers in the American education system. Denise and EdTrust have been fierce advocates for evidence-informed strategies and in particular with emphasis on students of color and low-income backgrounds. Denise is well-known in the education policy world, a distinguished leader with a very long track record going back to the Century Foundation, to an organization called Leadership for Educational Equity. Very important time on Capitol Hill, and time in the executive branch working in the Obama Administration Department of Education, about which we will spend some time talking.

Welcome, Denise. It's a pleasure to have you on EdFix.

DENISE FORTE:
Glad to be here.

MICHAEL J. FEUER:
Andy Rotherham is the co-founder and senior partner at Bellwether. Again, a very, very distinguished and highly regarded think tank/advocacy organization, again, oriented toward the transformation of education to ensure that systemically marginalized young people have a chance to achieve the outcomes that we all care about and that have been part of our ongoing agenda in the long history of American education.

Andy is also well-known as a clear voice at the, shall we say, intersection of those famous Democratic and Republican sides of our partisan political environment. He has founded other education organizations. Has served in the White House as a special assistant to the president during the Clinton administration. Has been a member of the Virginia Board of Education, originally appointed by then Governor Mark Warner, and more recently, by Governor Glenn Youngkin. Andy writes a very familiar blog and newsletter called Eduwonk, that's E-D-U-W-O-N-K. And somehow has found time to publish over 450 articles, book chapters, papers, op-eds, and some books.

Welcome Andy and Denise, both, for joining me. It's really a pleasure to have you on EdFix. Let me get right into it. I alluded earlier to the ever-changing world of education. Let me just say that we are recording this episode of EdFix, and by the time it is published and posted, things may have changed again. So we will encourage our listeners to acknowledge our efforts to think ahead and be flexible about what we are thinking about the long term, but anybody who's been trying to make predictions about the world of education lately knows that it requires more than the usual seat belts to keep ourselves on this roller coaster.

Let me start by just noting that the Trump administration had attempted to lay off, pretty much, the overwhelming majority of employees at the Department of Education as part of a move which was touted by the secretary as essentially being the first step toward restoring American greatness in education.
Let me start, Denise, you were on the Hill, you were in a previous administration. Help our listeners understand whether this is relatively a new idea to dismantle the department, if not, what's different about what's been happening lately?

DENISE FORTE:
It's definitely not a new idea. It's been around for a number, I don't know how long, but it's usually our friends on the Republican side who are interested, in what they call, returning education to the states. I think what is different this time is the swiftness in which a lot of these actions are happening and the lack of targeting. I think we could all agree that there are some places that need reform, significant reform, and the way to go about that is to be thoughtful about it, look at the programs, look at their performance, whether they are actually helping to increase student performance and well-being. And just a wholesale wiping out of certain departments doesn't feel strategic at all, honestly.

And we are greatly concerned at EdTrust about what's next, particularly when you think of the Office of Civil Rights, which has been the long-time protector of students' rights, whether they were children with disabilities or children of color. And really concerned that there may be some changes there that will not be student-centered, not be about protecting students' rights.

MICHAEL J. FEUER:
Thanks, Denise. That's already full of very important insights.

Let me ask you, Andy, from your experience this idea of, shall we say, devolving responsibilities that have been in the Federal Department of Education to the states, you are active so energetically, at both the federal and state level, what's the plus-minus on this idea of shifting responsibility back to states?

ANDY ROTHERHAM:
Yeah, so that's a great question, Michael, and thank you so much for having me. I mean, Denise said this is happening swiftly. Swiftly, I think she may have misspelled sloppily. There's some merit to some of the ideas here. So for rearranging some of these offices, thinking about where functions could be better aligned with outcomes for kids, but you have to do it deliberately. I mean, their argument is if you don't do this fast and aggressively, it won't happen. That's their case. I disagree with that. I think this isn't, government is by design, not the private sector, and so you want to be deliberate.

One of those things that there is some merit in is do we want to empower states more to try to innovate, try to do different things. It's hard to miss if you look at the NAEP scores, the National Assessment of Education Progress, it's hard to miss two big takeaways. One, scores started declining all throughout the last decade, really in the ESSA era, post when we took the federal pressure off on a accountability. And then they really went off a cliff in the pandemic. So that's the first takeaway.

The second one is, everyone hasn't been hit the same. Some states have proven to be more resilient against that. Some states have recovered faster, and that owes, in many cases, to state leadership of different kinds. And we're particularly seeing that around things like science of reading, and so forth. So how would you want to empower some of these states that are doing interesting things, and so forth? That's a legitimate question.

It raises two really big issues to parse. One is if you're not careful about how you do this, we're just going to double down on the variance we already see. And kids, the quality of the education they get will be even more tethered to their zip code, how much money their parents have. And then second, just thinking about what is the capacity of states to do this and what do they need? I mean, a dirty secret is a lot of people working in these state agencies are actually being paid for by federal dollars. We can argue it's too compliance focused, they're not necessarily doing the right things and all that, but there's an interrelation here.

And so, while I think quietly there's a lot of bipartisan energy, there's a lot of Democratic state chiefs who would be happy to take a trade where they get more flexibility over the dollars, and so forth. There's also just, we've got to be thinking in a plan full way. What does that mean in terms of strategic capacity? What are we going to do with that? And how is that money going to go out? And it's more complicated than simply saying, "Hey, we're going to give you a block grant."

These programs, as Denise sort of talked about, they play different roles. I mean, the purpose of Title I is pretty different than the purpose of special ed, for instance. And so you've got to do this thoughtfully. If you want to figure out, and then we haven't talked about yet, I'm sure we will, what does the accountability piece look like? So what does it look like in terms of measurement? What does it look like in terms of accountability for outcomes? I mean, these are all really complicated questions, it takes more deliberate focus and we haven't yet seen that.

The last thing I'll just say, Denise mentioned that this has been an ongoing thing. I mean, the first Secretary of Education for Ronald Reagan, who was the second Secretary of Education in the history of the agency, was brought in, Reagan said, "I'm bringing you into dismantle this agency." As he became more familiar with it, he actually became an advocate for it. He wrote a fantastic book about it. I'm sure you guys are both familiar with it, called The Thirteenth Man, and I'm not sure we won't see that over time. I mean, you're already seeing, I think quietly they're realizing that they've made a mess out of a few things like what they've done at the statistics agency and they're trying to figure out how to potentially fix that. So I'm quite concerned about a lot of what is happening when I'm not yet in the all-is-lost camp.

MICHAEL J. FEUER:
Very helpful. Look, you've mentioned a lot of things there. I just want to ask you both, that as we continue this conversation we keep in mind that we live in, what I call, an A.R.E., an acronym rich environment. And so, could you just elaborate, you mentioned ESSA, just for some of our listeners who aren't necessarily reading Eduwonk on a regular basis, what does ESSA stand for?

ANDY ROTHERHAM:
Sure. And you can go to Substack, and subscribe to it @Eduwonk at Substack and get it in your email box if you are missing that delectable treat.

So in 1989, the first President Bush, H.W. Bush, and Bill Clinton, who was chair of the NGA, brought the governors together with the President in Charlottesville and really sort of set the country on the path to standards-based reform. And the idea was we needed to have standards, accountability, resources, and obviously, states play a role in that. States have always had the constitutional authority for education, but that there was things the federal government could do. That was very controversial. I mean, the first President Bush failed in an effort to sort have national standards. The consensus that was put in place in 1994 under Clinton was we would have sort of a national accountability framework, but the states would set their own standards.

There was some real upsides to that, there was also some real shortcomings. And by the late '90s, you had this sort of motley coalition of moderate Republicans, new Democrats, and the civil rights groups, pushing to increase the accountability, create more flexibility, and so forth, that ultimately led to what's became the No Child Left Behind Act under the second Bush President, George W. Bush.

And that law, because of changes in our politics that we're still feeling the effects of, it was never reauthorized. So it was passed in 2001, it was supposed to be reauthorized in five years. It never got reauthorized. And so secretaries, Margaret Spellings, tried to issue some waivers. Arne Duncan tried to do even more. And it was pretty shopworn by the time it got overhauled in 2015, and essentially, everybody was kind of tired and people just threw in the towel on accountability. And so, there was much less accountability.

And the tragedy there, I would argue, is contrary to this myth that nothing works, and nothing gets better, and we've done nothing in 30 years, you actually saw steady progress for the lowest achieving kids, for kids furthest from opportunity, Black students, Hispanic students. You saw low-income students, you saw steady progress, but when the pressure on accountability was taken away, when Obama signed that law, we started to see a steady decline, that again, accelerated during the pandemic.

So that ESSA law, it still has some accountability, Senator Chris Murphy fought to get some accountability in there, but I think it's like it's pretty weak soup. Is it better than nothing? Yes, certainly, but it's not the kind of pressure that was there. And I mean, sometimes I think we make this work, Michael, more complicated than it is. It turns out, if you tell states, "As a civil rights matter, you need to focus on the kids who are furthest from opportunity and are the least well-served, and we're going to hold you accountable for that." Lo and behold, they focus on those kids and you get results.

And that's not just in education. You look across a range of civil rights issues, disabilities, gay rights, pick an issue and it turns out when you actually tell people, "Here's what the law is and here's what you're expected to live up to." They do, and I think one of the tragedies of the last 10, 15 years is just sort of the bipartisan consensus to throw in the towel on that, and I think it's had really terrible consequences for kids.

MICHAEL J. FEUER:
So you didn't unpack what ESSA stands for?

ANDY ROTHERHAM:
Oh, sorry. Every Student Succeeds Acts, and I'll leave it to Denise to argue why it's great.

MICHAEL J. FEUER:
Good. Okay, so that's exactly the right pivot, and I want to get to Denise, because I know that both, personally in your career and now as the leader of the trust, accountability is, I would say, maybe at the top of the list of the themes that motivate the work that you've been doing. And in particular, with respect to what Andy was mentioning, the enforcement of both values and laws pertaining to civil rights, and the rights of disadvantaged and disabled, and other marginalized populations in our great big mosaic of the American demography.

Say a little bit more about where you think we've been, where we need to be, in terms of this fundamental concept of accountability.

DENISE FORTE:
I love that question, and I love looking back at it, as well. I mean, Andy's right. Before No Child Left Behind, states very readily chose not to see kids. And by that what I mean is, they were able to look at their best and brightest and say, "See how well we're doing in school." But not really taking a look at those furthest from opportunity, our homeless children, our Black and Latino children, our low-income children. There were lots of stories out there about some school leaders, at the school level, telling certain kids to stay home on the day of test.

And one of the things that we've firmly believed at EdTrust is data is what you measure what matters. Data is so important when it comes to education. It tells us, when you do it right, when you make it publicly reportable, how well our students are doing. How well teachers are doing. How well the school itself is doing. The state. So data is really important.

And the price that comes with that, honestly, is it does hold more people accountable, right? And ultimately, the federal government, Congress and President Bush at the time, felt that was the right thing to do. My then boss, George Miller, was one of the Big Four at that time, and the Big Four were Congressman George Miller from California, Congressman John Boehner from Ohio, Senator Ted Kennedy, our beloved Senator Kennedy from Massachusetts, and Senator Greg from New Hampshire. And that's a wide range of political views there. And they made the right decision. Accountability with resources, with the opportunity to improve, which is what the No Child Left Behind hoped to offer. Was really important.

And I agree with Andy, as well. We saw a real slide moving into the late 2000s around performance. And some of that due to various waivers, folks didn't like to be held to such a high rate of accountability. And the tests were having problems, they weren't as rich as they should be. People claim there was lots of teaching to the test and folks didn't like that.

And on the other side, Congress really failed to provide the necessary resources to states to make it about school improvement. To drive dollars into education research, so that schools knew what to do. They drove some dollars into data systems, which is really important. But yet, states still struggle with publicly reporting that data, it is really hard to get some data from some states on how their students are performing.

So I think, and Andy laid it out really well, the history there, we remain very concerned, knowing the history, that some states just won't do the job, and they won't do the job. They've had a lot of flexibility since 2015 with their accountability systems. They already have a block grant that they can use, but many states have not chosen to be innovative, and they were given the opportunity.

So I'm a little suspect that we'll get more than what we've already seen. We will see, like we saw this year with NAEP, four or five states that did better than what folks thought they were going to do. But that's been the truth for a couple of NAEPs, honestly, in terms of the number of states who are showing promise. We're never getting the majority of states. And if folks are okay with saying, "Okay, you other states do what you will, and who cares what happens to these students?" That's a significant problem for this country.

ANDY ROTHERHAM:
Yeah, Michael, the watchword here is, I just want to underscore what Denise said, because it's so important, the watchword here is variance, and this debate tends to play out in a sort of counterproductive way, where you'll have people highlight the states that that are doing great things, and there certainly are states that are really doing fantastic things. You'll have other people point out the laggards, and in fact, there's some of everything. And traditionally, the federal role has just tried to augur against that to some extent, particularly again, for kids who have historically been underserved. And if you walk away from that, you're essentially saying, "We are just comfortable with a high degree of variance." That's not illegal. That's certainly in a federalist system like ours, you can make that case. But I think what's important is that everybody knows what they're signing up for if we do that and that degree of unevenness, and again, people can argue about whether that's inevitable, or an acceptable byproduct, but I feel like we tend to obscure just that hard discussion about that is what we are signing up for.

MICHAEL J. FEUER:
Well, I'm so glad that you've steered me right into an issue that I wanted to get some of your wit and wisdom about here. Part of this argument about the department, of course, ties to the two and a half centuries of debate about the pluribus and the unum in American political culture. And to what extent do we really want to believe in a national ethos of commitment to education for all, just to coin a phrase? Or to what extent would we be okay continuing to allow the kind of variance, that you've both now surfaced again in this conversation?

I remember there was a wonderful image evoked by a former member of the Harvard Education faculty who passed away sadly, just five or six years ago, Dick Elmore. He was once giving a talk and he said, "If you happen to be flying across the United States, and God forbid you fall out of the plane, you have a pretty good chance of landing in one of the best schools in the world. You also have a pretty good chance of landing in one of the worst schools in the world, and sometimes they're only a mile or two apart." And it was a way of capturing this fundamental predicament of the variance, and essentially, the inequalities that our education, and for that matter, broader society have been facing.

So here you have the ideal of a federal agency committed, at least in part, to correcting some of that variance. Do we have good evidence that since its most recent reincarnation back in 1979, 1980, that the department, as a federal agency, has actually been able to correct at least some of that variance problem that we have faced?

On the other hand, what do you tell people who say, "None of our business. If there's variance, that's because we believe in states' rights." And for me, the footnote there is, if states' rights produce national wrongs, too bad. Where do you come out on this?

DENISE FORTE:
I really like the way you frame that, and I think your example is right on, in terms of falling out a plane you could hit good or bad, right? That's beautiful.

Look, I think we do have some evidence. Is it across the board? No, but I do think we have some. I think the Office of Civil Rights, for example, they have been able to ensure that some school districts are doing right by all kids. And they have a backlog of cases, districts, that have not done the right thing by kids, right? So losing that, I think, is particularly significant.

I think we can also say the additional resources from Title I, IDEA, which supports students with disabilities. These students with disabilities, before 1975, would not have had access, general access to the classroom. The ability to get inside the school building, the ability to have some supports while they're there that can help them learn. All of these things have mattered.

I certainly wish if we had put more dollars into R&D at the federal level, significant dollars, we would have even more evidence. But that is one place that, unfortunately, folks have not, folks in power, decision makers, policy makers, on Capitol Hill, have not seen the value in, which is really a shame. Really a shame.

MICHAEL J. FEUER:
Andy, what's your advice to people who are trying to navigate this tension between, what I call what's in our state in the great seal of the United States, the tension between the pluribus and the unum? What do you advise people in terms of navigating that one?

ANDY ROTHERHAM:
Yeah, I think we're all in this together. I mean, I respect states and the role of states, as you said when you introduced me, I'm a two-time state board member. I believe in it so strongly I've been honored to serve on a state Board of Education for governors of two different parties. I think states are extremely important, and it's where a lot of the action is.

That said, again, we're all in this together. I do think the unum matters, and I would say, it's not that hard to make a case for the Department of Education. Unfortunately, I will say it's proven really hard for the Democrats, because some of the things they've decided to do. But look, what do you want to talk about? Charter schools? Find me the most strident conservative, and they will still acknowledge that the federal role in charter schools, starting with Bill Clinton, and then things that continued to the Bush administration, things that Barack Obama did, contributed to the growth of charter schools in this country.

Goals 2000, which was basically a block grant, was really important for states to develop their standards. And quietly, you'd find governors of both parties saying, "Yeah, we did that."

Denise mentioned IDEA. I mean, the condition and the way that special ed kids were treated prior to 1975, and then even prior to the founding of the department, and so forth, are there problems with IDEA? Oh, my god, they're legion. It's a very complicated law. But we are just so much better off than we were, and I think you can go on and on.

And I mean, are there problems? Yeah. And this is where I think the Democrats should have been much more on the front foot talking about reform. They've controlled the agency for 12 of the last 16 years, and they should have been talking about how do we rebuild a strong deep bench of career people there? The importance of public service. How do we reform this agency?

I mean look, last when they did these cuts, they cut the regional offices, and I had both Republicans and Democrats were telling me, "I didn't even know they had regional offices." I mean, so was there room for reform? Yeah, absolutely, but I don't think Democrats either led on that, or made that case. And you knew that there was a part of the Republican Party that wanted to come in and slash and burn this, which to me and my way of thinking about politics, makes the urgency to be a reformer and get in front of that all the more important when you know that is out there lying in wait.

So here's the thing, Michael. Donald Trump, he says a lot of things every day, a lot of which in my view are bananas, but not everything he says is bananas. And I think there's stuff you want to take yes for an answer on. He wants to bring chip manufacturing back to this country as a national security issue. Yes, for an answer on that. But who's going to do that? How are we going to train the workers to do that without strong national leadership? He wants to increase shipbuilding in this country. There's a number of policy reasons why that is declined. Shipbuilding, that's a pretty core national security issue, and if you know anything about history, our ability to build ships has proven important to times of international crisis. Again, who's going to build those ships? Who's going to do that kind of work?

You can think of a number of issues where it's not that the federal government is going to come in and do this, or Washington knows best, but how is this going to happen in the coherent way across the country without strong national leadership? And I think that's the case that we need to be making. And our adversaries, the Chinese are not abolishing their education roles, they're augmenting it. You're seeing the same thing in countries we're going to be competing against, whether it's India, Nigeria, people are trying to think, "What do we do to improve our human capital?"

And so, it's very strange in this sort of America First moment that we would be pulling back from that, rather than saying, "Okay, has everything worked? No. Is there a need for fairly substantial reform? In some cases, yes, of course." But what does that national leadership and that national footprint look like? And I think that both parties are sort of lacking in a compelling vision on that right now.

MICHAEL J. FEUER:
I want to go back, Denise, to your comments about the accountability problems, because once again, I think we've broken the record here, and it took all of 20 minutes before we got to the question of standardized tests. Usually that comes up even quicker. I want to thank you both for letting us have a few minutes of not worrying about that. But on the other hand, you did make reference to something very significant in that debate about accountability that we've been experiencing. Since the early days of the Elementary and Secondary Act, since the early days of NAEP, since the more current, more recent days of No Child Left Behind, and the ESSA, and all the rest. And that has to do with, on balance, knowing what we do about the imperfections of our assessment technology. Are we, or are we not, better off with a system that emphasizes the aspiration, at least the aspiration, to some kind of objective accounting for how we are doing? Help me with that one.

DENISE FORTE:
Ooh, that's a rich question there, Mike. I honestly think that we have to demand that all of our kids meet a certain high standard. They have to be taught that high standard. They have to have curriculum and the resources that will allow them to achieve that high standard, because it is part of the culture. And in fact, sometimes it's part of human nature, to leave some folks behind.

And I think what we've learned from a lot of our research, and it should be a matter of fact, but we have to state it over and over again, that all children have aspirations to achieve, and contribute, and be a part of a robust economy, and raise families if they want to. All children have those aspirations, but we are not acknowledging them in many instances. And it's that mindset, or culture, that allows that to happen.

MICHAEL J. FEUER:
When you think of No Child Left Behind, and I know the EdTrust was, I'm not sure whether you were already involved with the EdTrust, but they actually advocated in favor of the accountability and testing...

DENISE FORTE:
Absolutely, and we still do.

MICHAEL J. FEUER:
Because it was giving data.

DENISE FORTE:
Right?

ANDY ROTHERHAM:
Most of the civil rights community did. I mean, this was like, as I said earlier, in the late '90s that you had this coalition of this motley crew of center right civil rights-oriented Republicans, new Democrats, and the civil rights groups, all arm-in-arm arguing for this. And the fight was against the left-wing of the Democratic Party and the right-wing of the Republican Party, who for different reasons were resisting federal authority here.

MICHAEL J. FEUER:
You both represent, both an era and a continuity, of the pursuit of dialogue and discourse that gets beyond the very polarized atmosphere that we've been living in.

So here I want to ask you, let's have a breakthrough moment here. Advise your colleagues, in and out of government, on how to navigate this debate about whether testing is on balance to our advantage, or our disadvantage, and is there ground for some consensus here on ways to somehow mediate that dispute? Do you see what I'm getting at?

ANDY ROTHERHAM:
Yeah, it's a classic Washington dispute, though.

DENISE FORTE:
Mm-hmm.

ANDY ROTHERHAM:
Most parents, when you survey them or you do focus groups, they think we do roughly the right amount of testing, they're not nearly as up in arms about it as the advocates, and this is one, on so many education questions, we've allowed activists to hijack things relative to where we are now. Look, is there too much testing? Often there is. It's not federal. That's often stuff states are doing. It's often stuff districts are doing. It's vendor driven. It's not coherent.

I mean you often, superintendents in larger districts, they often aren't even aware of all the assessments that are happening when you get to formative assessments. There's a state legislator in Virginia named Shiler Van Vulkenberg, and he's got a bill to try to streamline some of that and try to better align standards and assessments as a quality issue. Those are the kinds of conversations that we should be having.

But basic assessment, it is a civil rights issue, it is the only reason we know about these gaps. And it's the only reason we're able to actually have conversations. I will talk about Virginia, which I'm most familiar with. We had the largest drops in learning loss in the country, and that's not surprising, because our schools were closed the longest during the pandemic. And pre-pandemic we had made some changes, we had lowered cut scores, things like that. The only way we're able to have an empirical conversation on that, where it's not just brute force politics, is when Governor Youngkin was able to say, "I'm looking at this data. We've got this federal data here from the NAEP. We've got our state data. These numbers obviously don't add up. We need to take some action here, policy wise and support-wise for kids." Like rinse and repeat that across the country, and absent that, we're just flying blind, it's special interest politics, and so forth, and the kids who need the most are going to end up getting the least.

So I think this is so many things, like mend it don't end it. I certainly don't want to defend everything that happens under the name of testing, but there's a reason that, historically, civil rights groups before this, there's a reason that Bobby Kennedy, the OG one, not our current, not the tallow eating one is running HHS, but the original OG Robert Kennedy, if you go back and look at the congressional record, spent an inordinate amount of time when he was a senator, arguing that there wasn't enough assessment attached to federal policy so we could make sure kids were being served, money was being spent well. It was a major focus in the waning chapters of his all-too-short life. He was focused on that, and I think he had it right then, and we would be wise to pick up that mantle now. To me, it's an absolutely core federal civil rights issue. And the amount of pressure on it, and the amount of people who are sort of willing to take a dive on it for these feckless reasons, is a real problem,

DENISE FORTE:
Huge problem. And that's why I started my conversation with you, speaking to the importance of data. If we cannot see what's going on in classrooms, or how school districts are doing, how states are doing, there will be no interest in trying to improve. Everybody will just be happy. Our kids are all bright, all happy, all the time, and there is a real disconnect. We've even done research ourselves, talking to parents, teachers, school leaders, students. And for the most part, they do all support some form of assessment.

As Andy said, there's only one federal test. Every other test that's going on is either state-directed, or directed by a school district. Should folks be looking at those? Absolutely. And in fact, in the Every Student Succeeds Act, there's actually a provision around states auditing the number of tests and trying to streamline. So we're all for that. And we want good tests. I would argue that the incoherence that's present right now, is probably the biggest problem. And you add to that how folks access that information, because there is so much through report cards and that they get at home, through the different diagnostics that the kids take in school like iReady, all of those systems do contribute to a lack of coherence, unless the state really makes that a focus.

ANDY ROTHERHAM:
Michael, one interesting thing here is, if you talk to people in other industries and you tell them the amount of information, everything Denise just talked about, that we get off of these assessments and the cost of those assessments relative to what we spend per pupil, it's infinitesimal, and all the quality assurance information we can get off of that. They are generally quite envious. They would love to be able to get that kind of quality assurance information for pennies on the dollar.

And I would actually argue that, this is one of these ones where it's very unpopular, no one's going to run for office saying, "We should spend more on testing." But look, we should be spending more, we should be investing more. There are ways we could do this better, there's those are quality solutions, technological solutions, and so forth. And so, it's a place we should be investing, it's just, that's again, you'll search in vain for a politician barnstorming on that platform, but it's the kind of thing that, in the policy world, we should be talking about how do we actually not cut the investment in testing, but actually increase it.

MICHAEL J. FEUER:
Well in the few minutes we have left, yeah, I want to try to riff off of what you've both just been suggesting here, and ask you a two-part question.

First, a little bit about your backgrounds and what propelled you into this work on education, education reform? But also if you can tell us something about what sustains your belief in the system, and maybe I would even say, your optimism, that we can get through the current crisis and do the kind of thoughtful reform that we think we need in American education?

DENISE FORTE:
You want to go first, Andy?

ANDY ROTHERHAM:
Yeah. I mean, Michael, I'm fundamentally somebody, I think America makes mistakes. I think it's impossible to look at our history and not see that, but I think in the long run, we get it right. And I'm fundamentally optimistic. People say don't bet against America, I don't know, maybe there may be a few times you might want to short America in the short term, but I would never bet against America in the long term.

And I've just spent the last few weeks, I've been out traveling around the country, which I always find is a really useful exercise when things like this are going on, because in Washington it's really easy to get down on all the latest things. And as you go out around the country, people are living their lives. They are focused on their family, their community, in many cases, their faith, whatever it is. And there's a fundamental decency there.

And so I get discouraged and frustrated, like everybody else. And these past few weeks have certainly been discouraging, but I'm fundamentally optimistic that we have the resilience, the resourcefulness, the cleverness, and so forth, to build something back even after this, and so forth. And I just think, like the American experiment, I am, I guess, in that way a sort of very chauvinistic America. I think the American experiment is the greatest experiment, and I just have enormous confidence in it. And I think a key part of that is our public schools and how we've delivered public education. That is changing, because our society is changing and what people want is changing, but that fundamental idea of a public provision of education to make sure everybody has access to equal opportunity, the ability to go for that brass ring. I can't imagine why would you want to work on anything else?

DENISE FORTE:
So I am a military brat, traveled all over the place in my youth. My father was a real servant leader, as was my mother. I'm optimistic, because I saw what they could do, and feel that same deep sense of commitment to be a servant leader and commitment to community, right?

I also have two young boys in the public school system here in D.C. This is my second career, honestly. I have a computer science degree and did that for about eight years, but really one of the reasons I left that field is I needed a greater sense of impact. And I do believe education has that opportunity. I've seen it over and over again, where it is impacting for all the right reasons, because there are committed folks, parents, school leaders, community leaders, that want to see things get better for their community and their students.

It's happening across the country, and we don't elevate all those examples, but they're out there. And I believe more of that can be true. I think there is a strong need for a federal role in education. I agree with Andy, I'm not about the status quo either. And we have seen some reforms at the department over the years. So let's not say they can't be done, they were done legally, which seems to be a problem with this administration, but there is opportunity, and the deep sense of opportunity in a public education system.

So that's why I'm hopeful. I'm very hopeful.

MICHAEL J. FEUER:
Well, what can I say except thank you, because I myself have at times wondered whether I can sustain my own, maybe, congenital optimism given what's going on, but you've given me some new reasons to be hopeful and to agree that there is great opportunity here for us to continue to try to get some of this right for all of our kids and all of our people.

And I just want to thank you both, not only for today's conversation, which I really encourage our listeners to google these two amazing people and read up on other stuff that they've written, said, and done. By the way, I should just say before we close, that if I've allowed any of my own opinions to seep through in this conversation, I hope our listeners understand that I am not representing the George Washington University or it's board, or any of our leadership--it's me personally, Michael Feuer, mouthing off on some of this stuff.

I want to thank you both for an extraordinarily interesting panoramic view of where we've been, what's going on, and where we could be going. I consider myself very lucky to count you as colleagues and friends in this business.

To our listeners, if you enjoyed this episode, as I said, please, you can subscribe. It's on Spotify, or iHeartRadio, or wherever you listen to your podcasts. We have a website here called EdFixPodcast.com. All of which are only made possible through the incredible and engineering talent of our communications director and coach, Touran Waters. Thank you again, Touran for all of that.

And on that note, let's look ahead. Let's try to keep the wheels on the bus here. And I thank you both again for your time on EdFix.

DENISE FORTE:
This was great. Thank you so much. Good to see you, Andy.

ANDY ROTHERHAM:
Great to see you, Denise.

Michael, thank you. It was wonderful to be with both of you.

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