EdFix Episode 18: Center on Education Policy - Boiling It Down to the Facts

TRANSCRIPT

MARIA FERGUSON:
Unforeseen consequences happen all the time in education that's why evidence and implementation research is so important. So we can monitor what's working, what's not working and make midcourse corrections.

MICHAEL J. FEUER:
This is EdFix, your source for insights about the practice and promise of education. I'm Michael Feuer and it's a great pleasure to host Maria Ferguson. Maria is the executive director of our Center on Education Policy here at the George Washington University. Maria is going to tell us about what the center is and why it is. We're going to learn from Maria some updates about the condition of American education. So Maria, welcome to Studio T.

MARIA FERGUSON:
I'm thrilled to be here. I'm very excited and I'm glad to be having this conversation, so thank you for inviting me. This is a good time to be asking about the center because this year, 2020 marks the center's 25th anniversary. The center was started as I said, 25 years ago by a gentleman named Jack Jennings. Jack worked for the house education and labor committee where he served as the general counsel and he sort of developed the idea of the center really based on his own experience working on the Hill. He felt that policymakers were at a bit of a disadvantage when it came to really having research, actionable research that they could use to help them inform policy. Academic research is incredibly valuable and useful, but when you're making decisions on the fly and you want to make decisions about specific policy, the timeline for academic research it just doesn't sync up.

MARIA FERGUSON:
That's just not the purpose of academic research to do that. So he started the center with this idea that the center could produce resources for policy makers, not only at the federal level, but also state and local. To help them understand the programs that they had in place, get a better sense of how local leaders were implementing those programs and make corrections as needed. Really very practical origins for the center. Well, it was very well received. I think the thing that it's probably most known for by those of us who've been in education for a while is the work that center did on No Child Left Behind. In Jack's day the relationship between Dems and Republicans, especially around education, was extremely collegial. They worked together. This was an issue that they more or less always found their way to be together on not so much the case anymore, but here's hoping that it can go back to that.

MARIA FERGUSON:
I know my contact with the center began as I started my policy career in education because I came into education from journalism. I started out working at a newsroom here in Washington DC and then went on to be the national photo editor at the associated press in New York and then back to U.S news and World Report down here in DC as a photo editor as well. I was very suspect of any research or evidence that had any kind of slant or spin to it. CEP didn't do that, they just were sort of just the facts, they didn't advocate, they didn't push a particular cause. And as a former journalist, that really resonated with me. So CEP was always my go-to for information because I knew someone wasn't trying to spin me.

MICHAEL J. FEUER:
Why would somebody with such a terrific career and a position in the Congress leave and then decide that he was going to go essentially on the supply side in this shall we say, knowledge relationship?

MARIA FERGUSON:
Well, I think for one, evidence mattered to Jack. I think he really felt it was important and for Jack it was education first. I mean he really cared passionately about this issue, he cared about the students he felt weren't being served as well by public education as they could be. I will say that CEP staff also made a huge difference. My deputy has been with CEP since the beginning. Diane Stark Rentner also affectionately a Hill rat, someone who knew the Hill inside and out. She was with Jack every step of the way and her presence and her involvement in CEP is just is clearly visible. You know Nancy Kober and other folks who've been with CEP, young people who've worked there for a while as a step in their career and have passed on. Our own doctoral students here at GW who've been part of CEP's legacy. I just think Jack was a real leader and he was really good at harnessing all that talent and putting it to use for education.

MICHAEL J. FEUER:
It is interesting that as a reaction to what was becoming a zone of much less civil discourse than had been in the past. We have this thing called CEP which is all about neutral, independent, objective fact based evidence as if to say partisanship be damned, we're going to provide useful information.

MARIA FERGUSON:
And boy there was no better opportunity to prove that then with No Child Left Behind because it costs a lot of consternation amongst people on the Hill and people on the field. This was a controversial piece of legislation and following it especially for the 10, 12 years that No Child Left Behind was really in its full implementation. I think in some ways CEP was the only one who could really do that because people trusted them and they really saw them as non-partisan. CEP if you look back at the research, they pointed out the good parts of No Child Left Behind and the bad parts of No Child Left Behind and did it in a way that really wasn't like a shame game, which so much policy research is.

MICHAEL J. FEUER:
As I recollect, No Child Left Behind itself was the result of a very strong bipartisan push in Congress.

MARIA FERGUSON:
It was passed literally in the shadow of 9/11 so there's always been this notion that if 9/11 hadn't happened and if Congress didn't want to come together and do something productive that it would've never passed in the first place. Because there was a lot of controversy even in the leading up to signing the bill and all that sort of stuff. The testing and accountability requirements, a lot of people felt were really rigid. Civil rights groups were very supportive of it because it was this notion of really holding schools accountable for all students and all subgroups. It was-

MICHAEL J. FEUER:
So is 9/11 is September of 2001.

MARIA FERGUSON:
Mm-hmm (affirmative).

MICHAEL J. FEUER:
No Child Left Behind, therefore was passed sometime in 2002-

MARIA FERGUSON:
It was signed in 2002 exactly.

MICHAEL J. FEUER:
And it was for the decade of the aughts as they call it. It was the major federal legislative-

MARIA FERGUSON:
I mean it was the law of the land really until 2016. It was metered more towards the end there because some of the accountability requirements were... The implementation research had sort of come to the fore and we really saw some of the challenges that No Child Left Behind brought to the table on this sort of stick to the test mentality so on and so forth. So CEP's implementation research year by year I think just really help people understand fact from fiction in terms of what the law really said versus what people did.

MICHAEL J. FEUER:
You were not running CEP, but you were a consumer of CEP.

MARIA FERGUSON:
Absolutely.

MICHAEL J. FEUER:
So I'd love, I'd love to hear a little bit about what you were doing in those years and why it was that the work of CEP was relevant, not just to the people who were on the Hill, but to organizations such as the one where you were working.
MARIA FERGUSON:
Well, it's interesting in some ways because I guess I had a little bit of a baptism by fire in terms of advocacy and partisanship when I went from being a journalist to working as a political appointee for the Clinton administration at the U.S Department of Education. When you work for a political administration, your job is to support that administration. There's not a lot of discussion about the rights and wrongs of what they're setting out to do, everyone falls in line and obviously there's conversation and discourse. But as a journalist my training was to be exceedingly incredulous about everything and always a little skeptical and I always wonder and I realized that I had to figure out a way to temper that. I wanted the information I wanted but I also needed to support the administration. But I got my information from CEP because I did not want someone to just tell me what I wanted to hear or what the administration wanted to hear.

MICHAEL J. FEUER:
And when you were a journalist you were covering education?

MARIA FERGUSON:
I started out actually covering national and international news. I was the real deal working at the associated press in New York, covering every natural disasters sporting event. I mean it was a work a day journalist, but no, there was not an education focus at all. I was taking it all in. It was an incredible experience, the ultimate proving ground for a young journalist. So that was great experience, and coming down to U.S News and World Report to work for a weekly magazine seems like a holiday by comparison.

MARIA FERGUSON:
But it was U.S News that gave me the bug for education because as you know U.S News covers a lot of education stories. So I was always fascinated with the rankings and the other stories that U.S News did. So I do have to say it was in there and when I was planning on going to graduate school, my decision was to go to an education school and study education or to get my MBA and I can assure you I made the wrong decision because I went to get my MBA and hated every minute of it. So after that I was determined to figure out a way to get education in my life.

MICHAEL J. FEUER:
Well as a matter of fact, the world of education policy and advice giving and reform has become more attractive to people with degrees in business.

MARIA FERGUSON:
Education is a huge, huge market. It is to say now over $750 billion industry and-

MICHAEL J. FEUER:
That's just K-12?

MARIA FERGUSON:
K-12, yeah. That attracts a lot of people. There are a lot of players in the education space right now and I think we don't really understand the impact that they're having. I don't think we understand the role of shareholders in education companies. I think there's a lot there that we still need to learn and figure out the impact of.

MICHAEL J. FEUER:
This is happening during a time when there is on again off again pressure about whether public education is doomed because of its bureaucratic structures and the appeal of market solutions. I don't think it's a coincidence that we've had these MBAs getting involved in education reform.

MARIA FERGUSON:
Well, I was a big believer in very interested in it obviously because when I left the Department of Education, I went to New American Schools which was an enterprise that was started by the nation's top business leaders. The chairmen of IBM and other top companies, the commissioner of the NFL in response to a Nation at Risk. This was a governor led enterprise that brought together political leaders, education leaders and business leaders to try and really make the U.S public education system world-class. It was this first inkling of are we going to stay competitive with the rest of the world? People starting to ask themselves, what do we have to do to stay top of the mark?

MICHAEL J. FEUER:
Well, you mentioned Nation at Risk, that's capitalized. It was the name of a report.

MARIA FERGUSON:
Yes, it was a landmark report that rang the bell on where the American public education system was currently lacking and fairly foreboding in terms of what the future held for it and why. And this really caught the attention of a group of governors, governor Clinton being one of them at the time, Arkansas governor and others, Lamar Alexander from Tennessee who really came together and the business community jumped in full board and New American Schools was born of that. It was a five-year, set out to be a five year venture to fund innovative public education models and determine their impact across the country. And we worked side by side with Rand Corporation, They were the independent evaluator of what was going on and the models were all different and some of them still exist to this day. And so it was a fascinating-

MICHAEL J. FEUER:
Do you have an example of a model? What does that mean?

MARIA FERGUSON:
Success For All was a reading program started at Johns Hopkins still very successful, that was one of the models. Some focused on specific things like literacy and reading, others focused more on comprehensive school reform, expeditionary learning. Outward bound, now EL schools was one of the original models, incredible network of schools all around the country. We have several in Washington. America's Choice was one that eventually morphed into Marc Tucker's or um Marc Tucker, he's now retired but the national center for education and the economy. So these were real innovators of people who really wanted to sort of test different models on how we educate students. And it was really the first time people started saying there really are different ways of knowing. There are different ways of learning.

MICHAEL J. FEUER:
A lot of these initiatives were done within the framework of the public education system.

MARIA FERGUSON:
And therein was the problem because the structure of public school often did not allow for innovation. These schools really required the freedom that you might have with an independent school and that was really hard for a lot of these school developers. And we sort of as staff faced it front line because we were the ones who were working with the school districts and the communities that we're trying to implement these. And the disconnects between how you allocate resources, between how you use teacher time, between the curriculum and the structure of public education was so rigid. It was very difficult for these models to really take flight and to even get support from the school boards and other communities. Very risk averse in school districts. Very risk averse for some quite reasonable reasons.

MICHAEL J. FEUER:
That report, even though it pretty much put to sleep, the idea that we would shut down the department, it did promote interest in these rather more a non-traditional.

MARIA FERGUSON:
Yeah. I don't think that was his intention-

MICHAEL J. FEUER:
That was not his intention?

MARIA FERGUSON:
But it had a really positive outcome, which is often how these things go, right? I mean No Child Left Behind was full of great intention and unforeseen consequences happen all the time in education that's why evidence and implementation research is so important. So we can monitor what's working, what's not working and make midcourse corrections. The rigidity of public schools sometimes make those midcourse corrections really challenging though. And I think that's why you had the origins of the charter school movement and choice and other innovations that we have seen and are dealing with right now is people's desire of stretch their wings a bit.

MICHAEL J. FEUER:
I'm not saying I agree with this, but for many people it is the teacher's unions which were one of the main obstacles to the kinds of reforms and innovations that were being promoted, advocated by these new organizations. Where are we in our understanding of the role of unions?

MARIA FERGUSON:
Oh, this is a very complicated question and in a typical CEP fashion, I will try and approach it from a nonpartisan place. I think it's easy to blame unions for troubles in schools. They're an easy target. I think unions have a really difficult job. I think they're just like any other organization or entity they have to evolve. They can't be static, but teacher unions are big and they're powerful and a lot of their power is tied into things that go well beyond education. So I think that can make things more challenging. For me you can't talk about teacher unions without talking about the larger profession itself. Teaching as a profession has always been challenged. It's a highly feminized profession and there's a lot of baggage that go along with that. I think some people would agree that the teacher unions really did have more of a labor market foundation if you will, as opposed to a professional foundation as something like law and medicine.

MARIA FERGUSON:
So I think teaching has always been stuck in the middle here. It's acknowledged as of course one of the most important professions that we have in our society but the development of it and a lot of the underpinnings of it don't really reflect that high professionalism. Now in other countries, of course it's very different. All you have to do is go to our to our friends in Shanghai or in Finland or all the other countries and we see that teaching is a very revered profession. Poll after poll about teachers shows a real disenfranchisement with the profession and we're really challenged in terms of promoting that next generation of educators. When you pull millennials about how they feel about going into teaching, I think one of the best things I read in this was probably five years ago was "becoming a monk" got more support than becoming a teacher amongst millennials-- "at least then people respected you." So it is a very complicated profession, and I don't know if teacher unions in their size and in their scope are always the best equipped to deal with so much nuance. And there's a lot within how you create a really viable profession in the future. Moving that supports the rights of teachers, gives them the protections they need, but is also nimble enough to be able to deal with the changes that are coming so fast and furious in schools.

MICHAEL J. FEUER:
Today the public attitudes about teaching and to some extent the public attitudes about the teacher's unions has also gone through some-

MARIA FERGUSON:
Absolutely. I mean, think about the rhetoric that we've heard at the national level for the last decade: "America's public schools are failing." It has been very negative rhetoric about public education, but we also have a big complicated country, a lot of different students more so than almost any other country in the world. And considering the peculiarities of our system locally controlled tax based which right there, you have so many structural inequities that are going to make progress difficult across the board anyway. One would argue well, you know what? We're actually doing pretty well considering what we're up against in this country, we're making progress slow and steady. I think if that was your profession and you heard your own leaders talk smack about your profession day in and day out, after a while you'd be a little angry too. I have a son who's training to be an educator as we speak, so it's fascinating watching what motivates him, what he's learning about all this sort of stuff. But I worry for him. I have to admit that.

MICHAEL J. FEUER:
I mean the E and CEP stands for education, but it could have stood for evidence also and what's the deal on the connection between evidence that derives from objective analysis and inquiry and the P in CEP which is policy. In other words, how does this stuff make its way in?

MARIA FERGUSON:
I'm not sure Jack would have articulated and spoken to evidence at the time when he was starting CEP, but I think basically the idea here is look, this is a lot of money, the federal budget and it's the greatest it's ever been right now with the budget that just passed for public education funding. A lot of money, why don't we take the time to do some research and gather some evidence so we at least know how it's being used. That might be a good idea, right? I mean there are very few areas in life. Can you imagine of them trying to send them mercury rockets to the moon without having invested, studied, went back, invested, studied, went back. I mean this was the process by which space travel happened because they looked at what they did, figured out what they did wrong and they fixed it. This is how all great endeavors go and in education it seems to be like, Oh, we'll just pass some legislation to hope for the best, and when the next administration comes in we'll change it all up and do something else.

MICHAEL J. FEUER:
There are people who have thought about this and who have actually written that in a way, getting somebody on the moon is an easier technological problem than fixing American schools.

MARIA FERGUSON:
Yes.

MICHAEL J. FEUER:
So the question becomes-

MARIA FERGUSON:
We don't have local control going to the moon or school boards.

MICHAEL J. FEUER:
Okay, well that's very interesting. So you don't have the same tension between the individual or the local on the one hand and then the collective or the national on the other hand.

MARIA FERGUSON:
Right. And you're not dealing with the public who have all been educated. None of the public's been to the moon, so they don't know from what they don't know. But you know, when you're dealing with education everyone's been educated so they have invested interest in it and have a lot of opinions. When you have that coupled with a locally controlled governance system, you have a lot of opinions. So having that new unanimity of vision and runway that you need because this stuff takes time really requires everyone to be on the same page. And I think that is just very challenging in this country because of the... Again, the locally controlled system and the and the tax based system because it creates such inequities in terms of resources.

MICHAEL J. FEUER:
I'm glad you mentioned that we've actually made progress, which is amazing when you think about the obstacles and the constraints on the system.

MARIA FERGUSON:
I mean in some places we're struggling. For sure.

MICHAEL J. FEUER:
So I was going to say average performance may be getting better, but we still have some really wild disparities and that's what's on a lot of people's minds and it should be. If you were the secretary of education or the president, what would you hope for in terms of the likelihood of progress and how to do it?

MARIA FERGUSON:
That's a great question and obviously a really difficult question. I don't think we know enough about alternatives to a public education system to walk in the other direction yet. The research that we have on vouchers, on charters, on choice is just not compelling enough to give me the impression that turning around and walking the other way is the way to go. That doesn't mean there isn't a lot to learn from those innovations that could help us with the current system that we have, but I think part of it is trying in some way to separate the very capitalistic nature of American society from education. I think those two things are just fundamentally at odds because public education should be for and about everyone equally and that is not capitalism, not remotely. So as long as you're going to have a winners and losers system, we're going to still have the problems that we have in this country.

MARIA FERGUSON:
But I do think that if we can make the most of our system knowing that it is a locally controlled system and no matter what foundations aren't going to change that. Groups of people trying to make progress aren't going to change that. Work with this system we have and try and level the playing field the best we can. I think that's our best hope right now. I don't think it's impossible, they're doing it and the California has taken steps to equitize their budgets. They realized policy and budget go hand in hand and you can't push forward policy without making changes in their budget. And they have done that and I think others are trying to do the same. So it's a long road, but you can't give up. You just can't give up.

MICHAEL J. FEUER:
The great contribution of CEP under Jack, under you has been to encourage somewhat more dispassionate look at the data, at the options and to use that as a way to encourage people to move forward. So thank you so much Maria. It's been a great pleasure.

MARIA FERGUSON:
It's been a lot of fun. Thank you.

MICHAEL J. FEUER:
Thank you so much. What a great conversation. And for our listeners if you enjoyed this episode then you can subscribe to EdFix on iTunes, Spotify, iHeartRadio, player FM, or wherever you listen to your podcasts. We also have a wonderful website called edfixpodcast.com and I am delighted to thank once again, our executive director, technical advisor, studio manager, and all time communications maven Touran Waters. Thank you all.

MARIA FERGUSON:
Thank you.

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