Too Cool for School

Higher education. Nuke from orbit, or?

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If the American Enterprise Institute were a prison, education policy scholars Rick Hess and Michael McShane would be the leaders of its most feared inmate gang. Today, they join Jonah not simply to pressure him into swearing loyalty, but to discuss their new book, Getting Education Right: A Conservative Vision for Improving Early Childhood, K-12, and College. It’s no secret that America’s education system is struggling, but what can actually be done to reform it? What does it mean to be a conservative in education? Are teachers paid enough? And does the Department of Education have any reason to exist?

Show Notes:

–Rick’s page at AEI

–Mike’s page at AEI

–Rick and Mike’s new book, Getting Education Right

–The Remnant with Brad Wilcox

–Rick and Mike: “The Past and Future of Education Reform”

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Comments (24)
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  1. Avatar photo
    T.Kalbach

    I listened this while catching up on my podcast backlog.
    I am open to the idea that any effort to get rid of the Department of Education is, generally speaking, a waste of political effort. However, no-one on the cast seemed to be making the argument that the country is better off for having the DoEd. How would we get to a place where it is no longer a waste of political effort? My assumption is that any path to that state of affairs would include all sorts of reform goals that are not wasted efforts.

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    Jaimehaughton

    I know I'm late to the party, but as someone who has worked in higher ed for 13 yrs, and is finishing her masters this semester - I loved this podcast. I posted it to my "Contemporary Problems in Higher Ed" class website. I don't know if anyone actually listened to it, but the professor mentioned that he was at a conference w/ Dr. Hess and appreciated my contribution of the podcast to my classmates.

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  3. Zluze777

    As a University of Tennessee Honors College graduate, smiled pretty hard when Jonah arbitrarily arrived at my alma mater as the epitome of public higher ed success.

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  4. BenP

    Punishing elite schools for having admissions critera outside of "academic merit" by witholding funding seems like an unwise precedent to set. Whose gonna put this policy into place? The Department of Education? Congress? How confident are we that the kinds of people who agree with AEI's position are going to be in charge and stay in charge? If we open the door the federal government micromanaging admissions systems, don't be surprised when progressives use this to force schools into all kinds of things we won't like.

    Don't forget that the just-overturned 2003 Grutter decision allowing the use of race in admissions rested on the idea that racial diversity serves a legitimate educational purpose. There's no way you're gonna keep out the stuff you don't like with an "academic merit only!" policy; it's way too vague. Thomas Jefferson HS, for example, just started a policy of offering admission to the top students from each middle school in their county. Conservatives aren't happy, but this policy sure looks like it's based on "academic merit", and SCOTUS just refused to hear a challenge.

    Now imagine Republicans somehow manage to implement a "base admissions on academit merit only or we take away your funding!" policy, and then Democrats take back congress and keep the White House, and progressives are set loose on how to implement this in a way they like. Maybe "use Thomas Jefferson HS's model or we take away your funding!" would be an attractive option.

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  5. BenP

    Interesting discussion - they made a lot of good points. Two weak ones I want to point out:

    - On class sizes, they proposed a chain of causality I would not expect from conservatives:

    (lower class sizes) -> (higher demand for teachers) -> (lower proportion of good teachers because the new ones won't be as good)

    Is it a general principle that when demand for workers in a certain profession increases, the average quality of work in that profession goes down? Their story is we have a certain number of teaching positions today, and since schools will tend to hire the best teachers they can get, they'd have to start hiring weaker ones to fill new positions. Huh? If demand for teachers increases, more people will choose careers in teaching rather than whatever field they would have gone into otherwise. How does it follow that these people will be worse at their jobs than the ones we currently have?

    - The part about "hard work is racist" is nutpicking. It came up when a charter school network changing its motto, and there was that "math is racist" thing in Seattle a few years back. Almost no one is arguing that we should tell kids not to work hard.

    Those are relatively small complaints. I appreciate their clear-headness regarding the use of test scores to rate teachers and schools: that project, though superficially appealing, is a mess. I also appreciate the point about teacher pay: in what other industries do we insist that salaries be unconnected to the labor market for a certain skill?

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    Honest Ape

    What is increasingly frustrating to me about the decades-long blabbering over what's wrong with America's education system and how to fix it is that it's not getting fixed. And, in the meantime, tens of millions of minds have gone to waste.

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    Ben Connelly

    This was a good interview

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  8. Placid Paddler

    I had a few rather large problems with suggestions of the guests. Mainly, I want nothing less in this country than for anything else to be piled onto “employers” backs to provide to society. Your employer should have less than nothing to do with your child’s education, they should be barred from any real involvement besides that of providing you monetary compensation and non interference. This sort of market ruining dynamic has already ruined our healthcare system.
    The goal should be that 90% of the population be fully capable to produce the funds to pay for a good education for their children and that public schools or funding be provided for children whose parents cannot.
    On a side note, the point about teachers unions being against moving funds away from administration staff bloat, and back into teaching got pretty short explanation. I can never get a straight answer from a teacher on why they support unions that seem to have teachers as their second to last priority. What the heck is going on?

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    1. Avatar photo
      Ben Connelly

      I agree with a lot of that. Still, I could see some employer-provided childcare to be useful. Not like healthcare. More like just a place you could drop your kids occasionally.

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      1. Placid Paddler

        Sure, on-site day care is a big bonus, and so long as it’s not required of employers, I’m okay with it. I draw the line at actual schooling where other problems are simply too obvious.

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          Ben Connelly

          I absolutely agree

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    2. GLW

      From CEW. I may be wrong about this, but one way for teachers to get more pay is to get more degrees. At some point in thus rat race they get more degrees than are needed to actually teach. The next logical and more remunerative step is administration. So, maybe teachers' unions are ok with more administrators because their members' careers benefit from that. Fix the teacher salary issue and maybe you can address the administrative bloat issue at the same time.

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      1. Placid Paddler

        In Texas, the administration sucked up a bunch of the money that was supposed to go to teacher pay increases last round.

        It’s the old bureaucracy two step. They demand more money to do the things everyone wants, they get funding, and they spend it on other things and go right back to saying they need more money for what people want. It’s like if you threw a concert with a famous group, and never put the famous group on stage. You spend the ticket money on warm up groups no one wants, and then demand the audience pay more to get the group they thought they bought the ticket for, rinse, repeat.

        You’d think the teachers, and the headliners, would eventually find new representation.

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    3. Avatar photo
      Charley Warns

      By saying you "had" rather than "have" a few problems, it would suggest those problems have been resolved. A more polished, if you will, way to make your point would look like: "I enjoyed [you can't be still enjoying it] the podcast, but tbh, I have a problem with the suggestion that employers should in any way be responsible for the education of their employees' children; as is the case with health care, it is not the employer's concern. I have another problem with ... yada yada." It's a more diplomatic and less word salady, if you will, way to put it. Yet ... I don't disagree with you.

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      1. Placid Paddler

        Charlie, if I had that level of writing skill, I’d probably not be retired. But thanks, anyways.

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  9. Avatar photo
    Charley Warns

    As Donald Trump put it, "I love the poorly educated!" I agree with the the teaching method of Rev. Maclean in "A River Runs Through It," as reading difficult books and then following up with an essay on what you had got out of it ... is everything! That reading and writing makes one smarter is something I sadly learned too late in life.

    I agree with everything said on the podcast; it's an important topic in need of more publicity. There's a connection to be drawn with Jonah's last G File. In his excellent book, "The Mind and the Market, Capitalism in Western Thought," Jerry Muller asks, "But why should intellectuals be critical of capitalism?" Part of his answer: "Antipathy to capitalism was also encouraged by the cyclical overproduction of educated men and women. The exaltation of the benefits of humanistic education by Arnold and others led to an ongoing expansion of university education, producing more broadly educated humanists than the economy could absorb." He quotes Schumpter: “his main chance of asserting himself lies in his actual or potential nuisance value, ” so that “the intellectual group . . . lives on criticism and its whole position depends on criticism that stings.”

    As Schumpeter put it, "Discontent breeds resentment." So if that's what gives your life meaning ... being a nuisance, it may explain the incentive to end it ... lots of laughter.

    Spot-on point in mentioning the hypocrisy of those speaking out against school choice being likely those able to send their kids to private schools or having the means to live in an expensive community.

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    John Morrison

    I was hoping to hear more conservative principles applied to education. Public schools, including the one I have taught at for 25-plus years, are bound by state standards; we enjoy all the trade offs of centralized planning. What would Hayek say? What can we tell from private schools? Who pays (private schools) for classes of 35 in K-12? And how much of schooling has been rendered obsolete by technology? Creative destruction everywhere but our schools? Many students and parents see little relation to school and the real world largely because schools have not kept pace with a rapidly changing world. Charter schools, pathways, options all empower stakeholders. Push for choice by promoting options in the public schools. Existing private schools have no space for the thousands of kids that would choose alternatives. Conservatives should push for charter schools with an eye on market principles, deregulation, reduce barriers to entry, require transparency and let markets decide. Public schools should experience public bankruptcy; keep what works and allow for innovation to replace dysfunction.

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    1. Avatar photo
      Charley Warns

      I disagree. It will always be reading, writing, and arithmetic ... full stop.

      “Something within fishermen tries to make fishing into a world perfect and apart—I don’t know what it is or where, because sometimes it is in my arms and sometimes in my throat and sometimes nowhere in particular except somewhere deep. Many of us would probably be better fishermen if we did not spend so much time watching and waiting for the world to become perfect.”

      I was thinking that an actor has to do a lot of memorization, but then again, Pitt didn't actually say that while he was fishing.

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