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Jan. 15, 2021 - Epoch Times
40:10
Dr. Williamson Evers on California’s State of Education | California Insider
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If the learning environment is not safe and reasonably calm, people can't learn.
If you're a child, do you want to go to school if you're going to be attacked with a knife or beaten up in the classroom or probably in the schoolyard or on your way to school?
If you're a teacher, do you want a disrupted class?
I mean, a student in a disrupted classroom cannot learn.
Cannot learn.
We know this from a large number of studies.
My guest today is Williamson Evers, an expert on education policy.
Dr.
Evers headed the Trump-Pence Transitions Agency Review for the U.S. Department of Education.
He is now a senior fellow and director of the Center on Educational Excellence at the Independent Institute.
His articles have appeared in such publications as Education Week, New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, and Christian Science Monitor, and he's the past member of the editorial board of Education Next.
Today we're going to talk about the state of public education in California.
Bill, welcome on the show.
Pleasure to be here.
Bill, before we get into discussing education, I want to learn about how you got into this space.
Well, many years ago, my children were going through public schools and my son was having problems with reading.
The teacher was going to maybe put him in a lower achievement group.
So I started...
What grade was he in?
This is like first grade, you know?
That's when you learn to read.
So I got concerned about that.
And when I was growing up, they were changing over from phonics to look-say, which is similar to what they do today with whole language.
And so I remember my mother teaching us from Why Johnny Can't Read about phonics and how to do word attack and how to break apart the sounds and words and so forth.
So I kind of helped my son a little bit, but he caught on to that all right.
So then in about third grade, He was telling me about his math homework and that maybe he was going to be put in an advanced thing of mathematics.
And so he told me, well, they don't really care if you get the right answer.
You know, what they want is some explanation, some story of how you did your work and so forth, but you don't care that much about the right answer.
And that rang alarm bells for me because, you know, you think about it, if people don't get the right answer, the rocket will not go up right, the bridge will fall down.
Getting the right answer is pretty important.
And I'm not saying that, you know, knowing how to go about the problem is not important.
It is.
But, you know, to denigrate the importance of the right answer, it seemed to me to be bad.
So I started reading about the controversies in math instruction.
And that's how I got really involved.
And I was a major figure in the math wars in the mid-1990s in California and nationally.
And so what did you do next?
Well, so I got involved and I organized, with some other parents, obviously, a group in Palo Alto, California, called Hold.
And it was a pro-solid math, pro-content-rich instruction in math.
And because the Internet as an organizing tool was just coming into being, We were able to mobilize and get hundreds of people to come to school board meetings and so forth.
So this came to the attention of some politicians in Sacramento.
And so I went and testified up there and I got to know a few people and I got appointed by Governor Pete Wilson to be on the California State Academic Standards Commission.
So you saw your child, you saw his math, and you saw this problem in math.
How did that motivate you to do what you did afterwards?
Well, you know, doing well.
I mean, my children have both done well.
My son went to University of California at San Diego.
My daughter went to Yale.
They're high-achieving students, and I, of course, care a lot about their success.
And I'm a PhD myself, so I think learning is really important and a pathway to doing interesting things in life, important things.
So I got, from being this parent activist, I got sucked into the I was in the Standards Commission in California and then George W. Bush was running for president and I got into his advisory group in education.
He already knew a lot because he had been the governor of Texas and very education focused.
But I was in his advisory group and I was in the advisory group for his transition.
And then I ran the schools in Iraq, so they were looking for somebody that could do that.
And they called me up one day and said, this is the Pentagon.
And you go, oh, what's going on?
And so they said, would you like to go and run the schools?
Iraq.
So I did that from July through December of 2003.
And then I came back, and in the latter part of the Bush administration, I was Assistant Secretary of Education for Planning and Policy Evaluation, so in the U.S. Department of Education in Washington, D.C. And you've helped this administration as well.
Yes.
So before Trump was elected, so beginning after the nomination, there's a transition team that goes in place.
And I headed the transition team for the U.S. Department of Education.
And then after, and so we made proposals of what We looked at everything that had been going on under Obama and even a little farther back, what needed to be fixed, what were policy areas that needed attention.
And so then when Trump got elected, so that's November, but he doesn't get inaugurated until January.
So I continued to work and we interviewed the people in the Department of Education because even though I had been in it and some of my colleagues in the transition had been in it, we didn't know the details of what had been changed.
And so we had to give a package to the incoming Secretary of Education Of what were the policy areas and what were sort of the details of structure and management and budget that needed to be looked at by her so she could make decisions in an informed way.
So you have a very interesting perspective.
You've been a policy maker, you've been a parent, you've been an activist.
And from your perspective, how's the trend of education going in California over the last few decades?
Well, I think it's really not going too well.
So under Pete Wilson as governor and under Gray Davis as governor, we were making a pretty good improvement.
And one sign of this was that we had two-thirds of the children In algebra in eighth grade.
So this is what high-performing countries do internationally.
So, you know, Taiwan and South Korea and so forth.
I mean, they may have...
That was in the 70s or in the 80s?
No, this is in the 90s, really.
In the 90s, okay.
Yeah, and early 2000s.
So it's just fallen apart.
So Schwarzenegger...
His heart was often in the right place, but he also, he wanted big box office.
He paid attention to popularity things that were not necessarily aligned with what would really be best for the children.
And I mean, all politicians do this.
The whole class size controversy is Parents loving small classes and the science saying that's not really the important thing.
The important thing is good teachers.
But anyway, getting this aside, so Schwarzenegger wanted to get in on the Common Core bandwagon.
And so I was on the California State Academic Standards Commission that reviewed that, and we went through it line by line.
This was a set of national academic content standards lists for each grade what the children are going to learn, and in this case in math and English.
And so, you know, there were a lot of tiny problems in the English standards.
They weren't too bad, but the math standards were filled with things that were missing.
So we had all these kids, two-thirds of them, in Algebra I in eighth grade, but Common Core has Algebra I in ninth grade, so that's Going backwards, essentially.
And it means it's problematic.
I mean, first of all, it harmed all those children that, you know, didn't succeed at the level of international high performance.
But it also means if you're trying to get into a selective college, you're not on track to take AB or BC calculus in your senior year because you can't.
You don't have enough years.
So, you know, it's just hugely problematic.
And it hasn't resulted in any improvements.
I mean, we have the national NAEP scores, and we have the Common Core-aligned Smarter Balanced scores, and there's no improvement in California.
It's, you know, it's been flat or declining slightly or something like that.
It's not going up.
They promised us That it would be going up.
They promised college and career ready students at the end of 12th grade.
You have written quite a lot on issues with education.
What about classroom discipline?
You've talked a lot about that.
I have.
And, you know, this is a foundational thing.
If the learning environment is not safe and reasonably calm, people can't learn.
If you're a child, do you want to go to school if you're going to be attacked with a knife or beaten up in the classroom or probably in the schoolyard or on your way to school?
If you're a teacher, do you want a disrupted class?
A student in a disrupted classroom cannot learn.
We know this from a large number of studies.
So we have a problem that both California and at the national level, there have been policies that have undermined A normal amount of discipline on school campuses.
So in the Obama years, the administration looked at a number of suspensions and decided, oh, there's too many people being suspended.
So we're going to roll back suspensions.
And this idea was also present in California.
So if you start doing that, it relaxes discipline, it makes laxness in discipline throughout the whole system.
And so we had this situation Where they had a substitute for an alternative to suspension that they called restorative justice.
And restorative justice, in principle, it's not a bad idea to be for restoring the previously normal situation.
I mean, to some extent our judicial system tries to rectify things, tries to Put people back where they were before and to punish people.
Japan is extremely oriented in its penal system, in its criminal justice system, toward restorative justice.
You're the criminal, you stole something, you have to give back the amount, maybe you have to give back an additional amount to compensate the person for the pain and suffering and terror and scaredness of being burglarized or robbed or whatever.
And you have to apologize.
You have to try and make right the psychological situation of the person.
So, you know, who could really be against that in the abstract?
But in a school setting, it doesn't really work as well.
Children don't really have A lot of possessions that they really own that they could rectify.
And so, if you get into parents paying off for their children's bad behavior, then that's not really the right, it's not really just and it's not really the right incentive for the kid.
It just becomes a spoiled kid.
So we don't really want to look forward to that.
Since it doesn't really work as well as it does for the adult criminal justice system.
And what is it?
I'm going to tell you.
So the operational meaning of this restorative justice is they sit in peace circles.
So these are just circles of grown-ups and children, and they talk.
And it becomes...
A strange psychodrama and a cascade of apologies and what are your feelings and what are my feelings and are you angry and is your anger over?
And, you know, just hours of this.
And so this doesn't really work, okay, in terms of getting the schools to be safe and getting the classrooms to be suitable for learning.
And so Max Eden, who's a researcher at the Manhattan Institute, has looked into all the studies that have looked at the cities that have this.
It's very, very popular, and it's popular throughout California, and it was pushed by the Obama people.
And it doesn't work.
So instead of disciplining kids, you put them through this process?
Right.
Instead of go to the principal's office, stay late after school, you're suspended.
Instead, you do this talk fest.
And do they do it based on certain racial ratios or certain factors?
One of the concerns about these suspensions was that some number of blacks, some numbers of Latinos were being suspended.
But, you know, really, criminal justice should be on an individual basis.
We're not indicting races.
We're not indicting people who speak some language.
We are trying to rectify wrongs done by some individual.
And that's how it should be at school, too.
So, yes, the Obama people were obsessed by race and by You know, dreams of equality that they had and so forth.
But the important thing is to have a safe school, to have a classroom where the teacher can teach without endless disruption and distraction, and to punish the kids that are misbehaving.
And, you know, that just has to be the way it is.
Now, let's switch gears a little bit and go to math.
Okay.
So, you started with math.
I did.
That's what drove me to get into this.
Now, how are we doing with math in California?
Well, as I said, so I mentioned Common Core and I mentioned that before Common Core we'd gotten two-thirds of the kids in Algebra 1 by 8th grade and that was similar to what high-performing countries were doing.
And so some have some differences.
I mean, they might take part of Algebra in 8th grade and part of Geometry in 8th grade and part of Algebra and part of Geometry in 9th grade.
Still, what it amounted to is by the end of ninth grade, they had completed Algebra I and Geometry in these four countries.
So this is what we should be aspiring to, and this is what the kids are capable of, providing they have the preceding years building up to that.
So we lost all that with Common Core.
And we have these NAEP national test results and we have these Common Core related Smarter Balanced test results that show there's been no improvement.
So, as I mentioned also when I first was talking about Common Core, the slogan of Common Core Is college and career ready?
So what they're saying is when you finish high school, you're ready to go take a job, skilled job, challenging job, you're ready to go into higher education.
Could be community college, could be California State University System, could be the research university system of the University of California.
Whatever it is, you're supposed to be ready for this.
Now, so, the colleges had, of course, before all this, had remedial classes because, in fact, when the kids went, imagine you're a kid and you were in a rough area of Los Angeles growing up.
You didn't have Jaime Escalante as your math teacher.
You had some other person, maybe well-meaning, but just not that great a teacher.
And so now you're at Cal State Northridge.
Okay.
You don't know enough math to take a college math class or to take a science class or an engineering class.
So what is to be done?
Well, what the colleges did Is they had remedial classes.
These were not credit-bearing.
You didn't get college credit because this was high school work.
This is work you should have done in high school, okay?
But you hadn't done it.
But they were providing it because, you know, they thought you were capable of doing their work, but you needed some prep.
Okay.
The administrators, and again, we have some of this concern about race and equality and whatever, but, you know, these are all individual students coming in here, not some race coming in, okay?
It's students that want to get a good life and learn what they need.
Alright, so, we have these children there, and they don't know enough, so they have these classes.
But the administrators are looking at it, and they have their agenda.
So they want people graduating on time, Under pressure, the budget is challenged by people hanging around a long time.
It looks bad.
People are not prepared.
So they decided, well, we'll do this.
We'll take these remedial classes, And we'll take a first year math class and we'll combine them.
So these kids are kids that would fail in a regular math class.
They're not ready.
And you're going to make them two years in a lot of work in one year.
But it's now credit-bearing, so it advances them toward graduating on time.
Well, this is not going to work, okay?
So now, let's put ourselves in the mind of a math professor.
You're Professor Joe Smith, and you're getting these kids in that, you know, you're an engineering professor, you're a chemistry professor, you're a math professor.
The kids are coming in, they're not ready.
Okay, so you complain.
You say, let's add another class in K-12.
Let's require, in order to get into CSU, that they have another class.
So now you're an administrator in the K-12 system.
And you're promising that these kids are college ready, but they're not.
So you need to have another class, but you don't have teachers for, you know, Algebra 2, and you need to do a quick fix.
So they make consumer math, checkbook math.
This is the lowest level math.
This is like Not algebra, not geometry, not trigonometry.
It's how to balance a checkbook.
It's how to manage your household budget.
And this is what we spent the 1990s getting rid of so that we could have kids getting into algebra 1 in eighth grade.
So this is a horrible regression that we're seeing here.
And, of course, the professors are apoplectic because the students are not prepared.
This is a good segue into testing and accountability.
How's that working in the current system?
Well, it's not working all that well.
So, we have, so we spent, the federal government spent $170 million creating a test called the Smarter Balanced National Test.
It's a Common Core line.
And California affiliated with that and uses that.
So, there's two aspects.
The computer-based test.
So you have to have perfect computers because the idea of standardized testing is every kid who takes a test does it under the same standard conditions.
You also don't want to have computers that you can somehow look up the answer on that computer.
So you have to have all that perfect.
Then there's something obviously weird about the scoring.
Normally, with standardized tests, the grades go up slightly, about 2% over the years.
And this is because the whole system, all the teachers, the schools, get used to the test.
I'm not talking here about teachers copying the test materials and giving the answers to the students or changing the answers.
There's problems with that, of course.
I'm just talking about normal, everybody following the rules.
They still tend to slightly go up.
The problem is, with smarter balance, They've been jumpy.
They've been flat, they've been down, up, and instead of a kind of a steady track, which is what you would normally expect.
So, this means something is going wrong with the scoring, and it's probably, there's sort of two different explanations of this.
So, the one I think is probably right is that they put new items in every year.
It's not the same test every year.
And they're supposed to calibrate The scores back to the previous test so that it's equivalent in difficulty.
But they may not have done that properly and that would explain the flatness and the jumpiness and the non-regular pattern.
There's another possible explanation, and that is in Common Core there's a lot of fuzzy things.
Learn the conceptual understanding, do all these roundabout methods, and so forth.
And many of these things are not really measurable, like the right answer is measurable.
And the teachers may have been emphasizing these aspects to the neglect of getting the right answer.
And so that may be causing the thing to jump around.
Now, we were talking a lot about Common Core.
I wanted to know how is this Common Core impacting the gifted students?
Well, I'm not so much concerned about that, although it would hold the math, for example, and math as another thing that's going on with the gifted students.
So we spend a lot of time and energy helping the kids that are behind, the ones with the most challenges.
I think that's fine that we spend a lot of work on that, but we shouldn't neglect The high achieving students, the ones with huge potential to be great scientists and inventors.
Are they getting neglected in the system?
Well they are, but there's another weird, unexpected consequence of something that's going on in California.
And that is, at the state level, They're changing the start time of school for high school students.
So instead of 8 or 7.30 in the morning, it's later.
You could say, alright, what's that?
What's the importance of that?
The problem is, if you have kids in gifted programs, if you have schools in International Baccalaureate, these programs take a lot of time.
And if you have these late start times, there's not enough time in the school day to help these advanced students, these gifted students, these talented students.
And our state needs them.
Our country needs them.
The world needs them.
These are the champions of tomorrow.
And if we don't give them an opportunity, then they're not going to fulfill that.
And what about the ethnic studies in the schools?
So, there's been a fad nationally of ethnic studies that are different pet nationalities in different states, but California got on the bandwagon on this.
Last July, I had a column in the Wall Street Journal called, and the title was, California Wants to Teach Your Children That Capitalism is Racist.
And it was about the curriculum, the proposed model curriculum for California.
And this curriculum had been put together by some K-12 teachers who were already doing ethnic studies, some of the cities already had this, and some higher education, some college-level professors who teach ethnic studies.
And it's full of jargon.
So, cis, heteropatriarchy, nepantla, nepantlus, fems of color, all sorts of just inside baseball language that's not really friendly to the average teacher.
Parents certainly have no idea what's being talked about, so there was that.
And then there's another very troubling aspect.
Instead of a straightforward account of the history, of the situation of the different ethnic groups that you might think ethnic studies meant, instead of that, you have victimhood.
So you're teaching, you're a student in one of these classes.
And let's say you're a black, let's say it's your ethnic group that's being talked about.
Instead of the inventors, the entrepreneurs, the scientists that have your same ethnic background, it's every bad thing that was ever done to blacks, okay?
So instead of looking And of course some of this should be taught, but it's a balanced account.
And so, let's say you're not a black, but you're in that same class.
You're a Latino.
Why am I having to listen to all this parade about that group?
You know, and why is it only...
So it's identity politics.
Yes, it's identity politics, you know, just to the max.
Defining people with identity.
So, and also, it's pitting groups against each other, particularly in the case of Jews and Arabs.
So, it really neglects, this model curriculum neglects anti-Semitism and, you know, I mean, what is worse than mass murder of a people and the Holocaust in the 20th century?
And it's a really downplay.
And, you know, all the things that have been done to Jews.
And, you know, I'm not saying that Nothing bad has ever happened to Arabs.
Of course, that's not the case.
But it's really put together in a way that causes friction.
So that wasn't really good.
Then the economics was just Marxist, socialist, communist economics.
I mean, it's all about The capitalists taking the surplus value, this is a Marxist technical term of the workers of the proletariat.
This is, and it's the labor theory of value, which, you know, has been out of scientific economics since the 1880s.
I mean, it's not scientific economics, but they're teaching the kids as if this is the reality of economic science.
So the whole thing was bad.
To the ridiculous point where they're claiming that the Arabian Nights is anti-Arab.
So these are folk tales passed down from...
Who's coming up with these?
These are these professors and these K-12 teachers that were in this committee that wrote this.
And, you know, I mean, think of the Arabian Nights.
Think of Aladdin and his lamp and the genie.
Think of the magic carpets.
Think of the evil viziers, which are kind of prime ministers, princesses, all this stuff.
These are Arab stories.
How can Arab stories be anti-Arab?
These people have some kind of, they're kind of strange in the head, so.
So that's really that.
So there was a big, when this was revealed in the middle of last summer, I wrote this, various other people wrote things, including Jewish groups protesting what was being done to them.
And so normally in school reform, things take forever and it's impossible to change anything.
Very difficult.
Don't be despairing.
I'm just saying sometimes it feels like it's a big challenge.
This turned around very quickly.
So within a few weeks the State Department of Education withdrew this Ethnic Studies, Modern Curriculum, and they said they're going to redo it.
So there's some sort of division within their ranks.
The State Board of Education, which is appointed by the Governor and confirmed by the State Senate, they said they were going to completely revamp it.
The state superintendent of education, Tony Thurman, said, no, no, we'll just add something about what's happened to the Jews in history and we'll leave all the rest, basically.
So, and we really dodged a bullet here because the state legislature was about to make this compulsory for graduation, to take this course.
I see.
I see.
And when they saw the controversy, ah, a potato.
So think about it from the standpoint of a legislator.
I want to be stuck with this, right?
I want to answer questions about this.
Think about it from the point of view of Governor Newsom.
He wants to be President of the United States.
He doesn't want to be sucked into this.
So they all step back from this.
Now, let's look into charter schools.
We're talking about public schools at this stage.
In charter schools, Are the only competition, besides the private schools, for average people.
Charter schools are the only competition to the public schools.
Well, there are somewhat inexpensive private schools too.
So if you go to religiously affiliated schools, they might have a cut tuition.
But, you're right.
So charter schools are a kind of public school, but the rule book has been thrown out.
So there's many volumes, many, many volumes.
There's a condensed version of the California Education Code that's like this thick, and there's many volumes.
So in the charter school, that's all thrown out.
Except for a few things, you're not allowed to have racial discrimination, you have to have safety and health, fire, things like that, okay?
So, essentially though, in terms of hiring and how you run things, the school has autonomy on this.
And so, you know, not every charter school works great, but in general, they're an improvement.
Plus, if they're not successful, they can retire from the scene Whereas a bad public school, a low-performing public school, it doesn't go away.
It's not shut down.
So you can shut down, or it can just wither away, a charter school that's not working.
So they're a very advantageous choice for parents.
You have to understand that something bad happened recently.
So there was this bill that passed the state legislature signed by the governor, 1505, AB 1505, and it said, so charter schools have to come into existence and they have to be authorized by somebody.
So it's a local school board, it's the county school board, it's the state board of education, and also they have to renew their charter.
Their charter lasts for a limited number of years.
So this law said If the charter school is duplicating the kind of program that the regular public schools are doing, they can disallow the charter for that.
And that is not really a good thing, because think if you're a parent, you don't want, maybe you don't want some very innovative or arts-centric charter school or something like that.
You just want a regular public school, but one that's working, okay?
So a charter school could be one with a similar Kind of offerings as a regular public school might just do it better.
What's wrong with that?
Many people would view that as a great thing.
And so that was a way that they could...
So generally, of course, these local school boards don't like charter schools.
It's competition, right?
Right, it's competition.
And they're paid on the daily attendance in their schools.
So if this kid is going to another school, that school gets, the charter school gets the daily attendance money.
So they are shy of that.
So this gets into the money thing.
So the other aspect of the law was that if a school district feels it's in financial difficulty, It can say, well, these schools are a financial threat to us.
We disallow it on that basis.
That used to be against the law.
They could not use the fiscal impact, the financial impact of charter schools as a reason to not authorize them.
So one interesting aspect of all this is State Senator John Moorlach, Here in California did an analysis quite recently and he said the fiscal impact, financial impact on local school districts is minimal.
It's so small it's not noticeable.
The real problems they have are their own mismanagement, their own floundering, their High pension costs, they're spending on administrative bloat there, whatever.
Those are where they're spending the money, not having efficient janitorial and gardening services.
There's many things that school districts don't do well.
So anyway, that's kind of the story on charter schools.
Now, with all that we discussed today, if there is one or two advice that you could give parrots, what would you tell them?
Or one advice you could give us?
Right.
Well, I would say the thing is if you have a Complaint.
You should make a complaint through channels, but you might be told, as I personally was told and as many other people I know were told, oh, you're the only person making a complaint, right?
Sort of a standard bureaucratic response.
Don't believe that.
Talk to your friends among the parents, see if other people have this, and then get organized.
Generally, the PTAs are not the vehicle for this.
The PTAs are too tied into the school establishment and the teachers union.
I'm not saying don't bring this to the attention of people in a PTA meeting or something.
I'm just saying organize independently of the PTA to rectify this.
And if it's really serious, we have a law in California called the Parent Revolution Law, and it says you, the parents, can get organized and change a school into a charter school.
And that's been done.
And the schools have improved.
So it's a worthwhile thing.
Bill, thank you.
That was great.
Thank you.
All right.
My pleasure.
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