American Education: What We Absolutely Can and Should Be Doing

In a pandemic-induced moment when the American education system has been blown into 25 million homes across the country, where do we go from here?

By John B. King, Jr., Margaret Spellings, and John C. White May 4, 2021

Carnegie Reporter Spring 2021 Future of Learning & Work

In a wide-ranging national policy discussion on the current state and future of learning and work, John C. White, former state superintendent of schools in Louisiana and chair of Propel America, interviews John B. King, Jr., former U.S. secretary of education under President Obama and president and CEO of Education Trust, and Margaret Spellings, former U.S. secretary of education under President Bush and president and CEO of Texas 2036. Their conversation addresses how to motivate the national will, focus, and resources to improve preK–16 education and postsecondary pathways in the U.S. to better serve the future of our democracy and economy.

The Era of Local Control

JOHN C. WHITE: You’re both former secretaries of education, but currently leaders of state-specific efforts. Tell us about where the education systems of those states are, broadly speaking, in the pandemic and over the last nine months.

MARGARET SPELLINGS: I’ve been calling this the era of local control, where the states, for good or ill, have had the action on education. We have just had a time of really diminished federal leadership — some people love that, some people hate that. I think John and I both were privileged to serve in administrations where we did believe the federal platform was important.

I want to give a little context. The Texas legislature meets, blessedly, 140 days every two years. So two years ago they enacted a major education reform bill that invested around 10 billion dollars in K–12 education, including a billion dollars for early childhood education. Even in Texas those are big numbers. The bill included reforms around quality teaching and research-based reading instruction and accountability, technology, an extended school year — and these things were just on the eve of being implemented when COVID hit. So a major legislative battle we’ll be fighting this session is hanging onto those resources and the reforms.

How have we fared in COVID? Not terribly well. As John and I have said many times, it has revealed gaps that we knew existed for a very long time and made them worse. In Texas our enrollment is down about 6 percent – that’s about 250,000 students who now are not even enrolled, so we don’t know how they’re doing, let alone how we capture their learning or lack of it. We have early returns that there’s significant learning loss for all students, but certainly for our low-income and minority students. I’m concerned that we’ve asked not too much of our kids, but too little. They are disengaged, disconnected, and it’s not a good scene.

Technology — obviously we’ve expanded learning significantly from where we were. It’s been clumsy and awkward, but we’ve learned a lot. Better than nothing, but we are not where we should be, and without investment our workforce in Texas will not be all it needs to be in future years.

JOHN B. KING, JR.: In many ways the story in Maryland has significant parallels. This has been an incredibly difficult period and an equity disaster. We already had very large disparities pre-COVID between the performance of our Black and Latino students and our white students, disparities based on income, and COVID has exacerbated all of that. It’s the kids in our highest-needs communities that are least likely to have Internet. Their parents are the least likely to work from home so they’re not in a position to support them. Most of our districts have stayed virtual for a significant part of this period, and that will have a toll in terms of lost learning but also in terms of socio-emotional well-being. We are seeing that kids need the relationships with peers and teachers at school, and being without that is very hard on kids across lines of race and income.

Before COVID, our General Assembly passed a major school funding reform, so we have some parallels with Texas. It would have directed significant additional resources to our highest-needs districts and PreK, improved teacher compensation, and created a teacher career-ladder model to strengthen the profession. We were very excited, but COVID hit, and the governor used COVID as the pretense, in my view, to veto it, a funding reform he didn’t support in the first place. My expectation is that the General Assembly will override that veto in the next couple of months.*

The reality now is that funding reform is the floor. We actually need more resources now as we think about how we address learning loss, hopefully with things like high-dosage tutoring and an extended school year. We need more investment in counselors and mental health services.

We’re seeing some transformations in our economy that have made improving education even more urgent. Some jobs went away due to technology over the last decade that just aren’t coming back, and that process has only accelerated due to COVID. We really need a workforce that is ready for information economy jobs and green jobs and renewable energy.

We have a very educated state in Maryland. Upwards of 45 percent of folks have an associate’s degree or better, among the highest in the country. That positions us well, but if we want to continue to grow and be competitive, we’ve got to make sure that folks in the high-needs rural and urban parts of the state get the support they need, not just to get to college but to get through to a meaningful credential.

SPELLINGS: We envy Maryland’s high completion rate since Texas numbers are in the low 30s, and we have some industries that have been particularly strained — the oil and gas industry, the refinery industry. Those carbon-based jobs are in real stress, and they’ll come back only in the short run as we shift to a more carbon-neutral world.

So how do we do a much better job of connecting the supply side — largely undereducated people, especially in demographically changing states like ours — with the demand side, our employer community? We have enjoyed Texas being a magnet for talent from around the country and around the world, but we have done a much less good job of educating our own students. We have to change that.

A Civil Rights Issue

WHITE: One thing that struck me over the last four years is the absence of a sense of collective leadership. To what degree in your states are the leaders — political, business, civic, the community leaders — saying coherently that these are the priorities and we need to move forward? Or is it more like the Washington cacophony where people are still going in a million different directions?

KING: I think there’s a sense that we need to do better and invest more on the career and technical education front. That’s pretty broadly shared across the business community and political leaders. But there isn’t the “hair on fire” feeling of urgency that we should have.

I was thinking this morning about NAEP scores — the National Assessment of Educational Progress scores. Probably 34 percent of our fourth graders are African American, and of those, 49 percent are below basic in reading. That’s a disaster, but we don’t have that feeling of urgency — that we should show up every day, placard in hand, chanting on the steps of the state capitol. But we should. And COVID has made the situation much more dire. I am certain that the next round of NAEP scores in 2022 will show even wider gaps based on race and income, and yet there isn’t the fire about it that there once was. A challenge for the new administration is whether they can bring a sense of national urgency to these issues, like President Bush and President Obama did.

SPELLINGS: In Texas, this big reform bill created some major momentum, but only after 10 years going in the wrong direction. We had gone from 33rd nationally in fourth grade reading to 46th, and that was a wake-up call for the state and leaders in the business community. Happily, they acted. I agree with John — the urgency isn’t there now. That hair-on-fire feeling, we need to reinstate it, because the communities that were instrumental in No Child Left Behind and Race to the Top were the business community and the civil rights community, and they both have drifted for a while. We need to get that band back together around these issues of urgency and predictability.

WHITE: You’ve both acknowledged the positive role that Washington can play in lighting people’s hair on fire. You were there in different roles for two presidents who tried to do that; then you were later in a seat to implement large pieces of those presidents’ agendas. What about the forces around these leaders that shape their thinking? What is the path back to strength, making education a front-page issue versus a back-page issue?

SPELLINGS: I’m optimistic that it can happen. I’m looking at the vote count sheet from No Child Left Behind, which was 87 to 10 in the Senate, thanks to leaders like Judd Gregg and Ted Kennedy, so we can do it. Americans might not agree on much, but I think we all agree that education is the way to create successful lives and communities and a successful country. Using that bully pulpit matters a lot. I will say — probably I shouldn’t — that maybe it was best that this administration did not use the bully pulpit, because I don’t know what that would have been like.

WHITE: The Trump administration.

SPELLINGS: I read the executive order on schools from President Biden and I couldn’t have written it better myself. It was all the things that we absolutely can and should be doing. Convening our best researchers at the Institute 0f Education Sciences on what we’re learning, getting with Health and Human Services on best practices and providing that as guidance to our schools and communities. It’s absolutely the right thing, and I agree with every word and I hope they’ll hurry up.

What Are the Most High-Leverage Things to Do at This Moment?

WHITE: I feel like I’m getting real optimism here! It sounds like you all feel a good band is coming to town, and that the pandemic, as horrible as it has been in so many ways, potentially could dislodge some of the stasis in education policymaking.

SPELLINGS: Absolutely. Our challenge will be building on John’s point about more resources. There’s going to be a lot of money sloshing around and our job is to make sure we don’t squander it. If we had all the money in the world, which we do not have all the money in the world, but plenty, how would we spend it? What are the most high-leverage things to do at this moment? I think it’s a great opportunity and I’m excited about it.

KING: I think that’s exactly right. And for a good example, Governor Haslam in Tennessee launched the Tennessee Tutoring Corps last summer where college students did intensive tutoring with younger students focusing on reading. Then they actually evaluated it. They learned what worked and what didn’t and now they’re going to scale the program, with some tweaks based on what they learned. He and I agreed that if there’s a big federal investment in tutoring, there needs to be a set of guardrails, basing it on evidence-based practices, with an evaluation component to know what works. Too often I think we fight over "do we have money or do we have accountability?" — when we actually need both. This is Margaret’s signature phrase, right? Reform plus resources equals results.

SPELLINGS: Amen!

WHITE: A missing piece is where the capacity exists to take resources and motivation and inspiration from federal regulations and translate it into coherent high-impact planning on the ground. I think you’d be hard-pressed to find many examples of where Cares Act funding was either notably high-impact or transformative, for instance.

SPELLINGS: That’s why it was such a lost opportunity with the previous administration, because you can aggregate and learn from and research those activities on the ground, like the one in Tennessee. Frankly, these things are embodied in Biden’s executive order. Secretary Cardona should immediately gather the best thinkers, the best researchers in mental health, in space usage and technology, and in reading and closing gaps. When you get those experts together you can glean and learn and proliferate, as opposed to having to make it up every day.

WHITE: Agreed. So what happens to the last generation of education reforms when we’re talking about new issues — infrastructure, student loan debt, getting kids back to school, and supporting students in acute states of need because of COVID? For the last 25 years we’ve been talking about other things — accountability and measurement, intervention at the school level, school choice, and market reforms. None of those things are going away, so in a world where we’re turning to a new agenda, what happens to the old agenda?

KING: I’d like to think we could weave them together. One challenge in setting college- and career-ready standards has been helping students catch up who are behind. Now we’re going to have a huge national effort to help students catch up and hopefully accelerate, so that should be an opportunity for some learning that would strengthen our approach to math and all instruction generally.

Some high-performing charters and some district schools did some creative things to navigate COVID and we ought to learn from them. Some schools deployed teachers differently so that, for example, the teacher who’s the superstar presenter of the mini-lesson does that for more kids, which frees up her colleagues to provide intensive support in small groups or to give more feedback on student work. We should learn from that. I think we can blend some of the things we’ve learned over the last 25 years with new things to meet the current challenges.

SPELLINGS: I think there’s a 2.0 version of the issues you raised, John. For example, we’ve all labored around standardized assessment and accountability and transparency, and those things are still important in a virtual world, a tech-based world. It’ll be accelerated by COVID and these investments. How do we embed assessment in tech-based programs so there’s quicker feedback? Parents are more aware now of where their students are in their learning. When you’re sitting with your child on a cell phone, you can understand that they don’t read very well, even though they got a B on their report card. How do we engage parents to be more actively involved in student learning? We’ve seen the importance of connecting with adults and peers, not only for mental health but for deploying personnel in smarter ways. I think that’s a 2.0 version of this old issue.

Another favorite is how are we going to use time? We’ve now blown open and extended the year, extended the day, proliferating high-quality curriculum through technology. Those are the 2.0 issues of those same old bedrock issues — measurement, accountability, high-quality curriculum, and high-quality teachers, but shaped and formed in a more modern way.

How Do We Create a More Muscular Federal Policy around Outcomes?

WHITE: It’s fair to say that No Child Left Behind and its predecessor legislation ushered in an era of standardization. But now the moment has blown our education system into 25 million little homes across the country. Standardization and uniformity are in smithereens. Will we ever get back to standard assessment in the way it was before the pandemic? Should we get back to it?

SPELLINGS: I think a little of both. We absolutely have to get back to assessment, although obviously we’ll have a temporary hiatus on school ratings and all of that — that’s right and proper. But we have seen before what happens when we don’t care enough to find out. When everybody is using their own measurements, sending their own invalid measures, we know who suffers.

I do think we’ll see much more innovation and thousands of different models for use of time, use of people, use of technology. But that’s a winning combination: bedrock, uniform, standardized, valid, reliable assessment coupled with a proliferation of lots of innovation.

KING: I agree. The underlying rationale behind assessment systems remains. But we are still going to be grappling with the fact that too many low-income students and students of color are not getting what they need to access a decent life. Whether people are accountability hawks or in denial about the need, the reality is that we have all these young people who aren’t being equipped with what they need, and as a society we have a moral responsibility to do something about that.

WHITE: Well said. I’m going to pivot now to a different subject, higher education. Is there an emerging higher education reform analogous to the K–12 movement? And will the pending renewal of the Higher Education Act be as cataclysmic, given the greater role the federal government plays in that system?

SPELLINGS: I think a coherent higher education reform agenda is happening in the private sector, in the employer community, and it is amazingly innovative. Whether it’s Amazon training high-skilled tech workers or employers doing it here in Texas, they’re addressing employability and postsecondary credentials, but not necessarily at a flagship university or a private university. We’re seeing an opening of the academy to the idea that you can get postsecondary learning in lots of places. It may or may not lead to a job, and we’re eventually going to do a much better job of knitting together the employer demand side and the worker supply side. A million and a half Texans lost their jobs in COVID and they’re slowly scratching their way back, seeking and finding enhanced skill development in all manner of places. I’m excited about it and it’ll be a motivator for policymakers, because as you know the federal role in education is largely about money and supports and Pell Grant rates and whatnot, and it’s not terribly strategic. I’m excited that this is emerging as a new frontier, and at the state level as well. We just can’t afford to do higher ed like we’ve been doing it.

KING: This is another place where I see a big opportunity for the new administration. President Biden talked during the campaign about doubling the Pell Grants. I think that’s great. But also how do we create a more muscular federal policy around outcomes? Do we find ways to reward the institutions that do the best job serving the highest-need students in getting them to a degree, a meaningful credential, and a good job? Do we exclude from Pell Grant access the institutions that chronically underserve students, where students start but don’t finish, don’t get meaningful credentials, aren’t able to get good jobs? Do we try to make up for the horrible history of underinvestment in our HBCUs? We then have to link that to a vision of how we improve degree completion at the most struggling institutions. Let’s give the resources, yes, and then let’s invest in strategies like better advising and wrapround supports and prerequisite courses and other things that we know will help improve outcomes. That’s a big opportunity. I hope the administration will seize it.

WHITE: You both talked about the civil rights role of the federal government and noted that the federal power in higher education is its checkbook. That checkbook now subsidizes the system that rewards conventional degrees, but credible studies are finding that the use of the bachelor’s degree as a sorting mechanism continues social stratification. It has the effect of reducing upward mobility, of promoting systemic racism and other forms of bias. And yet I don’t see right now a credible response to that civil rights issue from the alternative-credentials movement. What is the civil rights argument in higher education?

KING: There’s the idea of stackable credentials, where you create the opportunity to secure a credential that helps you get a job today, but with credits and transferability to do something different later on. I may take a job as a solar panel installation expert today but in three years, if I want to become a manager, I can use those credits to get that bachelor’s degree, or more. Creating that kind of flexibility could be a way to thread the needle.

The second thing is that the institutions best positioned to help us work through this are the ones we starve of resources. Community colleges can be the lynchpin of a credential system, a pathway for first-gen students and low-income students and students of color and returning adults to get onto a four-year degree path. In most states we spend a ton on the flagship universities where the affluent students go and dramatically less on the community colleges, even though they are the key engines of social mobility. Again, this is an opportunity where the federal government could say “We’re going to give you new money, but you — the state — have to show us you’re going to put resources into your community colleges.”

SPELLINGS: That’s also true of our HBCUs — Historically Black Colleges and Universities — and our comprehensive universities like my alma mater, the University of Houston, and public universities in our central cities. We have our incentives wrong in postsecondary education. We really need to think about what is our objective in producing human capital as a strategic asset for our state and nation and how are we going to invest around that and we have not done that in higher education. We’ve come a lot closer to thinking about our strategy and our plan in K–12, at least we’ve had those discussions. We’ve virtually had none of that in higher education, so it’s time.

WHITE: It seems like another opportunity for leadership from Washington, but also from those who have something to say about what happens in Washington — like the two of you, who have made this such an interesting conversation.

*Indeed, on February 12, 2021, the Blueprint for Maryland’s Future Act become law after the state Senate overrode Governor Hogan’s veto (the House of Delegates had already voted to override the governor’s veto).

John B. King, Jr., former U.S. secretary of education (2016–17), is president and CEO of the Education Trust. Margaret Spellings, former U.S. secretary of education (2005–9), is the president and CEO of Texas 2036. John C. White, former Louisiana state superintendent of education (2012–20), is cofounder and chair of the board of Propel America. This Carnegie Conversation, which was recorded via Zoom on January 22, 2021, has been edited for clarity and length.

TOP (l–r): John B. King, Jr., John C. White, Margaret Spellings (Credit: Illustrations by Alessandra Scandella)