Curriculum, Coherence, and Change (with John White)

[music] Welcome to the Report Card with Nat Malcus, the education policy podcast from the American Enterprise Institute. On today's episode, I speak with John White. John White is currently the CEO of Great Mines, the curriculum company behind Eureka Math and Whitten Wisdom, and was previously the Louisiana State Superintendent of Education, Superintendent of the Louisiana Recovery School District, deputy chancellor of the New York City Department of Education, and a Teach for America core member. John is at a long and varied career in education. So I thought I'd invite him on to discuss a range of topics, how the education landscape has changed over the last few decades, innovation in education, school choice, the importance of coherent systems, what we know about curriculum, and more. John White, welcome to the Report Card. Nat, thank you, thanks for having me. So John, you've had a long and varied career. So before we get into what you're doing now at Great Mines, I'd kind of like to ask you about that. That's great. Let's do it. So you were involved with Teach for America very early on in your career. First, as a core member, this is like late 90s? Wait, not like. I mean, first I should say it was far and away the best professional decision I ever made. I had an alternative to go work at a magazine in New York, which was kind of a luring, and this was kind of during the dot com era. And so my colleagues at the University of Virginia were kind of rushing off to Anderson and Goldman and Merrill and Chinner. And I think it completely fulfilled what I wanted to get out of it, which was a kind of hard in my commitment to the country to understand a little bit more of for the country's greatest challenges. How did they actually occur? Where were the systemic issues? And I got both intellectually a greater understanding, but also I think morally and spiritually, a much deeper commitment to it. So, you know, I'm still here 27 years ago. Later, this is my 28th back to school this September. So Teach for America fueled everything I've done in the days since I first left the classroom, since I first went in the classroom. And TFA's function for a lot of people was to sort of get them grounded in the education world. But what did you learn from those early days as a core member? I mean, as you know, as well as anybody, teaching is really, really hard. So I don't want to say that I stepped in and kind of mastered it. But I do think that I learned that teaching is a leadership act and that it is supported by other leadership acts. I worked in a school, my first school, 3,000 kids, and there were 200 faculty and administrative team of 10, a district of 40,000 kids. I mean, it was, it's an organization. It needs leadership. It needs vision. People need clarity on the mission and support. And I think I saw some successes in my school at that. But I also saw structurally and behaviorally a lot of things that could be corrected could be changed. And so it made me want to lead at a systems level. And I really ended my three years in that school wanting to go lead school systems. And in that regard, it, I think, to each America. In me at least, whatever you think of my career, really did achieve its mission. I mean, it's job. Teach America's job is to build the movement and educational inequity. And I signed up lock stock and barrel for that mission. So there was a ton of energy behind TFA back in those days. I mean, it was just like bubbling over. How much of that do you think was generated by TFA itself? And how much was it that TFA sort of served like this gateway function for young people to get involved? When education was pot. Yeah. Well, I think I don't, I don't see it as, I mean, as you might suspect. I don't see it as binary in that way. I think though it is true that Teach America is in a kind of virtuous dialogue with politics and with kind of ideology. And, you know, I'm a proud Gen Xer. I like come out of the late stage Cold War. I saw the Berlin Wall fall. I saw Desert Storm. You know, I saw us achieve gains in racial equality and so on. And I, I had a kind of institutional perspective on change that I don't think is mirrored in today's politics. And so I think that everything Teach America is an institution and it is about solution through public service, advocacy, whatever you want to call it, fighting for civil rights through institutions. You know, it's not a protest movement. It's not an opt out movement. It's not a, it's not a populist movement. And, you know, so I think no question that Teach America is both causal within the limited side of our politics that is education. Teach America is both causal of politics, but, you know, I would say generally education, like many other domestic policy issues is kind of a function of our politics. And in that way, I think Teach America is strong when institutions are seen as vehicles for change. And I think it is harder for Teach America when there is limited faith in the populist, especially on college campuses, that institutions can be a vehicle for change. So the question about how much of a difference did TFA make, you know, is debatable? You could say, I don't think it's debatable. Well, no, I don't mean it's debatable, but how much sort of characterizing how much of a difference is made on the one hand, you could say, well, TFA wasn't what it used to be. It didn't seem to have quite the energy as in those early days. On the other hand, if you look across the sort of constellation of people working in education, and you see a lot of TFA members, how much difference do you think TFA has made over the past couple of decades? Yeah, I mean, look, I think to your point, on a scale basis, you know, it's 75, 70,000 alumni, it is in any, you know, in any given year, several thousand active participants in the program, that's a drop in the bucket relative to the, you know, five million people in the workforce, 50 million kids in the system. But if you think about, you know, what jurisdictions are moving the needle, DC, 20 years of change, all TFA leadership, Louisiana, TFA leadership, Texas, not Mike Morath, but a big TFA contingent on his team, Tennessee, TFA lead. I mean, so at the systems level, it is, it is DC, I mean, it is TFA. And then I think when you look at the charter school world, which has, you know, places like New York or Houston, move the needle so, so much further than the system, that's TFA fuel, doesn't happen without TFA. So I guess I, I think that on one level, yeah, like it's a, it's a service program, not unlike AmeriCorps, it's not, it doesn't have the size of our military services, for example. But as a matter of influence within an industry that has been reticent to change and has, in many ways, actively sought stasis, I don't know another lever that even comes close to TFA in terms of its kind of endogenous potential for change. And I fear greatly for a world where TFA does not continue growing. I'm on the board of TFA, by the way, because I think TFA is our best hope for change at scale through the system. And for the stereotype that you'll hear from some critics, which is like, you know, this is sort of TFA, sort of a flash in the pan, where some kids will come in, but the majority of them move on before too long. That sort of runs right up against the observations you're making that there's, there's a lot of TFA folks who have been in it for the long haul. What's your general response to that sort of criticism? My general response is you, you don't go to the University of Chicago or Yale or the University of California, Berkeley or the University of Texas or whatever. I mean, the premier institutions in the country, you don't go there and say, hey, you have an alternative to go earn, you know, $200,000 right out of school working at Goldman Sachs, or you can come teach in inner city Newark. And you got to sign up for 10 years. Like that doesn't work. And so any, if somebody could figure that out, I'd be all in for a 10 year commitment, but it doesn't work. So, you know, if you want to enlist people who have significant alternatives to accrue greater personal wealth in the service of those who have limited wealth, you can't box them into a super long commitment. It works to have a short commitment. But on the other hand, the good news is, as I said earlier about my own experience, the commitment and the mission is so compelling because when you get in there, what you see is like, you know, being an analyst at Goldman Sachs sucks relative to being a core member at TFA. And it's morally, intellectually and just leadership-wise, invigorating in ways that those experiences are not flat out. So people get hooked. Look, I mean, you can call me whatever you want me. I've been in it for 28 years. This is my 28th year back in the game. And that's all TFA. Never would have happened for TFA. I literally would have been writing for Maxim magazine. I'm not joking. Not joking. Maxim magazine was my other option in New York City. And I can't fathom how consequential it was to go do what I did for myself. For our young listeners, if you're not familiar with Maxim, you should look it up. It's a different thing. Well, maybe not. Maybe not. John, the next part of your career was in New York City. under Joe Klein and Michael Bloomberg. During that period, this is 2008, I think that sort of zone. New York was sort of seen as one of the centers of education reform. Did it feel like that when you were there? - Well, man, it was like, I mean, I know, I love politics, I love government, I love public service. I remember, I grew up in DC. I know a lot of people have been on the hill and been in the administrations and they described kind of the formative, you know, campaigns, the formative days in those lives with the same level of romance and kind of invigorated entrepreneurship that I think back on those days. For I remember, I walked out of the headquarters next to City Hall in Lower Manhattan my first day in 2006, working for Joe Klein and Mike Bloomberg. And just I said, you know, I cannot believe I have gotten to this place, I cannot believe on living this life. The chance to serve at a level that I was serving in a with the need being what it was and in the environment in New York was so high energy with respect to education. Education was the defining issue of Mayor Bloomberg's term. It was the hard one. It was a system of a million kids that had been a bastion of politics and he was trying to run it as a professional organization and to be a part of that and to learn from people like Joel and the Mayor and others was just, it was an experience that I was so lucky to have and I think everybody who worked there at Tweet Court House in Lerman out and felt the same way. - So from what I understand during that time, you were in charge of among other things, managing New York's portfolio strategy. Can you, for those, for the uninitiated? - What's the portfolio strategy? And I'm gonna ask you next, how do that inform your work later on in New Orleans? - Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's funny, it sounds so quaint because in 2007 it felt so radical, you know? It sounds so quaint now because, we have ESAs and we have micro schools and New York. The idea that a school system would view itself explicitly as a monopoly, maybe is today kind of, you don't say it as much out loud and that's a credit to the people who have done the work to get it that way. But back in the day, it was an accepted article of faith that school board ran every single school in a given district. They were the owner, they were the operator, they were the people who hired the principal, they did the transportation, they did the bus thing, they did all of it. And the idea in New York was to kind of use charter schools and to create autonomy for traditional public schools in a way that allowed us not to see ourselves as the owner and operator, but allowed the school in particular charter school, but even a district school to see itself as the operator. And the central organization's job was to evaluate performance and to invoke stringent accountability standards and also to play a support role, a light touch support role. That was a fundamentally different way. I mean, Joel really wanted to flip the hierarchy of the school system on its head so that schools were at the top and the central organization was underneath, not the hierarchical, highly top down way that school systems have operated historically. So in a place like Harlem, which was the big district five, district four, district six in New York City, we instead created a system of independent schools that begot Harlem success, for example, which became success academy, four dozen schools across the city independently operating. Same in Bedford, Stibacen and Crown Heights, Brooklyn, and same in the South Bronx. And really seeing the level of entrepreneurship that that drew on because it just sucked in the talent of New York City. It brought people like me to New York City, back to New York City. It really did achieve what it meant to achieve. And the results of the charter schools in particular as well as the new small high schools in New York, they didn't work as well everywhere else if we talk about that. But you know, is a testament, and I think really was fuel for the charter school movement for a time across the country. New Orleans, where I moved in 2010, was really, or 2011, was really just a kind of further use case for that. It was applying a similar hypothesis at a greater level of saturation and with greater velocity than it was the case in New York. So you're talking about this perspective back in 2007, where it was just very normal to think in monopoly terms. And that was appropriate. And you can look since then and say, man, there's been a ton of change. You mentioned DSAs and there's lots of school choice in general. Charters have become sort of part of the fabric. You still hear lots of people saying, oh, well, it's a monopolistic system and it's dominated by that. What's the appropriate perspective on how much that sort of monolithic entity factor has changed or has not changed? Yeah, I think about this a lot. I think it is, I mean, it's all semantics in a way. I would say it is incremental change quantitatively but significant change philosophically. Meaning there's an openness, in particular, I think post-pandemic and you've written about some similar issues. There is an openness post-pandemic to the idea that the monopoly operator, the school boards, do face a set of legitimate competitive threats, not just kind of notional things you can take to your legislature and cry for more money, but existential threats that are taking market share. It's not just Charters. It's also private schools, publicly subsidized. It's also micro schools and other smaller operators and it's online schools. And I think that's been sort of to good and bad effects in different cases, but I do think that in general, yes, it's true. Today's landscape is much more conscious of markets and competition than was the case 20 years ago. And at the same time, when your state superintendent Louisiana, you don't just sit up there and be like, "Hey, Ten-Saw Parish Louisiana, you got 800 kids, we're now going to invoke our portfolio strategy." I mean, there are some times, many times, maybe even most times, when the most viable path to change runs right through the local public school. And I think you can say those two things at the same time. It's the overall landscape has changed, the philosophical understanding and our relationship to markets and competition has changed. That doesn't mean that we should ignore the fact that quantitatively and practically, pragmatically, oftentimes the route to change goes through the traditional public school. It shouldn't be, and you can't, if you're any good, being a state superintendent in particular, it can't be that you sort of choose one of those two schools that thought you kind of have to run both games at the same time. When we're looking at a demographic cliff that is going to reduce enrollment, in some degree, depending on where you are, on top of the sort of choice factors and the differentiation, one thing that it seems to me, we're still not very good at, is figuring out how to approach closing schools, closing low-performing schools. Do you think that we're very far at all down that learning path when it comes to figuring out how to trim schools that are low enrolled, low-performing, but it's painful to the local community no matter what? I think it's, you're right, first of all. But second of all, I think it's the idea of, well, we got to close 40 schools, we got to close two schools this year as kind of the defining meme for this whole question of managing demographics is a little bit more dramatic and a little bit less technical than what really should be occurred. In truth, school systems should have like any other organization that has physical plans. They should have long-term capital plans, informed by long-term budgets and long-term demographic forecasts that should take into account market parental preferences, geographic locations, transportation patterns, and all of that. A city like New York has always had that, because in New York, real estate is actually so rare. It's not that they have too much of it as they don't have enough of it, although now they're experiencing some of those issues too. And so as a result, you have a fairly sophisticated vacuum in within a city like New York for that kind of planning. It's habitual. Many places, it's not habitual. And now what I think you're seeing is not just a reticence politically, although there is some of that, but it's also just technically the work of figuring out how do you correctly apportion kids, dollars, adults, and facilities is a hard thing to do technically, not just politically. And I think a way to manage all of it is less through, you know, like in companies, you don't want to just wake up one day and be like, hey, sorry everybody, we're laying half the place off. You don't want to wake up one day and be like, hey, we've got one big school board meeting. And one person's vote will decide whether a school gets closed. You want to plan this stuff on a longer term basis. If you can't do that as a school system, you're just consigning yourself to causing a lot of misery for people at a real political headache for yourself. John, one initiative you were strongly associated with in New York City was the Izone, the Izone. - Yeah. What was the eye zone and how do you think it went? - It was a living breathing experiment to, or set of experiments run by the people who run schools to redesign school models, meaning schedules, bell schedules, staffing roles, curricula, around what at the time was the kind of promise of data-driven instruction, algorithms, adaptive curriculum, like what was called school of one. And we had a kind of community of about 100 schools that were engaged in this. Some as radical as breaking down walls within schools and creating large open classrooms where kids would move from station to station, some of them being actually much simpler scheduling reforms, for example. I think that the idea of a district like New York or any district of scale, having a concerted R&D strategy is awesome. And it is so badly missing in our industry at a federal level, at a state level, at a local level. The fact that New York, which has a lot of resources, a portioned, significant percentage of them, to R&D is right. I think that the questions we were asking were probably too dependent on technology that wasn't itself really ready to rise to the challenges that we were describing. And as a result, the most profound reforms were actually ended up being moral school reforms, like reforms in scheduling, reforms in teacher roles, as I said, and not the technology itself, which we had hoped, we had hoped that we would kind of invite commercial players in and that they would build solutions alongside our schools that really moved the needle forward. I don't think that happened as much as some schools made big improvements as part of this kind of community practice in the way they apportioned time and people themselves. But, you know, look, in the grand scheme of things, it was continued into the DeBlasio administration, it didn't make it all the way through. I'd like to see systems like New York and states, apportioned significant percentages of money toward R&Ds around their most pressing research opportunities, and I don't see that enough. So I think it was a good effort in that regard. - Well, that's one of the reasons I bring it up, right? We look now at the edtech offerings, and well, at least they're more advanced, right? If your observation about the IZone was, well, maybe the edtech wasn't ready for this sort of R&D at that point. One could argue, well now everything's AI'd up, so we're ready for those things. My question related to this is, do we have sort of the intentional infrastructure to test and deploy these new systems that seem to be coming out faster? - I mean, I think on the product side, yeah, I mean, in the sense that our companies be they technology companies or companies like great mines that are, I'd say, student learning companies and content creating companies as much as technology creating companies. Yeah, I mean, they're all R&D driven companies, they're intellectual property creating companies, they're working on solving problems for their customers. But I would say that ignores two things. One, there's a critical difference between consumer led, customer led, R&D and product roadmap, that is about helping develop affinity for customer or customers developing affinity, positive customer response, user uptake and so on, that's kind of that classic SAS R&D model versus evidence-based experiences tooling and content for kids. Those are different things. And secondly, there's a reason, therefore, why the latter thing is regulated and the former thing is not. Like Apple can develop a bunch of stuff to put in front of kids or meta or whatever that it doesn't have to run through state curriculum adoptions. But ostensibly at least, the stuff that spends the most time in front of kids goes through in schools, goes through some regulatory apparatus. And I don't want, I don't on the first side, I don't know, I don't think that the generally speaking, we can say that the private sector is deeply driven by the latest research in cognition and applied pedagogy. I think I'd like to say great minds is an exception to that, but I think most companies we can't say that and I think that's a lot of why we have the kind of backlash in the edtech world that we had. But secondly, you can't say that the regulator is right now, which are still basically running some of them at least, the same state listing processes with the same curriculum reviews that they have been for decades. You can't really say that they're serving, and maybe it's not their job too, maybe it is, as an effective consumers of the latest research and applying it to a rigorous regulatory processes that kind of accelerate advances in technology. They're very much laggards rather than leaders in the kind of formation of new products in school. So no, I would say the infrastructure you're describing in spite of many, many good efforts, like the ALI coalition and others are really, is really not there. No. John, this seems pretty important, right? Because if you believe sort of the press reports and sort of the research reports, there's not hundreds, not dozens. There's thousands of edtech offerings that districts have not just available to them, but often cases on the books that they are subscribing to. And so having a sufficient R&D infrastructure not on the production side, but on the consumer side, on the demand side seems pretty essential. And it doesn't seem like the supply of tech-driven solutions or content solutions is going to slow down in the coming years, probably going to amp up. How big of a problem do you think the demand side R&D infrastructure is in the current state? Yeah, and that's, I mean, first of all, I'm going to use that. I mean, that's a very, I think, well put articulation of what it is that we're talking about, the demand side R&D infrastructure. I think it's a massive missed opportunity. I think that it's a misunderstood phenomenon because the kind of, let's call it kind of supplemental product class tends not to a kind of play and a highly regulated context. I mean, they're making products that are sold and the government tends not to understand that world very well. And it's in that kind of space that a lot of the stuff that people are taking issue with is showing up in schools. So I think that's an issue. There's even a, I think a more kind of low-hanging fruit though and fundamental question, which is, it's not just that like shiny AI tutor that's showing up or the, you know, math practice application that your kid's getting in some random intervention block for 25 minutes every Thursday. It's also just like standardized tests. I mean, like those haven't changed really in fundamental ways in a very long time. And the private sector in the K-12 arena is just reacting to what the market is asking for. And in that case, the demand is really coming from the regulators and everything is downstream of that. You know, the states are asking for tests that are very much indexed toward reliability and scale and cost. Those, those three factors. But we've made real advances in our understanding of cognitive science, of curriculum quality, even of teaching and learning. And the tests are not aligning with those advances. Well, that piece of academic infrastructure, the tests is a function of the need to regulate academics in schools at a massive scale. Really, truly, if we're being honest, initiated by the federal government. There is not remotely the product capital, the product development and research capital, in that field that is needed to shift a system of that size and magnitude. And yet, were you to do it? And I've got plenty of thoughts on how. You would see, I think, the fastest academic advances at great scale of any investment that we can make. And so I guess I'd say that it's, yes, it's ed tech, it's supplemental, it's the AI tutor or practice, whatever. And it's the parents at the school board that are frustrated with screen time. But it's even bigger than that. It's that it's the acknowledgement that 830 to 3 is largely infused with products that come from outside of the creation of the school system. And that those are infrastructure that the government requested. Even if it didn't create it, it requested it. And yet, since NCLB, the government's regulatory apparatus and certainly it's A&D efforts have not really changed. And it schools are pretty much therefore living in the same R&D and regulatory product framework as consumers, as you said, demand that they were living with 25 years ago, even as research and technology have advanced hugely. So I would say that creates risks, no doubt about it. Out of control technology, lots of wasted time, bad stuff for kids. But even more than that, I think it just creates massive missed opportunity because the market is a mess. and it's not keeping up with stuff that we know. I don't want to get back to this stuff in a bit, but I also want to touch about your experience in South. You were in New Orleans. You had a short but impactful stance leading the recovery school district in New Orleans. What did you try and do there? Well, after Katrina, there were no people tragically, so there were no kids. There were no kids, so there's no money in the school system. The school board remained. There were no employees in the school system any longer. There were a few functional buildings. And so the state took nine out of 10 schools under its authority and had begun in 2010 when I agreed to come to New Orleans. Something that didn't look that different from some of the things that we were doing in New York, which is to create nonprofit independent charter schools to attract a lot of talent, to hold them accountable, empower them, and let them run. And when I got to New Orleans, that effort was kind of, let's call it a third underway. But what you saw also was an emerging system of schools, not just independent charters like exist in plenty of other places. I mean, there was a clear path to getting to a time when every school was under the umbrella of a high performing charter organization. And to get back to this, that takes a regulatory apparatus at scale too. It has to be systematized. And some of that is political. And some of that is like, you have to not do ridiculous things like admission screens in one school and not in another. So some of it's kind of just limiting amounts of bad behavior. But much more than that, it's about an enduring system that has some values around the decisions that it makes around how kids can get into given schools, around how dollars are allocated, around when there need to be consequences invoked for schools for employees or for kids. And therefore, they have to be standard. So we really set about building the first system of completely fully autonomous non-profit governed schools in America. And really still the only one today. That started with enrollment, which is really an obvious place to start because the flow of children across the system is the greatest expression of your values and is also the greatest liability to your values when kids are left on the street, not able to get into schools for no reason when there are too many of this type of school and not enough of another. The whole system doesn't work. But it goes from there to resource allocation. How much money should a school get for serving a child who is nonverbal and paraplegic? All the way to questions of expulsion. What is the line? You can't have a different line in a hundred schools. You gotta have one line, one process. So I'm really proud looking back on those times because what that begot was the ability to gradually return that system of independent schools to the local school authority without corrupting the values. We built the system and then six or seven years later, we legislated it into the law. And that's what our mission was. The success of the Katrina Recovery efforts have been remarkable. I think in most evaluations, certainly a special circumstance. What was the key plank there? I think there were four. Charter schools as an independent and empowered entity removes politics and bad management from the equation. Second, it attracts massive amounts of talent provided you create the conditions and Katrina certainly did that for surfacing talent from within and recruiting talent from without. Three, charter schools are also a vehicle for high levels of accountability because the schools are on contracts. And fourth, fair resource and creates a conditions for success in ways that are not just selecting the top kids but are choosing the hardest to serve kids. And so you have this kind of virtuous cycle, empowerment and empowered leadership, attracts top talent. It attracts people who want to be accountable, but they want to be accountable with fair resources. New Orleans is the best embodiment of those principles that Joel Klein in New York, Arnie Duncan in Chicago, and really in many regards, the school choice movement generally, although there have been some deviations from this, I think emulated, especially in that kind of race to the top era. But what's amazing about New Orleans, really above all else, is not remarkable miraculous process, but really a steady progress over a period of now more than 20 years. And the progress continued. New Orleans is vastly outpacing the state's rate of growth, the urban, its urban counterparts in Louisiana still today. And largely unchanged as a governing model. So John, you would know about that. You were the Louisiana State Superintendent of Education from 2012 to 2020. That's a long run. What were the main things you tried to accomplish as Chief of Louisiana? Five things. One, what we tried to systematize, chaotic early childhood system into one unified system of Head Start, pre-cindergarten and childcare. In both early childhood and K-12, we had a curriculum-led reform academically, much more than a standards-based reform. And I'm fine to talk about that. That has a great deal to do with why I am where I am. But our view was the curriculum scaled behavioral change in schools, scaled expectations in schools, much more than standards. Third, to professionalize the development of teachers. We were one of the first states to move toward a full year residency for aspiring teacher candidates. Fourth, to diversify paths to the middle class and a livable wage through the restoration of career and technical education integrated through apprenticeships and community colleges. And fourth, to intervene aggressively in instances where there was persistent failure. And there have been about backer vouchers prior to that. And very much then we instituted school choice programs before the USA and the recent wave. We applied the recovery school district and other school systems across the state. And I would just say more than that, looking back on it, we sought to use the authority that NCLB and later ESSA gave us to really name honestly how many schools in Louisiana were struggling. And to assure that those other four pillars are the childhood curriculum quality, prep for teachers and career technical education were applied aggressively in situations where kids were being denied a quality education. And I do think that that piece of what we did can be underappreciated. There are states out there that are naming the minimum number of schools 5% under the federal law as struggling. There were years, we were open naming 40 to 50% of schools in our state. And what that means about the state role is a very, very different thing. The state that's naming 5% of his schools in Native Improvement State, that's naming 40% in Native Improvement. And so that was our fifth pillar. Would you say that the work that you were doing was at sort of the foundational level, were you past the foundation, and were you at repairing things? How did you see the main efforts that you had to do? Yeah, that's a good question. I mean, the theoretical framework for what we did, I would say is this, my background as you've been generous to note was in big cities in New York and New Orleans. And in those places, you ask me about the pillars. It's like talent, talent, talent, and more talent. And we talked earlier about TFA. I mean, you know, no secret, right? Harlem, Betstuy, New Orleans, these are Teach From America infused areas and attracted other challenge from within and without those places. It's not going to be the same in Bunky, Louisiana or Ten-Saw Parish, Louisiana. It's just not. And I had never worked in rural communities. I'd never really even worked in suburban communities. There's not going to be TFA in a Voils Parish Louisiana, at least of any great consequence. There's no Gates Foundation grants to, you know, Lincoln Parish, Louisiana, or whatever. So, um, so what do you do? And our view was that, yeah, at a foundational level, over maybe a longer period of time, but through a balance of coherence, meaning the stuff that teachers are told to do is the stuff they have the tools to do and the incentives to do. At scale, and there aren't that many things at scale, you could achieve steady progress and admit it ain't going to be through Charters, vouchers, and TFA. And so that was kind of our starting point. What scales coherence when it's not talent, infusion, and markets? And our answer really was the product environment is a mess. The tests, the standards, the curriculum, and the interventions and the teacher training, none of them talk to each other. Districts are buying a kind of smorgasbord of this stuff. And if you actually made them talk to each other, you have a hope of teachers knowing what to do, trusting that if they do it, they'll get results, feeling accountable for results, feeling rewarded for results, but also feeling like they have a real path to results. And our perspective was that curriculum provided you had accountability as a baseline condition. Curriculum was the best vehicle for embodying good principles of cognition and pedagogy at scale, a coherent learning environment for 700,000 kids. And I'd call that foundational. I mean, in the context of any leading system around the world, that's foundational. But in the US system, somebody in the government saying, we have a distinct view and almost a mandate to apply high quality curriculum. classroom to classroom is viewed as radical. So foundational in Korea, radical in the US. John, in 2014, the governor wanted to withdraw Louisiana from the Common Court. You pushed back. Was that to maintain the coherence of the shift? Why'd you push back? Yeah, I mean, I have no. I mean, Sanders are a word on a page, right? I mean, nobody should live and die over a given standard. It's more that when you have 70 school systems, 700 or 800,000 kids, 50,000 teachers, you go down the road of putting things in place brick by brick and for a while, just for a while, it's fragile. And if you say which he said, we're going to throw out the tests, we're going to end these standards. You got to go back to the first brick you laid. All that training you had done for teachers on the curriculum, on what would be on the tests, goes out the window. And it's emotional and, you know, some level existential, but even, even if it's beyond that, it's just time wasted. So yeah, my issue wasn't political or ideological with him or with that issue. My issue was much more practical, which is he had commissioned four years of work. And I was. It was going to be over my dead body that I had to go back to the teachers and say, I'm on board for just rolling that work back. No chance. And it was good work. And Louisiana was out ahead on curriculum. And the reason that Louisiana made it through the pandemic, at least with its program intact and its results, you know, up flat to up rather than just plummeting, which is the rest of the country, is that Louisiana teachers have worked for 10 to 15 years on mastering curriculum. They know what to do, whether it's remote or in person. And thanks to my successor, they were, they were in person. But they know what to do. There wasn't a question. There wasn't chaos, like there wasn't so many places. You said a few minutes ago, a lot of the work that you were doing was sort of foundational. And on the other hand, you say, well, with the common core, it's not. It wasn't necessarily my love for the common core. It was the long-term investment in consistency. And so that raises the question that we're going to get to about high-quality curriculum. And that is, what's in the balance of deciding, you know, let's make marginal changes on the curriculum we've got versus, you know what, it's time to overhaul this thing because this curriculum is not strong. I mean, you had Louisiana in a decade-long sort of movement. And you wanted to keep it in that same direction. How do you weigh the differences here when you're thinking curriculum is key, but so is consistency? The way that we struck a balance between consistency and improvement was admitting that states and governments generally shouldn't be in the business, at least not the way they're set up in this country, of making products. The state of Louisiana is not a product organization. So our approach was to commission the private sector, but in ways that were different from the way that most states do it. One, we were going to be much more assertive about what we wanted, both in the features of the curriculum itself as well as in the way these companies serviced the product. We wanted to use our purchasing power and our district purchasing power to drive specific changes in the curriculum and the way that was serviced. And we were very hard on the vendors in that regard. But secondly, this sort of thing where states only choose to regulate curriculum every seven years. I still don't know what the magic of seven years is, but whatever. We just said, we'll take your submission whenever it comes. We'll do it on a rolling basis. So that when your product gets better, we review it. We wanted the products to get better. We didn't want to have just one or two curriculum, unless we wanted every curriculum to be at standard. And when a curriculum wasn't at standard, we said to the vendor, this is how you get it there. And so we didn't just do the once every seven year thing. We did a, a, on a rolling basis. That's why I said earlier on the R&D discussion that states have an enormous role to play in the shaping of the product class and the markets themselves. And, you know, my view was, let's acknowledge the private sector is where those products are going to get developed. But let's use our power assertively and routinely to work with them to get their products up to snuff. In education improvements don't happen overnight. Since you left Louisiana, Louisiana's fourth grade students have made huge gains on NAPE. How much of that progress do you think is attributable to your efforts in Louisiana? And I know it's not a contest, but I want to let your view on it. Well, I'd say I think some, but I don't, I don't totally accept the question, which is I think that what Louisiana and Tennessee in particular, and to an extent Mississippi have been blessed with are two decades of really, really hard work between both public and non-profit private advocates, meaning you had going back to Buddy Roamer 35 years ago in Louisiana and then through Governor Foster, Governor Blanco, Gendel, etc. You had a bipartisan set of state superintendents, governors, state board members that were pretty focused on putting things in place brick by brick. And so, you know, I believe that as much credit as owed to our team when I was there as to Paul Pastor X team before me and to Kate Bromley's team after me. I mean, on one level, I think Kate's team has done a great job on another level. Quite obviously, there were things put in place when Paul is around or Paul predecessor Cecil Picard was around or me that played a strong role in this. And I, you know, I'm ballparking it at 10 to 20 years of the kind of runway you need to see, to see the gains that Tennessee, Louisiana, Mississippi, and DC have seen. So, I think Kate's done a great job. I think our team did a great job. How much, when you hear the Southern Surge talked up in the press and so forth, I don't hear a lot of this. Well, it's decades of sort of balanced steady work. How much do you hear of that? I mean, is this response sort of the key to the Southern Surge that you don't hear that much about? Yes. I think there are two things, two features of it that don't get talked about enough. And I think you're right. That's the one that gets talked about least time, time and political stewardship. Look, if you look at Tennessee, I mean, just look at the caliber of people that Tennessee has had as governor and as state commissioner. They've had many over the last 20 years. These are outstanding political figures. I mean, I had the blessing to be on Phil Brattison's show and Bill Haslum's podcast six months ago. So, I mean, that is incredible. I mean, those two men led that state for 16 years and they were pinpointed on education. And they hired incredible people and made investments in data infrastructure in particular that still exist and remain a pest in that state. And I think in our state too, you know, sometimes in spite of our counterproductive politics, like you alluded to earlier, I think we've had that kind of a pretty good balance of Democrat and Republican stewardship of the system with, I'd say that one notable exception that you described earlier, not describing that analysis to you, but to me. The other thing though that I think they, it's not just time. It's an external presence of organizations pressing on the government. And if you look at Tennessee score, if you look at the Barxdale Institute, if you look at in Louisiana large, so the advocacy organizations, including new schools for New Orleans, new schools for Beton Rouge, you know, there is, it's not just governmental leaders that are making this happen. Those investments over time have been kept, kept the stale, those states on the rails. The last thing I'd say is I just want to acknowledge, I think it is, there is, there are structural advantages to those states. One, there are fewer jurisdictions in those states. And anybody who thinks that's not a factor in governing doesn't understand what it means to govern. We govern 64 parishes. You know, in New Jersey, what do they have? 550? I mean, in New York, what 900 or 800, whatever it is, I mean, it's like, it's just not the same thing. I can call every superintendant in the state and have a conference meeting on a Friday, that week in our offices. You know, I mean, it just, there is a proximity and a level of influence when you have that. And I think in other states, Southern states, that's been used to the advantage. You look at the Jeb Bush years in Florida, for example, they had real influence and they used it locally. So there's a reason why the Southern states have been able to have that level of over time sustained governance. And some of it is about the fragmentation or the coherence versus the coherence of the local context also. When you became superintendent, Louisiana, there was already a voucher program early in your tender, it expanded. And there's a lot of folks who are going to say that program did not work very well or that that outcomes did not work very well. What do you think explains that? And you can feel free to deny the premise. - No, I mean, you know, more than anything, what can we learn from that experience? - Well, I'd say we created the conditions for measuring student learning with the highest degree of comparability and validity possible. And we indexed very much in that way. Our program was oriented around students in low income, struggling schools, being able to move toward a higher quality school. We took that mandate to be great. Let's measure one school against the next. And so, you know, when I see a school, whether it's a public school, a charter public school, or a non-public school that has 10% of its kids on level, that's not a good school. So, I mean, I take it to be. There were a lot of schools in that program that weren't good schools. I mean, no one has ever rebutted that to me. It's like, I look at a score of 10% of the kids are passing the test. And I'm saying, someone didn't do their job this year. It's not about some state policy or whatever, it's that. But, you know, and I know there are a lot of people on the right that were pissed off at me about that. And about that approach to accountability. And it's been relaxed. Ironically, it's relaxed in a way that makes gains or comparative value of schools harder to research. So, it has a sort of double effect. People claim it has a kind of market liberating effect. People can be who they want. It attracts higher performing schools, maybe. But you wouldn't know, 'cause you can't measure them. Now, that all being said, I do think that our approach, somewhat by force of the law and somewhat by choices that administrators like me made, didn't stimulate the market in the way that some of the more market-friendly advocates who have rewritten that law and these laws have wanted. Meaning, now their approach has been to relax requirements and just say, well, you can choose your own test. You know, we're not gonna measure comparably. We're not gonna shut you down all that. I'd like to see there be more thinking and I think it's advanced. I think it's gotten better about supply. And my response always was, you know, the charter sector, I think the charter sector supply strategy has weakened in recent years. But back then, the charter sector had a robust supply strategy, a real pipeline. I did not see at that time an equivalent on the nonprofit side where people were, excuse me, on the non-public side, where school operators were getting the capital that they needed to grow successful operations. And as a result, there was a kind of complaint of like, well, you're over regulating schools and the elite schools don't wanna participate, but I always found that was kind of missing the point. The point in some level was like, well, where's the supply to scale in the first place? Good news is, I think that there is more attention to supply today. Bad news is, I think that there is not much attention paid to earnest, high rigorous, high research school quality in the policy and research community on the right. I'd like to see a little bit more of both. I'm rooting for it. I mean, I really hope that ESAs and vouchers succeed. I hope they succeed in a way that can be validated and researched and not just by consumer sentiment. John, it's time for grade it. I'm gonna give you a quick topic. I want you to give me a quick grade and a brief explanation. All right, here we go. All boys' schools. A plus. And why? Not for every kid, not for every family. I had two reasons. One, I went to one. It had its weaknesses, but it changed my life. I mean, I can't imagine being who I was without the sense of identity, purpose, and focus that that school gave me. And I think being in all boys' school wasn't the only reason it did that. But I think it was a good starting point. And secondly, because I've seen in rare cases of courage where people mostly liberals, by the way, created urban boys' schools that are some of the finest schools I've seen anywhere, just as good as the school that I went to, which was a private school. And that was mostly in New York and Chicago when I worked in those two places. And I think, look, a bad boy school that doesn't teach kids to read is a bad school. So I'm not saying it's a categorical thing, but I think it's a shame that we don't have more. Green time limits in schools. Important policy being done in a way that probably we will regret and modify in a couple of years. And so a grade? - Oh, B minus. A streetcar named Desire. - Movie player or kind of both? - Let's go to the movie. It's most accessible. - Yeah. I mean, Brando can't be beat. It will always be New Orleans's number one kind of pop culture calling card. I'm both compelled and obligated to give it a solid A. - Teacher tenure reform. B plus not transformative, but underappreciated. It creates a decision. If you have to have tenure, it creates a decision that has stakes, that if you focus on its scale, it can have a really positive, cultural and performance effect. And I think it's not transformative, but it can be used well. - Growing up in DC, and this one hits close to home 'cause both my boys were born and raised in DC for most of their childhood, my daughter too. - Yeah. You know, it's funny. I mean, I give it an A plus plus. I think that in today's context, DC is so villainized and it's thought of in places like where I live in Louisiana as this kind of bastion of progressivism. I didn't grow up in that time or feel any influence about. I grew up in a time when DC was a, it was an industry town. There was very little, you know, private equity, tech, wealth in DC. Their politics wasn't as pack and kind of even, you know, high-priced lobbyists consumed. It was a town of lawyers, think tanks, non-profit interests, trade associations and politicians. And as a result, it was a town that was all about work. It really was. It was an industry company town where the company was the federal government. And whatever you think of politics and the establishment and the swamp, it was mostly a town. I experienced it as a kid, as a town of people who had mostly given their life to their fellow citizen. And that, you could be over romanticizing it, but I think as a kid, when that's what you take from it, look, my brother joined the Navy, I went to teach. So if that says something about the way we grew up in DC, then I like to give it a night plus. The Every Student Succeeds Act. It's just a solid C, you know, like, I mean, just like the ultimate C. I mean, there's just no, there is no other grade that could be given to the Every Student Succeeds Act. It's not even, it's not a gentleman's C. It's just a well-earned C. Like, thanks for getting through the class, but not much else. Um, last one, science of reading legislation that keeps popping up across states. Yeah, I mean, look, let me just give props where they do. I think Emily Hanford, the team in Mississippi, Kerry Wright, Kelly Butler, you know, these people, they've done this country of service. But the legislation and the implementation per some of the points we made about states earlier are only as good as it is. You know, like, it's copycat legislation. So states are pretty much putting on paper the same thing. And yet, I'm sure when we look back on this and you and others have researched this 10 years later, one state's gonna do, you know, insanely well and one state's gonna have done next to nothing and probably waste it a lot of time. And I think you see some evidence of that on the ground right now. So you can't really give it an A, because like most state policy stuff, it's probably only as good as the people who are actually doing it and the structures within which they're doing it. That said, massive progress. So I give it a big. - All right, thanks for the grades. The grade at everyone, which I always appreciate. John, no F's, no F's in that mix. - No F's, that's true. We try and pitch right in the middle of the place. - Yeah, all right. John, you're now head of great minds. That's the curriculum cut behind Eureka Math and Witt and Wisdom. What are you all trying to do there? - We have 60 minutes a day with eight million kids and to teach them math and reading. And we are trying to essentially have our eight million kids school system be the highest performing school system in the country. We don't track our growth by some obscure RCT or QED. We track our growth by measuring the state testing outcomes of eight million kids and seeing if they're moving the needle. So far we've got results back from Texas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Arkansas and Florida that look very, very good. This year, those are the five states that have reported so far. By the way, I don't, you know, I mean, if you look at Arkansas's results, which are uncomfortable tests and we'll have to see how they do over a period of time. But Kudos to the governor, Texas has got the accelerator pressed obviously, Louisiana, Tennessee, Mississippi. So I think we feel good about the first results that have come back. year we'll have to see how the rest of the country fares. But that's what we're trying to do. And you said earlier when we were talking about Louisiana, the curriculum was the strand that you were going to push on in Louisiana. Now you're the head of a curriculum company. Just a bit more, why is this the key factor to work on? Well, I think you asked earlier about, you know, is what's fundamental and what's kind of innovative or an accelerant? And I guess I felt when I was confronted with that question of like, what do you do in Tensaw Parish? You know, when TFA is not there, Keps not there, you know, Gates isn't there, whatever, what do you do? It dawned on us like who's talking about what kids are actually learning there? And it made me go back to, you know, Don Hirsch as an example of someone who was clear-eyed about the absence in in really all the policy communities rhetoric or former otherwise, about the substance of schooling is the stuff that kids teach and stuff the teachers teach. And the politicians don't want to talk about it because they don't want to put a thumb on the scale. Now our system is political and it's scared of confronting this issue of, you know, what is it that kids should teach and should not? And then people see, you know, when you go there, it's tough, like it's a tough conversation. And yet the coherence, the thoughtfulness, the level of challenge that kids experience, even just how they spend their time in a given lesson, obviously has massive implications for whether they learn. I mean, how is it that after decades of education reform, we can't be having a conversation in this country about what books kids read or starting that conversation weighs good and bad, but also like, what are they spending their lessons doing? And I think the ed tech stuff is kind of getting at that a little bit, maybe for the first time, which is good. So, you know, curriculum is not an answer to the education problems of this country, but it seems to me to be a necessary ingredient of education progress in this country. And I'm also, you know, in my role, I'm kind of done with doing stuff that doesn't scale and it scales. Like, you know, there's 50 million kids, K 12, most of them have something that looks like a curriculum in most of their day. So, that's a vehicle for change. I'm not going to be able, whatever I'm associated with, train every teacher to guide a mentor, every superintendent, to, you know, pass a policy on tenure for every state, whatever. But what we can do is grow high quality curriculum in a way that gives every kid the poorest kid in this country to the wealthiest kid in this country, a shot at learning high quality math, literature, history, science, and anything else every day. And thus, I'm a big believer in curriculum, even though I believe it's just necessary, not sufficient. I think this sounds like a silly question, but I think it's also an important one. How much do you think we know about what makes curricula good? I don't think we know much about what the practical shape and structure of our curriculum should be, because I think we have basically, in our country, said, well, here are the state standards. A good curriculum covers the state standards to the end degree and has certain features that embody the aspirations of those standards. And the Common Core era that we talked about earlier was kind of the high watermark for that rhetoric. There have been a lot of good is come of that. I don't think it's any coincidence that Tennessee, Mississippi, Louisiana, or this, and DC, or the states that have taken curriculum the most seriously. That's not a coincidence. But on the other hand, there's also been a lot of waste of time, even in the good curriculum implementations and even in the good curricula. My view is there's too much teacher talk. There's too much burden on teachers to prep. There's not enough help for teachers or focus for teachers to focus on the pieces of the lesson where they're most needed, rather than pieces of the lesson that they're just trying to burn through. My view is that students aren't getting enough time to practice their skills over and over and develop fluency and most of the high quality instruction materials. So do I think we know a lot? I think we know a lot. Do I think that the kind of products themselves and the regulators that are approving them are using everything we know? No. No. And I think we are, there's some great curriculum out there and much, much better than there were 15 or 20 years ago at scale. But there is a lot of learning that could be applied to the structure of the products. One good thing though is we have started to listen to some basic pieces of literature. I mean, you look at art products, for example, or others. Don Hirsch was largely ignored for 20, 30 years by the establishment. You look at our products and they build on the principles of knowledge building, memory retrieval, and that's evidence that we can install research within the products. One concern that some have, I have, is that it seems like relatively few curricula get tested in sort of a experimental trial approach. Does that concern you? Or is the burdens of trying that out just too large to make any sort of experimental evaluations? Yeah. Well, I'll say something that I probably won't be popular with some of your colleagues in academia and maybe not mine in curriculum. I don't believe that curriculum is an intervention unto itself because it's really a teacher tool and upset a very diverse student experiences. As a result, I find controlling for the implementation variations almost impossible to conceive of at a scale that is intended to replicate the scale that wish the product operates. What I am encouraging in our company and I would encourage our competitors is to start at a level of correlation where you look at, in our case, the 678 million kids we serve in any given year and say, "Okay, well, let's just start with this. How well did the kids do who use that curriculum on state tests this year over a multi-year period?" And to what degree can you begin to draw correlations between kids, schools, and jurisdictions that are moving forward or moving backward and the curriculum they've chosen? What I find is that the large scale tests or studies show null effects of curricula. My hypothesis there is that's because it's not really an intervention and the implementation variations are too wide. So what companies do is they find ideal conditions within a narrow jurisdiction and they go create an RCT that then they claim, "Well, this is an intervention. We see we got an RCT that has significant effects." But in fact, replicating those conditions at scale is inconceivable also. So I think that just the research vehicles and the sort of social science approach to curriculum, in my view, hasn't worked well in either regard and I'd prefer that we start with just basic correlations and are we seeing growth in the places that use certain products or are we seeing districts stagnate when they use those products? And a very transparent rendering rather than hiding behind niche slow-scale QEDs in our CTs. John, do we know enough about the status of curriculum to know who's using what across the country? I mean, even if you look at these comparisons, it doesn't seem like we could compare, compare curriculum A to B to C because the map seems mostly blank. Yeah, why? I think that's right. States don't, states, some states track it. Louisiana tracks it rigorously. Many states don't. And so you have to resort to kind of proxy tools like GovSpend to figure it out. And you, as a researcher, I suspect, need greater verification that facts or facts. But there's absolutely no reason why there shouldn't be an easy database for you or other researchers to attach to begin to do those macro correlations. I cannot tell you sitting in this seat, how I've been surprised by how much the industry, and I'm not saying the people at great minds or anywhere else, just the industry generally, is focused on inputs rather than on outcomes. And the logic model is, and that includes districts in many cases when they choose a curriculum. The logic model isn't there. Like it should be, this is an input for spending dollars, for spending time, for spending effort. We're hoping to see these outputs, meaning there should be a behavioral change in the way the kids and teachers are spending their time. And over time, that should generate outcomes. That level of kind of linear logic doesn't really exist. And there's no real means of testing it because of what you're saying. There's not a kind of large scale accounting for whether this, whatever you want to think of it, as an intervention or anything else, is working. That's why I'm saying, like I think the starting point for getting the logic model right is just start with the most rudimentary data. Los Alparish and Louisiana uses this curriculum. It has for 10 years. Has it gone up or has it gone down? I mean, that like, that doesn't seem like rocket science to me. So that's where we're doing. That's what we're doing. We're looking at every district, every state. And when it comes out, we release it around across the company. We measure its effects or measure its whether it's going up or going down just a correlation. And we then say, is our multi-million-kid school system improving or not? And I think that ideally would be done by researchers, not by companies. Done. I got a bowl of questions, but I'm running out of time. Last question. How much ceiling is there on the curricular improvement? I mean, are we at the 70th percentile of where curriculum can take us? The 40th? How much room do you think there is in the effort that you're putting your shoulder to? Yeah. Well, let me just, and you can drag in me and if it's something longer than a last minute question. So if you give me one minute, I'll give you my best answer. I think we're rolling the first inning. I think the good news is there's a lot of energy for curriculum and high-quality instruction materials. And that's great. But I think that we haven't nearly gotten as much juice out of the products as we as we can and out of the commitment that schools are making to them to implementation. Why do I think that? Because I think that there is some of what we're doing today with the curriculum in schools that is really the most essential, richest learning for kids. And at the same time, kids are still not getting everything they need. And as I said before, I think both teachers and kids are spending a lot of time doing stuff that they don't need to be doing. And that's extraneous to accelerated learning. So look, do I think we're getting, you know, are we reaching a ceiling on the products that exist today in schools? I don't know if it's a ceiling, but we're certainly trying to ring a lot out of them. It's a lot of effort for incremental improvement. But I think as these products evolve, ideally, you will see the research, drive a sharper use of time for teachers and a sharper use of time for kids and a sharper use of time for machines. And one of the things that's missing in the Edtech discussion today because I think the Edtech industry has bungled this so badly and that we in schools were perhaps naive to some of the early effects is that the technology has kind of showed up without a clearer use case. There are powerful potential use cases, but it shouldn't remotely be to eradicate the equally powerful, more powerful use cases for teachers. So I'm faithful, I'm hopeful that there will be an evolution of products over time that rebalance what it is. We really want teachers and kids to spend their time on and focus on what it is that teachers can do versus what it is that machines can do. And I think we can get a lot out of the out of the more out of the curriculum. We get that balance, right? Last thing I will say though, it all that will not happen if there is not a popular understanding among school system leaders and among companies of what's working and what's not. And right now, all of this product development largely exists kind of behind the curtain and not out in the open for debate around what's actually working to make gains at scale. Research is a too often is a sales enablement tool, not truly a driver of the market. And I think unless that changes, like outcomes becomes the kind of value system that purchasers and creators use when curriculum is developed and bought, then I'm less optimistic. So, you know, I mean, you didn't say this. I'll say it, but the idea of having researchers be able to create a transparent accounting of what's working in curriculum, like at scale, even just correlationally. To me, from a curriculum perspective, that's the best thing that could happen. John White, CEO of Great Minds, thanks for coming on the report card to talk about it. That was awesome. I really appreciate the chance we can do it again. Thanks for listening to the report card with Nat Malkas. And thanks especially to today's guest, John White. I also want to thank Ellie Lucas, my producer who makes this podcast that's it for this episode. I'm Nat Malkas.