Susan Pendergrass speaks with Andy Smarick, senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, about Missouri’s education leadership shake-up and what comes next. They discuss how to find the right commissioner of education, why outside reformers tend to succeed where insiders struggle, what the dismantling of the US Department of Education means for state accountability systems, why public complacency about poor academic outcomes persists, and more.
Episode Transcript
Susan Pendergrass (00:00):
Thank you so much, Andy Smarick, for joining once again on the Show-Me Institute Podcast. We love having you on and I appreciate you taking the time. You’re a busy man, so it’s really wonderful to have you back.
Andy Smarick (00:06):
I love being here. It’s a treat. Thank you for having me. I always like talking to you, but also anytime I get to talk about state-level education policy, it’s a treat.
Susan Pendergrass (00:19):
Well, I know that you have experience serving on a couple of state boards, both K-12 and higher ed. Just to bring you up to speed on what’s happening in Missouri: we have a relatively new governor, about a year in, and we had a state board of education where people stayed in expired seats, rubber-stamped decisions, and were very complacent, I feel comfortable saying. Our governor shook up that group and appointed new people who came in and said, what do you mean we don’t have bylaws? It was like, this is bananas. At the same time, the governor issued an executive order requiring letter grades on schools and districts, new school report cards. I don’t know exactly how everything went down, but our Commissioner of Education resigned, our Deputy Commissioner resigned, and our president of the state board of education resigned, all in about one week. So we are now straightening things out and there is a new board president. But this new, relatively new board now has the task of finding a commissioner. The way things have happened in Missouri is we always get a new commissioner from the ranks of the state education agency, maybe from the legislature, always from Missouri. Just a real this-is-how-we’ve-done-it mentality. And we have not been big reformers. No Chiefs for Change in Missouri. Like a lot of states, our reading scores for young kids are tanking, forty percent below basic for third and fourth graders. We have a state accountability system called the Missouri School Improvement Plan in which 516 of our 520 districts are fully accredited and about four are provisionally accredited, none unaccredited. So we have this meaningless accountability system where every district is fully accredited, even St. Louis, which I can’t even go into. So here we are, and I want to know a few things from you. Number one, if you were on the Board of Education in Missouri, how would you go about finding a new commissioner? What would you look for? And then later I want to get into what’s happening at the national level. We are not doing well academically, we have never had a bold reformer in charge, we keep doing the same thing and getting the same result. What would you do if you were in their spot?
Andy Smarick (02:59):
So in education, I’m going to wind up to this answer, so just bear with me for a second. Conservative can mean two different things. One is the traditional conservative view, which is to preserve, to stand athwart big, swift, dramatic, perpetual change. You’re trying to keep things the way they are because there’s a lot of wisdom that has gone into it and people are accustomed to it. In education, there’s also this other right-of-center conservative view, which is we have to be much more open to choice, competition, accountability metrics, and so on. And it seems that Missouri has been one of those very red states that has tended to believe in the first kind of conservatism: protect our traditional school districts, protect the hierarchies we have, protect the tradition of you grow up as a professional, as a teacher, then a superintendent, then maybe go to the state education agency. A lot of people believe that’s the way to do it.
There probably is an ethic among a lot of people to keep it that way. The only way you get out of that is if there’s a recognition among leadership that we can’t continue to preserve the status quo, that we have to change some things. That is a big step for a place that has elevated the idea of preserving for a very long time. If they get to that step, then they have to do the very tough things, which is start to pull out the Jenga pieces of that conservatism. The most important one is having board leadership and having a state superintendent who come from outside the state, and then having a board chair or board president who is not going to just do what the staff of the state education agency says or what the district superintendents say. We saw this work quite well about fifteen or twenty years ago. There was a big movement nationwide in educational reform led at the state level, and a number of states chose out-of-state superintendents and commissioners of education who did a terrific job of shaking things up and advancing a bunch of important proposals. The downside is a lot of them were so brash and so young, and I have to say so cocky, that they made unnecessary waves and kicked a lot of people in the shins in the states where they landed. So my view is a place like Missouri should pick someone from out of state for a state chief, someone with a long track record of success, but someone who isn’t so green as to think he or she knows everything. Someone with enough humility and enough time on task to know what they don’t know, and who can come in and be bold enough to make some changes, but not think that everyone in the state is a dummy who needs to be ignored. That’s how I would think about it. And if you have a board chair and board membership who get all of this, it makes things a whole lot easier. But that might be the hardest part of all. Who is your board president? Who are the board majority going to be? They have to be the ones with the backbone.
Susan Pendergrass (05:57):
Yeah. I feel like we’ve had people come in and say, well, I’m only the commissioner, it’s not my fault that the kids don’t read. And then people say, well, we’re a local control state, so it’s really the local guys’ fault that the kids can’t read. Then the legislators are like, well, who’s supposed to be making sure the kids can read? And technically, kind of they are, but them plus the board, and there’s just fingers pointing every different direction with nobody really taking responsibility. If we had the capacity for hard things, we would not have all of our districts be fully accredited. There’s even pushback on the letter grade idea because folks will say, well, then the teachers in those F schools feel bad and the parents feel bad and the kids who go there feel bad. I’ve seen some states change it to colors or something where nobody feels bad. I’ve also heard folks say it’s racist because a lot of the D and F schools enroll large percentages of students of color. So there are just all of these reasons to resist. It’s going to happen because there’s an executive order, but I feel like we’re going to have a hard time finding somebody who’s willing to do those things.
Andy Smarick (07:17):
Well, your state, like every other state, has a state constitution that makes the state ultimately responsible for education. Your state, like others, has both tradition and some laws that give a number of powers to local districts. The weird thing, and I’ve seen this in a lot of different states, is the state government ends up in a very weird position. The state can get sued and state leaders can get criticized if kids aren’t learning, because the state actually has constitutional authority to make sure kids are learning. But as a matter of practice, and often of state statutes, a lot of this power is delegated to districts. States then try to recapture some of that power through the accreditation system. It’s the way the state can say, okay, districts, you have the power to do these things, but we’re going to hold you accountable for results and we’re going to accredit you or not. And then it turns out it’s virtually impossible to take away the accreditation of these districts because of legislative pushback, and the state typically doesn’t have the capacity to run a district if it does take away accreditation. It just becomes a complete hot mess. That’s why you need state leadership who has some experience but also some backbone to say, this is how we’re going to thread the needle of state authority, state responsibility, local control, and still making sure that kids learn. This is not easy, other states have gone through it, but it isn’t the kind of thing that someone who has lived in Missouri all their life and grown up professionally there can do easily. It’s going to be hard for that person to get out of that box. Having someone from the outside who can start to do some bold things, including hiring smart, tough lawyers, having board leadership who’s going to stick by it. But I just want to emphasize this point: every state I ever talk to begins by saying, well, you know, we’re a local control state, our districts have all the power. Everybody says that. Go back to your state constitution. The state is the one that’s going to be responsible. And if the state has the backbone, it can do a whole lot. But whether it has the backbone is the operative phrase.
Susan Pendergrass (09:41):
Yeah. So about seven years ago we developed our own school report cards with letter grades, called MOSchoolRankings. I’ll just plug it. It was with GPAs, and this year for the first time I just took the GPAs and converted them to letter grades because folks found GPAs tricky. I put up the methodology. I took all the data from our state education agency, DESE, and just tried to make it a map you can zoom in and out on, easier to navigate. And my thinking is you have to do these things, make sure you say how you do it, and then people can argue with you and debate whether it’s right or wrong or good or bad. And many people have. A lot of people don’t like that the average is a C. I’m open to discussing why the average should be anything other than a C, but you have to at some point just make the move and then be confident enough in what you did that you can defend it and change it if people point out flaws. But this is where I think we struggle at DESE. They struggle to just put that out there because they worry about every negative outcome and consequence. And it’s like, yeah, but at some point to not do it is worse than to do it.
Andy Smarick (11:10):
For sure. And I’ve gotten to the point of realizing that if you have been in a system at different ranks for thirty or thirty-five years, all of your friends, your reputation, your pension, your income, everything about your identity is wrapped up with that system. Expecting these folks to suddenly turn the corner and say, you know, we’ve messed up, tens of thousands of kids are not learning right now today in classrooms, and we have to start holding the adults accountable for that, including teachers and principals and local school board members and local superintendents, and we have to be courageous about it. That’s asking a lot of people who are of, by, and for the system. It can be a whole lot easier if you just get someone from the outside with the courage to do it.
Susan Pendergrass (11:54):
Yeah. So can you think of an example of a state that has done this well?
Andy Smarick (12:02):
Definitely during the late No Child Left Behind era and then the Race to the Top era, a number of states found people from outside. Tennessee was famous for this. Arne Duncan ended up going to a couple of different places, including Rhode Island. New Jersey ended up picking Chris Cerf. There was a movement where probably ten or fifteen states did this quite well. My state, Maryland, brought in the superintendent of Mississippi after Mississippi had had so many gains, so she could carry some of those especially reading reforms to our state. This is not uncommon. Texas did something like this for a while. Louisiana became very famous during the John White era for doing this. But in all of these cases it began often with a governor, and then some members of a state legislature who said, we just can’t keep doing things the way we’ve done in the past. We have to do things differently. Once the governor says something like that, he or she can appoint people to the Board of Education who will do things differently, and the legislature, at least his or her party, will start to fall in line, and the media then starts to understand how serious it is. It is hard to do this without the governor leaning forward and giving the blessing to the bureaucracy to do things differently. So the question for you is, is your governor going to spend any political capital on this and say things are messed up and we have to do things differently?
Susan Pendergrass (13:29):
I don’t know. I hope so. But I haven’t seen evidence of that. I suspect, though I could be wrong, that they’re looking more internally than externally. However, I just want to add one wrinkle to this context that we’ve been thinking a lot about at the Show-Me Institute. If you’re following the US Department of Education, I believe you used to work there. Is that right?
Andy Smarick (13:54):
Yes, back in the day.
Susan Pendergrass (13:55):
Last week they moved the Office of Special Education over to the Department of Health and Human Services. They moved the Office of Civil Rights over to the Department of Justice. The building where the Department of Education used to be is now vacated. All those people are over at an old Department of Energy building. It’s a significantly reduced staff. Without touching the Every Student Succeeds Act, they are effectively dismantling most of the structure over there, at a time when the current president said that sending education back to the states was one of his priorities. I’m particularly concerned that at a time when Missouri has this vacuum, we could be looking at the apron strings being cut, states being told to sink or swim from the federal perspective. You don’t have to maintain the accountability systems. The Secretary is encouraging states to submit requests to waive parts of the law. I don’t really know exactly where it’s headed, but that concerns me. Do you think they’re going to let off the gas on mandated accountability systems in exchange for flexibility?
Andy Smarick (15:15):
Such a good question. To begin with just some editorializing: it is astonishing that Congress has allowed this to happen. In general I’m a big fan of decentralizing education power to the states, but that they’ve been able to administratively dismantle a department without Congress doing anything about it is just shocking to me. Even members of the Republican Party twenty years ago, let alone forty or sixty years ago, who jealously guarded the prerogatives of the legislative branch to create departments and fund departments, would have been appalled at this. There would have been unanimous consent to stop this from happening. So that says a lot that Congress has just sort of excused itself from the discussion. It has been remarkable the extent to which that building where we used to work, and the thousands of people there, is just empty, and they are handing off all the tasks to other places. I don’t know how this is legal, but I guess they’re figuring out a way to do it.
Now, the people who are leading this from inside genuinely believe that education will be better off if Uncle Sam isn’t meddling in it so much. That requires a theory of action, or at least a theory, that the reason why things are bad is that Uncle Sam is causing them to be bad, as though if Uncle Sam backs up there’s going to be a sunnier future ahead. Or it requires believing that it is just morally wrong for Uncle Sam to get involved, and whether states sink or swim after he gets out, that’s up to them. That’s a theory, it’s an ideological approach, and they have the right to pursue it. Donald Trump was elected and he gets to hire who he wants to. But then, to your point, it starts to implicate the Every Student Succeeds Act, which still requires the federal government to do some things related to state accountability systems. And if you believe you have the power administratively to undo a cabinet department, I suspect you probably believe you have the power to ignore some federal accountability provisions and just allow states to do what they want. So we’re going to be left in this position of saying, all right, the federal government is getting out of the business of accountability, therefore the states need to do it well. And then anyone who cares about kids learning will ask, okay, are states going to do this well? And so I turn to you as a state leader. Is Missouri going to
Susan Pendergrass (17:23):
Yeah.
Andy Smarick (17:47):
kick butt and take names?
Susan Pendergrass (17:48):
I’m concerned. I mean, No Child Left Behind was difficult and a lot of people didn’t like it, but test scores went up. Strict accountability, test scores went up. As we backed off, the Race to the Top era with waivers, and then Every Student Succeeds, which allowed more waivers, states were able to lower a lot of bars. Some states raised bars, like you mentioned, Mississippi and Louisiana. Some states are doing a great job, especially with early literacy. Others are not. And so Missouri, I think of it like this: you have a college student and you’re paying all their bills. You’re writing the checks, ordering their textbooks, doing all that work. Then one day you say, you know what, instead of that, I’m going to give you $3,000 a month: you pay your rent, your utilities, get your own books. There are going to be kids who step up and do fine. And there are going to be a lot of kids who take that $3,000 and immediately go to Cancun. We know this. It kind of depends on what you’ve done with the kids so far. And I feel like we have lulled the states into a feeling of compliance. If we just tell you how we spend our Title I dollars, fill out this form, and report that our test scores keep going down, no one cares. There’s no stick. They don’t withhold the money. We just say our test scores this year are lower than last year, and they say, good to know, here’s your
Andy Smarick (19:14):
Yep.
Susan Pendergrass (19:22):
check. So if that’s how you were raising your kids so far, why would you expect them to step up and become suddenly responsible?
Andy Smarick (19:31):
Okay, I have to admit that I have learned a hard lesson in my years doing education policy, which is that I was wrong that the political system of its own volition will always push for big action to make sure schools are great. I believed that if we had accountability systems showing that schools were underperforming, there would be a perpetual energy within the public to say we have to fix this, that it was just a matter of making the knowledge available and then everything else would take care of itself. It turns out it just doesn’t work that way. You need leaders at the top to constantly push and say, we are not doing well enough, we have to do dramatic things to make sure kids are going to be better off. Otherwise, No Child Left Behind is in place for a while and then people get sick of it. Or you have some interesting testing regimes and then there’s pushback to that, or just resistance to Uncle Sam in general. And people like the two of us say, but kids aren’t learning anything anymore. We are seeing a cratering of student learning since the peak of No Child Left Behind’s learning gains. This is horrible. Kids just aren’t learning anymore. The Andy of twenty years ago would have assumed the nation would revolt and say, how dare we do this to our schools and our kids, we have to do something differently. Instead, I don’t want to say it’s crickets, but there has not been a major wave of energy to change things again. The only way to do this is for governors or presidents to say this is not good enough and keep pushing. It is the ultimate dog that didn’t bark. The story is why something isn’t happening. If things are so bad in student learning, why is there not a dramatic energy within the public to do things differently? So maybe I look to you. In Missouri, are people just satisfied? Do they just not want the hassle?
Susan Pendergrass (21:28):
Why do you think? Yeah, they are like, we love our schools. All the time: we love our schools. We love, love, love our rural schools. It’s hard, kids show up with a lot of baggage, it’s just hard. But we love our schools. God forbid we have tiny districts getting below fifty kids. We love it. There isn’t an appetite to say, well, thirty-some percent of our rural high schools don’t offer calculus, and we don’t think we need it. It’s like, well, those kids are going to join a world where a lot of other kids had access to these things. It’s just, I don’t know the word. Complacency for sure. And it gets exhausting to continue to talk about it because it feels like
Andy Smarick (22:20):
Yeah. So this is why it can feel that way. And listen, if I were a state superintendent, based on the things I have learned, I would always begin a big reform movement by saying, first, all of the things you just said, but sincerely, because I believe this. I would say I love our public schools. I know how much they do for kids. I know that we love our teachers. I know that these schools are part of the community. I know that they help shape young people in ways beyond reading and math scores. I know that we love to go to these sports events. I know that we love to go to our fifth-grade graduation. This is an important strand in the fabric of our community. We love these schools, we love our teachers, we need to protect them, and we have to do better. What I found in that previous movement of big, dramatic out-of-state actors who came in and took over is they were awesome at the we-have-to-do-better part and absolutely lousy at the we-love-the-schools-and-teachers part. And that just caused a lot of anger. It was toxic in the long run. It is so important to a state to hear the we-love-our-schools message. That’s why they end up picking leaders, board presidents and superintendents who are of the system, who sincerely love their schools and say that. But they’re bad at the second part: we have to do things differently. The key to leadership right now is finding someone who can say both. We love these schools. We love public education in our communities. But Lord, our kids deserve a whole lot better than this. We have to do some things differently. That’s a rare leader.
Susan Pendergrass (24:00):
Yeah. Well, I think that’s a great place to end, because what else can you say? That’s awesome. That’s what we’re looking at. We’re going to find out soon, and not just Missouri. Many states have the same problems. I would love to have you come back again, Andy. We love having you.
Andy Smarick (24:16):
I love getting emails from you or Zach asking me to come on. I’m happy to give my bad opinions on anything.
Susan Pendergrass (24:23):
No, you have such a good, crystallized view of these things, and your experience on state boards is invaluable. I do appreciate it. Thank you for taking the time. I know you’re busy and hopefully you’ll come back soon.
Andy Smarick (24:40):
Whenever you call. Have a great summer.
Produced by Show-Me Opportunity
