Homeroom with Sal & Margaret Spellings - Wednesday, November 3

Hi everyone, welcome to the homeroom live stream. Sal here from Khan Academy. Uh, we have a very exciting guest today, Margaret Spellings, former Secretary of Education of the United States and CEO of Texas 2036.

But before we get to that, I will give my standard announcements. First of all, a reminder that Khan Academy is a not-for-profit organization. We can only exist through philanthropic donations, so if you're in a position to do so, please think about going to khanacademy.org/donate.

I also want to give a special shout-out to several corporations that have stepped up, uh, when they appreciated how many people were leaning on Khan Academy during the COVID crisis and continue to lean on Khan Academy, and that we were already running at a deficit and our costs were going up. So, special thanks to Bank of America, Google.org, AT&T, Fastly, Novartis, and the many other supporters of Khan Academy.

But we still have a gap, especially as we go into 2021, so as much help as you can provide is very much appreciated. I also want to remind everyone that you can get a version of this live stream wherever you get your podcast, Homeroom with Sal, the podcast.

So with that, I'm excited to introduce Secretary Spellings.

Margaret Spellings: Hi Sal, thanks for everything you do.

Sal: No, well thanks, thanks for joining us. Obviously, it’s a day where there's a lot going on in the world, but it looks like the election results are kind of in a paused mode, so maybe it is a good time for us to chat about something else.

Margaret Spellings: Yeah, exactly, about something else.

Sal: So there's a ton to talk about, and I want to encourage everyone watching to put any questions you have for Secretary Spellings or myself on the message boards. We have team members who will surface them, and I'll try to get to as many as possible.

But Margaret, you know there's, I guess, two things I'd love to talk about. Well, first of all, explain to all of us what Texas 2036 is.

Margaret Spellings: 2036 is the bicentennial of Texas, our 200th birthday. We use that kind of as a hook to try to get people to think about the future. What we're trying to do is put what I call the sensible center together to think long-term about the most important issues that confront our state.

And of course, those are education and health, natural resources, infrastructure, the way our government performs, justice and safety issues. We're trying to corral people to focus on the future, to think big, to think long-term, and to use tons and tons of data, the facts, to inform our work.

Sal: And is this like a part of, is it kind of spawned by the government or is it a separate kind of industry?

Margaret Spellings: Not for profit. It's a not-for-profit organization really created by the business community. It's a who's who of business and civic leaders from around our state who want us to get out of the tyranny of the urgent and think long-term about what our state will need.

You know, we know Texas, like California, Nevada, the West where we operate, is big and growing and getting more diverse by the day. We're getting older, we're getting younger, we have a great hand to play with human capital as our number one asset.

But we have to do a lot of things right to make sure that we fulfill them and leverage the possibility that we have with this vast number of talented people we have in our state.

Sal: And what, you know, paint a picture for us. What does Texas 2036 look like if y'all are successful?

Margaret Spellings: Well, we will have invested in education and health. We sadly lead the nation in the number of uninsured adults and children. We have the health outcomes to show for it. We are dead last on things like maternal mortality and diabetes and obesity and things like that when it comes to health indicators.

Where we were once in the mid-30s on our national education report card in reading, we have fallen to the low 40s on the NAEP in reading. And so we have work to do.

And you know it's going to take vigilance and attention by the business community, it's going to take resources, but it's going to take really all of us understanding that these are the priorities for our state and for our nation and we have to attend to them in the short term and over the long haul.

Rome wasn't built in a day.

Sal: Absolutely, and putting your education hat on, which is really, you know, part of Education 2036, and obviously your experiences as Secretary of Education. You know, whoever is the next administration, obviously we’ve had, beyond the healthcare crisis, the economic crisis, we’ve had an education crisis because of distance learning and COVID.

One could argue we already had an education crisis even before COVID. If you were advising whoever is going to be Secretary of Education come January, what would you encourage them to focus on and how to approach it?

Margaret Spellings: Well, one of the things I think is so critical, and you've just said it Sal, is that you know our students have really lost ground. And in some cases, we've lost the kids.

I mean literally our enrollment in Texas is down six percent. Those numbers hold up across the country. We have probably two to four million students who were enrolled last year and aren't this year, mostly in the early grades and pre-K programs and the like.

For those students that are enrolled and learning, we know that it's not as productive as it once was, obviously, with an inability often to meet face-to-face and engage with teachers and peers. And so we really have to confront learning loss. We cannot afford to lose this generation of kids, and they are way behind overall, especially our poor and minority students—those students for whom COVID has revealed really an incredible amount of inequity.

So what I would do if I were advising the next president is to say—and you're tailor-made for this Sal—you know we've got to think about how we’re going to get our students caught up and how we’re going to use tutoring and one-on-one coaching and other interventions, research-based practices to get those kids caught up.

Secondly, I would say we have to have broadband—ubiquitous broadband and devices—everywhere, period. And we need a national plan to do that. Obviously, states are important in those discussions, so those are two things I would do right away.

Sal: And actually, I’d also love you to advise us because, you know, your first point actually touches on both points, but on that first point about ways to fill in folks' gaps and do the necessary remediation so that this year's damage doesn't last. You know, that's what we work on a lot here at Khan Academy, but I'll be very open—you know, it's when I think about interfacing at kind of a governmental level, especially the federal government, it feels very intimidating.

How do you get these two worlds to kind of work together? Do you think there are opportunities there?

Margaret Spellings: I sure do. You know, there are platforms like AmeriCorps and City Year and programs like that that could be built out to engage a workforce, if you will, that could be engaged in this tutoring and coaching.

You know, we know here's the problem: kids have lost ground. And second, we know we need to intervene with them in safe ways. Well, how do we do that? Well, it's going to be one-on-one engagement, often online, sometimes in person, can be in person. We could do that safely potentially.

How do we get them trained and with research-based practices? How do we identify the kids that need help the most? And how do we use platforms like AmeriCorps and others to set sail and join hands on this issue?

You know, I think people—whether they're retired people or university students—people want to help our students catch up.

Sal: So you're kind of imagining a world where AmeriCorps, or maybe even a broader kind of coalition of volunteers, are actually going in there and providing the one-on-one help that a lot of kids are going to arguably always needed but need even more now.

Margaret Spellings: Exactly, and I think we have existing platforms both at the state and federal level that can be deployed to do that. We can pay some of these people—maybe there are some that are volunteers.

What we know for sure is that these individuals will need skills and training at a sophisticated level to help kids get caught up. Obviously, it's easier to do with younger children than if you're trying to help kids get caught up in calculus—you have to know something about calculus.

Sal: No, no—I absolutely. You know it’s interesting because obviously Khan Academy is one layer where people can get practice at their own time and pace and fill in those gaps.

And you know, one idea that your last comment just triggered in my mind is maybe working with a lot of these groups so that they can be kind of a force that engages a lot of these students on platforms like Khan Academy, but also the opportunity to do small group or one-on-one tutoring.

There's a separate not-for-profit that I've just spawned up—it's separate from Khan Academy called Schoolhouse.world—which is focused on how do we pair students for free with live tutoring, so I’d love to talk to you offline about how all of these different pieces can fit together on the digital divide, which is kind of your second big point, which I couldn’t agree with more. What do you think?

Margaret Spellings: Well, first question: why do you think this was not part of, you know, maybe the first few rounds of stimulus? It feels like a no-brainer to me. You know, for 10 or 20 billion dollars out of a trillion or two, you could maybe solve this problem and do you think this—you have hopes that it will happen in the next few rounds of stimulus?

Margaret Spellings: You know, it’s a complicated problem. Every state is different. Their provider community, the private sector community is different in each state, whether they have attacked this through some sort of a central planning process or a hub. That varies all over the country.

So I know that we in Texas are one of just six states that don't have a plan, which limits our ability to draw down federal resources. But when I ask why is that, it’s because we’re big. We have a multitude of providers. We have, you know, the—not the bottom of the Grand Canyon, but the Rio Grande Valley. I mean, very, very remote places.

And then of course what we know for sure—and you know this—is that in urban America this is an affordability issue. It's not that the infrastructure doesn't exist; it's that folks can't afford the hundreds of dollars, often, it is for those high-speed connections.

Sal: And how would you recommend we can solve this? Is this something that does get solved at the federal government level? You put in a stimulus program or something else, or is this more of a state-level issue?

Margaret Spellings: I think it's going to have to be a combination of both. I mean, some federal policies, some freeing up of options for states, but states are fundamentally going to have to attack it.

You know, obviously we need additional resources from the federal government. We in the states cannot print money for these sorts of things like they can, but if we're going to address it quickly, it'll need to be a partnership.

And as we go through this crisis, obviously a lot of sub-optimal things—you know, we've talked about several of them. A lot of kids might fall further behind. They've been disengaged. Do you see any potential silver linings from what we're going through right now or reasons for hope?

Margaret Spellings: Yeah, you know, I used that same phrase and Arne Duncan corrected me the other day and said these are not silver linings, they’re hard lessons, and I agree with that. But I do think there are some takeaways and some learnings from this. One is I think parents have a better understanding of where their students are.

You know, it's one thing to get a report card home in the backpack, and it's a whole other thing to see your child working and struggling and maybe not reading on grade level, or with the needed math skills or whatever. So I think parents have some insights they didn’t before.

Secondly, I think, you know, we've made a little much more progress in technology learning and having our teachers, yes, struggle with it but make progress and understand how we could better maximize this tool.

Third, I think we're learning and seeing that it can be a tool where customization and embedded assessment, progress monitoring can be, you know, standard operating procedure.

So I think there are some things we're also learning that our human capital can be deployed in more efficient, smarter ways. Maybe we need to have the world's best lecturer doing the teaching remotely while, you know, others are doing coaching and one-on-one meetings with parents and families and students and the likes.

So I think we are learning some things; we're seeing a proliferation of innovation and problem-solving around the country. And one thing I do think is missing that I wish we would do is engage our universities to establish a research agenda so that at the end of the day—at the end of this big experiment—we've learned some things about what worked and what didn't.

Sal: I love that last idea because, yeah, there's always—you know, universities are always looking for things to research, and we have a massive experiment going on right now that seems worth studying.

So we're getting a lot of questions in from social media—from YouTube—Park Pal is asking what it's like being Secretary of Education? What do Secretaries of Education do?

Margaret Spellings: Yeah, that's a—I mean I'll just add to that question one question. We imagine, you know, in other countries would call it a Minister of Education. What is the role? How is it special in the United States especially?

Well, you know, it's an important platform. And I think—and you know I’ll leave it to the audience how well it's been maximized in this recent past. But you know, if I were the Secretary of Education, I would be gathering experts from all of these fields—mental health, technology, disease control, space utilization.

I never called anybody from the White House or from the U.S. Department of Education and said I need your help, where they didn’t come running. So I think it can be a convener of expertise, a proliferator of information and practice. It can be a great listening agency as a department as people are struggling with and learning from what happens.

So, to use that bully pulpit in really muscular ways is a big part of the job. Secondly, it can be an advocate for resources both within the administration and in Congress and a translator of what's happening around the country and a solution provider so that Congress can act.

And you know, I think we could do a better job of doing that too, especially on things like broadband. You know, what are the consequences for not having broadband in our schools, both in terms of learning loss, but in terms of health care and a lack of economic connectedness and the like? So it's basically an information proliferator, a listener, and a gatherer of expertise on the policy level.

And then secondly, and importantly, especially in higher education, certainly in K-12 too, it is a distributor of needed resources, especially around issues of equity, Title I schools, financially needy students in higher education and the like.

On that last, on that kind of policy budgetary front, where do you see the biggest levers? You know, if you were advising the next president, where would you try to make sure you see extra investment?

Margaret Spellings: Well, I think, you know, one of the things of course you would expect me to say this as a strong advocate for assessment and measurement and transparency that No Child Left Behind started and that was affirmed by the Every Student Succeeds Act, and that is that we have to—you know, we will not solve issues of equity if we bury our heads in the sand and stop caring enough to find out, as I like to say.

So how do we think about measurement and accountability and testing in this era? What's appropriate? How do we do it? How do we collect data? How do we still have that accountability? You know, we taxpayers are paying a big load for educating our students and yes these are our challenging times but how might we think about those issues going forward?

I'm a big, "What gets measured gets done" kind of person, and I think that's a major issue before policymakers and educators now. And how do we thread that needle? Because it makes tons of sense, you know.

Anytime someone says, you know, it's very popular to beat up standardized assessment, and I always say, would you prefer non-standardized assessment? Would you prefer no assessment? Because you know you need it, right? But yeah, maybe some people would agree with that.

But you know, but it does seem like it's an interesting question of how it is used or how it is perceived. You know, there's a lot of debate right now at the college admissions level around schools going testing optional and maybe out of necessity because of COVID.

But some, you know, the University of California system just like, you know, literally said we will not consider ACTs or SATs. How do you think this is going to evolve, and where do you think it should evolve to?

Margaret Spellings: Well, what we know is that no system is perfect, and as you say, you know a lot of higher ed institutions are test-optional.

Well, in my view, it's just a matter of time before things that are less standardized, less validated, more subjective come into question about fairness, discrimination, and whatnot. So I like to think that, you know, what we need is a full and complete picture of which standardized measurement is a part, and certainly that's true in K-12 education as well where I think we are getting—and this is what technology will bring us—is embedded progress monitoring along the way that gives teachers real-time information so that they can tailor their instruction, they can intervene with students along the way.

One of the things that was a, I guess, a flaw, although you know the industry was where it was, you know back in those days, you know that the teachers didn’t see the value in assessment because it took too long to get any information to them that was useful.

And so I think technology will help us solve those gaps, course-correct, and it'll be better for kids, it'll be better for teachers. And I hope that, you know, this high-stakes notion will die down. You know it's real high stakes for students to lose as much educational ground as they're losing now.

Sal: And explain the term progress monitoring a little bit more. It's a term—for those who are in education it's a term that's very fashionable these days. What does it mean to you?

Margaret Spellings: It means that you're checking in on students in a regular way and course-correcting along the way. So just like you, when you know, when I was in school back in the dark ages, you know you had your weekly spelling check or your weekly pop quiz, or you know, so it's a regular assessment, low-stakes, embedded, often online, that gives teachers and students information about where they are.

Sal: Yeah. The way we imagine it is, as you mentioned, it could be on a paper base, it doesn't need technology, but you know, like on something like Khan Academy, every interaction is not just practice, it's also an assessment.

You can log it and we give the reports to teachers and if they can look at that in real-time, they can make the appropriate interventions and do that type of thing. And to your point, in that type of a world, you don't have to have that, you know, you got one shot at this student and this is going to be your grade for the term depending on how you do.

If you haven't done so well the first go, keep working on it, it's not a big deal.

Margaret Spellings: Exactly, exactly. That's the other thing that I think is going to be a silver lining out of this, is you know we are learning—and we already knew this—but you know we'll come to expect that education is more à la carte.

That some students are going to master something in three months, some it will take 13 months, but that this customization—because of the embedded progress monitoring and because of the use of technology coupled with great educators—will really change this model.

Sal: I hope so. You know, we talked a lot about 2036 from a Texas lens, but I’ll stay indexed on that year since that's a lot of focus of your life. How do you think, especially the education world—you know we talked a little bit about how Texas might be different in 2036, but how do you think education needs to be different or how do you think it will be different if we fast-forward 15 or 16 years?

Margaret Spellings: You know, I think we have to start thinking more seriously about how we use time different from now. You know, the academic year has been blown up. The academic calendar has been blown up.

And so how do we use our time in ways that are more à la carte, my word, and we have things like stackable credentials and badging and proof of mastery along a continuum, and you just put that in your portfolio or your backpack or whatever, so that you're evidencing your learning along the way.

I think one thing that I've seen, and this is certainly happening in higher education and certainly in the employer community, you know brand is starting to matter much less.

You know, the name of the institution on the top of your diploma matters less now than, you know, can you code? Can you think critically? Can you write? Can you, you know, this, that, and the other thing? And I think we in education and in organizations like yourself are going to have to help translate: does this person have a skill? Does this person have this knowledge?

Sal: No, you're absolutely—I mean, I also share that dream that, you know, in the next five, ten, fifteen years, pathways are not based on seat time. There are alternative pathways that are based on competency, and you can kind of cluj together your own experience, and they can directly have pathways to whatever folks want.

You know, just in the remaining time we have, we have a lot of educators watching this. We have a lot of parents, we have a lot of students—any, you know, kind of thoughts that you—any advice you would have for them?

One is they’re trying to navigate their own or their children's education through COVID and then think about the future broadly.

Margaret Spellings: Well, I do think there's no harm, whether you're a policymaker in a state legislature or a mom or dad with a student or a teacher, understanding, you know, how are we aligning our performance with our use of resources?

And what I like to say is we got to put our money where our mouths are. You know, we say it’s important to close the achievement gap and to make sure that all students reach a particular level—that was the whole, you know, genius, if you will, behind No Child Left Behind and having those higher expectations for all of our students.

But we also have to resource that issue like we were real. And so we need to be looking at, well, how do we deploy technology?

How do we deploy teachers? I mean, our very best teachers working in our most challenging settings—do we have the right curriculum, technology supports, interventions to close the achievement gap?

So how do we think about resources coupled with goals and objectives for students and families? And if you haven't, go find out how your school is doing. Obviously, those will be old data points from last school year, but you know this school year we ought to be looking at—not necessarily accountability based on a test—but where are the kids?

You know, how many minutes are they learning a day? You know, what are the outcomes? We have to keep our eye on the ball and care enough to find out, as I like to say, as opposed to kind of this ostrich approach of burying our heads in the sand and hoping for the best.

Sal: Yeah, yeah. Don't be afraid of the information; don't be afraid of the messenger, so to speak.

Exactly. No, well, thank you so much, Margaret. This was—you know, I guess I really enjoyed this because a lot—a lot of what you said resonates very strongly, very, very strongly with me.

But you know, it’s always great, especially in times of crisis like this, to kind of, you know, think about how we could be doing things and how we can come out of this in a better—and better shape than we maybe even entered it.

So thank you so much.

Margaret Spellings: Don’t waste the crisis, as they say.

Sal: Don't waste the crisis. Thank you, thank you for joining us.

Thanks everyone for joining today.

As always, or not always but especially today, thank you. It was a great conversation with Secretary Spellings.

It's always great to talk to national leaders who, you know, I think are really thinking about the future in a way that's going to best serve students and best serve teachers and parents.

And, um, I thank you for joining and, you know, we got to stay tuned. I'm also keeping track of what's going on in the election—that’s the other interesting thing going on in everyone's lives right now—but we will see you next week.

So please join us for the next Homeroom with Sal live stream then.