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Is The Status Public Education A Scandal? Dr. Ed Moore Thinks So · Conversations: Special Guests with Preston Scott

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  For a little more history. It is Thursday, July twenty seventh, show
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  number forty nine, seventy five. I want to be here for five thousand.
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  I don't know about that, and I just I'm trying to I'm trying
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  just to do a normal show, and I think things are conspiring against me
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  in that. But that's what we're going to try to do. Anyway.
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  How you doing, I'm doing great. We're gonna talk about one of your
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  favorite topics, one of our favorite topics. You and I, I think
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  first kind of cross paths on the topic of education. Yes, many many
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  years ago. You formerly the head of the Independent Colleges and Universities of Florida
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  for many many years. Big fan of education. I'm a big fan of
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  being smart. I'm not as big a fan of education as I used to
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  be, And I think you and I might share a lot of the reasons
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  for what's happened. But myths and scandals. How does that intersect with education?
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  Well, because I think it's probably the number one biggest domestic policy scandal
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  in America. Now explain Well, first of all, there's hardly any noise
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  at all out of Washington, d C. And you don't hear any of
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  the people running for president talking about it. You know, we tend to
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  look at education oddly. It's only focused locally all the time. It's a
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  big issue locally. You've talked, I think in your first hour this morning,
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  you were talking about the local school board and Billy Jean king Buck and
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  all. We talk about the nuances and the minutia of education, but we
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  really don't talk about performance per se. Florida's done a better job than most
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  states, and then a lot of the states, starting back with Jeb Bush
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  and reforms and changes in the recent legislature. Could you argue catching up,
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  trying to catch up, trying to catch up. But you can either catch
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  up by you're getting better and you're you're starting to pass people, or you
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  can catch up by other states failing. But Florida's effort was to try to
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  catch up a little, and we have. But sadly the bars low.
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  The bar is very low. And the recent NAPE scores and AAEP National Assessment
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  of Education Progress tests that are given to fourth graders and eighth graders were atrocious,
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  frankly, And you can look at universally across the board, whether it's
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  on the math end or the reading end of these kinds of tests. When
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  you talk about people that are advanced and achieving well, and they scom basically
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  in four categories that below basic, basic, you know, proficient, and
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  that's usually the largest category, meaning you're you're doing okay, you're just barely
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  making the scores or advanced. Advanced numbers tend to be somewhere between six nine
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  percent state to state. I mean, it's not like that chunk ever,
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  really gets much better. Proficient tends to be the one that shrinks a little,
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  Basic grows a little, and then the below basic that students just aren't
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  getting it at all, Well, that number just kind of keeps staying steady
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  or growing over time. And if you go back and say to two thousand
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  and compare two thousand scores to the twenty nineteen or twenty twenty two scores,
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  we're getting worse. And a big part of it was the pandemic kind a
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  huge effect on public schools in student learning had dropped a lot, and we
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  can get caught up in allowing that to be an excuse, going, well,
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  you know, students weren't in the classroom, YadA YadA, or did
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  it rip a band aid off to me, it did. Yeah, it
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  showed really that we're not performing very well. And the people that are in
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  the public policy positions nationally now they throw a lot of money at education,
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  but then they don't pay a lot of attention to it, and nobody's really
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  looking to say, Okay, who performs well, why do they perform well?
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  What can we do better? And that's not happening. It's just moving
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  on, moving on, churning. You know. I would say, we're
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  just churning students through the process and we're failing. And I'll look at the
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  minute, I'll look at some international scores as another exam that compares us to
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  other countries, and we're doing really poorly. Okay, we'll just be depressed
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  this morning, it's all right. It is a scandal doctor Ed Moore with
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  us this morning. We're talking more history on the Morning Show with Preston Scott
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  doctor Ed Moore with me, and we're talking about another scandal and it's I
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  don't know, is it it's sort of it's it's rooted in history, but
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  it continues today. Yes, well is the education history should tell us where
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  we're headed as well. And when you start like taking a snapshot at a
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  moment in time. The snapshot can be really nice and flowers and butterflies as
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  such, or snapshot can be dark and wilted flowers butterflies. And I'm not
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  so sure you know what we're doing in education is not wilted flowers at this
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  point. Well, I think I think we both are sure that that's exactly
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  where we are. You're gonna give a little perspective here. Um, you're
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  gonna give some numbers, but some context for them. Yeah, they're the
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  NAPE exam. What they do there is their number of jurisdictions. So I'm
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  going to give you more than fifty. There's more than fifty states. They
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  separate like the Department of Department of Defense. I'm not Barack. I just
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  jokeder them. I said, mails are gonna come in there and say,
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  what is he? Barack Obama seven states or something and DC and whatever.
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  But if you look at eighth grade math, for example, on the re
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  since scores, no states improved, two had no change at all in fifty
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  one jurisdictions decreased, and what subject that eighth grade math exam? My gosh,
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  okay, math's pretty critical. I would say fourth grade math zero improved,
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  ten were flatlined. Basically, so this is a nationwide snapshot. Yes
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  it is, okay, and then forty three states decreased. So if you're
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  looking at it as a social scientist and trying to figure out, okay,
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  what's going on here? Who does better? And the thing that struck me
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  when I really started looking at the base details is our states are very diverse.
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  They're very different urban states rural states. It's just a jumbled mix of
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  who does well and who does poorly. And you can't pinpoint and go okay,
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  urban state A did fantastic, and then Royal state B did fantastic,
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  and the others didn't know. It's all blended together, you know, West
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  Virginia with Illinois and uh, Georgia with New York. I mean that you
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  get these similarities of poor performance. All circles on the Venn diagram intersect.
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  Oh yeah, it's just one big circle. Yep. And then you if
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  you look at it based on on the characteristics of the student taking the tests,
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  white score about twelve point better than the the the mean score black score
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  thirteen points less, Hispanics five points less, Asians plus twenty two. So
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  when you start carrying that over to like the Harvard lawsuit and North Carolina in
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  lawsuit with Supreme Court. You know, Asians in math and reading in these
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  standard tests tend to do better. They don't all do better, but as
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  a collective they do better. So when you're if you're diversity blind in your
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  admission scores, it's going to skew towards the students that perform better. We
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  tend to say, oh, that's horrible, instead of saying, why are
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  they scoring better? What's cultural going on? What's going on there that enables
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  one group to score so much better than the others? H Math and science,
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  for example, we've pushed women for since I was a kid, trying
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  to get more women into into the maths and sciences. Boys on these tests
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  still score six state points higher in math than girls. Do boys score higher?
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  Yeah, in in the math scores? Interesting, why is that?
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  After all this time? Why is that? Is anybody really looking at that
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  and trying to see H? And then what ends up occurring, and this
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  is where I come in. With the higher d end of things U,
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  S, A, T. And ACT exams, you start to look at
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  those, what's occurring is you know, people aren't scoring so well. So
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  colleges and universities their responses, we don't require that anymore. About two thirds
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  of them don't, as opposed to just dumbing down the standards, which is
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  kind of what we've been doing elsewhere a little bit. Yeah, but we
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  just won't require well, I'm sorry, you know, it's the only one,
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  the criteria for admission, a standardized test that everybody takes. Its exactly
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  the same as about the only evenly based one. It's not gonna there's no
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  bias in that at all. It's just a test. But what we're gonna
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  do, no, we want to accomplish all these other things instead of worrying
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  about the quality of the output and the quality of the students that are going
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  there and how to make everybody accessible for them. We're just going to know,
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  we'll remove that bar. We don't lower the bar, we just take
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  the bar away. That's a scandal, and boy is that going to backfire
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  on us. The long term implications of this are scary. Doctor add more
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  with us One more segments still to come, a little more history on the
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  Morning Show with Preston Scott. Final segment of Your Doctor, Ed Moore A
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  little more history. The education scandal plaguing America. We're already seeing those also.
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  Yeah, now, and the Florida legislator has been good in responding to
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  this. They passed that recent build this past session. Well, they're trying
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  kind of a universal voucher that yep, yep, you can move and you
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  will get money from the state wherever you're going to educate your kids. But
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  there's some bugs in that that will work out, but it's going to have
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  a tremendous effect. Gun. The elephant in the room to me, and
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  I've been saying this for years, and I come from a private school background
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  with K twelve, is you gotta pay teachers if you want quality in the
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  classroom. Yeah, yeah, and accountability in the classroom. You need accountability,
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  always need accountability. But there are school systems. Brower just dealt with
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  it on a five to four vote, I think where one board member was
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  trying to get teachers paid at eighty thousand dollars level. You know, and
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  money doesn't make you know, it's not going to change things. But what
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  it will change is we have a shortage of teachers that's going to get worse.
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  Yes, And the only thing you can do there is to try to
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  elevate what you can make being a teacher, to track people of quality into
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  the education profession, which is what we should be doing as a matter of
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  public policy. I mentioned earlier on the PISA exam. That's the international exam
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  that not at all students take. It's very selective states take it. But
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  it's a seventy nine or eighty countries give this exam. Just as a point
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  of reference. The United States came in thirtieth in math eighth and reading in
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  eleventh, and science thirtieth. In math is scary. You know, it's
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  a it's a global marketplace. We're competing, but we're so bad in math.
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  We don't know it. Yeah, it's hard to know. We can't
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  calculate that. I guess every of the stat we can't extrapolate that into we're
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  losing the battle. Yeah, but then I check a look at real quick.
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  Our time is so short. But the total expenditure is what we spend
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  in the United States for mediocrity at best. I mean, there are some
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  exceptions, and you know, I hate to be that broadly general, but
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  we have to. Yeah, six hundred sixty six six number kind of always
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  scares me. But six one hundred and sixty six point nine billion billion with
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  a B dollars and it spent on public education in the United States, which
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  is about thirteen thousand, one hundred and eighty five dollars a pupil on the
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  calculation from education statistics, there's no correlation between states spending per student and performance.
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  You can find high high spending states per people. They are spending twenty
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  something thousand dollars per people that are doing terribly get no outcome. And yeah,
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  and you know when you have urban districts that nobody performs, that nobody
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  performs a great Yeah, it's kind of scary. But they're spending a lot
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  of money. We mentioned there's a critical growing need for teachers and that's going
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  to stay here, and yeah, it's not getting we must do something about
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  that. But Florida's forty second in total spending and we're nowhere near forty second
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  when we do the rankings. We're all over the all over the place federal
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  government money and it's not a total is nine thousand, nine hundred. We
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  spend about ten thousand dollars a student in Florida County. Federal, state,
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  and local money. There are states, as I mentioned in localities that spent
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  like Washington, DC spends over twenty thousand dollars to no performance whatsoever. We
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  have to start looking at those kind of things. Then when you look at
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  post secondary, Florida spends about eighteen or nineteen thousand dollars per student. Then
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  post secondary, which is colleges and universities, tuition is seventeen percent of what
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  gets spent per student in Florida. Some states it's much higher. We've had
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  since Rick Scott came in and a governors that say, well, we have
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  to hold the line on tuition, and so we're keeping that flat. But
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  it costs the taxpayers for that to happen. So what there's pressure to spend
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  more from the public treasury rather than out of the student's pocket. I mean,
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  somebody's paying the bill one way or the other. So if Preston Scott,
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  the student isn't paying it and more taxpayer is going to end up paying
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  it. Yep, there's a balance there. There's a need for keeping it
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  low to make access better for more students and create a pathway for excellence if
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  you can, or add to success or all those nice little phrases. But
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  it's also part of that whole public policy equation of where we're spending the money,
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  who's spending it, and what's the performance my analysis. You know,
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  this is quick and thirty minutes of airtime, but we're not doing a real
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  good job nationally. Florida has improved, Florida's getting better. That's nice to
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  see. But on the whole, everybody that's in the wagon is not.
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  We don't have the silver bullet to deal with this yet, no, not
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  at all, and no political inclination to really dig into it. I mean,
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  it's just not there. You want to get the Mama bears and the
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  suburban whatever soccer moms or whatever you want to call, if you want to
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  get them behind you on the public policy issue, start talking about education.
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  We're not doing that. Good to see good being doctor ed Moore with It's
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  a little more history on the Morning Show with Preston Sky.