 I'm here today with Andrea Gabor, the Bloomberg Professor of Business Journalism at Baruch College. We're here to talk about her new book, After the Education Wars, How Smart Schools Upend the Business of Reform, published by the New Press. Thanks for joining me. Thank you. Pleasure to be here. I found this book very important and inspiring. Thank you. What I'm most interested in is what inspired you to impart this to society, to create this book. Well, as you know, I was a long-time business writer, management writer, and at the start of the Bloomberg administration, a wonky business magazine asked me to write an article about the New York City Principles Leadership Academy, which had been founded by the Bloomberg administration to help train a new cadre of principles for the small schools that Bloomberg was hoping to open, partly to replace the existing, quote-unquote, failing high schools, large high schools. This was one of a new brand of public-private partnership, and so I was there to see how this was working out. The Principles Leadership Academy was based on General Electric's wanted management training center in Crotonville, New York, which had recently been renamed after Jack Welch, the former CEO. And in fact, the first training session that I was able to attend featured none other than Jack Welch, whose nickname was Neutron Jack, lecturing New York City educators. And he was known as Neutron Jack because he'd had a pension as CEO for cutting any business that wasn't selling off any business that was number one or two in its industry, and he had had a similarly brutal approach to employees. So I was very intrigued by what Neutron Jack was going to teach New York City educators, and perhaps even more importantly, I was intrigued by how those lessons were going to be received. So that sort of started me on this journey, and that's what got me really interested in what does business have to teach educators. And of course, one of the things that became apparent very early on in New York, as I sort of continued to follow this initially in New York, is that New York has an incredibly deep bench of very successful educators going all the way back to the 1970s, Debbie Meyer and the Progressive Small Schools Movement, which was very influential on Bloomberg. She was the first educator to win a MacArthur Award, so an incredibly deep bench. And the Bloomberg administration recognized this and in fact elevated many of the folks from that small schools progressive movement to senior positions in the New York City Department of Education in the Principal's Leadership Academy. But at the end of the day, they always promoted the business guys, even the mediocre business guys above them. So as an example, Principal's Leadership Academy was modeled, as I said, on General Electric, but it was also modeled on a really novel principal training program that had been started in New York City by a visionary educator by the name of Tony Alvarado. And that institute was run by a woman named Sandra Stein. So they bring Sandra Stein into the Leadership Academy, but then they hire mediocre CEO from a failed telecommunications company to be her boss. And that lasts all of about two years until they finally get rid of the business guy and they promote Sandra Stein. But when you looked at New York over and over again, the educators were always overshadowed by the business folks because they didn't trust these admittedly somewhat lefty, oftentimes hippy educators, but very talented educators because the instinct was always to trust the business mindset. You can sense from your awareness of dimming and what you're seeing and hearing starting with the New York episode during the Bloomberg administration. Now in your book, you move around the planet or around the nation, I should say. And what do you find in the various different locations? Are there people practicing what I'll call dimming-like creativity? Are there places being devastated by the authoritarian stranglehold? The progressive small schools movement in New York was really an eye-opener because Debbie Meyer actually formalized the idea of the teacher leader. And these were schools where, in her original view, she didn't want a principal. She just wanted teachers collaborating together. So in that sense it was. Of course, these were small schools, relatively easy to do in those small settings. In many ways, I think one of the most fascinating examples is the Education Reform Act of 1993 in Massachusetts. That actually propelled Massachusetts to the top of every achievement metric in the United States. It put Massachusetts on a par with all those Asian nations that we often feel that were not competitive with. What was so remarkable about Massachusetts was both what the act did, but also the process for achieving it. So the act was based on a three-legged stool, so a lot more funding. They really poured money, especially into underserved communities. There was an accountability piece. And an exit exam that was based on what turned out to be the most sophisticated, well-thought-out curriculum in the country. And a whole other conversation about why the Common Core wasn't based more on the Massachusetts curriculum, but that's sort of a whole other story. Equally important was the fact that this was a bipartisan piece of legislation driven by two Democratic state legislators and a Republican governor, William Weld. And it was very contentious, but they got through it. And there was a process for bringing in the community. So this was not quick and dirty. This took several years to hammer out. You had teachers, parents, community members, business people. The teachers' union were all involved in helping to develop what this reform should look like. And sadly, what's more remarkable than what Massachusetts achieved was the fact that the nation as a whole did not really look at it as a model. I also looked at the Leander district in Texas, which is probably the biggest district you've never heard of and that our viewers have never heard of. It is almost the size of New Orleans. And it is the largest district that I've run across that really adopted Deming's model of collaborative, continuous improvement. Consciously. Consciously. Attributing it to his insults. Absolutely consciously. And almost everything in that district for over 30 years was driven by this idea of collaborative, continuous improvement, you know, group learning, driving fear out of the workplace, building trust. There was a very important moment when a Education Commissioner in Texas, under Ann Richards, basically said to the districts, if there's something getting in the way of you're being able to do a good job, let me know. And we'll give you an exemption. So the academic director of this district decided, you know what, we're going to take him out his word. And they applied for an exemption from the punitive teacher evaluations that were then in place. And they decoupled teacher evaluations from all sorts of other decision making. They got this exemption renewed year after year after year and it became very important to the culture of this district. And the other thing that was really important about it was nothing there was ever mandated. So the district starts out very small, 2,500 kids roughly. Now it's almost the size of New Orleans and as it's grown and as its culture has spread in all sorts of different ways, right? They never mandated that employees go to trainings. They never mandated that they attend the annual fair where teachers come together and showcase the kind of improvement work that they've been doing. It was all driven from the grassroots and, you know, obviously paying attention to who they hired, encouraging people to do different kinds of things, showing them who got promoted, the superintendent of the district, leading every new teacher training effort at the start of each new school year. So there were all of these different complex interwoven cultural methods, right? That the Leander district applied but none of it was ever top down or imposed or required. Very interesting. And I want to pause here and say, I am not a charter school opponent, okay? If you think about what the original animating idea was for charter schools. It was to create a space for experimentation by teachers and by parents. And one of the greatest champions of this idea was none other than Al Shanker, the great teachers union leader, okay? And that idea was hijacked by conservatives who saw a way to undermine one more sort of governmental sphere, in this case, quote, unquote, government schools, right? And as you've seen the proliferation of charter schools, we've also seen a proliferation of interest and money by big philanthropy. Now how do philanthropists measure their return on investment in a charter school? This is where New Orleans really comes in. They measure it by test scores. And often the rankings of the schools which are based on the test scores of the students. So you have this incredibly reductionist approach to education which is driven by this. So everything for years has been focused on ELA test scores and math scores on an ever proliferating array of tests. Remember we have more and more and more tests every year. They're constantly changing. And because of the sheer volume of testing, they're cheap tests. They're dumb tests. They're bubble-in tests. They're awful tests, okay? So you have this real dumbing down in many ways of education. And aren't teacher evaluations and teacher incentives correlated with this? So the teachers are taught to teach the test, not to teach the... The things that you should be learning. Yes, absolutely. So one thing follows the other. And so you've had a situation where the number of states that have stopped testing civics is huge. And not that I'm advocating necessarily the testing of civics. But in today's world, if you don't test it, it doesn't get taught. So civics is getting short shrift. Science in elementary schools is getting short shrift. Forget about the arts, right? Which is an incredibly important engine for creative young minds. So there's been a really pernicious effect here. We have gone from the first transition, the Industrial Revolution in the 1800s, replacing muscles. And then in the service revolution starting in the 1970s, we were replaced what you might call administrative authority, because we could automate certain tasks or have robots painting the car's body or what have you. Now, we're driving all of our students toward the STEM disciplines. At the same time as AI and machine learning are going to replace the, what you might call, value of the STEM disciplines. They will be competing with the robots and that our children need to learn emotional intelligence. We've replaced the muscles, then we replaced the head. And the place we have to migrate to now is the heart. And when I listened to you talking about the administration of all these tests, and so it seems almost like a soulless system. But the deming-like vision that you share with me, that you've seen in Massachusetts, you've seen in Texas and some other places, does what you might call breathe a little hope into the possibilities. Right. Well, you know, when you talk about heart, one of the first things, places where my mind goes, is to those amazing students in Parkland, Florida, who took this devastating event of the mass shooting, and emerged as these crusaders for democracy, these crusaders against gun control. And if you look at the stories about those students, these were kids who had a wonderful drama teacher. These were kids who participated on the debate team. These were kids who were nurtured in their school to be ready for this moment and to seize the moment. You know, by contrast, you know, we referenced New Orleans before. All those folks who tried to rescue New Orleans, the New Orleans school system by taking it over and chartering, I think they had good intentions. But there is a situation where you had, again, outsiders, and big philanthropy coming in, imposing a system on the community. And by the way, one of the things my book does is it goes into great detail on the community-led efforts to establish charter schools that were thwarted by the charter gatekeepers in New Orleans. And what they do instead is they bring in these large national CMOs, Charter Management Organizations, like KIP, or KIP-like schools. And again, nothing against KIP, there's probably a place for KIP in the school universe, right? There are kids who do well in schools like that. But they bring those in and keep in mind that New Orleans actually has a two-tier school system. So for the schools that are non-selective where the vast majority of poor African-American kids go to school, they don't have a lot of choice. Their choice is either KIP or a KIP-like, no excuses, strict discipline school. So here's this model that's supposed to offer choice. There's not a lot of choice. These strict discipline schools might work for some kids, but they don't work for all kids. And we're talking about schools where kids are required to walk down straight red line in silence, eat their lunches in silence, they get demerits if they wear brown socks instead of black socks, or they drop their pencil, or they ask their neighbor for a pass. It's not that far. It's not many steps away from being in prison, is it? No, it's not. No, it's not. I saw teachers at these schools trying to inject some creativity, but these are not places for nurturing creativity or a debate or collaboration. And that was the system that was imposed from above in New Orleans. It's an interesting thing to listen to you that a business reporter, studying comparative business methods, finding Deming over Taylor, and then using that to cast a lens on the education reform, is finding the silver linings and the extreme dysfunction of that business, like that wrong business method. And I hope for our country and for you that you can have a tremendous influence on the business people where you started so that our young people can get out from under this dilemma. Well, thank you for your mouth to God's ears.