In this special episode of WonkyFolk, Andy Rotherham and Jed Wallace sit down with education policy legend Dr. Mike Kirst—a man whose career spans six decades of shaping education in California and beyond.

From working in the Office of Management and Budget under the Great Society programs to chairing the California State Board of Education under two governors, Kirst shares an insider’s view of how education policy gets made—and remade. He walks us through his incredible journey from Harvard to Washington to Stanford, including his role in designing Title I, navigating political upheaval, and helping reinvent California’s education finance system.

You’ll hear:

• How Mike stumbled into K–12 education policymaking—and never left
• Behind-the-scenes stories from the federal and state levels
• Reflections on the evolution of school finance reform
• Thoughts on what California’s education system got right—and still needs to fix

This is a masterclass in education policy, history, and political resilience from someone who’s truly seen it all.

Show Notes:

• Andy on the ESA division question: https://eduwonk.substack.com/p/will-the-trump-administration-go
• Overview of California's "Local Control Funding Formula" (LCFF) enacted in 2013-14: https://www.cde.ca.gov/fg/aa/lc/lcffoverview.asp
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Hey, Andy.

Hey, Jed. How are you?

I'm doing well. You know, we're really going legit. We had Macke Raymond last time, and we got Mike Kirst with us now.

You would think that, like, we know what we're doing here or something.

Yeah, no, it's good. It's good.

I feel like. Like people are starting to wonder, is this like the California Education podcast or not? Because we're getting all these rock stars from California.

But we're really excited to have Mike. This is just. I've been looking forward to this one.

For a while, so. Yeah, it's great to have you here, Mike. Well, before it gets started, we will remind, this is Andy Rotherham and Jed Wallace, and this is WonkyFolk.

And yes, it helps us if you guys sign up and give us likes and all those kinds of things. So thank you for all of that. And meanwhile, Mike, just so great to have you here. You know, can you get us started with your own bio?

I don't even want to take a run at it. And before we got on, you were talking about these things from, early on in your career that I knew nothing about.

And I consider myself kind of, a Mike Kirst aficionado. So can you, just equate our listeners with, what your background has been and just the depth that you bring to all these issues?

Right. Well, I'm in my sixth decade of education policy and education implementation work, and I got started very young.

I came right out of Harvard with a PhD in political economy. The education building was next to us, but I was what was now called the Kennedy School of Public Policy. And I never walked in a door.

And so how am I here? So I was going and wanted to work in Washington, and it was really hot in those days, the New Frontier and the Great Society.

And so I applied to the Office of Management and Budget, and they as a premier organization, they said they had openings in veterans, water pollution, and education. K12 education.

And I said, out of that lot, I'll take K12 education. And that's how I'm on your interview today. So I worked with the Title 1 program and John Gardner's Task Force on Education and worked at OMB.

It was terrific. I wanted to get closer to the field of education.

So I transferred through the Civil service into the Office of Education and now Department of Education and worked there and was the first guy hired to administer Title 1 and then worked for the U.S. senate, where I was staff director of the U.S. senate Subcommittee on Employment, Manpower and Poverty. Everything's going great. And I worked for a Senator Clark of Pennsylvania, where my home is. And so he lost in a shocking election and Humphrey lost.

And I was fired and had six weeks to get out of my office. Two children. I had this feeler from Stanford University to be a professor, something I never ever thought of.

I thought, oh, what the hell, I'll go out there and the Democrats will be back. And so I came out to be professor of education and taught school finance and federal and state policy and so on.

So to wrap up on the background, in 74 I was introduced by a friend at the business school to an up and coming politician named Jerry Brown. And we got along great. He's Jesuitical. If you say A, he says Z. If you say Z, he'd say A.

So I really liked this sparring and was known as his sparring partner for the rest. So there I was with him at 35 main president of this California State Board of Education.

Forty years later, we're in our final, his final term and it's 40 years later and I'm president of the State Board of Education. So that's the background. It's very deep in federal and state.

And as we get to it, my lack of, I think working at a local school district level will show up in my comments and my reflections on where I want to go in my career now and have been working on more recently.

All right, fantastic. So you were with Jerry Brown in his Linda Ronstadt years and then you were also with him in his charter school years. Is that an ad right?

Yes, I was his chief advisor in education. I also worked with him when I was mayor in Oakland and we tried to take over the schools, but as mayor.

So yes, all those years we've been working together and we knew so much more when we came back and then we did when we left in 82.

Yeah.

His evolution as a politician I thought was really fascinating and I'm eager to hear as you talk about your evolution as you think about things differently, just with more experience. As. As well. He was very interesting to watch, as were you. And you coming back and doing the state Board again was a really cool thing.

It was a really cool thing to see. So help, like, listen, what are you working on now?

Let's start and we can sort of start with some of the national stuff and then, and then we can dig down to California, which Jed, obviously and you know yeah, than I do.

Well, I'm, I'm working on two things. One is to push agendas that I came to after writing a paper for the Learning Policy Institute called Standards Based Reform.

Looking back to look forward.

And I tried to assess what we did in California in the eight years with Brown and what I did and look at what was successful and what wasn't so successful and what I would do over again. So here you are with all my experience, and you're still learning. And so I, James Carville said, it's the economy stupid.

And my conclusion was it's a teacher stupid.

And we've never, we've never had a policy that really enabled teachers to implement higher levels of curriculum and instruction like science for reading.

I was a big supporter of the Common Core and we really implemented that with vigor and money, but we never really prepared our teaching workforce and our principals to carry that out. And so that's one of the themes of the discussion.

And then the one thing, and the other thing I'm working on is reexamining the relationship between K12 education and post secondary education and expanding our vision of that. So just a hint of coming attractions. A third of our workforce works on, works through either a license or a certificate or a credential.

A third of it. Who knows anything about that?

And so I'm looking at ages 16 to 25 in all forms of what I call educational attainment, and that we have much more educational attainment.

When you look at the combination of K12 and higher ed, and you look broadly beyond just college completion and associate degree completion, both of which percentages are up. But that's the second thing I'm working on, so I'll stop there.

Jed, where do you want to start? There's a lot there. We could talk about teachers. Obviously, the curriculum stands. The Common Core piece.

Yeah, I would start with that.

There's a lot. Where do you want to start, Judd?

Well, I'm curious just about this, this teacher, this teacher support work and the idea of what do you call micro credentials or badges? And I will say, if you guys haven't been to a harmony school in Texas, I really, really encourage you to go to Harmony.

They just, they got 45 thousand kids and they're just doing incredibly well.

But one of the hallmarks of the organization is that outside every classroom, the teachers proudly demonstrate the badges that they've earned over time. And it's like some of them have 50 60 80 badges there. And the kids also know what badges the teachers have.

I don't know some of them. Mike, you were saying in your, in your piece, if we get it to be too focused on individual areas of interest. Not that.

Not that great from, from your standpoint, in terms of what you're trying to do.

But if you can, if you can deconstruct the individual practices, the individual expertises we're wanting the teachers to get good at, perhaps this is a whole new way going forward. So I really thought that was an interesting idea.

Well, yeah, Let me start from mea culpa. Perception of what I think we did not do and I did not do in my final eight years was we had no strategy. Big strategy to let's take the Common Core.

California adopted the Common Core. We never changed it, and we were wholeheartedly behind it. So we had clear standards.

We have one of the better assessments, I think, in Smarter Balance, for example, state assessments. But we never developed and never had a vision of how would you enable the teachers to really teach the new Common Core mathematics and reading?

And I'm talking about it full scale. We had a lot of help in a lot of what I call islands and deserts.

The islands of success were where we had grants from the Gates foundation and state money to really prepare the teachers to teach it. But, we're huge. We have 350 thousand teachers. I should have been reaching, two, three, four of those. So to do that.

So my big conclusion was that, we as a country have never tackled the challenge of professional development. And I think science of reading will, go the same way, and California's new mathematics projects will go the same way.

So you've got to get a strategy. Now, the specific thing to demonstrate this I'm pushing now is why do we end? Almost all states have.

All states have teacher certification operations, okay. And they have standards. And it's been getting better over time. Certainly in California, ours has improved. We have.

They have to actually demonstrate teaching and so on exit exam is much stronger. Why do states stop being responsible for professional learning and professional development after they're certified? Why?

You're assuming that they're inoculated or something. You've got these two shots and that's it. Unless.

So my recommendation is that, for example, in California, we have a thing called the California Teacher Commission. Most states do it through the department.

I've actually, rewritten that law that says the state is responsible for the full continuum, the life course of teaching.

And just like Credentials, you need to have a policy that states what they need to know and be able to do if you're going to implement science of reading and you got to do it through all the grades.

So I just saw a big RAND study where there is some professional learning, but it's K2 and so even Mississippi, which I have links to in all my work to their professional learning part. They, they didn't really focus on the secondary schools nearly as much as the elementary.

So it's gotta be big, it's gotta be deep and you've got to have some state policy and leadership there and then thinking about it, the biggest hang up in this recommendation is not only course of politics and what will the unions think and so on, but how would you really motivate the teachers to do this? I mean, you just can't ram it down their throats.

And you're going to get the unions in the union states like California if, if you don't talk with them and carefully think about the incentives. So that led me to the idea of micro credentials which they would be rewarded for and that they would get credentialed to teach science of reading.

And as California envisions it, we're doing a mathematic new mathematics curriculum which is very different conceptually and I think you got to keep your eyes on that. And so, we're trying to do it there.

So what's your quality in this though, Mike?

Because I mean, so like, and the interesting thing, like the unions, there was a time when like the AFT in New York, for instance, was offering the best PD around and like people thought it was like very high quality professional learning. So with Microgrid you could see the unions actually playing a role there, not being against it.

But how do you just across the board guarantee quality? Because right now we sort of have a de facto system, right, with steps and lanes and nobody thinks it's really getting us quality.

So at scale, particularly in a state like yours, but even like in a state like mine, Virginia, where we're still, we're still talking, but a good number of teachers and so preparation and training at scale, how do you, how do you, how would you ensure quality in your model?

Well, let me address the unions and then come to more directly to your question. If you look on the website, the NEA has 175 credentials.

I have links to this in all I'm talking about in the paper I did for Brookings Institution, the Brown center there.

We'll put that in the show notes as well.

Yeah. And so the unions are not adverse to credentials.

What they're afraid of, at least what I hear is that they won't have enough control over it and that it'll be too much top down and it will impede their independence.

And that gets to the second part of your question because some of that concern I don't know how to deal with because I'm advocating strongly that this professional, state professional development plan and strategy and implementation would be tied to the state's curriculum and instructional standards.

NEA has 175 credentials and you can take them for anything you want, and so I would want to hem it right into what we're trying to do with these. And there I think we'll run into tension, but we may be able to negotiate out of that.

I'm not sure where that will go, but I think that you've got to tie it to the curriculum and standards and that'll tie to the assessments and that makes people of some of the teacher organizations nervous. So I'm struggling with exactly how to handle that bridge.

Yeah, it seems like without really robust quality assurance you're going to get what we have now just sort of in different bottles. And honestly, I think the NEA right now people may not be in a big hurry to give them control.

They're having a fair amount of trouble with curriculum and some, some, some, issues with anti Semitism and so forth and some of the curriculum they've embraced.

The AFT has a stronger record here and the FT is still, for the most part, not entirely, for the most part they've stayed pretty good on Science of Reading, but it just seems like the quality assurance here, that's always the problem that we, that we come back to and it's really, let's see if.

We can work that out.

I don't, I don't think, I think, there's ways tying my two interests together there, there's lots of credentials out there of all kinds of fields that have high quality. There's also a lot out there that don't have high quality and they have a credential.

But I think there's so much experience with credentials and there's a whole world that a lot of us I don't think know much about which I'm getting into of what credentials are like and what their quality control is. So I don't think that's Insurmountable to design it well.

And if you look at Mississippi's website on how they do it, they build a lot of quality into it. And so. And they're getting results. So I think we can deal with that.

This whole field we're discussing is highly undeveloped and I'm hoping we can get somewhere.

Well, turning to the national scene generally, what I'm so encouraged about is how many of the people, including the three of us here and many others, are now talking more about curriculum and instruction and teacher development. And it's not just accountability and standards and so on.

So my, my conclusion from my work is most of my career and I'm going to use my turtle metaphor, Dick Richard Elmore taught me that policy. Mike, he would say, is the shell of the turtle and inside the turtle is the moving parts. That's deep into curriculum and instruction.

So I've spent a lot of career working on the shell. And yes, I've, reformed finance programs in several states, including my own. And that's important.

But unless you're getting into those moving parts, you're never going to get where you want to go. So I think that's really the challenge. But I'm seeing a change in the dialogue.

I don't know whether you two do, but there's people that wouldn't have been that focused on curriculum, instruction and are now getting away from that. And it's not just accountability. I mean, this stuff that all we have to do is go back to no Child Left behind and have high standards.

We've learned that that's not enough.

Well, I think what I'm seeing, like to give a nod to Elmore, that's something I think he was right about. I think I was wrong about and others were.

The theory of action was sort of, if you put in place the accountability, it's going to create the incentives and you'll start to see this kind of support on things like curriculum and build that capacity. And Elmore said that that was. That theory of action wasn't going to happen. And he turned out to be right.

And I mean there was other things with no top behind politics and stuff, stuff but like this idea that you could you. You would really see a robust marketplace come up. It just didn't happen.

The support wasn't always there, wasn't there in the necessarily in the public sector at the state level. And so that's, I think has caused people to think, okay, what do we need to do intentionally around those things?

And then like a lively debate about where do you do it, do you do it at the state level, do you do at the federal level? Some combination, what should that look like? And that seems like kind of where we are now.

But like the idea that the sort of black box, the classroom, that if you create the right incentives that people do that work and that will happen. That I think that theory, people are like, no, we got to be much more intentional about that, those aspects. And that's, that's good.

And the thing about charter schools, they're not top down, but the good ones are super intentional about all of those things.

The thing I've been focusing on lately as it relates to science of reading is what exactly does the shell consist of? And we have the Mississippi example, we have Tennessee, we have Louisiana, we have North Carolina.

There are aspects of a science of reading approach that seem to have crossed state lines. They are kind of being called the Southern surge right now.

And I also have my son who's got a friend whose father ended up getting involved in the science of reading policy wars in California and was just so disheartened by just how watered down the science of reading bill is.

And everyone's trying to present it as some kind of example of Mississippi like thinking, but most people that get into it, they look at California, there's no real accountability effort for choosing materials. There's not any specificity about the kinds of practices that are, that are wanted and not wanted.

And we delegate all sorts of authority to the locals. And I don't think we're going to see much Mississippi like pedagogy in vast swaths of California now.

But I don't know, Mike, maybe do you see it differently? Have you followed the.

Yeah, I think you're too pessimistic.

I don't think what's in a bill, I think there's enough in the California bill with the right implementation and the right people leading it, we could do it.

It's got enough of a mandate that, and this is from somebody that's worked up there a lot, you know that with the light leadership and follow through, it could it, it could be done. And so, you've got enough examples to fill in the blanks.

You don't need every sentence in the law to, you can overwrite the law in some ways, so. And lead the resistance.

So I'm thinking, there's a lot of technology out there as to how to do this and our problem is huge scale, bigger than I Am worried about the other, the details of the bill. We have some, we have momentum. I'm more worried about the big deal in California is not reading.

We have, in my view, the most interesting and exciting math curriculum which the state board has adopted in the country. It's a big shift to more conceptual learning, more applied learning.

And when I think about the problem, the problems in math are much deeper than reading. And we have, and nobody talks about the science of mathematics. What you have is a war of mathematics, not a science.

We haven't, it's like Russia and Ukraine. We haven't been able to bring the sides together and they're still out there lobbing, drones at each other.

Yeah. Although the Russian, the Russians are pretty good at math.

You know, a lot of, a lot of parents are paying for their kids to get Russian math extracurricular. But yeah, I take your point.

I, I mean, on the science of reading, Bill, I think it actually points up this problem on like quality and so forth, which is like we, everybody, the conventional, like I'm reading like amateurs talk about the unions, professionals talk about the teacher prep programs and the ed schools. Right. And that's where like a lot of the resistance lies.

And I worry, Mississippi, the states that have done it well, these were pretty prescriptive bills around these things. They also made sure you had a high quality, knowledge rich curriculum, which I think is an anathema to some of the ed schools. I've been struck in.

Mike, I don't know if this is your experience, like in Virginia when we're writing standards like the media portrays it as all left. Right.

But the real core fights are often about pedagogy and they're about are you going to have actual content and facts or are you just going to have sort of themes and real progressive pedagogy?

And obviously that is one where like, you talk to like a cognitive psychologist, like a Dan Willingham or somebody, they'll tell you you need the content, you need the knowledge rich curriculum. But it's treated like a jump ball, who, like, who knows, maybe we should do whatever.

And I feel like that's like the bigger point of, of resistance.

That's the shoal the stuff's going to run up on maybe with math too because like some of these things, they're not real big on math facts and they're not big on teaching kids algorithms and all of that.

Yeah, I think it's deeper in math, the disagreements than here and we saw that in California with the personal attacks that were really out of bounds by various factions attacking each other personally and sort of doxing them and you know.

Yeah, it's rude really. You get really nasty emails about math. I'm sure we'll get some from this podcast. Those people, they, people do feel strongly on both sides.

And you do.

Yeah.

Like you tend to get like really pretty intense feedback.

But we have made a decision. The framework seems to be in California, the mathematics framework, not leading to that much resistance. So I think there's a will to go ahead.

It's, it'll be very hard to do.

But the policy wonks, they, we're, a lot of us, including me, are just really getting into this in a way that I think is going to get to the root of the cause of our, of our lack of an implementation. And so this I'm encouraged by. At least we've changed the wonkery where in terms of where they're headed.

In some ways you've still got these arguments about vouchers and so on.

Yeah, that's where I wanted to go.

You're the first to share with me, at least in a while, that you're encouraged about a narrative specific to pedagogy and instruction happening at a national level. Because basically every conversation I have has nothing to do except for science of Reading Wars.

And aside from that, it's really around universal vouchers, ESAs, these kinds of things. What, what observations do you have about that new phenomenon?

Because when you were on the State Board, essentially ESAs and vouchers were not ascendant. They were not moving and now they really are. So what do you have to share on that?

Yeah, my comments about the national was really around the wonks and not about federal policy. I don't. Federal policy is just noise and distracting noise in many ways. And so I think that's really of not. Not helping.

But it, it's much in cultural issues.

So I think that probably the voucher, the ESEA's, the overwhelming amount of money will go to people that are currently in private schools and that won't add much value. So their. And they'll get a more of a break on tuition and the private schools will be able to raise their prices and perhaps pay their teachers more.

But I don't think there's going to be an explosion of enrollment in micro schools and backyard schools and so on. And I don't know what to make of this ability to buy tutors and so on and various toys for your children.

So I think it's going to end up being the usual thing which is it'll benefit the higher income, middle higher income that are going to private schools and it'll help some private schools that are very low tuition, particular in the southeastern parts of the country. So that's, that's my thought on what it's going to be and it'll have a lot of support from the Republican Party.

How do you think it's going to play in a place like California? So you guys, California is probably not going to opt in to participate because it's got the name Trump attached to it and that's enough.

And it's a Democratic state and they're not going to like this so they won't participate. But it's a national program and so you get a dollar for dollar tax credit of 17 hundred dollars.

A lot of wealthy people in California will be able to take advantage of that.

And so their money will be going elsewhere, to the Southeast as you're talking about or to scholarship programs in Chicago or Rust Belt cities or whatever. We think like how are the politics of that going to play play in California? Will that, because it's such a strong Democratic state, it won't matter.

Will that create pressure on state leadership?

I don't know. We don't know who the state leadership will be. The 800 pound elephant in California is the governor.

The governor has an enormous amount of power and just structurally any governor and so I have no idea who's going to be governor and I know if Jerry Brown had been governor it would be very, very interesting. It's right down his alley. But I don't see quite any Jerry Browns out there in the candidate pool we have so far. But who's to know?

They're still entering the thing. So I don't know.

We don't know will be the state superintendent and, but there's, and then there's, I still don't know how, how it, what the regulations are going to be and how if, how loose is it. Could we use some of the money for things we really want to do like we've talked about before, could we use this to leverage that? I don't know.

And so it's the, I'm also intrigued with the block grants.

Right.

Boy, would I like to have had those block grants.

You know, when, when we went Obama, I, Arne Duncan came into the state of California and held press conferences criticizing the governor for not going along with mandatory teacher Evaluation. And I, we were at war with the Obama administration.

DeVos comes in, all of a sudden we got the flexibility to do some more things we wanted to do.

So I could see these block grants going to what I'm talking about in terms of instruction, and I can see an idea block grant going towards redoing special education in California so a really aggressive governor can get his hands on that and do something. So the block grants are attracting my attention more than the ESSA.

Like on both, there's a common thread which is like, you're, I mean, you're giving voice, and I appreciate giving. Like, when you talk to a lot of people privately, they're like, oh, yeah, I would like to have a block grant. That would be great.

And a lot of Democratic governors are like, well, if I could do with these, you do the scholarship program, because that's the law.

But if you could also use that tax credit money to run programs for special needs kids or extra tutoring or for English language learners, like, you could do all kinds of interesting stuff with it. They're like, yeah, then that might be something we could, we could opt into.

And on all this stuff, the Trump administration always has a path of like, could they do something that kind of brings people together and is, and it is broad, or can they do something that's like, as politically divisive as possible and drives like wedges, as much as possible, and almost invariably they choose the wedge. Right. So they could be doing, like, with these block grants, they could be saying, we're going to give you extra money. Here's a dividend.

We're going to restructure the department. We're going to give states a different dividend.

They could be, they could be making it so that blue state's like, yeah, okay, we will, we will do this. But they're not. They want everybody to howl. And I think they're going to face the exact same choice on the tax credits.

They could do it in a way that's actually broadly appealing because you could use it for a lot of different things, not just tuition. Or they could do in a way that's sort of maximally politically divisive.

And again, like, I think on mo, not, not every single thing, but overall, in general, like, divisiveness is always the safe bet with them. And, I don't know. So we'll, we'll. Time, time will tell.

But there, there, there, there's opportunities here that are like, constantly squandered.

I think it's just going to come down to how much money there is and if there's a lot of money that's available for program enhancement within the traditional system, even if some of that money ends up going to private school tuition stuff, we're going to have a lot of big players in California and in New York and these blue states say we need to keep this money within our states. But we'll see if the number of people who participate ends up being really small and the dollar amounts don't seem that high.

Maybe they'll stay out for the long term. But I just, I don't think that's.

We'Ve talked about this. I think one of the things they're gonna have to do is figure how do you get the people who get their taxes from prepared for them?

Make sure they're aware of it. Like it's. Since it's only 17 hundred dollars it doesn't matter if you're people like us or you're Bill Gates.

And so like they're gonna have to figure out how do you ag. Where, where do people aggregate and where can you start to get? So everybody's getting asked, hey, do you want to participate in this?

Otherwise it won't be, Rick Hess think, Margaret Rosa thinks 28 billion a year. Once it's fully up, Rick Hess thinks like seven or eight. So there's a pretty wide variance of assumptions on how much uptake you're going to get.

So we'll, we'll see. So Mike, I want to, I'd love to like, ask your thoughts. Charter schools and charter schools nationally and charter schools in California.

But before we do, I just had one question about LCFF that I wanted to ask you about because it kind of relates to the money as well. And you should probably explain what that.

Is for non Californians, Jed, and also.

To like accountability too.

So the local control funding formula was California's successful effort in 12 and 13 to redirect large amounts of money to schools based upon the numbers of low income and other special needs kids that they served. It was a massive accomplishment and all of that.

And one of the biggest changes that happened in the design of the whole system when it was first proposed, it was called the weighted student formula and it didn't get through. Brown recognized. Wait a second. Local control is better branding. They called it local control funding formula.

But from a substance standpoint, the thing that was really different about year one and year two, year one, the money was supposed to flow to the school level. Every school was going to receive the dollars based upon the schools that the students that they served at the school level.

But they changed the design of LCFF such that it would go down to the district level. And once it was at the district level, CTA endorsed it. Many other people endorsed it and it got through.

But what it's done then for big school districts, it's given them the leeway to move money where they want to move it. And a lot of the schools that were intended to get the funding didn't get it. And so I just. And we still fight for it.

And maybe you're feeling now, Mike, is they're actually getting it in the end.

I don't know, but I just feel like this is a fundamental foundational issue, around the design of that system and weighted student formulas that are happening across the country right now. Do you have any, any observations on this?

Yeah, I sure do. Well, I disagree with what you're implying.

I support and supported the district level and it was never, I don't think there was any doubt that it was going to be that way because that's the way Brown and I wanted to go. And the legislature was also inclined that way. And I think over time it's the right decision. So you can't.

And of course I'm, as I said, I was worked on Title one, that's a school based program. I know a whole lot about that and I agree with that. At the federal level, I think school based is there.

There's a little amount of our expenditure, only 8% in California that, I would still do title one at the school level, but I think the districts, remember when it passed, we were coming out of a recession and they had just been hammered. And to tie all that money down to schools was really a problem. We had a pandemic there. Again, you need flexibility.

And I think that running we have 10 to 11 thousand schools running a formula that is strict on exactly earmarking money for 10 thousand schools and saying you gotta pass it all down in this way. Brown and I agree. We just don't know enough to do that kind of specification.

You know, maybe you guys are brighter than we are, but we didn't, Brown was the Jesuit of training and he preached humility. And he wrote Arne Duncan a letter, said you need to proceed with more humility. So that would be our thought about it at this point. And so they.

There's so many external variables that come in. Declining enrollment. Now they have huge declining enrollment and you're tying it to schools. They need to adjust across the districts.

So, for what it's worth, I thought we made the right choice.

One thing I wanted and we got was we got funding for the charter schools and put them in the regular formula rather than having them outside with their own formula. So that I think was important as, as the money went up. So we sort of were able to incorporate that in them in the system.

And we were going to give the. We. Our proposal was to give the charter schools whatever, treat them as districts and give them whatever their pupil populations were.

And then we had to compromise on that that they have to have the district average spending and they couldn't get the spending with the kids they had.

Yeah.

So I don't think that the people who criticize what we did in terms of district flexibility have ever run a district. And so I'll leave it there.

I love it. Well, I mean, there are two issues that are here there. One is just around fairness.

And I'm just sorry, but like in la, teaching in South Central and seeing how much money Bodry sucked away from our school in South Central, seeing how much money sucked away from. From Watts, seeing how much money is sucked away from east la, There's a foundational fundamental problem here. And I think there's this.

I think there's a pretty easy answer. Send the money to the kids for whom it was intended. Yes, it makes it hard for school district managers to deal with it. But. But that's its own issue.

And there may be other ways to solve that problem on the charter school side, the problem. And I got a. I have a call in an hour and three minutes with a guy who's still mad at this in Oakland, right where we put.

Where there's the cap, the concentration cap. So a charter school cannot be funded any higher than what their school district's concentration level is.

So if I serve 100% low, special needs kids or low income, and the unduplicated count, and Oakland is only 85%, well, the 15% additional that we would get because of the kids that we serve, we just don't get it.

And the cynic in our view says the reason that we put that cap in place is because if there was funding that went to the school level like that, or charter schools would get that additional money, there would be a financial incentive for schools across the state to convert to charter status. And there were status quo interests that just did not want that to happen. So we have to make these designs. You're right.

You know, Mike, the overall funding benefit for charter schools within the local control funding formula, totally game changing. It was incredible the progress that was made there.

And so I constantly had to remind our base that we have to stay focused on the enormous progress that was made. At the same time there were these other things.

And I hope down the road California finds a way to make sure that the highest needs kids are the ones that actually get additional resources at levels beyond what is currently happening.

I think, yeah, I don't know that there's any momentum to change that at this point. In fact, I'm disappointed that there's not enough momentum to change the finance formula. It's very, very popular. It's outmoded in many ways.

You know, it's run off of school lunch. Well, if everybody has school lunch, it's not a real good indicator of a free, free school lunch.

So I'm for all for changing parts of it and I'm having trouble getting momentum because it's so popular.

Yeah, it's.

And it's hard to figure out what measure to use because the logical thing would have been then to switch to something like Medicaid, but with the recent tax bill now that's not necessarily a great. And so there's a little bit of a question about what actually is a good measure of measure of poverty right now that schools can, can use.

Some of the low hanging fruit is now gone for different reasons. I mean the universal lunch thing is good.

More kids are getting lunch, but it is to your point renders it not a great measure of, of actual levels of poverty. We should probably.

I gotta have a couple charter school questions here, Mike. You know, Andy, will you let me hear like a dog with a bone.

With these charter schools.

Well, look, I mean I actually so these other issues. But hey, there's a profound difference in California now than when you were the chair of the state board.

I mean there in California, my view is. And look, the advocates did a great job. They did a great job. It would have been way, way worse without the advocates.

But one of the things was the state board is no longer an appeal body for charter schools across the state. And so I just wonder, what are your observations, Mike, about those changes? How bad are they?

What would you suggest to charter school people going forward? Should we take a run at them once we have a new governor and perhaps a new way to tackle the problem? Any thoughts you have here?

Yes, well, I was a strong supporter of charter schools and obviously the governor was, when he couldn't take over the schools in Oakland, he started his own charter schools and was a strong supporter. What has happened in California since Brown left in 19 is a tragedy.

I mean they just kneecapped it in terms of the charter movement. They, the big one was that all the local districts have to do is show a fiscal impact from a charter. Of course they're losing enrollment.

They have a fiscal impact. If they can show a fiscal impact, then you can deny the charter. And so that was catastrophic.

I think then they cut off the appeal line to the state board. We were the second largest charter operator in California off of LA Unified.

And going up and charters overall were raised going up on a 45 degree angle in California under Brown's years. He used to every charter school we denied at the state board level. I had to go into his office and justify it and I was guilty until proven innocent.

And so I had a very high bar to reach. And, and basically we, we got around to the. Yeah, there were problems here. So I think it, it's, it's really too bad.

And yes, there has to be some political initiative to revive it. And I don't know, I don't know us to think, I don't know whether this will work and I haven't thought a lot about it.

But now that S is around and we the savings accounts and the federal law on the tax deductions, I think one way to go at it is the thing that I always did was say charters or public schools. I never used the word charter schools. I use charter school, public schools.

And that you're under such attack now that you need you the education traditional education lobbies. You need an alternative. People need choice, they need difference. They need innovation. They need things that parents want bottom up.

They need entrepreneurs to enter the field and the youth.

You've given that argument over the people that will aid people to people that have passed laws which will aid basically the existing private schools, in my judgment.

So that, that way of saying we're the counterpoint, we're the public school Counterpoint to this choice voucher movement is the only thing I can think of. And so I think, I fight. I would like to try that out as a PR campaign and maybe work.

I, I mean I think that even the unions would say I'd rather have a charter school than a, than a private school. So there we are.

Well, I can go off on charters forever, but yeah, you were a great state board chair. Just generally you showed a lot of courage on charter issues over and over again.

And yeah, you made some hard calls on some schools appeals, most of them. I think you made a good decision. There are a couple, we talked about them over and over again. But that's what you have.

That's why you want an authorizer at the state level to be able to make those tough judgment calls. And if you have a straight, if you have a strong board chair and board generally, you're going to make some good decisions.

And it's a shame that California doesn't have that, that option right now. Andy, any thoughts that you have? I also want to like let Mike go in whatever direction we haven't let it go. Yeah, I think, well, the one thing.

I think we haven't talked about yet in depth that would be good before we, before we wrap up is this, this post secondary question.

So Mike, you've been doing this work and you're talking about like if you just look narrowly at college or you look narrowly at certain high school attainment measures. You get one picture. If you look more broadly, you get another.

And you were talking about all the people who get various kinds of certificates in this country and all sorts of various kinds of non degree credentials which seems likely to increase with the recent tax bill as this workforce pell. So you can do sort of shirt US Pell grant for short term programs.

There's different views about what that's going to mean in terms of quality and for the program. But it certainly it's going to mean expansion of this kind of thing. And I just wanted to hear like your, your take on that.

What it means, what it means for K12. And then a question that I'm particularly interested in, like a lot of those people are sort of.

We have the great thing about America, we have a second chance system. If things don't go well for you the first time and we do a bad job delivering education for you, you can still pursue it other ways.

And you see that like I find community colleges be like kind of inspiring that way. But you also see that in various kinds of certificate, different kinds of training programs and so forth. And like, how do you think, how do we.

A lot of this pathways and this push for this work comes out of Europe, but we're not a European country in terms of our culture around this kind of thing. And so that's kind of wanted to hear you riff on that a little bit.

Well, let me step back and answer the question after I sort of frame what I'm trying to do.

Sure.

So the narrative out there on education is K12 education is declining and it is in test scores or it's, stagnant. Higher education is under attack for DEI and antisemitism and losing of popular support. And so we're really, in a, in a very, very bad way.

So what I have tried to do, and I agree that the testing is alarming, is to reframe the. Go back to another concept which is called educational attainment.

And I start off by thinking, well, the economists, Rick Hanishek's good friend of mine, and they talk about all the lost income and economic growth from low education skills.

And I keep thinking, well, if you think about, if you combine K12 and higher education, the picture isn't, there's a very different picture of educational attainment in terms of its growth. Not only its growth in numbers at the higher ed level particularly, but also at the attainment rates. So the attainment rates are up.

So I began to think about what's the broadest screen I could look at of all the options that are open for people between ages 16 and 25. And then what is the real picture of educational attainment when you get done with that?

I learned a lot of things since I was 17 or from, since 15 years old under Pisa. We should be judging this system a little bit more broadly and particularly if you're going to talk about the economy.

So I looked at everything that I thought that was relevant. I'm sure there's some things that I don't.

And just to give you the more positive picture here are areas of dramatic or significant growth in participation and educational attainment. And agree some of these, there's quality issues and all of that. So I'll start with high school advanced placement.

We're all aware of the startling increase now if you go back, say the Nation at Risk, which Macke Raymond's study did for Hoover, that you had on in your classroom, we're way up in ap, I mean, indisputable second huge increase in dual enrollment, dual enrollment is skyrocketing and the majority of it takes place on community college campuses. And even if there's some problems with, and there are with some of the quality of it, there's so much more of it. It all can't be bad.

Even Mike Petrully argue with this over, it can't all be worthless. And I notice the.

He's the only one that makes me sound insufferable. Yeah, yeah.

He's citing that as well. Okay. Also up significantly as a completion of four year degrees. The complete College America movement which was.

And if you look at 6 and 8 years, they're up in the last 10 years by 6 to 8% which is a lot. So associate degrees are more tricky because a lot of students leave. Those don't get the degree because they want to.

They transfer and think who needs an associate's degree. So. But they're still up. Awful lot are apprenticeships and that's. However apprenticeships account for less than 1% of our labor force.

So it's up a lot. And there's all this talk in Congress about it. It's minuscule but it's up. Okay. Credentials, that's up a whole lot. We've talked about that.

And even in education it's up a lot in terms of the broader micro credentials. But licenses, certificates, credentials all over the place.

I got onto this partly I go to the doctor, like my eye doctor and I see three people that hold credentials who give me eye tests before I see the doctor. I get 10 minutes from the doctor. I get 20 minutes from the people that have certificates that are running all these tests on my eyes.

You know, I have glaucoma and so on. But it's just all over the place. Licenses, I go to the barber, he's got a license.

I did a study with Dick Scott on all the entities of post secondary education in the Six County Bay Area. There's 350 of them. We would look at truck driver schools. I can never drive a truck, so they're. That's up.

And military education is often overlooked.

And it is also very strong how they can take these people that can barely pass the ASVAB and make them into repairing some complex thing on an aircraft carrier. How are they doing this? I mean it's amazing what they're doing. 5% of our population from high school goes into the military. Okay. Now the ones.

And I'll conclude with what we don't know anything much about first of all is on the job training. No, let me back up. First of all is career and technical education. There is almost no studies on this.

The last ones were by NCES and they were very old. We've got all this two by two pathways. You know about it a lot out in California called link learning.

Two years of high school at linked to two years of college. This is really expanding. It's a clear pathway.

There's other pathways through community college that are much more developed now rather than a grab bag of courses, but we just don't know. On the job training virtually very little. It's a huge.

And then declining is correctional education, education in our juvenile facilities for kids who are incarcerated. And then we know very little about some of the certificates out there and the licenses but we're growing in understanding them but not so much.

We just don't have a handle. Their licenses and certificates are all over the place. It's a third of the workforce operates with a license, certificate or credential.

So it's either up or data gaps. And so this is what I'm working on and I think we need to understand this much better and expand our discussion.

And I don't know why we talk about apprenticeships so much and not about credentials and certificates and all that. And Washington hasn't even woken up to this. So there I am.

You know, it's fascinating. I think people who don't follow are struck by how the data gaps. I think people.

It reminds me of like high school graduation rates like 20 25 years ago. People just assumed you, we, you would know this stuff and there'd be. And in fact like the data was terrible. We didn't really have good.

And I feel like it's the same way like what's happening. States are working on it. You're seeing a lot of efforts. I'll brag on Virginia a little bit.

We've been trying to do a lot of, to improve our data systems and actually track people and see what, see, see what's happening.

I know I say track people and like a certain kind of person, flips out but actually I just like, like keep track of what is actually happening so we can figure out what's working, what's not working, what is the, what is it, what does it look like in the economy. But there's a lot of work, there's a lot of work to be done there.

So I think Mike, like one thing I'll just say that I admire about you is like you're talking about the next stage in your career after saying you've been at this for six decades and that's just a tremendously admirable thing and I have so much respect for it that you want to continue and you will continue to contribute. It's great.

Yeah.

It reminds me of in the last months with Don Shali talked to him a few times and he came to this K16 thing. Jed, keep working on that. Keep pushing on that. So, Mike, you and Don came to a similar, I think, recognition and Larry Rosenstock too.

What is it with these Californians?

Well, continuing mischief making, for many, many decades. So Mike, it's just been great to connect with you, hear what you're doing late lately and we look forward to staying in touch.

And please keep us aware of whatever the next thing is that you're working on because we'll be curious.

Thank you.

Well, thank you for having me and I enjoyed the conversation.

Excellent. Thank you.

Thank you now.

Bye bye.

Bye bye.