3 Takeaways - Highlight on Education: A Specially Curated Episode (#203)

Episode Date: June 25, 2024

Want to get smarter about education? Listen to this specially curated episode of 3 Takeaways — with former Presidents of Harvard University, Larry Summers and Larry Bacow; former Secretary of Education, Arne Duncan; former head of Oxford University, Dame Louise Richardson; former Academic Dean of the Kennedy School, Iris Bohnet; Nobel Prize laureate, Joshua Angrist; and founder of online Khan Academy, Sal Khan.

Hello, everyone, and welcome to Three Takeaways. Today, I'm delighted to bring you the first of many specially curated highlight episodes. In each of these shows, we'll bring you the most compelling moments from the hundreds of episodes of Three Takeaways that we've recorded over the last several years. We're in the midst of graduation season. So today, please enjoy hearing from some of the leading minds in education. First, you'll hear former Secretary of the Treasury and President of Harvard Larry Summers on what he perceives as a transformation

in the world of education and the hard choices facing leading universities. Next, former Secretary of Education Arne Duncan exposes what he describes as the lies and the broken system that have caused American kids to fall behind. You'll also hear from Iris Bonet, the former academic dean of the Kennedy School and co-director of the Women and Public Policy Program, on how simple, evidence-based changes can reduce and neutralize the biased behaviors in classrooms. Next, a conversation with Larry Bacow, former president of Harvard University, on the role of universities in a democracy.

Another segment features Dame Louise Richardson, former head of Oxford University and an Irish expert on terrorism, who explains why the whole point of a university education is to ensure that you never see things in purely black and white terms. Then, you'll hear why some schools routinely produce high-performing students, as we speak with Nobel Prize laureate Joshua Engrist. And finally, I speak with Sal Khan, founder of Khan Academy, which is one of the world's largest online learning platforms, about the importance of addressing learning gaps and his vision for the future.

Enjoy the show. Hi, everyone. I'm Lynn Thoman, and this is Three Takeaways. On Three Takeaways, I talk with some of the world's best thinkers, business leaders, writers, politicians, newsmakers, and scientists. Each episode ends with three key takeaways to help us understand the world and maybe even ourselves a little better. I'm excited to be here with Larry Summers. He was formerly Secretary of the Treasury, and before that, he was President of Harvard University. How do you see universities and college educations in five or 10 or 20 years? I think that universities, you're probably thinking of the leading universities or the

most elite universities, places like Harvard, are in ways they don't yet recognize. Going to have to make a very profound choice. Do they want to define their greatness as universities in the way that Augusta defines its greatness in the sphere of golf through its incredibly curated experience and its staggering exclusivity? incredibly curated experience, and it's staggering exclusive? Or do they want to define their greatness in terms of the scale on which they are transforming the world? It wasn't an option to have vast impact through teaching and pedagogy until fairly recently. You could admit a 1,600 student class or a 1,200 student class or a 2,000 student class. But as long as you were admitting each year

10 basis points or less of the class of students, There was a limit to the difference you can make. But today, with the capacities of distance education to provide for experiences that are both at much larger scale and much more individualized, When I have an extra 200-person class, nobody can say, can you repeat that for two minutes? Because I was distracted for a moment. I have to provide the materials at the same level to all hundreds of students. I can't go faster or slower for particular students or segue to respond to the interests of particular students. All of that kind of thing becomes possible. And we are just at the very beginning of it in education. You know, when the first movies took the form of people putting cameras in the back of theaters and recording what was going on on the stage.

Over time, there was transformative change. A movie became something that was very different from that. The people who had been most extraordinary as theatrical actors, in many cases, weren't so great as movie actors, and a whole set of new people became terrific as directors, as producers, as actors in the context of movies, and movies became something very different. I believe that's what's going to happen in education, and the crucial question is, who is going to lead that? Talking a little bit more about education, the top universities, especially the Ivy League universities, have stayed essentially the same for 50 plus years. And the education they provide

has also stayed the same. As you mentioned, they really haven't scaled. They all have about 10,000 or so undergraduate students. I thought a lot when I became president of Harvard about industries. It was pretty rare for the leading firm in 1960 to be the leading firm in 50 years later. And it was without precedent for the leader 50 years before and the whole top 10 to have changed very little over decades. Part of that is a reflection of the fact without the profit motive, there's less forced or disruption and more force for comfort. I think another part of it has to do with the fact that universities are run much more by

their most important employees, faculty, and other institutions are, and it's well known that for reasons that aren't hard to understand, that worker-owned or controlled firms are resistant to expansion because they dilute the rents that are going to the current incumbent. I think that's a part of it. I think another part of it, maybe the most important part of it, is that universities are networked. Students come because they think the faculty is great. Faculty come because they think the students are great. The students come even more because they think the other students are going to be great. And faculty come because they think the other faculty are going to be great? So if the main reason people chose hotels was to meet people in the lobby,

and you became a great hotel, it would be easy to stay a great hotel, even if you went downhill, because everybody would be used to your lobby as the place to meet. So my suspicion is that there are going to be limits to how much transformation is going to come from the existing leading universities. And I think the question is going to be, in what ways is this going to be transformed by those outside of the traditional leading universities. I'm excited to be here with former Secretary of Education Arne Duncan. How common is it for the grade level standards to be too low for kids and parents to believe that the kids are meeting grade level standards or are even honor roll students when in reality they are far behind

where they should be? What we don't talk about is we spend eight to nine billion, whether it be eight to nine billion dollars each year on remedial class in college. And what that means is young people with a high school diploma go to college and then have to take non-credit bearing classes, bring through Pell Grants, bring through loans, terrible for them, terrible for their parents, terrible for taxpayers, nobody wins. That's the conversation we don't have. And it was true, I talked about the book, as you may remember, that when I was running the Chicago Public Schools, our test scores were going up every year, we were celebrating, we were feeling great. And then the consortium on Chicago School of Research did a really important study.

Illinois was one of many states that had reduced standards. So we were living that. We didn't know it. And what the consortium did is they did a correlation between, quote unquote, meeting the Illinois state standards and taking the ACT. If you were meeting standards, that correlated to a 16 on the ACT. If you get a 16 on the ACT, basically you have a 10% chance of graduating college. You're not ready. And so we had been

lying to kids and families. We didn't know we had, but it was an unbelievable punch in the gut. And so we stopped paying attention to the kids who were quote-unquote deficient. That was no longer the goal. The goal is to get kids into an advanced status on the state test. That correlated to a 20. And those numbers for us in Chicago public schools were small. And so it really was a hugely important impetus for us to push harder. But when you have a measuring stick that shortchanges kids, it deceives them and families. I think that's one of the most insidious things you can do in education is give people a false complacency or a false sense of optimism or false sense of hope when we're actually setting them up for failure down the road. I think it's horrific.

I'm excited to be here with Iris Bonet. She's a professor and former academic dean of the Kennedy School. What can we do to reduce and neutralize biased behaviors as we raise our children? I myself have not done research in children, but I am going to give you some generalizable insights from that type of research. Seeing is believing. It's very important that our children see all kinds of different people in all kinds of different roles. They need to see female astronauts. They need to see black astronauts. They need to see white male teachers. That's really important. And that, of course, affects our media, affects the books that our children

read, affects the cartoons our children watch. And that, in fact, is an area where, Lynn, I think, compared to when we grew up, we actually have made quite a bit of progress. So seeing is believing, and there's some really good research showing that even short exposures to such of these role models that I just now described, at an early age and even at a later age, the research has been done in elementary school and has been done in high school of bringing in, for example, female scientists to increase the likelihood that girls think that STEM fields could be for them. And even short exposure can affect career trajectories. I think that's something that parents could easily do. Just make sure that your children have all opportunities available. Again, we don't want to brainwash

them. Exposure to the whole world, not in a stereotypical way, would be very useful. I'm delighted to be with Larry Bacow, former president of Harvard University. Larry, you've said that universities play an important role in supporting our democracy. How did they do that? People should never forget that the original function of a university was to educate citizens for democracy. And so we do that in a variety of ways. We do that by conveying to our students that they have a responsibility to get involved.

I've also spoken about the civic and social responsibilities of universities, but also of our students and of our graduates. One thing which I routinely do is each year that's in an election year, I make a point of giving entering students their first homework assignment. And that is, if they're eligible to vote, they're obliged to register to vote, to inform themselves of our candidates and the issues, and to cast a ballot. It's not a political statement. It's one of engagement. And so I think creating expectations is important. I think it's important that we encourage

students and our graduates to pursue careers of public service, both in electoral politics, but also in civil society in a variety of ways. It makes no difference in my mind what your profession is. There are opportunities to become an active and engaged citizen, and we need people to do that. I often say I've yet to meet anyone who believes the world that we live in is perfect. This is equally true of Democrats and Republicans, liberals and conservatives. If we don't think it is perfect, the only way it gets better is if good people all across the ideological spectrum are willing to work hard to improve. And that's a responsibility that we all bear. It's a special responsibility for those who have a privilege

to get a college education. My guest is Dame Louise Richardson, a renowned academic leader, political scientist, and expert on terrorism. She was head of both Oxford and St. Andrews universities. How is studying terrorism good training for running universities? That's a question I often get and usually respond with a flippant comment about counterinsurgency and how useful it is to understand it. But actually, the thing about terrorism is that they are invariably fairly small organizations operating under conditions of real uncertainty. And yet they manage to have an outsized impact. For much of my career, I was running relatively small institutions, St. Andrews, relatively small university, and we managed to have, I think, an outsized impact.

So just understanding how small organizations can function and punch above their weight, I think, was helpful. Anything related to binary thinking? Well, I do think that one of the characteristics that terrorists invariably share is binary thinking. That is to say, a Manichean view of the world that sees the world in black and white terms. And interestingly enough, most terrorists see themselves as the good guys. They see themselves as David fighting the Goliath. I think universities are

the opposite of that. Part of the whole point of a university education, I think, is to rob one of one's certitudes, to ensure that you never see things in black and white terms, to teach you to appreciate nuance and the various perspectives on any given issue. They're polar opposites, I think, in that respect. I'm excited to be with Nobel laureate Joshua Angrist. Josh is a professor at MIT and co-founder and co-director of MIT's Blueprint Labs. Josh, your results on what you call the elite illusion or eye-opening, Can you tell us about them? Sure. That's a name we gave to a phenomenon. I would say it's kind of something that's apparent in our research on schools.

Many people, parents and families and schoolchildren, of course, are interested in the question of where the best schools are. And people are naturally drawn to schools that have very good outcomes. And now I'm thinking about K-12 American education and public schools. And the most eye-catching schools in the public K-12 sector are what are known as exam schools. Those are selective schools. This includes, for example, the Boston Latin School in Boston, near where I live and work. That's the oldest high school in the country. It's a very selective public school. A lot of famous people went there, including some Nobel laureates and well-known public figures of

all stripes. And those kids who go there have very good outcomes. Other schools that your audience might be familiar with are the legendary three of New York City, Brooklyn Tech, Bronx Science, Stuyvesant. But not just in Boston and New York, around the country, there are stratospherically selected public schools where kids have very impressive outcomes, careers in public life and science and so on. And so naturally, families observe those outcomes and they're keen for their kids to go to those schools. Now, we've actually studied the causal effect of going to exam schools. This was one of the first series of studies done at the lab. So we had data on people who applied to the schools and were able to follow the applicants who do and don't get offered a seat at those schools.

And we can use the magic of econometrics using a methodology called regression discontinuity research design, which simply essentially produces something like a randomized trial for schools that admit kids based on a cutoff. Because very near the cutoff, people just above and just below are similar. And what that research shows is that, yes, it's true that kids who go to, say, Boston Latin or Stuyvesant have very good outcomes, but it's not because of the school. People who come close to the cutoff but don't get offered a seat have similar outcomes. And so we call the fact that there isn't really a causal effect of going to those schools, yet parents see the very good outcomes and are seduced by that. We call that the elite illusion.

They desire to take advantage of what looked like very good outcomes. But really, what you're seeing there is a result of a phenomenon we call, more technically, selection bias. The kids who go to Boston Latin or Stuyvesant have good outcomes, meaning higher test scores, and they're more likely to go to college and so on, because that's the type of kid that gets in. But it's not actually a causal effect of going there. I'm here with Sal Khan, founder of Khan Academy, the free remote learning platform. Khan Academy is unique. No one comes close to them in breadth or in scale. It has been said that data is the new oil.

You have millions of monthly users and hundreds of millions, I guess billions, as you said, of minutes of learning views and 15 or so years worth of data. You have the most data on education of anyone. What have you learned from all that data? We've been able to use data to understand which content is more engaging, understanding which learning mechanics are more likely to keep someone engaged or not, which ones are more likely to drive learning outcomes. And I think we're just scratching the surface.

I think as we go five, 10 years in the future, I'm hoping that Khan Academy can actually help push forward some of the learning science, because it is a platform where we could very easily run experiments and with very, very large data sets to understand what can really help students better learn. What are some of your recommendations, building habits or anything else?

You see students succeed, you see students struggle, you see students persevere. Yeah, well, you know, I'm a big believer in habit generally. You know, for any parents and students watching, whatever you think you or your child is capable of, I guarantee you, if you just pick a direction and dedicate even 20 minutes a day to that direction, but that 20 minutes can't just be revisiting or redoing what you already know

and what you feel comfortable with. If you're willing to engage in things that are essentially at your learning edge, that 20 minutes every day, you'd be shocked how much it can build even in a month or two to completely changing your capabilities in that space and your perception of yourself in that space. And we see letters all the time from folks who dropped out of high school, who thought they

weren't good at math or science or some other topic. And then as, you know, maybe as an 18 year old, they want to go back to college or as a 20 year old, they want to go back to college. I said, yeah, I spent the summer. I just spent 30 minutes a day, an hour a day on Khan Academy. I started at one plus one equals two. And I just relearned everything or filled in all my gaps. And these letters, these people are both happy and thankful, but they're also angry. They're like, why couldn't I have done this before? And now math is intuitive for me. There's nothing. It's not rocket science. I mean, even rocket science isn't rocket science. If you learn all of the fundamentals and learn it intuitively and get a chance to get practice and feedback. So that's

my biggest advice is that, you know, pick a direction, build a habit, be willing to step out of your comfort zone. And Khan Academy is a great tool for doing that, especially in an academic context. I hope you've enjoyed this Education Highlights episode. Stay tuned for more highlight episodes. If you'd like to listen to any of the full episodes, former Secretary of the Treasury Larry Summers is episode 32. Former Secretary of Education Arne Duncan is episode 102. Former Academic Dean of the Kennedy School, Iris Bonet, is episode 103. Former Harvard president, Larry Bacow, is episode 112.

Former head of Oxford University, Louise Richardson, is episode 195. Nobel laureate, Josh Angrist, is episode 153. And founder of Khan Academy, Saul Khan, is episode 76. If you enjoyed today's episode, you can sign up for the Three Takeaways newsletter at threetakeaways.com, where you can also listen to previous episodes. You can also follow us on LinkedIn, X, Instagram, and Facebook. And if you're enjoying the podcast, and I really hope you are, please review us in Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. It really helps get the word out.

I'm Lynn Toman. This is Three Takeaways. And thanks so much for listening.