Mike Morath -- Texas Education Commissioner

Kaufmann:  We’re honored to be joined today by Commissioner of Education Mike Morath for the great state of Texas. He leads the Texas Education Agency that oversees pre-K through high school education for more than 5.5 million developing minds right here in Texas. Commissioner Morath, thank you so much for spending a little time with us here at the Bush Center.

Morath: Thanks for having me.

Kaufmann: And our co-host today is Anne Wicks, the Don Evans Family Managing Director of Opportunity and Democracy at the Bush Institute, and an education expert in her own right. Anne, thank you so much for helping put this together, actually.

Wicks: Thanks, Andrew.

Kaufmann: Well, so Commissioner Morath, your journey is an interesting one. I haven’t done the math on it, but I don’t think there’s too many software entrepreneurs that are leading state education agencies. How did you develop this passion and calling that, in your own words, is kind of retirement. What’s retirement?

Morath: Yeah, my path is nontraditional to say the least. Reflecting on it now, it’s fascinating, because you don’t know why the Lord has you on the meandering path that you have, but I had a whole host of life experiences that were pretty instrumental in my journey. So, I wasn’t born in Texas. Before we lived in Texas, I lived in an old coal mining town in the Appalachian Mountains in southwestern Virginia, and we moved to Texas. My mom calls TEA at the time, there’s no internet, and says we’re going to move to North Texas. My dad’s job transferred him. We want to find a great school for our little boy. Where should we move? And the first eight people that she talked to at TEA said all of our schools are great, you can move anywhere. And she never fully believed that. And so she was persistent, and somebody then advised her to check out Garland. And so we moved to Garland. I got educated in Garland public schools, and I truly got a phenomenal education in Garland. I came out of high school with 36 hours of college credit. I had three years of computer science and a year of typing. I ended up when I went to college, I was so well prepared. I graduated from college in two and a half years, came back here to Dallas, started a dot com, and it was a catastrophe. And I was grateful to have avoided alcoholism in that process, and then my next company ended up being vastly more successful, lot of work, a lot of hard hours. The American dream is not for the faint of heart, but it proved to be quite lucrative for me personally. But all along the way, I had always been called to do volunteer work with kids and work with kids in particular. So, I set up volunteer programs at Anacostia Middle School, even when I was in DC going to school in undergraduate, came back here, became a big brother as part of the Big Brothers Big Sisters program, and I did that for 10 years. I was matched to two different littles over the course of that time, and my first little, we were matched for six or seven years, and he turns 16, comes over to the house, wants to apply for a job at Braum’s. I don’t know where your listeners are, but Braum’s is a great chain here in North Texas.

Wicks: Great burgers and shakes.

Morath: And he can’t actually fill out the job application without my help. His level of literacy was insufficient for an entry-level fast-food job application. I had spent years with him, but I didn’t spend years with him as an academic tutor. We went fishing and camping and made jerky, grunt, men stuff. And I just remember that so clearly that this is not acceptable. How can we let this happen? How can I personally let this happen? So, I sold my software company and ran for the school board because I never wanted that to happen to any of my brothers and sisters ever again. And so that’s what got me involved in this. I ran for the school board. I was unmarried and had no children. I met my wife, my now wife, on a medical mission trip to the middle of nowhere Mexico. She’s an eye doctor and was giving sight to the blind. And I don’t speak Spanish and have no medical skills, so I was preparing food for the eye doctors, but that was also attached to an orphanage, and we did a bunch of care for both the indigent and children. And so I was on the school board for four and a half years in Dallas. I did get elected. The work that we did on the school board, was pretty focused on changing the system for our children. If I was going to throw a perfectly fine private sector life away and pursue service on a big city school board, I wanted to make sure that I was as effective as possible. So what I’ve attempted to do, to somewhat overcompensate for my noneducational background, even though I did actually teach part time when I was like 21 or 22, but I’ve tried to spend as much time and energy as possible being a student of teaching, understanding how the brain works, understanding how curriculum has to be designed for memory to be formed, understanding how teachers should be trained, trying to study the difference between the way a master of the craft in one classroom and a master of the craft in another classroom molds eager young minds, how the system writ large works. So, what’s involved in becoming a teacher? What’s involved in growing professionally as a teacher? How well do we train principals? What’s the most important practice that a principal needs to focus on in order to coach up teachers, the way that the system actually has to be oriented to maximize student learning, the way the system has to be oriented to support families, to support parents as a child’s first teacher? So I’ve attempted to do that as much as possible, both while I was on the school board, and then in my in my role currently as Commissioner, but I was on the school board for four and a half years, and we were able to do some pretty incredible things. One of the things that we did in Dallas was we changed the way teacher compensation worked, and this and a bunch of other things led to significant outcomes gains in Dallas, which is why I think Governor Abbott noticed me and the work that we were doing, and then gave me the opportunity to serve in this current role. So that’s a little bit about my path to this job and what I get to do every day. And being the Commissioner of the Texas Education Agency, you get beat like a donkey on a fairly regular basis, because there’s 29 million Texans, and they all have very strong opinions on how education works, but it is my job to wake up every day and think about how to make life better for five and a half million souls. And there’s no better way to live out this brief period with which we are blessed with breath, than to have that opportunity to serve in this way.

Kaufmann: You have had to navigate a lot. You kind of just referenced it, it is a challenging job. And I think one of the things that is interesting right now is that everybody wants their kids to be well educated. I think most parents, really, that’s at the top of their mind. And we talk a lot about national politics, but a lot of what happens in education happens at the state and local levels. How do you view the role of the state? Where does the state stop and end? What hands off to the local government, and where does the federal government come into play in your job and to your point, you know, if you’re going to do this, you want to get stuff done. You don’t want to just, you know, keep beating your head against the wall. So how do you go about getting stuff done in the structure that we have?

Morath: Yeah, well, in Texas, you have 1,200 locally controlled school systems. Several of them are charter school system organizations. The majority of them are traditional school district organizations. But there’s 1,200 of them. There’s 9,000 campuses in Texas, five and a half million kids, 800,000 employees. We spend about $80 billion a year in Texas on K-12 education. Everything is bigger in Texas, and so our role at the agency, the state’s role, you know, there’s I think a lot of healthy debate about what should be local, what should be state, what should be tightly controlled at the local level, even at the classroom level, you have inside of districts, you have these decisions as to what should the teacher him or herself own versus what should be the principal’s responsibility, what should be the responsibility central office. And I don’t know that there is one right answer to those structural questions. I can tell you how things are structured in the Texas policy framework is that the state sets broad parameters of expectations of what students should know and be able to do at the end of every school year. And because it is basically true that learning mathematics in Lufkin and learning mathematics in Lubbock, math still needs to be learned in both places.

Kaufmann: Two plus two still equals four.

Morath: And so you have a set of expectations that we believe that every third grader in Texas by the end of third grade should have memorized their times tables. So that is actually codified in state policy. It’s a set of expectations that if we as adults got our act together, this would be true for all children, and all children can, in fact, reach that level. So the state sets these basic expectations for what should be true for students in terms of learning, what they should be able to demonstrate in that learning, and then provides funding and essentially guardrails to local school districts to execute, and then it’s the job of a local school board to hire their superintendent. Superintendent then runs and makes all the operational decisions inside the context of a local school. They have a budget that they have that is not set by the state. It’s There’s a set of parameters, so there’s some degree of variance in how many resources they have. Different communities can choose to invest more or less in their schools, from a resource perspective, but ultimately, the local school system leaders, they’re there every day. They’ve got to get results. They’ve got to make sure that kids are loved and they learn, and so we at the state essentially provide leadership, guidance, support. There’s a set of guardrails, and then resources that come from the state, and then our local leaders, with all the talent and gifts that they’ve been given, then try to make all that learning happen across 9,000 campuses. The federal role is pretty limited. The Feds provide about ten percent-ish of funding to education. It comes in streams. So, one is to make sure kids are eating while they’re at school, so you get some money for that. One is to make sure kids get special education services, so there’s that. One provides a disproportionate, sort of extra set of resources to support low income kids. And then there’s some for vocational education, what we call career and technical education. And they have varying strings attached, like every federal fund, and you have to sort of deal with those strings as they come. Some of the strings are onerous and some of the strings are nothing burgers. It kind of depends, right?

Kaufmann: I’d love to start diving into some of those, you know, exactly how you’re in the process of getting  that done?

Wicks: Yes. Thanks, Andrew. So, we have a few policy priorities here, things that I know you care about, so I want to dive into a few of them. The first one is state accountability. So, one of the federal roles is that there is a rule every state has to have an accountability system that lets us measure the performance of districts and campuses so we can all see what’s happening, how students are learning on those campuses in those districts. In Texas, that’s called the A to F system, but we have not been able to release scores for a number of years, which is something that’s really confounding to a lot of people. What’s going on?

Morath: Yes, it’s a fascinating experience in the way separation of powers works in the United States, because two out of three branches have agreed that you should have an A through F system, and one of those three branches says you shouldn’t. So, one of our roles at the state is to evaluate how well students are learning, and we do that a couple of different ways. We look at what they know at the end of the year, it’s very Darwinian. Did you learn your times tables or not? But another one is actually how much you grew. So, if you were way below grade level the year before, and you’re still below grade level this year, but you’re closer to grade level, you might be failing on some basic proficiency measures, but your growth scores are off the charts. So, when we evaluate a campus on its performance it’s very holistic, we look at the better of how well did the students grow and how proficient the students are, how much can they demonstrate? And we do that a bunch of different ways. We measure math and reading and welding licensures. There’s a whole bunch of ways that we do this, a very balanced system, and then we provide a rating of the campus, A, B, C, D, F, you know, everybody understands A is better than B. So, you might not know exactly how your kid’s GPA was calculated, but you do know 4.0 is better than 3.0. This is the way that it works. So, two years ago, a coalition of school districts did not like the fact that they were A through F rated, to the point that they sued us in a Travis County District Court, and so a district court judge issued a temporary injunction two years ago, which we are still under, because the wheels of justice turn quite slow. But we’ve executed the A through F system in the executive branch as required by the legislative branch, and then the judicial branch is preventing it from being executed, at least until we finally get this resolved at the appellate court level.

Wicks: So, when we’re not able to understand the performance based on that campus and district level, like to see kind of an apples to apples, you know, you said you grew up in Garland. What’s happening in Garland versus Lubbock versus El Paso? What are we missing out when we don’t have that information?

Morath: It’s a great question, and we know, both from a common sense perspective and empirically, that a lot of bad things have happened to our kids because we have not issued A through F ratings for two years. I am not just Commissioner of Education. I’m a dad. My wife and I were blessed with four young kids. We have twins in first grade, third grade and sixth grade. And I want the best for my children. I want to know how well is their school performing, if it’s not performing well writ large, what can I do about that? So, I happen to be Commissioner of Education, so I know exactly how well my kids’ schools are doing.

Wicks: Like, do you like seeing Mike come into your parent teacher conferences?

Morath: But unfortunately, there’s another 5 million parents that have been blinded to this information, and so that means that they can’t advocate for their kids the way they need to, the resources their kids need to have. And you’ve lost that ability for like a Consumer Reports function and people then just acting with that information to support their kids. In addition, schools themselves don’t have the A through F ratings. So if I think about a principal or superintendent building action plans, you know, a C is a celebration if you were an F a year ago. You want to build action plans that are recognizing where we are, what’s the cause of where we are, and then how can I make next week better than last week. And so that continuous improvement muscle has essentially been removed from the system for two years as well, to the significant harm of students. Anybody that you know that thinks about this from a common sense lens, realizes, what’s inspected is respected. This clearly matters. But you don’t even have to have just common sense to recognize how valuable this is. This has actually been empirically studied in Texas. So Texas has had an accountability system for quite some time, and there were a bunch of researchers that started this. It was like a longitudinal study they did in the early 2000s, and imagine two children, they are both identical in their academic and behavior history. They are attending schools at similar rates. They’re getting similar report card grades, and then standardized test scores look the same too. And for both of those children, imagine it’s bad. It’s not where you want those kids to be. If one of those two children is in a school that is labeled A or is labeled exemplary, and another one of those children is in a school that is labeled F or that is labeled unacceptable, what happens to those children next? And so the researchers looked at this, and what they found was that because of the public issuance of ratings, when a low performing child was in a school that was labeled low performing, that kid in the next year did better. The kid showed up to school more. Kid had fewer disciplinary infractions, kid had higher grades, kid had higher standardized test scores. The researchers that studied this studied this all the way through high school. Kids graduated at higher rates. The kids went to college at higher rates. They studied it until the kids were, I think either 25 or 30, and they looked at their income, and the kids were making more money than the other kids. So when you turn off that accountability system, you should presume the opposite happens. The kids then do not do better the subsequent year, because the system did not have this information to engage in the self-correction mechanisms, and that’s precisely what we’ve seen, especially in mathematics, where this effect is particularly strong. We saw mathematics achievement begin to slip in Texas because we turned off the lights for two years, and the lights are, at the time of this podcast, still off, but we are making arguments in front of in front of judges, even as we speak.

Wicks:  And President Bush is famous for his phrase “the soft bigotry of low expectations,” if we don’t measure all kids, it’s because we assume, you know, some of those kids are just never going to learn or succeed, and we know that to not be true, that all children have the ability to learn and succeed and need to be seen and served in our public system, funded by a vast amount of public dollars. One of the things that I thought was interesting is there’s some districts that decided to release their scores on their own, and because they are doing what you said around sort of action planning and using that information to serve kids. Is there any districts that you want to highlight that have taken that on?

Morath: Well, you know, we’re here in North Texas, and Dallas and Garland have, among others, released their ratings in the most recent year, but this has been going on for two years. So, the first year, 150 districts sued, but there’s 1,200 school systems. And the next year, I think 30 districts sued, but there’s 1,200 school systems. You know, not everybody agrees. I don’t agree with everything with my wife every time. There’s a healthy difference of opinion on the A through F system among educators. And some people are very bold in their leadership, and they say, you know, this is where it is. We need to be honest about where we are today, and we’re going to build action plans so the next year is better. And then some districts don’t publish that information. There’s data and interesting studies on this that go back a long time, because man today is not all that different than man 2,000 years ago. So there was a study in the 1970s they called the Lake Wobegon studies for any Garrison Keillor fans.

Wicks: As the Minnesotan in the room, I’m really appreciating this reference.

Morath: My wife was born in Minnesota.

Wicks: She’s excellent.

Morath: Good folk. So, in West Virginia at the time, every school district in the state did some form of standardized testing, and they used, maybe the Iowa test, the basic skills, if you all recall that, that still around, it’s being renamed. There’s a bunch of these sort of nationally norm referenced tests. They did do those tests, and then they published the results. Each school system in West Virginia published the results of their scores. And they would do this every year, and if the scores were good, they would celebrate, if scores weren’t good, they would talk about it, but this was a public process. Well, this was done without any sort of strong oversight. You hear this term about high stakes testing. There were no ratings or anything like that. These were just tests that were administered, and then people publicly reported the results, and nobody paid that much attention to how the tests were administered. So, a researcher grabs all of these results and finds that the average child in West Virginia is at the 82nd percentile, given all the self-reported information that comes out of these test scores. And if you don’t know much about mathematics, average is 50, and it’s 50 pretty much anyway you calculate the average. There’s been a bunch of wailing and gnashing of teeth over those studies. And some people are like, well, people are just lying. And I don’t actually think it’s people are lying. I actually think it’s a case of, when you sign up to work in public education, you do so typically, because you love children and you want what’s best for them. You’re driven with this very compassionate heart. And we are blessed. We’ve got an army of angels that work for us in schools all over the United States, all over Texas. But there’s a flip side of that, that if you are in a meeting and you happen to work in investment banking, you do not, in the room, have a bunch of people sitting around talking about their calling. It doesn’t happen, my apologies to the investment bankers in the audience, but it does happen in a room full of educators. And in that room of investment bankers, to quote, our basketball aficionados, “ball don’t lie.” They’re looking at money, and the money tells the story. And if I’m talking about little kiddos that are full of boundless joy and energy, I love little Johnny, and as a result, the human mind being what it is, I convinced myself that I am then doing right by little Johnny. But those aren’t axiomatic truths. You don’t just love kids to high levels of mathematics proficiency, to high levels of reading proficiency. Love is a minimum ingredient. You have to start this work by loving children, but it takes discipline, it takes focus, it takes a high degree of expertise, and it takes intellectual honesty. And when you do something, and the results don’t quite work, you need to know that that has happened so that you can adjust accordingly. This is how you get better. We are not going to create a utopia. That’s not going to happen. We are all fallen, flawed creatures, but what we do have to do is embrace a mindset of continuous improvement, and that is being clear eyed about where we are today, and building action plans so we can try to get better, and then checking, did it work, and how well did it work.

Wicks: Yes, clear eyed, full hearts, and for the Friday night.

Morath: Can’t lose, this is Texas.

Wicks: That is the truth.

Kaufmann: It is high school football playoff season right now, in fact.

Wicks: Okay, I want to switch to another topic that’s been in the news lately in Texas around Bluebonnet curriculum, which is something you all developed at Texas Education Agency. For those in our audience who don’t know, not many state agencies are in the curriculum development business, and I’d love for you to tell us what it is, why you built it, how you built it, and what’s the intent behind this project.

Morath: Well, this is not a short story, but I’ll try to make it short. So we, at the state agency, are constantly trying to evaluate practices in schools, see patterns across the state, identify where we see outliers that are strong in terms of student learning, where they’re weak, and in all of our analysis, we started to notice something. And what we noticed was that the typical student assignment that kids received from their teacher in the classroom was actually below grade level, all grades, all subjects.

Wicks: Meaning, if you’re a third grade kid doing a math lesson, your math lesson might actually look more like a first or second grade lesson.

Morath: That’s exactly what it means. And there was a national study that did this. We did a version of this. We looked across 27 school systems. We found 19% of elementary reading assignments were actually on grade level. And it’s not because the other 81% were above grade level, they were below. So, it’s 19% at or above grade level. We discerned that this is not happening intentionally. It’s not like there’s a conspiracy to dumb things down. Teachers are using resources that they were given or not given by the school district. They’re working very hard. Kids are doing the assignments that they’re given. The kids didn’t choose to take a below grade level assignment, and so this sets up a situation where a kid works their tail off all year long. Teacher works his or her tail off all year long, getting As, Bs at the end of the year. Then you get a standardized assessment, which is built to be grade level, and it shows you you’re below grade level. You’re like, what gives. Well, if you were taught second grade content all year, and then you’re given a third grade test, unless mom and dad did a lot of work outside of school, which does in fact happen, you’re not going to do all that well on that third grade test.

Kaufmann: If I’m a parent, I’m not thrilled about that.

Morath: That’s right, but you also don’t even really know, which is unfortunate, because, like, do I trust the standardized test, or do I trust what my teacher’s grades have been given me all year long?

Wicks: And I know the teacher. I don’t know this mysterious test.

Morath: I don’t know whoever made the tests, so it leads to sort of total concept rejection, although not universally. I always joke with my team. I’ve got a couple of brothers. One of them lives here in Arlington, and he’s like my redneck brother, focus group of one. I test things on him from time to time, and so his boys, my nephews, one of them had real struggles on some of these standardized tests. And my brother’s talking to me, and he’s like, I know exactly why this happens, I’ve looked at the assignments, they’re not giving them real work in school. So he didn’t blame the test, he just recognizes. So, there’s some recognition from parents of this, but not universal recognition. So that’s part of the story, then COVID hits. Now when COVID hits, what has happened in COVID is you had a huge chunk of America and American parents that now started to see day to day lessons on a daily basis that they weren’t really seeing before, because maybe the kid was at home and there’s a zoom lesson, and you’re seeing what’s happening on Zoom. And there was a giant awakening from parents that were like what is this? This is not what I was taught. And so sometimes it just seems ideologically off or pedagogically off, but many parents are like this is not why I sent you to school every day to learn this. This is dribble. And so that’s really consistent with our findings. So, we’re looking at like, what is causing this, and the way that instructional materials make it into the classrooms, as it turns out, in Texas, can’t speak for every state, is highly varied. The state essentially gives districts money, tells them to buy anything they want. They’re allowed to buy anything they want. They do. Some of them buy really robust, rigorous stuff. Some of them don’t. And even that is complicated, because sometimes they buy it, it’s this mix of printed and digital licenses, and then they ask their teachers to, once a week, spend time building lessons, and they can select from any of these off the shelf resources. That is a different problem, which is also fairly catastrophic for the health of the teaching profession.

Wicks: So if you don’t know, there is not a curriculum box that comes from the state agency that shows up to a school and the teachers implement exactly.

Morath: There has not ever been, it’s highly localized, very idiosyncratic in terms of system, but I just want to talk about the lived experience of our teachers for a bit. So Governor Abbott asked us to convene a teacher vacancy task force a couple years ago. We convened, and we had a bunch of teachers, a bunch of HR professionals, principals. It’s an interdisciplinary mix of folks, and the teachers not universally, because there’s 1,200 school systems, so nothing you can say about public education, you can say is universally true. There’s too much variation, but it was very common for the teachers to report I am being worked to death. I have to spend somewhere north of 80 hours to do all of my job duties each week, to do them well, and sometimes I have the 80 hours to give, and sometimes I don’t. And when I don’t, and I’m only working 60 hours a week, I still know that all this other work has to happen, and I’m intellectually burdened by this, because I signed up because I love children, and I know that I can’t do the job that I need to do unless I spend all this extra time, but where am I going to find that extra time? There’s a lot of things causing that, but it is caused in part by not giving teachers a set of instructional resources that have been well built and vetted that they can use as a starting point. Because, if you don’t give them that, and you just say, at the end of the year, I’d like them to be able to do X, and you figure it out all along the way, many of our teachers are very gifted, and they can do that. I will tell you first year teachers are not.

Wicks: I was terrible at that.

Morath:  Because you haven’t seen the arc of how something in April connects back to something in August until you’ve done that at least once.

Wicks: I was just trying to survive Tuesday.

Morath: So, if you are making your teachers spend roughly six and a half hours a day delivering instruction to children, and you’re making them build all of that instructional design from scratch. You know, I don’t know how much public speaking you do, but there’s a there’s a general rule of thumb for me and my team, if I’ve got to go out and give a speech, I’m going to spend generally twice as much time writing the speech as I do delivering the speech. And the difference between that and teaching is, I don’t have to determine whether everybody in the audience mastered what I was given. So, if you think about what a teacher needs to do from a preparation and after delivery, the ratio is way off, and the United States is unfortunately uniquely dumb in how we burden our teachers in this way. Because if you look at Finland and South Korea and Japan, the ratio of teacher time spent teaching versus teacher time spent thinking it’s about 50-50, and in the United States, for your actual, you know, normal eight hour work day, it’s more like 80-20, or 90-10, but as I’ve said, the eight hour work day is a myth for teachers. They have to work way more than this after school and nights and on weekends trying to put together these lessons. And so, you have all of this sort of observationally that we can see that members of legislature hearing from teachers about this. So, you’ve got parents that are upset about rigor and content, in many cases, for the first time, having been awakened by COVID. You’ve got low levels of student achievement data that’s accompanied by now strong evidence that underlying lesson designs tend to be inadequate. And then you’ve got teachers saying, like, y’all are killing us. You’ve got to give us more time to plan or better preparation materials, or both. And so the legislature acted on that, and they said, what we’re going to do is we’re going to start vetting instructional materials with real resources at the state level for quality. We’re going to allow districts to buy off of that list, whether it’s anything that’s been vetted that’s high quality, and we’re going to give them more resources to do that, so they increase the instructional materials budget for districts by 50% so that they could buy these higher quality materials that have been then vetted by the state. And we’re going to go one step further. Rather than leaving the design of instructional materials entirely to the private sector, we are going to create what we believe to be one gold standard option that is a reflection just of Texas standards, that is built just for Texas. And so they directed us at the agency to build instructional materials to be an additional option. So now you have for profit, private sector textbook publishers, and you also have the TEA that is offering instructional materials, and so Bluebonnet Learning is the materials that we created. And it’s important when you think about that as an option, because you’re like, why does the public sector need to do something that the private sector has been doing for 50 plus years? It’s because, well, our incentives are actually somewhat different. If you’re selling textbooks, you know, you’ve got to make margin, you’ve got to make EBITDA for those companies, and we are only interested in what is the thing that’s going to lead to increased student achievement, and what is the tightest alignment with state content standards. So, if you’re a private sector publishing company, you generally want to build, like, one textbook, and maybe make very minor changes from one state to the next. We’re not constrained by that. It’s a very Texas built product based on our standards, and designed around the best cognitive science evidence, even if that theoretically lowers the margin, and of course, that’s even a misnomer. There is no margin. So when school districts purchase the Bluebonnet materials, the only cost is the cost of running it through a print shop. That’s it, because all the materials are digitally, you know, they’re PDFs, and so the only cost is printing. And we don’t need to make any money printing. Somebody needs to make a little money printing. It tends to be a much cheaper product as a result.

Wicks: So districts can choose it, they don’t have to choose right? I want to ask you about the controversy around it, because there’s been some controversy around the content and how it was built. I’ve looked at some of it. The rigor in it has been fun to see. I have a fourth grader, so I was thinking about, I was looking at some of the fourth-grade content around that, but there’s been some critiques that it takes a very heavy Christian view, too many biblical references in the content. I’d love to have you talk about that process and the public review.

Morath: Yeah, I don’t think any of that criticism is accurate, but unfortunately, this is a different discussion on how the media creates an echo chamber around a particular idea, whether that’s ideas more than reality or not. To be clear, you have like 300,000 pages of content.  You have to design lessons for 180 school days. Over 180 school days there tends to actually be about 165 instructional days, think like field trips and fire alarms, that sort of thing. So, that’s 165 reading lessons. In the very early grades, there’s actually two sets of 165 reading lessons. So, there’s 165 reading lessons on phonics and phonemic awareness and handwriting and penmanship, cursive and print, grammar and spelling. And then there’s a different 165 reading lessons that are about growing vocabulary and reading for comprehension. That gets unified in third grade. So third grade on there’s just 165 lessons, but kindergarten, first grade, second grade is 330 lessons in reading. In addition to that, oh, by the way, there’s math. And so we have math lessons, kindergarten, first grade, second grade, third grade. For again, 165 days sort of built out. There’s a bunch of, I think, criticism leveled at the product, and all that criticism, I think, fails when subjected to any legitimate scrutiny. One is that it’s too hard. The curriculum is legit. You have kids in second grade reading about the War of 1812. You have kids in fifth grade, and they will read A Midsummer Night’s Dream. And this is not like watching Leonardo DiCaprio do it on TV. It’s not the cliff notes.

Wicks: It’s not a graphic novel.

Morath: It is Shakespeare’s iambic pentameter. They’re reading and discussing in fifth grade. And we’ve been piloting this for quite some time in rich communities and poor communities, in rural and urban, and it works. And if you think kids can’t do this, you are incorrect, regardless of how well resourced the household they came from or not. There’s a second grade unit that talks about ancient Greece, and I’m watching a second grade a lesson in ancient Greece be delivered at a 99% low income school in a really broken part of one of our towns in Texas, and the teacher’s like, this is the review portion lesson. Remember what we talked about, I want you to pair up and describe the differences between Plato, Aristotle, and Socrates. And I’m sitting there, you know, crisscross applesauce on the ground next to the kids. These are second graders, and they’re all talking like, Socrates, he was the blind one, right? Yeah, that’s right, Socrates was the blind one. It’s amazing.

Kaufmann: Kids can learn.

Morath: The teacher’s going on. It was just so amazing to watch this lesson happen. And the teacher’s like, okay, remember, in Athens they created a way of government that was new at the time. Whole class response, what was it? And they were, like, democracy. So somebody tell me what does it mean? What does the word democracy mean? And you know, kids are second grade, their hands are shooting up, and little Jaime come to the front of the class. And Jaime comes in front of the class. And what is democracy? Democracy is where you vote for your leaders. And this is what you’re getting, and it’s very interdisciplinary. What I’ve just talked about is history and civics. There’s science, there’s literature. Kids are reading Treasure Island in fourth grade, Wind in the Willows in third grade. It’s classic literature. It’s a very humanities style, interdisciplinary, kind of classical approach to reading instruction, where you’re teaching foundations of grammar and syntax, but you’re also reading interesting stuff. So, there is some rejection of that concept, but the interesting stuff that has engendered the most public discussion is the fact that periodically, there are references that are religious in nature. So, in fourth grade, there’s a unit where you learn a little bit about the Middle Ages, and so there’s discussions of kings of the Middle Ages, and the Magna Carta comes up, but also the Crusades. Well, the Crusades was not a real estate conflict. It was a clash between Islam and the Church, and so you have to provide some degree of background on that for kids to understand that. If you’re going to teach the Renaissance, do you talk about the influence of the Church? Do you even talk about the influence of the Islamic civilization in, say, Spain. And so do you leave these topics out? And if we choose to leave these out, if we, in public school, deliberately remove this one aspect of human knowledge and human experience and literature from our children, they will not be well educated. What are they going to do when they read Steinbeck in high school, and Steinbeck starts making references. Who is the Solomon guy? I’ve never heard of this guy before. You want to include that as part of a well-rounded education. You don’t overwhelm them, you don’t proselytize. This is not designed to make anybody believe in Hinduism or Islam or Judaism or Christianity or any of the number of polytheistic faiths that exist. But you do want to ensure that if you are giving kids instruction in the rich language that is English, you don’t ignore the fact that we have 240 idioms of this language that come from the King James Bible. And what do those words mean? What does the term come from? If you hear this in common parlance, what is the reference? So that kind of content is included where appropriate, where relevant. It’s not an overwhelming number of lessons. It’s a small piece of the puzzle, as part of what should be expected in a well-rounded education.

Kaufmann: I think we’re all really fortunate that our Commissioner of Education is this passionate about education and what our kids are learning, and that they’re learning. I know that makes me optimistic for our kids’ future. What makes you optimistic for our kids’ future as we kind of wrap this up?

Morath: I mean, there’s so many things to celebrate about what our teachers are doing and what our schools are doing. But in Texas, when I think about the scale of Texas, because again, my lens, I’m not in a classroom teaching 20 kids. My job is to see across the system, to recognize patterns, and to promote the patterns that seem to be most beneficial to kids. And so these kinds of curricular investments that you’ve seen the legislature make, will support learning and students all over the state, whether they use Bluebonnet or another State Board of Education adopted high quality instructional material. This is good. It’s going to help the lives of teachers. It’s going to help the lives of kids. We also, in Texas, have made an investment in teachers that is really unusual. I don’t think any other state does something like this. There’s a provision in our laws that is called the teacher incentive allotment, where, if you as a local school district want to do this, it’s optional, but you build a teacher evaluation system that is fair and rigorous. And fair meaning, like two different administrators walk into a classroom, they draw the same conclusion. Not just I like you because you have a good attitude, but we have a calibrated set of understanding of what you are doing is good teaching practice based upon an evidence-based rubric, and the level of growth year over year that students are demonstrating is there. If you do that, the state will send you somewhere between  $3,000-32,000 of extra money per teacher, and that’s based upon the teacher’s level of performance. Also, we send a disproportionate amount of money to low income and rural schools. It’s a very, sort of equitable distribution of resources. That that you do for the least of my brothers, you do for me kind of thing, and so that policy change has been going on for some time. And it’s slowly working its way through Texas, but we have 25,000 teachers designated so far. We will be within 100,000 teachers designated. The number of teachers in Texas making six figures because of this has skyrocketed, now from a low number to begin with, but all of the six figure teachers four years ago were football coaches, and now they’re also reading and math teachers. By the way, I love my football coaches.

Kaufmann: It is high school playoffs.

Morath: I also love our math teachers and reading teachers. There have been some research studies done on this, and so this seems to be leading to higher rates of teacher retention and teacher satisfaction in the districts that have done this. Dallas was really the first district in the state of Texas to do this with a policy that this was in some ways modeled off of. The Dallas experience is fascinating because it’s been around long enough that it’s really been able to be studied in a rigorous way. So, a Stanford economist looked at Dallas’s system, and from the year 2015 through 2019 the achievement gains made in Dallas for all kids, and then disproportionately for low income kids, was massively higher than every similarly situated district in the state of Texas. For those that spend time reading these studies, they’re all measured in things called effect sizes, which I feel like you have to have an advanced degree in statistics understand. So, I called the researchers like, can you explain to me what this effect size is, give me like a frame of reference? And he said, well, I can frame it for you in two in two different ways. One, you’re familiar with how much ground we lost due to COVID. This is the same amount, except it’s gain. And he said, I’ll frame it for you a different way. This is equivalent to roughly 25% of the rich-poor achievement gap being eliminated in a four year window, because in Dallas, what they do is evaluate teachers holistically in a very fair system. The teachers whose performance improves get fairly large raises. They can range from anywhere from $1,500 to $5,000, actually even $8,000, in a year, which is a pretty good raise, and then the teachers whose performance doesn’t improve don’t get a raise. And that practice change, not only does it massively improve over time student learning, because it changes the sort of selection effect of teachers over time, but it is also the best way if you think about honoring teaching as a profession. If we cannot get serious about identifying professionalism and rewarding teachers with that professionalism, we will continue to have a profession that is that is really struggling. And I’ll frame this in a different way. Every teacher in Texas is very familiar with this experience that I’m about to describe. You’ve got two third grade teachers, one in classroom A, one in classroom B. Bell rings at 3:00. Teacher in classroom A walks down the hall, gets in the car, and drives home. Teacher in classroom B stays there until 8:00 at night, calling parents, working nights and weekends. At the end of the year, they both get the same raise, and it’s like $250 or something like that. That is so corrosive to our professionals. And I don’t know why this is some radical idea. Because Adam Smith wrote about this a long time ago. This is not a new concept.

Kaufmann: And in every other workplace it’s the other way.

Morath: So there are districts that are basically changing from everybody gets an across the board pay raise no matter what, no matter how effective or ineffective, how hard you work. There are districts that are changing so that they now pass out raises differentially. And you know, sometimes people call this performance pay. Most people think about this as if you pay for performance. It’s going to cause teachers to get better. I want to disabuse anybody of that notion. You don’t have teachers today that are like, you know, if they paid me $10,000 more, I’d work harder. That’s like, not a thing. It’s actually somewhat insulting to think about that. Again, we’ve got this army of angels that work for us. But not everybody is equally effective and they’re not growing at equally effective rates. And so by differentiating the way raises are paid, it doesn’t cause teachers to get better, it does cause teachers to remain teachers longer. And we need as many skilled professionals in our classroom with hearts of love and with discipline and an endless reservoir of passion and compassion and who are constantly thinking about the discipline of mathematics or history or science or social studies. That’s who we need. That’s as a dad who I want teaching my kids.

Wicks: It lets us say to the teachers, you’re really good. You are an expert. You’re a professional with expertise, and all that hard work you’re doing is making a big difference for kids, and you’re going to get paid differently because of what you’re delivering in the classroom.

Morath: That’s right, and if you drive around town, y’all live in Dallas, you can drive around town, they put billboards up in Dallas and say Dallas ISD teachers, $62,200-$102,000, that’s the pay range. And now we’re talking now, still, don’t get me wrong, that’s actually still not what teachers are worth. A high skilled kindergarten teacher produces about $400,000 of net present value for the country every single year of their life.

Wicks: I just love that you put in that present value of a kindergarten teacher. Maybe the only state commissioner around who does that, which I like.

Kaufmann: I respect it.

Morath: But we’ve got to get serious about honoring our professionals as the professionals that they are, and so what makes me really optimistic is that in Texas, we are starting to tilt in that direction, while still honoring local control and allowing district communities to differentiate how they do that.

Kaufmann: Commissioner Morath, thank you so much for the time today, but also for your leadership in our state and you know, we’re proud of what our kids are doing, what our kids can do, and we’re glad there are dedicated professionals from teachers to the Commissioner’s office that are helping them get there. Thank you for the time today and thank you for the work you’re doing.

Morath: Thank you very much.