A Matter of Trust: Macke Raymond on “Unheard Voices” in America’s School Communities

- It is Thursday, April 9th, 2026. You're listening to Matters of Policy and Politics, a podcast devoted to discussion of Hoover Institution, policy, research, and issues of local, national and geopolitical concern. I'm Bill Whalen. I'm the Hoover Institutions for Virginia Hobbs, or distinguished policy fellow in journalism. I'm not the only Hoover fellow who's podcasting these days, and I encourage you to go to our website, which is hoover.org. And there you'll go. Actually, if you do hoover.org/podcast, you'll find a whole array of podcasts, including the audio version of Goodfellows that I have the honor of doing now in Springtime across America, which for many families has meant spring break, a week off from classes where many kids get away from the grind by literally getting outta town and seeing other parts of America. I can personally attest to this as not too long ago, two of my 7-year-old grand nephews, their second graders in Greenville, South Carolina, came out to California to pay me a visit. But the debate over how to achieve better outcomes in education and greater equality in public schools doesn't take a break. Education is a topic of today's podcast as group. It's my great pleasure to welcome to the podcast by Hoover colleague Macke Raymond. Margaret Mackey. Raymond is a Hoover Institution distinguished research fellow and program director of the Hoover Institution Program on K through 12 education at Stanford University, a leader in studying charter school's, education reform, policy measurement, performance, accountability, and incentives. She's produced an extensive record of publications that includes Hoover's Unheard Voices, community Conversations Project, and a report she got co-authored with Mardo Al that was published late last month. As the name of the project implies its purpose is to give citizens and communities with low performing schools a space where they can relate their experiences with their local school systems and help identify ways to create better learning spaces for their kids. Mackey great to see you.

- Hi Bill. It's great to be here.

- So we have had a fellow named Rick Che on this podcast. Before I know him, you know him very well because you happen to live with him. He is your husband. So this is the first now husband, wife podcast we have done. We have now checked that box.

- Alright.

- Umm, kind of curious, when you have a colleague at the Hoover Institution to whom you're married, that means you see him in the morning, you go to work together and maybe you see each other during the day. You come home at night, do you talk shop when you get home or do you put shop behind when you get home?

- We talk shop all the time.

- All the time. And his shop is education as well.

- He's an economist and he studies the economic impacts of how well school systems perform and how that eventually affects their communities, states and nations, economic wellbeing.

- Now, when I had him on the podcast, he told me how he got into education, which was via economics as you mentioned. What drew you to this field? Why? Why do you find education so compelling?

- Well, clearly there's no other public policy commitment to building the human capital infrastructure of our country other than our investments in public education. When it started all the way back at the founding of our country, the commitment was only to track education and how much education was being consumed or developed for kids. But it's grown into a huge democratic priority. It's a big value in our, in our society, and it matters a lot in terms of how well people end up doing in life, what kinds of opportunities become available to them. And so it really is, as far as I'm concerned, one of the huge public policy engines. And I've always been interested in how government decision making affects people's livelihood and outcomes. So education is a natural place to look.

- And if our director, Kalisa Rice were here, she'd tell you it's in her opinion, the civil rights issue of our times.

- Unfortunately, that's true. In the ideal world, we would care deeply about every single child and making sure that they were equipped. Unfortunately, our histories have not led us to a state where that is true, but it's still an aspiration that we hold.

- I'm not an education maven, but I've been following the topic for decades, since I came to California to work for a governor. And going back, this would be the mid 1990s, I'm dating myself here. Mackey, back in the nineties, education was primarily a muddy conversation, especially in a state like California. It was always, why doesn't California do better? We don't spend enough on public schools. And the pushback was, well, it's not just a financial argument, it's also a quality argument as well. Why don't you offer a choice? Why don't we examine curriculum? Why don't we exam better, better examine our standards and make sure kids are graduating with the skills they need and so forth. It seems to me, I mackey that the conversation has been morphing the past few years. And there's one thing that I look at that is the change agent here, and that's COVID. Hmm. COVID hits in 2020 and it immediately just sends the world into chaos. And for a lot of Americans, it completely blows up their education arrangement. Their public schools are closed, maybe their private schools are closed as well. Now parents are looking at education maybe in a different light. Their kids are not getting educated at school, they're getting educated at home. And we could probably agree that getting educated on a computer screen is not the same as being in a classroom. So now they're concerned about the quality of education their kids are getting. They may be concerned about their teachers and who controls schools because unions did not behave very well during COVID. I think they were very resistant to opening. So maybe if your parent, you're starting to question, are my kids educators? Are the teacher's hearts really in the game or not? Now we have this thing called COVID Learning Loss, which we'll be coping with for years now. Something which, you know, Rick has been looking at on in his studies as well, am I right here in that COVID was a big disruptor when it came to education? Or am I, am I at la la land?

- You're not at la la land. It was a disruptor. But if you actually look at the pattern of how schools were doing, they were already in free fall before that. Right? The period of COVID just accelerated the decline. And unfortunately, performance has continued to decline even as we've gotten back to school. So you are right in pointing out that what happened during that time was the deep systemic failures of the way we educate kids became very, very apparent. It accelerated a conversation around not only what kids are able to learn, but how, how we are willfully ignoring those situations in which kids aren't learning. Well, to harken back to your comment about about money, the irony about the pandemic itself was the billions and billions of dollars that were handed out virtually string free during the period of COVID ostensibly to try to help school districts hold together and ensure that they were developing effective learning opportunities for kids. And what ended up happening was, as you say, much of that money did not actually reach its intended purposes. The law said only 15% of those dollars had to be spent on instructional purposes. But in fact, many places, even that 15% did not get spent on kids. So there's a huge influx of money, practically nothing to show for it. A few gymnasiums were built, a few track, track and field arenas were built, but mostly that money went to keeping teachers on the payroll or even adding teachers to the payroll when in fact that has had absolutely no discernible impact on what kids know.

- There is a financial conversation going on these days, Mackin, and it has to do with money based on enrollment. And we have a problem now across the country in that you have declining enrollment in public schools. I've heard various explanations for, for why there's declining enrollment. I've heard, again, some people have said, well, COVID was one of the reasons that push has parents suddenly looked at homeschooling as an option rather than public schooling. But also parents have choices. Now they can do vouchers, they could do private schools as well. But in your estimation, what is, what is pushing down enrollment Mackey?

- So the decline in the student population of school aged kids is the major driver, right? Of the declining enrollment Politically, people are jumping on a whole lot of other factors in order to try to meet their own agendas. They're blaming transfer of students into charter schools. Well, there's only about 6 million kids in charter schools. That's not a big effect. Oh, it's homeschooling. Well, there's only about 3 million kids in, in homeschooling. That's not a big, really what's happening is that families, particularly in urban areas, are finding the cost of living so high, affordability being a huge issue for so many families. They're choosing not to have as many children as other families had in earlier generations. So the entire population of school aged kids showing up at the front door of any school is declining.

- Right, right. One other thing to to add here that I want to get in community on her voices, it's also parents voicing their frustrations and getting involved in the game. Getting back to politics in 2021, Glenn Youngin runs for governor of Virginia. He's running against Terry McCullough, who's a very well-heeled democrat. McCullough's expected to win and youngin seizes on an issue. And the issue he seizes on is schools. What he was looking at in particular, I think it was Loudoun County, which is just outside of Washington dc. It's the beyond the excerpts of Washington dc and they're having an argument, I think a conversation Mie, I believe it had to do with maybe bathroom policy. I could be wrong here. It was just a question of parents being involved in how the schools made their decisions. And these parents felt very left out, very angry and their voice of frustration. And in this election you saw that turn into muscle and a push young and young Ken into office as well. But I'm curious, do you see parents getting more vocal now in education?

- Well, certainly, as you alluded to earlier, when parents were looking over their children's shoulders,

- Right, - During the pandemic looking at online education, one of the big revelations was the ideological gap between many families and the teachers who were teaching their children. And moreover, the exercise of authority by the teachers to try to bring those ideological lessons into the classroom. That was the, the foundation for many of the culture wars that started to erupt during the pandemic. But certainly since the pandemic in Virginia, he was smart enough to understand that this was a real emotional hot point. And so he, he worked that when he was elected, he did in fact try to address education. I would say his efforts were more aspirational than actual. While he did secure some incredibly smart people to help him in his education agenda, he really didn't move the ball very much. And so when you're looking at how Virginia is doing, it's not a story that looks like the Mississippi Miracle, which is a state that came from the absolute bottom of the rankings and took on the issue of really addressing early education reading. So from kindergarten all the way through fourth or fifth grade, bringing a coherent strategy for teaching reading to every single child in the state. Now, that wasn't a political process, that was a, a state leader saying, we are going to coordinate all of our resources in this particular direction. I didn't see that in Virginia. That just hasn't happened. But the issues are there. Parents don't like ideology in the classroom, no matter where they are. They don't want that for their kids. They do want coherent, they want effective learning experiences for their kids. And where that's not happening, they want to have a voice. They want to have a seat at the table.

- I was talking to a reporter the other day about Governor Newsom, Gavin Newsom, governor of California, who's expected to run for president in 2028. And our conversation was, what various hand grenades in California will catch up with him come the time he runs around the country. Because to get elected, you have to essentially position yourself as a middle of the road unless there are exceptional circumstances. You have to convince the American people you're not crazy to one extreme or the other. And so Newsom is gonna have to fend off the image of California at large. So the reporter said, well, is the issue homelessness is the issue how California spends its money? And I said, well, those are valid issues, but one to also look at will be schools and education, because there are various policy aspects. So to come back to haunt Newsom, for example, if a kid wants to re-identify his or her agenda, California Newsom signed a bill, which said the school does not have to report back to the parents that this happened as well. So you may see California's educational approach on display as well in 2028.

- Well, and let's not forget that California was a state where the teacher stayed out an entire extra year.

- Yeah. - And there was no leadership from Sacramento on trying to address that, even when it was clear that children had a much, much lower risk of infection. And even when it was clear that the infection rate for teachers in states where the schools had reopened earlier was nowhere near as, as impacted as the teachers association and teachers were telling people their their risk rates were. So I do think that there are ways that California has distinguished itself as the anti-education state. I have high hopes that that actually can be redressed, but it's probably not going to happen anytime soon.

- We also, while I don't think California is a pioneer in this practice, Mackey, we have popularized the art of teachers going on strike during the school year. It happened in Los Angeles before COVID actually, but it's occurred at her. It's a regular bug feature in San Francisco. It had a strike earlier this year. Oakland always seems to be having strikes going on. And this, at one point, this was not considered kosher in the world of education. Teachers did not walk out on the school in the middle of the year, but now they do it. And what always kind of amuses me about it, Mackie, and again, I'm looking at this from a political standpoint, invariably these strikes happen and the unions put kind of the worst people on display as their voices. And it's just, it's people with orange and purple hair and multiple piercings on their faces, and it's just not kind of the comforting school arm that you and I may have grown up with.

- So one of the big insights to me living in California for the last few decades is that the union actually has a much larger political agenda than advancing the interest of teachers.

- Yeah. - And so it's actually been a question in my own mind of why, why do teachers continue to allow their dues and their political action fund payments to go for things that they have absolutely no say in, and that have potentially impact even on their own ability to do their job in the long run. That's when I see folks, as you described, being the spokespeople for the collective actions that the unions and the teachers association want to take. That says to me, that's an Overton Window problem where they're actually trying to move tolerance in, in a direction so that they can advance other things.

- Yeah. Well put, well, governor Newsom does run for President Mackey. He'll be going around the country listening to a lot of voices and having a lot of conversations in communities. Which takes us to your project, unheard Voices, community Conversations. Let's begin with a basic question. What inspired you to do this?

- Sure. So I've been looking at education issues for 25 years, and one of the real obvious things to me as I go around the country and I am engaged in various policy dis discussions and even school district level decisions, is that people who have to live with the results of local school districts, and by that I mean employers or local electeds who are trying to improve the quality of life in their communities, nonprofits, parents, and so on Are not engaged. They are not invited, and they are not included in much of the decision making about what schools do and should do in order to produce graduates who are ready for the life after high school. So I wanted to find out what, what was that all about? Was it a lack of interest? Was it a lack of capacity? Was it a lack of time and and expertise, or was it something less structural than that? Was there actually process involved the folks who could be at the table but weren't, were somehow not either given access or given the opportunity or were actively prevented from participating?

- And the voices are parents, teachers, activists, business leaders?

- Yes. All of the above. We made the decision not to include students, but they are also a stakeholder group that has very little voice, but these are stakeholders that actually are vested with interest in, in how their schools are doing. And for the most part, the Unheard Voices Project was really just trying to identify the dimensions of how much unheard there is, if that's a, a construct. And the first project that we did was a national poll that we literally we're just trying to get sort of the size of the problem and the boundaries. And the one takeaway from that, which led to us doing the community conversations was that most local people that we talked, that, that were surveyed, had a single source of information about how their schools were doing. And that source was the local school district itself. And you can imagine that if an underperforming district is asked to describe how they're doing, they are not prompted to transparency. And so that particular project learned that regardless of whether the school was actually doing well or doing really poorly, that the quality of the communication, the content of the communication, the, the stories that were told were very much the same. That basically school districts have an incentive to, to only tell the Roy side, right? They're not required. And that most folks are not aware of the other more objective measures that states are required by the federal government or require of themselves to produce and make transparent and available to families.

- So you're not finding an organization where people could say, go online and look up state numbers for school districts to see where your school ranked and things like that. Or individuals. Were not talking to each other on bulletin boards.

- So those resources do exist. The penetration of those is trivial and frankly, states in many cases, states make it difficult to go find where the school rankings, where the school evaluations and and performance scores are, right. They bury them six or seven clicks down as opposed to making it transparent and they do not require transparent and obvious access on local school district websites.

- Did you look at all at how local media cover the schools in terms of outcomes and so forth?

- Sure, we did. Thank you for asking. Disappointing bottom line. Disappointing. But what we found was that the media rely on wait for it, the local school district in order to get information about the schools. And so whether that's an act of an act of collusion or whether that's just an act of lack of motivation or lack of under understanding that there are are other resources they should tap, we didn't probe.

- I'm interested in the states that you looked at back. You did focus groups in Colorado, Indiana, new Minnesota, Pennsylvania, New Mexico, New York, West Virginia.

- You are correct.

- I'd like to know why you focused on those states in particular. There's no California, there's no Texas, there's no Florida.

- You are correct again. So we took a look at the distribution within every state in the country there. We took all of the reports on how schools were doing those objective measures I was mentioning earlier. And we took the bottom 20% of schools and put them all in a pile and then said, we want to tell the story of the, this community of schools. We tried to make it as broadly representative with only nine choices. We wanted to have urban and suburban and rural schools. We wanted to have places where there was school choice and there wasn't school choice. We wanted a place where the entire education system was not controlled by the state education department. And so that's why we excluded California. That's why we excluded Texas. That's why we didn't do New York. We tried for Chicago and we, we were not able to get the right pieces lined up so that we could do a focus group.

- Would that have been an ideological problem? Would they have just said, this is a conservative think tank that's that's that wants to do this? Or, or do they just frankly not wanna let you look under the hood?

- No, I think that there was, there was some resistance to having anybody take a look at this question.

- Yeah,

- I don't think they necessarily had a bias against Hoover or somebody who was right of center, the local. We wanted to partner with a local organization who had a better opportunity to recruit the kinds of folks we wanted to talk to. There was, I think, a reluctance on their part of fear of backlash. If any of those did it. I, I think that there was much more self-preservation at work in that environment than we found in other parts of the country.

- That would make sense.

- Yeah. I will say earlier work in California, we found that same thing. That there was a real concern about retribution.

- Right. Let's go through some of the findings of the report, please point number one. You've already touched on this. Communities have limited information regarding school performance. So my question is how do you change that? How do you give them more information?

- Well, I was surprised that less than half of the folks that we talked to across these nine focus groups actually looked at what were interested in measures of performance. Less than half of them actually regularly said, I wanna know how the schools are doing.

- Right?

- So that threshold in and of itself suggests a barrier to engagement. If you're not aware that the schools are doing badly, you're maybe not motivated to to, to try to get involved. Of the folks that were motivated, very, very few of them knew about other objective measures other than what the school districts was telling them. So again, there's a learning curve there that we found that was a barrier to either folks realizing how much the problem, how large a problem they had, or using that information as part of their advocacy to get involved.

- What if you said new rule every year my child gets report card and every year the parents get a school report card.

- I know that that's been tried in some places. And the difficulty is that that's always a state mandate and that that becomes an unfunded requirement of school districts and they practically never do it.

- Right.

- There you go.

- Okay. Alright. Point number two, finding number two. Those who are familiar with performance ratings consistently rate schools as low performing. In other words, they don't care for the status quo.

- Yes. And the criteria that they're using though are, are sort of a story in and of themselves. We did not hear very much about whether the students that were in the schools at that time were actually learning as they should. We didn't hear about whether students had literacy skills or math skills in enough time in order to prepare them for advanced learning. The, the sort of deeper cognitive learning that reading leads to, or the math skills that would set you up to be able to take high school sequences of math. We, we didn't hear practically anything of that. What we heard was, my kid is coming outta school and he has no pathway. He doesn't have skills for a job. He's not prepared for college. He has no clue what he wants to do. He is not prepared for life. Now that's a pretty devastating and damning indictment of the school, but it isn't tied to anything that the school necessarily did or didn't do. And we were expecting a little bit more understanding of what schools ought to provide. Then we heard from many of the, many of the people that we talked to.

- A third finding, even when improvement efforts demonstrate success initiatives are often discontinued following funding cuts, leadership changes or shifting priorities.

- Ah, so now we're getting to the, the story under the rock. When you lift it, I'll give you the meta finding and then I'll tell about the, I'll talk about the specifics. The meta finding is underperforming districts don't look like they're really committed to improving. If that were the case, we would find sustained efforts to improve. We would find initiatives that actually survived over leadership training, train changes, or were able to be defended in budget allocation decisions. We didn't see that. So the meta finding is people seemed to be okay with whatever bad answer all around as far as I can tell. The bigger part of that though, and the, the, the micro data that shows shows up in our conversations is that there isn't a coalition of insistence that schools get better. And that takes the point of view that a superintendent who is really reform-minded has a very short half-life that shows up in the data as new school boards make dramatic reallocation decisions and take funding in different directions, that programs that are intended to bring community in on helping with programs or opening up lowering the walls of the school so that students can have community-based experiences, those tend not to survive because those resources could be reallocated in in other directions. So again, the, the, the meta finding here is that there isn't a real community commitment to trying to improve the schools

- Finding. Number four, while community members understand the consequences of poor schools, they believe the value of education has declined for families and students seeing structural barriers as factors eroding confidence in schooling as a pathway to opportunity. What are structural barriers?

- When we asked folks to get more specific about what was holding back their schools from improving, they, they spoke about social and economic differences within communities as being a significant gulch that was difficult to get over. And that the things that were valued by many families now have drawn back from the ambition that your child will be well prepared for work life military. They've been pulled back to a much closer set of things that are more about the experiences that students have in school. And experiences don't necessarily mean. Learning experiences can mean finding teachers who look like them, independent of whether that teacher can teach and is effective or finding that there is support for cultural habits and practices and, and differences across community members. What they're looking for is a way of having students experience school rather than having school molding the student into a life of opportunity. And I take that to mean that they've given up on the performance dimension that they're pulling back into, well, if I can't have outcomes, at least I can have process. And so that's where the conversation, our focus group members thought the rest of the community was saying, we're not gonna get the outcomes we want. We might as well at least make their experiences.

- Alright.

- Valuable

- Finding number five. Participants believe that crucial decisions regarding schools are made without community input or representation leading to solutions that do not address the community's actual needs. And we referenced this earlier with the conversation about what happened in Virginia politically so people feel left out of the process.

- This was the biggest learning for us. We expected to hear a little bit about not being invited to the table. We were not ready for the huge report of broad scale, disregard, disrespect, active exclusion that we heard in every single community we went to. This is a, this I would call a structural barrier that has nothing to do with the way that schools are, are structured, but absolutely has to do with the way in which school systems have been able to isolate themselves from any kind of consequence. And the ability of teachers and administrators and school board members and superintendents to shield themselves and believe that they have complete discretion to move as they see fit, independent of aspirations from the community. Just just speaks to a, a, a serious, serious disconnect both on the side of community. They've been so out of the loop for now generations that they don't know enough to be fully engaged. And on the other side, a growing expectation that there's no one that is capable of being engaged.

- Lemme push back a little on this please. We have professionals that deal with education. A superintendent is an educational professional, a principal, a teacher, and so on and so forth. Hasn't there historically been an arrangement where you're involved with the school, you're involved with the PTA, maybe as a community leader, you help sponsor programs in school and so forth, but ultimately you trust the people running the schools just as you would trust law enforcement. You trust your politicians. Is part of the problem here, just that trust and education has been eroded?

- Yes. I think it's actually an example of a much larger phenomenon, which is that we have come to not have confidence in our frontline workers. I do think that there is a layer on top of that in the education setting, which is that there are a set of decision makers, and I'll specifically say school boards and superintendents whose service orientation may not be as altruistic as we might want for people in those roles.

- Alright, so the stakeholders wanna be more involved. What do they wanna be doing? Because everybody will tell you they're busy these days. Everybody has time to go on social media and tell you how busy they are these days. So what, what do the shareholders want?

- There were very specific things that stakeholders told us in these meetings. There are, in many states a requirement of community engagement. When you're hiring a superintendent, they'd like to be involved in that kind of decision. They want to have more input in the budgeting process. They would like to have more input in teacher evaluation. Many, many schools do a cl what they call a climate survey where they survey teachers and administrators and students about how they think things are going and whether they feel included in belonging. And very few of those surveys actually go out into the community and grab some of these stakeholders that we've been talking about. So there, there were able to identify several ways, very specific ways that they would like to be engaged, right. At the same time, they also say that there is a pretty substantial gap in their knowledge of how schools work these days. And that they feel that there should be some support for helping them get over that learning curve so that they can be more constructive and not just asking for vague things, but actually be an active partner to the decisions that are on the table.

- Binding number seven and fair dot only a couple more of these to do untapped civic capacity exists with nearly 90% of participants willing to join community efforts to improve local schools over half wanting active participation to the point of committing to 20 plus hours over a six month period. Okay. So they're willing to put skin in the game.

- That is absolutely true. Interestingly, individuals say they don't feel they can make a difference just one by one. But they do have great confidence that as a collective, that the community can in fact be a force for. Good.

- Good. Alright. Point number eight, finding number eight. Community members value collective potential over individual influence. Strength in numbers, I guess is what you're saying here.

- Yes.

- Okay. Explain why.

- Partly it's a recognition that different stakeholders bring different assets to the table and that all of those assets have the potential for being helpful. Second is that there are different levels of expertise and different areas of expertise. So they would expect business folks, the local employers to be much better at looking at budgets than if you were part of an artistic community. But that artistic community could be very valuable in terms of broadening the focus of some of the opportunities for students to experience some of the more cultural and artistic and non purely academic pieces of, of the learning experience. They felt they could make a contribution there.

- Alright. And point number nine, finding number nine, communities know what would, what communities know what would enable their participation?

- Well, yes, this is true. We were a little surprised at what they thought enabling would do. I mentioned before they, they'd like to be invited to school 1 0 1, some kind of a working curriculum that would give them the background they need. And that actually could be extremely easily provided. You know, it does not take a lot of effort to put that together. The second thing that they said would be enabling is that, as you mentioned earlier, everybody else is paid for participating in these kinds of conversations. And given the community communities in which these low performing schools are often situated, the lower economic earning power of members of those communities makes the kind of time and transportation and engagement more challenging for them than it would be in a more affluent community. So they were looking for things to be subsidized, whether it was transportation or their time or providing meals or whatever.

- Alright, so now you have traveled around in America, you've been to nine communities, you have learned firsthand what the concerns are. How do we take the concerns and now channel it into action?

- Well, I'm glad you asked because the work of my team at Hoover has not only been focused on understanding what the, what the street level opinions and appetites are, but we've also been looking at what are the necessary system-wide changes that we need. And I mentioned earlier it seems that there's nobody really interested in improving local schools. Yeah. That's not just a local problem. We actually took our collective foot off the gas in the second generation of federal accountability policy. We used to have no child left behind, which was for all of the other things that weren't very great about it. It was the first time we, we said accountability has to have consequences. When that program was renewed in 2015, the consequences basically went away. And what we see in the decline that my colleague Eric Ack has, has documented is a function of the fact that there's no consequences. There's no nothing about intervening in, in underperforming schools. I think this study speaks to the possibility of a bottom up and a top down opportunity that says where schools are failing. We have the sanction of the state government, they have the responsibility to intervene even if they haven't up till now. And we have local motivation to create a, a good vision for the school. I think both of those things can be guided by examples of proven success in other arenas that look like them. And I think we can actually use the data that we got and the insights from this study to help foster a kind of mixed engagement strategy for intervening in the large number of schools across the country where improvement is needed but hasn't happened.

- I think I know what you mean when you say top down, but what do you mean when you say bottom up? Who are you referring to?

- So again, I think that there's an opportunity to reach out to some of these unheard voices individuals invite them to engage in a decision making process about what will happen with the failing schools in their communities. That I don't think they get to design a school completely at their own discretion. I think that needs to be guided by here's a list of successful school models that we know work in communities like yours. How much of these, how much of this opportunity do you see now? And which one of these do you think would actually move your schools forward? And that would be an exercise that could be sanctioned and and empowered by the top down state authority. But I think build a better connection between school and community in building that up, that that future

- Agree. Finally, Mackey, let's talk a bit about education at the Hoover Institution. There seems to be a lot more focus on it since I, I go back to 1999. You you came here in 2000, so we're, we're both lifers here it seems. But when I first came here in 1999, there was attention to education, but it was not the same attention given to say, economics foreign policy. But that's changed over the past 25 plus years. And I think one of the reasons why is our director, Conis Rice, people think of Condi Rice and they think foreign policy, national Security Secretary of State, they don't understand the education side of things. That she comes from a family of educators. It's in her blood and it's part of how she sees the world in terms of fairness, as we talked about with civil rights in terms of America's standing in the world in terms of does fundamental opportunity. So I think her vision is very much reflected in Hoover these days. I do you agree?

- I do. And I would say that we could, those of us who work in education could not have a stronger champion because, because of all the things you just mentioned, she brings it down to education in almost every single arena that she speaks. And whether it's talking to global leaders or whether it's about global instability and the rise of sort of extreme politics, she brings that to education. She says that's an important ingredient when she's traveling to talk to banks around the world. She's saying, you're not doing enough in building your human capital infrastructure. And guess what that means? That means education.

- Right. - So she's been a phenomenal spokesperson for the, the work that we try to do here. I also think she, she brings a pragmatic view to the, the work that's actually helpful to us as scholars so that when she engages with us in the academic or research work, she's very, very much interested in doing work that can be translated into policy impact.

- And that's been helpful. And I think this is one of the great things about unheard voices. I, when you work at a think tank, you work at an academic institution, there's a great tendency to just live within the bubble, look at the world's problems within the bubble, write about the world's problems, project, your ideas and so forth. But you're in the bubble nonetheless. You're not going outside of the bubble to find out what the rest of the world thinks. And so I think that is part of the beauty of what you've done here. You've actually, you've actually done legwork here. You've actually gone out and talked to people and found out what's on their minds.

- Well, thank you Bill. It was quite an experience, I have to say.

- Right. So what's next for you?

- Well, we are very interested in the moment that exists with the prospect of the federal footprint in education policy shifting. We're not exactly sure how the shift will go, but we know shift is happening. And the consequence of that is that there's increased pressure on state education agencies that if they are in fact going to be the recipients of returning education to the states, which is the current federal mantra, they have a lot of work to do to be ready for that. And so we've had the last 18 months have been focused on a very, very deep and productive conversation with state education leaders about the changes that they need to make. And I'm very delighted at the receptivity, the, the recognition that state agencies do need to change what they do and receptivity to some of the ideas that we've been developing here at Hoover.

- I'd be curious to see how much of a wake up call the Mississippi Miracle is for other states.

- Oh, it's huge. It is a beautiful example of a policy that has been focused on and driven through implementation with all of the necessary parts and pieces as opposed to just handing down a mandate.

- Right?

- And so it's a living example of how you can get an entire system to change the way it does things. I know that many other states are grabbing onto similar practices, whether or not those other states are as conscientious and consistent as the leader in Mississippi was, remains to be seen.

- Sounds good. Maggie. Raymond enjoyed the conversation. I assume you're wearing green because it's Augusta, right? Masters week.

- Oh, yes. That must be it.

- We were joking before on the podcast, Mackey and I are not golfers, so

- Sorry.

- Sorry. But anyway, great conversation. Congratulations, unheard voices. Wonderful, wonderful job.

- Appreciate it. Thank you for your time.

- You've been listening to matters of Policy and Politics, the podcast devoted to the discussion of policy research from the Hoover Institution, as well as issues of local, national, and geopolitical concern. If you enjoyed this podcast, please don't forget to rate, review, and subscribe to our show. And if you wouldn't mind, please spread the word, tell your friends about us. The Hoover Institution has Facebook, Instagram, and X feeds. Our X handle is at Hoover ins. That's spelled H-O-O-V-E-R-I-N-S-T. I also encourage you to go to our website, which is hoover.org, and sign up for the Hoover daily report, which keeps you updated on what Macie, Raymond and or Hoover colleagues are up to. And that's delivered to your inbox. Weekdays Unheard Voices is available as well@hoover.org. You'll find it on Mackey's bio page. Probably the easiest place to find it, along with her interesting writing on learning loss and teacher performance, and all sorts of other fascinating aspects about education reform for the Hoover Institution. This is Bill Whelan. Till next time, take care. Thanks for watching.