The Department of Education Reform at the University of Arkansas is celebrating its 20th anniversary this month. Last week, two faculty members from the department joined Ozarks at Large's Matthew Moore in the Bruce and Ann Applegate News Studio 2 to discuss the beginnings, the impact and the future of their work.
Harry Patrinos is the head of the department. Patrick Wolf, a distinguished professor, has research expertise in school choice.
The Department of Education Reform began in 2005 through a $20 million gift to the university from the Walton Family Foundation and the Windgate Foundation. At that time, a lead grant officer for the Windgate Foundation was John Brown III — the third John Brown to be the president of John Brown University from 1979 to 1993 — who then went on to be a state senator from 1995 to 2002. Wolf says when Brown left political office, he was a bit let down.
Wolf: He was disappointed that lawmakers didn't have an abundance of evidence-based information about what helps students succeed. And that $20 million established the program, endowed the chairs, endowed fellowships for graduate students and really launched us on this 20-year odyssey of discovering ways to improve education for Arkansas kids and kids around the country and around the world.
Moore: What drew you to wanting to learn more about education reform, Harry? For you?
Patrinos: Well, for me, I've always worked in education, and I'm a firm believer that education opens up opportunities for people and for societies and countries. And looking at how education systems evolve, funding outcomes, I become concerned that we need more information about what works. We need to evaluate programs that we have, and we need to put in place policies and initiatives that will help the neediest do well.
Moore: Patrick, what about for you?
Wolf: Yeah. I mean, I have always been interested in the effective delivery of public services. My original training was in political science and in public administration, but I always was a numbers guy. And so I wanted to be able to study large numbers of organizations that are providing important services to the public. Well, that's K–12 education. So that really attracted me to K–12 education. And I arrived there during a time when people were raising the issue of school choice as a possible intervention to improve outcomes for students. And so I started evaluating school choice programs, and I've never looked back.
Moore: The department as a whole has seven goals that help to align their mission. What can you tell me about those goals, and how do you see that impacting the work that you do on a regular basis?
Patrinos: Well, for me, it's making education systems better and looking at how resources can be used most effectively. Looking at how we can improve outcomes by bringing the best evidence to bear. So focusing on evaluation, focusing on the implementation of good programs and making sure they're effectively targeted, implemented and monitored. Also, the vision is that we improve learning outcomes because that's the main component of a good education. It allows people to progress in their careers, to have more opportunities post high school to either go to college or to get a good job.
Wolf: And I'll just add that across the seven goals you see a mix of focus on Arkansas — that's our home state, that's what we care most about — but also a broader perspective across the country and across the globe. And what I'm really excited about now is we have data-sharing agreements in place. We have various evaluation agreements in place for the state to really make the state of Arkansas a laboratory for determining what helps boost student outcomes. And so, presumably, kids in Arkansas aren't radically different from kids in other places. So if we can learn what works for kids in Arkansas, those lessons can be broadly applicable across the country and across the globe.
Moore: How has the department's work shifted over the last two decades?
Wolf: That's an interesting question. So we have a mandate to focus on certain areas of education policy: teacher quality, transparency and accountability, school leadership, school choice. And then some of our faculty, like Dr. Patrinos, have sort of a wild card appointment, which is education policy — so any organized attempt to improve outcomes for kids. And so basically, over the last two decades, we've had the specialists really focusing in on their topical area. And then we've had the education policy people looking for opportunities to grab a policy that looks promising now and evaluate it to the best of their ability. So they have more flexibility to be opportunistic in their selection of topics. The rest of us have to focus in our area, and we've tried to stay true to that.
Moore: How have you seen the topics that interest you change over 20 years?
Patrinos: One that's definitely topical is tutoring. We knew before the pandemic that tutoring is effective. It's effective when it's one-on-one. It's effective as small group. But it's very expensive to have people. And what we learned during the pandemic is that you can do tutoring online. You can do it on phones. And it's just as effective but at a fraction of the cost. And now post-pandemic, we're still seeing a learning gap. The recovery hasn't come yet. And one remedy is tutoring, whether it's in person or online. We need to do that. So that's an area that we've become more familiar with, and we are carrying out evaluations and reviews of this in Arkansas.
Moore:So maybe the topics necessarily haven't shifted, but your nuance and understanding how they work has grown and changed over the course of years.
Patrinos: True. I'd say that's true. I'd say also what's becoming important to our work — to everyone's work — is technology and AI. This is probably the question that comes to us almost every day. A lot of concerns about it, about the risks of AI. Also a lot of promises about AI. And we're trying to find out what's in it for education systems. How can we use this to help teachers, to help students to progress?
Moore: I'm speaking with Harry Patrinos and Patrick Wolf with the Department of Education Reform at the University of Arkansas. What are some examples of how you've seen the education policy community push back against your work?
Wolf: So I evaluate school choice programs — public charter schools, private school voucher programs. Now the new brand of school choice is what's called education savings accounts, or ESAs. These tend to be controversial because there's more of a partisan divide on school choice policies than in most areas of education reform. When I first started evaluating private school vouchers, there was a bipartisan consensus supporting those programs, at least if they were directed and targeted to disadvantaged subpopulations of students. A lot of Democrats could get on board with that, and a lot of Republicans supported that as well.
But about seven or eight years ago, there was a split — or almost a divorce — within the education reform political coalition, where the Democratic Party became more focused on the educational status quo and defending that, and less interested in supporting various reforms, including choice-based reforms. That is changing, that is evolving. Recently, Jorge Elorza, who's the former mayor of Providence, Rhode Island, took over as the head of an organization called Democrats for Education Reform. And in recent years, that organization had been opposed to any and all private school choice programs. But under Mr. Elorza, DFER is now coming out in support of these programs, so long as there are accountability arrangements and assurances that disadvantaged kids are going to be included when these programs go big, go to scale and are universally available. So that's just an example of evolution in my area of school choice.
Patrinos: And I'd say the other area where there's some pushback is on test-based accountability. In the early 2000s, there seemed to be a consensus among policymakers, among researchers, that some level of accountability is important. This is around the area of No Child Left Behind with Bush, right?
Moore: Yeah.
Patrinos: There was a lot of consensus then. And then you started hearing voices, well, tests aren't everything. I agree. But it is fundamental, and it's something worth measuring. We saw less attention to this during the pandemic, obviously. And then post-pandemic, the accountability debate has slowed down. I think here it's strong in Arkansas, but nationally, globally, there's less emphasis on accountability. And I think it's something that we need in addition to other things. But having that basic information, especially about early grades, is very important.
Moore: As we think about celebrating the impact of the last 20 years, perhaps you're thinking about what the next 20 years look like. Can you predict at all? Can you think at all about the things you're working on now? How much will transform over the next 20 years?
Patrinos: Yeah, we're already seeing the transformation take place. And it will manifest itself in the demand for skills. The demand for skills will change. People with basic math, good reading skills, but then also presentation skills, team skills, being adept at technology, all that will be important for people, and that's difficult to teach. Having a curriculum — that's the noncognitive skills, social emotional skills. But it needs to be built into the systems. And that's what we're investigating. That's what I'm investigating.
I've been working on education and labor market outcomes, and you could predict pretty easily up until now what people will get in terms of jobs, in terms of earnings. And we're seeing that start to change now. And I think we'll see more change. But what we've seen in simulations and some of the technological advances is that people with better skills, whether it's their math skills, reading skills, tend to do well in times of change and uncertainty.
I think the whole economics of education was born out of a period of tremendous change, and it was the technology of the day back then. And this sort of disequilibrium that was created raised the demand for skills as we were measuring it then. Education — it'll be called something else, perhaps, in the future. But we have schools, we have education programs, we have colleges. That's where people will get their skills, and they need to find skills that will allow them to continue learning.
I think one thing — we don't know a lot about the future, but one thing we know is that there will be constant change. I think the days of having a job post high school or post college until retirement as a singular job — a singular job — I think people have different and many different opportunities, and they need to be able to move around in that situation. And that requires skill.
That was Harry Patrinos, department head, and Patrick Wolf, faculty with the Department of Education Reform at the University of Arkansas. They joined Ozarks at Large's Matthew Moore last week in the Bruce and Ann Applegate News Studio 2.
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