Hope for a Brighter Future for Education and Equity
An Interview with John B. King Jr.
John B. King Jr. is a candidate for Governor of Maryland. Until the announcement of his candidacy in April, King was the president and CEO of The Education Trust, a national nonprofit organization that seeks to identify and close opportunity gaps, from preschool through college. King served in President Barack Obama’s cabinet as the 10th U.S. Secretary of Education. Before becoming Education Secretary, King carried out the duties of the U.S. Deputy Secretary of Education. King joined the Department of Education following his tenure as the first African American and Puerto Rican to serve as New York State Education Commissioner. King began his career in education as a high school social studies teacher in Puerto Rico and Boston, Massachusetts, and as a middle school principal.
Julie Allen: John, the first task of the Biden-Harris administration in education was to staff the Department of Education. How did the administration do in assembling its new team, led by Miguel Cardona as Secretary of Education?
John King: I'm excited about the experience and vision of the Biden Education Department team. Secretary Cardona experienced firsthand the transformative impact of education in his own life and committed himself to education as a teacher, principal, and leader at the district and state levels, so he brings tremendous expertise and passion. And he's building a good team. James Kvaal, who will be undersecretary overseeing higher education, served in the Obama administration on the Domestic Policy Council. He’s an expert on higher education issues and dedicated to expanding opportunity for historically underserved students. Roberto Rodriguez will be joining the Department as assistant secretary for planning, evaluation and policy development. Roberto has been leading Teach Plus, which does great work elevating teacher leadership, and before that he also worked in President Obama’s Domestic Policy Council. Ian Rosenblum, the current acting assistant secretary in the Office of Elementary and Secondary Education, was the executive director of Ed Trust-New York. He's working to support states and districts through this complicated moment as we try to get back to school safely. Susan Rice is going to do a fantastic job leading the Domestic Policy Council. Carmel Martin, who served as assistant secretary for policy and budget at the Education Department in the Obama administration, is working with Susan Rice. Catherine Lhamon, who was the assistant secretary for civil rights working with me at the Education Department in the Obama administration, is now leading the work on the Domestic Policy Council focused on racial equity and was just nominated by the President to once again lead the Department’s critical civil rights work. And Tiffany Taber, who has been my senior advisor at Ed Trust for the last four years and a career civil servant in the Education Department before that, will be Secretary Cardona’s chief speechwriter. It's really a superstar team at the Department and the White House, and they are already putting forward ambitious plans that build on powerful work that we began in the Obama administration.
Allen: As you mentioned, the Biden-Harris administration has a very ambitious education agenda stretching from cradle to career. What are some of their key education accomplishments in their first 100 days?
King: The American Rescue Plan provides significant resources in a number of important education areas. You've got nearly $130 billion for K-12 that can be used to address the academic and social-emotional consequences of COVID and to help schools reopen safely. You've got substantial investment in the American Rescue Plan in saving the childcare sector, which has been hit incredibly hard by COVID. You've got investment in higher education, at least half of which goes directly to help students through this difficult pandemic period, and then you've got dedicated resources for improving broadband access. So, there are lots of good things in the American Rescue Plan. Then they've come forward with the American Jobs Plan and the American Families Plan, which invest in our physical and social infrastructure. The American Families Plan adds four years to our universal public education system by making the investments necessary for universal pre-K for 3- and 4-year olds and by making two years of community college free for students. The plan includes significant investments around support for college completion, so not only making community college more affordable, but also increasing the likelihood that students will succeed by providing wraparound supports. There's also a commitment to paid family leave, which is critically important, and an effort to extend the expansion of the child tax credit, which was included for one year in the American Rescue Plan, and which has the potential to cut child poverty in half in this country.
Allen: Many of the goals of the administration’s education agenda require not only Education Department policymaking but also Congressional action. The federal education policies of the Clinton, Bush, and Obama administrations often garnered bipartisan support. Given the current hyper-partisanship, particularly in the Senate, and the Senate’s filibuster rule requiring at least 10 Republicans to support most legislation, do you see a realistic opportunity to return to bipartisanship in education policy and politics to move the administration’s education agenda forward?
King: You know, infrastructure is an issue that has historically generated bipartisan support. I think there is a recognition that we have to evolve the definition of infrastructure. Universal access to broadband is very similar to what electricity was in the New Deal era. It's foundational to participation in the 21st century economy. I also think there's a bipartisan recognition that we should be doing much more in early childhood. If you look across the country, you see Republican governors proposing significant increases in early childhood education. And the model for college promise programs that provide tuition-free community college is in Tennessee under former Governor Haslam, a Republican. So, I'm hopeful that there's an opportunity for bipartisanship. A lot will depend on Leader McConnell and his colleagues and whether they are willing to proceed in a bipartisan way. I feel very strongly that Congressional Democrats should not wait endlessly for that bipartisanship. Bipartisanship would be good, but we shouldn't allow that to prevent us from moving forward if the Republicans won't come to the table seriously. I think the administration and Democratic leadership in Congress realize that their task is to deliver for the people.
Allen: Historically, the federal government’s contribution to overall K-12 education funding has been relatively small (less than 10%). But now, with the nearly $130 billion in relief funding under the Biden-Harris administration’s American Recovery Plan going to states and districts for K-12 education and another $40 billion for higher education, how should they prioritize spending those resources to support students?
King: Because the federal percentage is relatively modest, it's really important that the federal dollars be deployed in ways that incentivize states and districts, as well as higher education institutions, to make the right investments, which are equitable. One important provision of the American Rescue Plan is a provision that says states and districts can't cut their highest-need districts and schools, which was a problem that we saw in the 2008-2009 recession when even with federal stimulus resources, states and districts still disproportionately cut their highest-needs communities. Districts that have large numbers of white students spend about $2,000 more per student than the districts that have large numbers of students of color, so we're upside down -- we're spending more on the students with advantages and less on the students facing the greatest challenges. We should reverse that. The good news is we get the return on investment; additional spending can translate into better outcomes if we invest it in the right practices. Second, I think we ought to be acting on the evidence. The additional resources from the American Rescue Plan ought to be invested in the things we know will make a difference for addressing the impact of COVID on kids’ academic and social-emotional needs -- intensive, targeted tutoring; approaches to expanded learning time that combine strong academics and enrichment; and a focus on relationships and mentoring because we know that kids who have a strong relationship with an adult at school or at a school partner organization are more likely to be successful. As we look forward to these potential new investments, we know there's a huge return on early childhood education, but it has to be high-quality, so we should invest in the early childhood educator workforce, dual language opportunities for students who are English learners, and good data coordination systems between the early childhood and K-12 sectors. We should also make sure that federal resources for post-secondary completion are used in evidence-based ways. We know, for example, that CUNY ASAP (Accelerated Study in Associate Programs), which has been shown in randomized control trials to double completion rates in community colleges, has core components that are replicable.
Allen: A headline education debate this year, which was front and center in Secretary Cardona’s confirmation hearing, is testing waivers. Under the Every Student Succeeds Act and its implementing regulations adopted during your tenure in the Obama administration, states were given flexibility on what tests to give and how to use mandated test scores for accountability. The prior administration granted testing waivers in 2020, but President Biden and Secretary Cardona have said there will be no waivers this year. How should we think about testing and its role in driving educational excellence and equity?
King: Well, especially in the context of COVID and its impact on unfinished learning, we need information about where kids are to inform our efforts around tutoring, summer school, and investments of funding. At the same time, we want states to have flexibility on how and when they test and we want to make sure that schools do not suffer negative consequences for the disruptions of the last year due to COVID. So, I think that the Biden-Harris administration and Secretary Cardona struck the right balance, keeping testing but not using the assessments for identifying schools for corrective action. Assessments will be used to inform how we direct resources and supports. But the testing issue is pointing to a broader frustration among educators because even though assessments are described as a tool for resources and support, they often feel like a tool for punishment and shaming. I think policymakers and civil rights advocates have to take that critique seriously and make sure they are responding with appropriate interventions and supports. The $130 billion in federal aid is a good step because it is going to allow us, for example, in a school where we have a lot of third graders who aren't reading on grade level, which we know can be a predictor of a host of negative outcomes later in a child’s life, to surge supports to that school. Those supports can include reading specialists and intensive tutoring, which have a strong evidence base, to help those students make up the ground they need.
Allen: The pandemic has been very disruptive to our public education system, to children, and to families. What lessons should we take away from how public education policies and support structures impacted the system’s response to the pandemic?
King: One of the things that's heartbreaking about the last year and a half is that we could have had a much more coherent response to COVID from both the public health and public education standpoints. We had significant equity gaps before COVID and coming out of COVID, they will be significantly greater. We had a digital divide before COVID. About 79% of white families had reliable Internet access, 66% of Black families, and 61% of Latino families. The digital divide that we called our “homework gap” before COVID became an “access to school” gap once we had to move online. We spend significantly less on our districts that serve our poor students, and the districts that had fewer resources had less support for their teachers and for the transition to online and hybrid learning. Their kids were less likely to have devices. Low-income parents and parents of color are much more likely to have to work outside of the home -- about 1 in 5 African Americans, and 1 in 6 Latinos, in the workforce can work from home. So, many kids are home by themselves or with other siblings or working to support their family. McKinsey recently reported on data from a number of assessments, which suggest that we are probably looking at five to nine months of unfinished instruction for all students, with six to 12 months of unfinished instruction for Black and Latino students. With significant unfinished instruction and social-emotional costs -- isolation from peers and teachers -- it's going to take us a long time to make up for all this. At Ed Trust, we say “unfinished instruction” rather than “learning loss” because we like to think we're going to get it back over time. One of the questions for the country will be what we do about this. The American Rescue Plan could help make a difference here, but we’ve got to make sure that money is used to tackle the underlying inequities that are behind how we got here.
Allen: Can you comment on the equity challenges in higher education and potential solutions to mitigate those challenges?
King: We sadly have a higher ed system that replicates a lot of the equity gaps of our K-12 system. Black, Latino and low-income students are disproportionately concentrated in our community colleges and regional public colleges, while they are significantly underrepresented in our flagship institutions and our selective-admission private colleges. We, again, spend much more on affluent students than we spend on economically vulnerable students and despite all the rhetoric around affirmative action, Black and Latino students are still dramatically underrepresented in our selective colleges. So, to get to a better place, we must have an honest conversation about resource allocation. We need to spend a lot more on our community colleges and our regional public colleges not only to help support students, but also to help those institutions serve their students more effectively. We should be reinvigorating affirmative action and admissions practices that produce diversity in our flagship and selective colleges. Colleges have become a lot less affordable and we are putting too few resources into helping low-income families access college. In 1980, Pell Grants accounted for about 80% of the cost of a public four-year college tuition. Today, they account for about 28%. We've passed the costs of college on to students and families. At a minimum, we should double the Pell Grant, which would profoundly impact college affordability. The American Families Plan does include an increase in the maximum Pell Grant of about $1,400, which is a step in the right direction.
Allen: The United States is seen as a world leader in so many domains, but not in education. What steps would you take to make the U.S. education system a world leader?
King: This is a very complex problem and trying to frame it risks oversimplifying it. But there are a few things that I would do. First, we should start earlier -- 0 to 4 years old, making sure that infants, toddlers, 3- and 4-year olds are getting quality care and support. Second, in K-12, we should pay teachers a lot more, invest much more in teacher preparation, and be more selective about entry to the teaching profession in a similar way to our most successful competitor nations like Singapore. Third, we are not very good at linking educational experiences to the workforce, to economic activity. This is a place where I think the private sector could be a very powerful partner, lining up coursework in college and even high school, internship experiences, and career counseling with jobs. There's a project called P-TECH where IBM is working with the New York City Department of Education and the City University of New York. Students at P-TECH graduate with a high school diploma, an associate’s degree, and first in line for a job at IBM. There is a much longer list of all the things that I would do, but those would be a good start.
Allen: Pivoting now to placing education in the broader landscape of social issues, in the midst of the national reckoning over racial injustice, how can leaders and other stakeholders in education strengthen our democratic traditions, moving beyond rhetoric to action for equity?
King: The challenge is exactly as you say -- how do we make the rhetoric real. A lot of nonprofits, corporations, foundations, universities, and school districts put out statements last spring of solidarity with the movement for racial justice. Many of them said Black Lives Matter. That was an important moment. But my question when I speak to superintendents or college presidents is, “Have you translated that statement into substantive change?” I want to know whether you have Black teachers; if you don't have Black teachers, it's hard for me to believe that your claim that Black Lives Matter is heartfelt. This is also true of higher education institutions. As of 2017, 14% of undergraduates were Black, but only 6% of faculty members. There are more than 500 private colleges that have no tenured Black faculty member. I want to know whether there are racial disparities in school discipline in your K-12 district. There are districts where the suspension rate for Black female students is as much as eight times the suspension rate for white female students. We know that for pre-K, for 4-year olds, there's significant racial disparity in discipline. African Americans are three times more likely to be suspended from pre-K. So, if that's happening, how do you then say you genuinely believe Black Lives Matter? If your curriculum does not include Black authors, stories of Black people, the history of systemic racism and of Black excellence, then I'm going to be skeptical of your claim that you believe Black Lives Matter. If a higher education institution is not systematically analyzing campus climate for Black students and trying to address their on-campus experience of racial hostility, how seriously can I take their pledge? So, I just ask people to hold up a mirror to ask whether they are moving their practices to reflect their expressed values. I'd say we have a long way to go and, of course, in many cases, Latino students are similarly disadvantaged across our institutions. And we have to examine this moment of anti-Asian American hate. We ought to look at our instructional practices and asking ourselves, “What more could we be doing to make sure that we are valuing the humanity of all of our community members?”
Allen: Where do you place education in the criminal justice reform movement?
King: As Americans, we tend to respond to all problems with incarceration. If you are struggling with addiction, mental health issues, or financial problems, then incarceration is the solution. I think we should start by rethinking public safety and asking where we can respond with addiction treatment, mental health services, and other supports and end cash bail. But once folks are in the criminal legal system and incarcerated, we should be thinking about rehabilitation and skill development rather than just punishment. About 95% of incarcerated folks come home. How can they be in a better position to be successful when they return to society? One of the things that we worked on in the Obama administration that I continued to work on at Ed Trust was access to Pell Grants. The 1994 crime bill banned access to Pell Grants for folks who were incarcerated, which is terrible public policy. Folks who get an education while incarcerated are dramatically less likely to return to prison. Prisons are safer when there are strong educational programs and folks are focused on opportunity when they get out. We started a pilot project in the Obama administration to allow 65 colleges to use Pell Grants for incarcerated students. Betsy DeVos and I did not agree on very many things -- almost none -- but I did agree with her choice to expand the program. In the December stimulus package, Congress finally repealed the ban on Pell Grant access. It was a huge win for the advocacy community, but, most importantly, for the folks who are directly impacted -- the folks who told their stories to members of Congress and persuaded them that the policy decision in 1994 was mistaken. We ought to be thinking a lot more about creating opportunities for folks who are incarcerated to get education and skills, to get ready for jobs, to deal with any addiction issues or mental health challenges they may have, so that when they come home, they are more successful -- that will make us all safer.
Allen: Last fall, the Aspen Institute launched K-12 Climate Action, an initiative that you are co-chairing with former Governor Christine Todd Whitman. What sparked your interest in playing a leadership role in addressing climate change and how have you worked with the Biden-Harris administration on this initiative?
King: What sparked my interest is that I hope human beings get to continue to live here -- it's a nice earth. While I say that a little bit flippantly, there's a lot of truth in that. Climate change is an existential threat. In Maryland, we are already losing farmland on the Eastern Shore to saltwater intrusion and we experience flooding in Howard County on a regular basis. Climate change isn’t a tomorrow problem, it’s a today problem. We've got to take urgent action and schools have a role. Schools account for a lot of infrastructure. If all of our more than 100,000 school buildings were using renewable energy, that would be very impactful. If we were able to move our school bus fleet of over 480,000 buses to electric, that would improve air quality. Schools distribute meals every day. The disposal of what's left from those meals and how those meals are prepared, how the food is grown -- all of that affects climate change. In addition to infrastructure, there's a curricular piece. Students need to understand the science behind climate change, and they need to understand the implications that climate change and environmental justice issues have for our society and how they can have a role mitigating the consequences going forward. So, I’m focused on both the infrastructure side and the curricular side. I also think there's a great opportunity to prepare young people for new green jobs in renewable energy, weatherization, and electrification. So, there's a career and technical education element as well. Some of what we have been advocating for is in the American Jobs Plan that President Biden announced in April, so we're feeling very hopeful that we're at a moment where we're going to move forward on these issues.
Allen: Turning now to your personal journey to the pinnacle of national education policy and civil rights leadership, can you share a bit about the transformative power of education in your own life?
King: My journey in education really goes back to my family. Both my parents were New York City public school educators. My father was African American. He grew up in a very segregated New York City and saw a path to opportunity as a public-school teacher and then principal. My mom was born in Puerto Rico and came to New York as a child. My grandmother worked in a garment factory. My mother learned English in the New York City public schools, and went to Hunter College in the CUNY system as a first-generation college student -- a classic Nuyorican story. She became a teacher and a school counselor. My parents spent their whole lives working for the New York City public schools. But they couldn't have known the difference school would make in my life. My mom passed away when I was eight, in October of my fourth-grade year. I lived after that with my dad, who was very sick with then-undiagnosed Alzheimer's. So home was scary and inconsistent and unstable. As he got sicker, it became more and more difficult to get food and to keep our household going. The thing that saved me was school -- the consistency and the nurturing environment of school and my relationships with teachers and peers. I was very blessed to have a series of amazing New York City public school teachers who gave me a sense of hope and purpose. I remember the things that we did in fourth, fifth, and sixth grades like it was yesterday. Then, my dad passed away when I was 12. I moved around to different family members, different schools. It is important, as I tell my story, to tell how hard my time as a teenager was. As happens with many kids who experience trauma, I was a really angry teenager. I got into a lot of trouble in high school. I actually got kicked out of high school; I’m the first U.S. Secretary of Education to be kicked out of high school. I was very fortunate that, in that moment, when my life could have gone in a lot of different directions, family members, mentors, public-school teachers, and a school counselor were willing to see me as more than the sum of my mistakes and to invest in me, to have more faith in me than I had in myself. That second chance was a critical part of my path. You know, I was inspired by the teachers I had early on in my choice to be an educator, but I was also inspired by the educators who were willing to give me that second chance. As I think about advocacy work, I think a lot about how to ensure that we don't ever give up on our young people. Even especially when they make mistakes, we must find ways to invest in them and help them get on the right path. The adverse childhood experiences that young people have -- whether it's being homeless, losing a parent, having a parent that is incarcerated -- can have a detrimental long-term impact on their wellbeing. I think there is more awareness of the problem than there is deep understanding of the practices necessary to help kids and communities heal. We are trauma-informed in some places, but we are not healing-centered, which is the next step. We need to make sure that educators have strategies to help students work through these challenges. In too many places, we still use exclusionary school discipline as the response to kids acting out because they've experienced trauma. In this country, 1.7 million kids go to a school where there's a law enforcement officer but there is no school counselor. We have to invest in supports -- teacher training, counselors, mental health services, and family support services. We are reliant on a superhero model, individual schools and individual educators who are creating really robust supportive environments for students, but we have not scaled that across systems.
Allen: Can you share what has sustained you in your social impact work over the years?
King: I will share two stories. Two or three years ago now, I had the chance to visit one of my former students in Massachusetts, Chynah Tyler. Chynah came to the middle school where I was a principal when she was in sixth grade. Her brother had been killed in violence in Boston. But Chynah really blossomed as a middle school student and went on to be very successful in high school and now, she is in the Massachusetts State Legislature, chairing the Black and Latino Caucus. She is a phenomenal leader. I don't know that you would have seen that for Chynah in sixth grade, adjusting to the routines of middle school. I visited her on the floor of the Massachusetts State House. When that building was built, they were not expecting an African American woman to have a desk on the floor there. The difference that schools can make in kids’ lives, I saw it in my own life but I've been privileged as an educator to see that in students and that’s the sort of intergenerational impact you can have. The other thing that I draw hope from may sound overly optimistic about America, but President Obama often quoted Dr. King as saying, “the moral arc of the universe is long but it bends toward justice.” I really do believe that, and I think we are moving in fits and starts toward a better, more just America. I believe it because it is true for my family. My great grandfather was enslaved in Gaithersburg, Maryland, about 25 miles from where I live in Silver Spring, Maryland. The property is still owned by direct line descendants of the family that owned my family, and the cabin in which my great grandfather and his family lived as enslaved people is still standing on the property. In three generations, my family went from enslaved in that cabin to me serving in the cabinet of the first African American president. That is a powerful arc of the American journey. Not to say that we haven't had lots of setbacks and challenges and we grapple with those all the time, but I really do believe that in our democracy lay the seeds of greater justice ahead of us.
Allen: In closing, is there anything else you would like to share in reflecting on the Biden-Harris administration’s first 100 days?
King: I think that the core message of the Biden-Harris administration is that government and public institutions can be a force for good in people's lives. I think there is an appreciation of that in the public now, having seen the consequences of government mismanagement of COVID during the Trump administration and now the benefits of a coherent national strategy around COVID vaccine distribution and economic recovery. Competent government can be a powerful actor for opportunity and equity and so I'm excited to see the national conversation move toward how we use government as an effective lever to improve people's lives.
About the Author:
Julie Allen is a Harvard Advanced Leadership Initiative Senior Fellow. Ms. Allen had a distinguished career in corporate law, focusing on capital markets, public company M&A transactions, and boardroom governance and counsel. Most recently, she was a senior partner at Proskauer Rose. She currently serves as Chair of the Board of Directors of Read Ahead, a reading-based mentoring organization serving NYC public elementary school children, and as a member of the Advisory Board of the Harvard Kennedy School Carr Center for Human Rights Policy.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.