Sara. Okay. Let me get started as everybody is coming in to sit down and make sure first we need to really thank david and carrie have put together a Wonderful Program and theyve been good at nudging people to do what they should on time. I want to just start out with some general comments and then turn to specifics. So first off, education is an excellent investment, both for individuals and for society. I think we can i want to make this case in terms of an efficiency argument. Failure to close the gaps, which are really big and growing in Educational Attainment is likely to both hinder Economic Growth and also increase the burden on tax payers over the long term. I think there are just two big takeaways from this first. Money matters enormously in education, but thats a necessary, not a sufficient condition. Secondly funding really needs to be matched to a commitment to accountability and in the education space innovation. The federal government has a big role here. Okay. That said, the title of this event includes i believe from bridges to education and its worth noting why education is different and arguably a good bit more complicated than the challenge of building a bridge. The economics of building a bridge is tough enough in terms of the problem in terms of who pays it, how do we do it at the lowest cost, but there are blueprints, theres an Engineering Solution to building a bridge or building an airport. Education is more difficult in that were still trying to uncover the underlying technological process that is what we should do with different populations of students. Were learning a lot, but these are really hard problems and again its worth making that distinction. Second, another sort of opening point is just about every big volume on education starts with some bit of a narrative about falling behind. It is certainly true that the u. S. Lags other countries in terms of test score growth and changes in College Completion, but its also worth putting a more optimistic note on the table. That is, over the last couple of decades weve actually seen some growth in test scores and in the early grades. That said, theyve been stagnant in the middle grades. Weve seen some reductions in High School Dropout rates. In the most recent decade weve seen increases in College Enrollment rates and College Completion rates. Those gains are not spread evenly across the population and we should be increasingly concerned about the degree of inequality. Whats more is i think were going to talk as we go along in this, we know a great deal more about what works and actually what doesnt then we did two decades ago. Some of this owes a big debt to the founding of the institute of sciences in 2002, but theres a hopeful note here. Weve made some progress. Theres a lot more to do. Two messages, we want to use evidence to shape policy and we need to innovate in this space. My assignment, what are high return investments and priorities for federal education policy. I decided to make that a little bit narrower. Prek, talk to diane. Shell answer question questions about prek. Also i think the forgotten piece of graduate education and funding the sciences, but weve got to set some boundaries here. Indeed im going to set even a better boundary here, im going to do something that economists are pretty good at. Dick and i have co lewded on this enterprise. We are going to exercise some division of labor here. Im going to concentrate on the postsecondary margin which is my comparative advantage and hes going to concentrate on k12. We have a lot to discuss and i think within k12 you can think about three buckets. School accountability, school choose mechanisms, teacher preparation. Were going to hit on those i think through the course of this 40 minutes. Im going to talk in terms of the post secondary sphere, in terms of Student Financial aide, College Choice and then the supply side of Higher Education. I want to say just a quick moment about the federal role in education policy here because it deserves some comment. We spent about 1. 2 trilli 1. 2 t federal education each year. In that quarter thats about 100 million are ek kwqually did between elementary and secondary and k12 and then theres another 100 million in terms of Student Loans. You might ask what are the big missions of the federal government. The first issue is credit constraints. Thats one of those market failures that economists love to teach about in introductory classes and they really matter in education. Theres a good reason to think that individuals cannot fully finance worthwhile investments in education. Theres a compelling Government Role in that area. Second is what im going to call a limited, but certainly not zero role of the federal government in regulation or auditing the use of its funds. Preventing the worst outcomes. Third, and this is where i think hopefully well have more discussion. The federal government really has an advantage in funding research, innovation and development. These are innovations that when we discover something that works in one area, we can spread them around to other communities. Many of these things need to be done at scale and it is only and the federal government is actually well positioned not necessarily to execute these experiments, but to at least seed the the next is the challenge were facing in Educational Attainment. These things start early. The gaps start actually very early before kids enroll in school, but they continue on so here are what im going to call the entrenched elementary secondary achievement gaps. The blue bars are comparisons of the quinntiles by education, the red bars reflect the black white difference. You should think about these in terms of grade levels of achievement a achievement. They are very meaningful in terms of grade levels of achievement and what is striking here is how large the economic gap is relative to the race gap. If you look back 50 years ago the race gap would have been larger than the economic gap. But things get worse as we go on to College Enrollment. The lefthand panel is enrollment by Family Income at the lowest quartile on bottom. The Left Hand Panel is completion. The dark dashed line is essentially the behavior of those students who are working College Going choices in the 80s. The lighter blue line is students making College Choices at the beginning of the 21st century. The takeaway is first off theres a positive gradient and the second is the gaps have w e widened and theyve widened markedly over time. Theres not much more youre going to push up that enrollment rate and only about a ten percentage point increase at the bottom which is meaningful again the increase at the top of this distribution between the top and the bottom. Now, one might rightly note these are not adjusted for differences in achievement on entry. Again, if you do this additional calculation, youd still very large gaps and theyve increased over time. So on the order of about 16 Percentage Points in College Completion. So thats the preliminary. Thats the problem we need to address. As i say, im ceding some territory well come back to, but i want to talk about Higher Education and this may get some front billing in the d. C. Environment given that the act was reauthorized and whats on the table is reauthorization of the Higher Education act which somehow congress hasnt gotten to yet. Within this rubric are the big programs of title iv facial aids which you probably know as stafford or direct Student Loans or pell grants, and i want to touch on the supply side problem. Federal aide and grant aide. I think we have really compelling evidence at this juncture from sue and work that ive done on the g. I. Bill, the transparent grant aid can have a positive effect on collegiate attainment. We have grant aid on the table right now or effectively grant aid in the form of the pell grant, which we spend about 30. 6 billion a year on and the tuition tax credits which amount to another 18. 2 billion. If you look back at 2010 at the peak enrollment those numbers total 60 billion. The bad news is that even though these programs have two features that one might really like in a student aid program, that is theyre portable so theyre in effect like vouchers, secondly theyre means tested, the problem is theyre not very transparent. And because theyre not very transparent, particularly the tuition tax credits, theyre not having necessarily the impact that we would like to see on student enrollment and more importantly helping students to finance really worthwhile collegiate investments. I think ill draw your attention to two issues here. First the tuition tax credits. Separate from the problem of really a total lack of salience. They dont matter to you if your parents dont get paid another 18 months from when he yyou appo college. You wont see that in terms of a tax benefit. At that point you may have lost interest or its not going to effect your decision and indeed that comes through very clearly in the research literature. Many students dont even know about them. The pell grant is actually a bit of a challenge here because it serves such a broad umbrella of students that its not very well targeted. I want to draw your attention. The pell grant generosity has actually increased a bit in the last decade. I want you to draw your attention to the column on the right here which is the portion of students that are independent, likely over the age of 24, they have Young Children of their own. Now, one of the challenges is designing an aid system that meets the needs of this population who are likely responding to near Term Economic shocks as well as the needs of students who are recent high school graduates. And the system of Needs Analysis that we have doesnt accomplish either objective very well. And so given that im running out on time, well come back to this, but there are excellent recommendations by a panel called rethinking pell grants that would serve to essentially divide the resources with separate Needs Analysis systems between pell grant Adult Program and a pell grant young program. Loans. Everybodys favorite question. Im going to simply note that theres nobody anyone who has read a newspaper in the last ten years knows that there has been much attention with headlines like a generation hobbled by the soaring costs of college. Contrary to what some newspapers would have you believe, the number of undergraduate students who are drowning in six figures of debt is more like one in 30, rather than the median or the mode. Theres a point of just getting the numbers right that are important. Also, theres a really important study that i believe was presented last year by adam luny that looks at what is a real increase in default rates, which has occurred over about the last eight years to increasing to about 5 and they ask why. There are two big factors that are at play here. The first has to do with the changing student populations, a shift that is the students who are most likely to struggle are these older if you will nontraditional borrowers and second a shift in the type of institutions that those students are attending. When you take out the compositional changes, the loan issue is different than it has often been characterized. So this brings us to the question, there are real questions as to whether some of the students struggling are really being buried because they may be enrolled in a college that had weak returns in expectation at the worst example of this would be those institutions that have turned out to be downright fraudulent and theres a question of can we help those students avoid those choices, which is a College Choice problem, and what do we do with students struggling in repayment. Given that i think im nearly at negative time here, im going to hit one point here on my list, which is one of the most popular policies from both sides of this aisle has been discussion of income based repayment and there has unfortunately been little attention to how this Program Actually effects the liabilities of the federal government. Recent gao report notes that the liability has now increased to about 74 billion, which is about triple what it was estimated to be. Essentially what youre doing is youre trading an insurance mechanism for more moral hazard and adverse selection. The primary beneficiaries are not going to be those who have borrowed a little bit and really are struggling with small amounts of debt, but turn out to be those who are getting forgiveness for graduate borrowing. I think ill come back to this. Could i have two minutes and then ill two. Okay. Well come back to this. College choice. Theres much to do here. But this is a case where we need r d sponsored by the federal government. Its a real again, there are two groups of students who are not very well guided at this point, particularly the older nontraditional students who dont have access to either peers who are going to college or traditional guidance mechanisms. I think there are interesting experiments we can do there. Supply side. Resources matter enormously. If you see whats going on at Public Institution resources per student have declined markedly. These are constant dollars. The issue here is how can we encourage greater state funding . We see increased strat fiction. This is an issue to address. But really the challenge resources are what they are, are there ways for the federal government to support productivity and enhancing innovati innovations. Are there consolidations that can be supported. Again, literally the billion dollar question is can Technology Change education productivity in the higher ed space. Okay. Main takeaway, again, weve got accountability and addressing market failures. I want to end on this final note, which is were doing better. Were learning a lot about how markets work in education. But theres room for more investment here and just as a relative point, this spending on research on education is about 279 million a year, which is about 102 times spending on nih is about 102 times greater than spending on nasa. Theres room for more investment here and theres many high return projects to think about. Let me turn this over to the professor who is going to take on the k12 side, i believe. Sara has written a thoughtful, valuable paper. I agree with the she used for federal education policy. We agreed i would focus on recent research how recent research informs the design of federal activities in three areas, accountability, teacher policy and school choice. Just a few words on context. Inequality in educational outcomes in each of the 50 states each of which has its own educational system is very high. Lowquality schools are associated with low rates of intergenerational mobility. This is worrisome because the promise of upward mobility provides a lot of the glue that has held up democracy together. So improving education, especially in states with lowquality state systems, and especially if your children from lowincome families should be a goal of federal education policies. What are the policy tools . As sara writes in her paper, funding and regulation are the primary sets of tools. The federal government has attached strings to aid and this has effected actions of states and School Districts. Theres Good Research on that. Some reactions in some tights tying post great recession, Education Funding to the adoption of the common core has shown regulations are not very popular. The ever Student Success account that moves the design of accountability systems firmly to the states, theres still a regulatory role and its still very much up for grabs what these federal regulations will look like. Ill come back to that. Turning to the first of saras buckets, accountability. Very important and its very difficult to get accountability right. A litmus test of that that would be whether an accountability system encourages skilled teachers to work in highpoverty schools. Thats a test that most accountability tests will fail. One is the auditing function. Strong support for National Assessment of educational progress is absolutely critical. Another opportunity would be cost sharing for states to participate in International Testing programs. Three american states that participated in the 2012 assessment for 15 year olds. All those states report p proficiency show theyre doing the same, but one state has average scores above the the oecd average. So again, thats the importance of this auditing function. And helping states to benchmark how theyre actually doing. So thats the second. Second, signal openness to innovation and accountability systems so its a spark of Innovation School design. Currently all state accountability systems are based primarily on student math and reading scores. Now, the skills are clearly important. And this ematter. But there are at least four welldone Research Studies showing longterm effects, interventionists designed to improve the lives of lowincome children, that did not affect test scores. One of these is the opportunity. Part of the effects of placement before 18 no effect on test scores. That suggests the importance of the accountability in a broader sense. The great availability of data on college, on crime, on labor Market Participation wages suggests the possibility of designing much more creative accountability systems. And i think encouragement of that would be valuable. Particularly encouragement of innovation in the design of education for teenagers. If you look at their scores, as sarah mentioned, improvement of scores in 9yearolds, no improvement in scores of 13 and 17yearolds, and very large gaps by race, ethnicity and income. So we really need to have to find new ways of finding education to teenagers, some ways to try to include more connection to the world of work. So i think it can signal an openness to accountability systems that would support innovation in these areas. Examples of things that have been tried with some success, small high schools of choice, new york city, Early College high schools, National Guard challenge, some urban Charter Schools. Third, to support collaboration of states to work on the design of new Educational Options for teenagers. It would be great particularly if the states with the weak systems can collaborate with the states with strong systems. And finally, on the innovative accountability systems. We would hope to see significant variation among the states. On teacher policy, youre all over the place, the research that shows what every parent knows. Teachers matter, and a big variation in teacher quality. What is much less attention, however, is very Good Research is showing that the performances of Novice Teachers, and the rate at which they improve their performance depends on the skills of the grade level colleagues, and on the quality of the environment allowing them as adults to learn. So thats critically important. And you think about accountability systems. Where a Novice Teacher is placed has an impact on how she appears on the accountability. We dont, unfortunately, know very much about how to Design Systems that provide both accountability, and support. Thats an area where we really need to do more research. Of course, this is what School DistrictCentral Offices are supposed to do, provide this combination. Very few know how to do that. I think theres a real need for research in that area. Another area related to that, and which i think research could be promising is looking at how charter management organizations, the design of the same combination of support and accountability of schools in their network. Some initial results are somewhat promising, but again, there has not been a Systematic Research program. School choice. Clearly valuable widespread support. But the thing that has not been talked about is critically important, what might be called peer group influences. I want to quote a working paper. A disruptive peer during Elementary School reduces earnings at age 26 by 3 to 4 . We estimate the differential exposure to children linked to Domestic Violence explains 5 to 6 of the rich poor earnings gap in our data. So you can clearly understand that any system of competition, competing for students, what kind of students do you want to avoid . Students who are likely to have those kinds of deepseated behavioral problems that come from Domestic Violence at home, perhaps Domestic Violence that their families observed in Central America before they came to the united states. So thats i think a quick does not mean the choice is not a good idea, but it does mean that enormous attention needs to be played to where those children go to school and the consequences for them and the children who are in school with them. Now, laws and regulations governing Charter Schools vary enormously from state to state. Theres little systematic knowledge about how these regulations affect which children go where. Thats a promising area for research. On vouchers, another area of school choice. There are lessons i think from observing chile. Chile has had national k12 vouchers since 1981. Up through 2007, the value of a voucher did not depend on the familys income. Nor was there very much accountability for private schools. The system well studied, and the main consequences are three. Stagnant achievement and growing gaps by income and increasing isolation of lowincome kids in particular schools. In 2008, chile dramatically changed its educational voucher system. The vouchers for poor kids are 50 more than those for affluent families. The School Receives a concentration bonus if it serves a large percentage of poor kids. And significant accountability of all schools that accept vouchers. That has led to substantial improvements in math and reading achievement and closing of gaps between low and high income kids. The only sensible response is to say, i get about ten questions for you about how this voucher system is going to work. The details matter enormously. So to sum up. The audit function is very important in federal government. Second, be sure that the rules governing regulations dont hinder innovation, particularly in the design of education of teenagers. Especially the consequences of state and local initiatives in these areas of accountability, teacher policy in schools choice. In all of these areas, theres a great kedeal to be learned and e consequences of the policies for the distribution of student achievement. Thank you. [ applause ] let me just ask a broad question which is, whats the major problem to be addressed in education right now . Is it the whole system isnt doing a good job of educating children, or is it really doing pretty good for most kids but not good at the bottom . Why dont i talk about the k12. Again, theres not one system. There are 50 systems. And they look fundamentally different. And they have very different outcomes. Those outcomes matter. And federal government spends less than 10 of the money. It has some regulations that are not very popular. So the problem is, there isnt one system. I think in Higher Education, youre talking about a diversity of over 4,000 institutions. And they are very, very different in terms of the students they serve, their focal mission. I do think that in terms of picking one issue, it is the success of low and actually moderate income students and their capacity to both make good College Choices to finance those College Choices, and then ultimately to complete. Staying on this kind of big picture. Some people would say, look, you noted in your paper that real per capita spending in the k through 12 area has almost doubled in 30 years. But you say the results have been modest. So someone says, can we spend more . We dont do very well. Maybe youre not advocating spending more primarily. So, one, are you advocating spending more on education, and two, how do you respond to the criticism that more money doesnt seem to matter . Just a couple of things about it. First of all, jackson and johnson wrote a nice paper in the quarterly journal of economics where they showed the impact of income on Student Outcomes is better than they previously thought. And a second paper that shows the same thing. Over time, while the u. S. Has not gotten great on accountability, its very different than it was in 1965, when the secondary education was passed. It doesnt mean all the money is used well by any means, but i think were beyond the point to say money doesnt matter. Because with title 1, it goes to 14,000 School Districts. That doesnt make any sense at all if youre thinking about having an impact on the lives of poor children. Goes more broadly youre saying . Its a political reality that doesnt make sense. I think in Higher Education, again, averages are deceiving here. Theres no question that money matters. It depends on who you are as to whether resources have increased or not. If youre a student at one of the most elite universities in the country, resources per student have increased. If youre a student whos attending a Community College or fouryear institution, its likely given reductions in state funding, that resources per student have decreased. So again, you know, theres a lot of i think weve come around to see, you know, on whole, resources really do matter. At the same time, thats necessary but not a sufficient condition for educational success. There is room in both k12 and in Higher Education for innovations that essentially increase productivity. That is, you know, improve Student Loans without changing the cost. So, lets talk about school choice, talk k through 12. The ever students succeed act has already been enacted. But a lot of regs have not been prom ul dpratd yet. How much leeway does the next admission have to think about charters and vouchers, and what are the facts on that . I think a lot will am depend on how the president elect uses the bully pulpit. Again. I think the effects through well, for example, there are these very detailed issues, you know, about the allocation of spending across schools. There is a big fight how do you account for teacher salaries. Salaries in schools that serve primarily middle class kids are higher because the teachers are much more experienced. Theres a big fight about that. I think the in the area of research, i dont think they have much leeway over Charter Schools, except perhaps to encourage more attention to these regulations through research. The fact, you know, we always hear about the study that on average Charter Schools arent any better. But to my knowledge theres not a systematic look at the five states. Its enormous in terms of whom they serve and the outcomes they must show and whether they do a poor job, whether theyre eliminated or not. I think were on the same page entirely in that, you know, this notion that we have, we have 50 state experiments going on, and then within that, about 14,000 School Districts. And we have an increasing body of evidence on matters like school choice, the charter programs, as well as vouchers. You know, its good evidence, but its honestly a little bit mixed in various forms. And it is not the kind of evidence that i think is certainly i dont think dick or i would be comfortable in suggesting that any piece of it is so definitive that it should suggest a specific set of federal regs on, you know, charters, vouchers, or teacher compensation for that matter. We are learning a lot. You know, theres room to learn more. Its imperative to collect data, to assess it carefully. But the evidence actually doesnt, i think, support strong federal policies in this area, beyond this important what im going to call an audit function, and also this function of making sure that theres really the worst kinds of fraud and poor performance dont persist at the bottom. One other comment. After the esea was passed in 1965, that provided title 1, very significant federal funding for compensatory education. The administration used the withholding of title 1 funds as a stick to get southern School Districts to comply with the civil rights act. Effectively desegregate schools. It was not popular at all, of course, but it did achieve its objective. But again, thats the question of whether the federal government is willing to use its regulatory power. 10 is not a lot, a big percentage, but on the margin its significant dollars. But this does take a pretty heavy hand. Okay. I have more questions, so lets move on. There were a lot of interesting suf in your paper about teachers. Particularly like this idea of within three years of a teachers career, you know if theyre a fabulous teacher or a bad teacher. I was wondering, you did mention that if teachers are basically there are people who are going to be Great Teachers and some who are going to be horrible teachers, then some of these pay for performance schemes, how do they even be expected to have an impact . There are people who are wonderful at this and other people who should not be teachers. You mentioned theres like evidence that within the first three years you can maybe create good teachers. A couple of things. First of all, the newest work shows that in the right setting, with the right support, teachers improve well beyond the first couple years. And the newer work is quite good on it. But only in those settings. Now, i think this pay for performance, thats the current name, the old name was merit pay, mathematica has done a multimillion dollar study on the effects of variety of teacher performance plans. My interpretation of that evidence is almost no effect. Except in most cases, most teachers got extra money. In those cases, of course, they were quite popular. Not a very powerful strategy, i think, for but i would distinguish that from the situation of providing extra money to work in difficult situations. Combat pay will not do the job if theres not support to do to actually do the job. But if the job has particularly a longer school day, a longer school year, and is quite demanding, some extra pay on that can make sense. But thats very different from the performance based pay. Let me ask you about something that you didnt mention. One of the things that people normally think about, when youre trying to buy a house and choose where to send your kids, you look at class size. There was some controversy over whether class size matters. What is the current thinking on the importance of class size to achievement . Well, i think the best you know, the analysis of the tennessee stars shows that having smaller class sizes in kindergarten makes a substantial difference, particularly in schools serving high concentrations of lowincome kids of color. I think as you get to higher grades, the research is not nearly as clearcut. I think theres also this question of markets and implementation matter enormously in this. The tennessee class size experiment is very different than the rollout of reduced class size in california, which, again, the incentives were to reduce class size effectively, independent of other educational considerations. So actually, i think kids are a little better off in a slightly larger class than a class that combines across grade levels. You want to be careful in terms of how you do these rollouts so that you dont end up having the more affluent districts effectively buying the very experienced teachers from the low income districts. So, again, design matters, implementation matters enormously in how these policies are put into play. Higher ed, quickly, and then ill get to some of your questions. You talk a lot about school choice. And thats a big problem. That people are not going to the right schools. That really lowhanging fruit . Is that something that would be very difficult to change or something that you think might be actually not that difficult and could really have a big effect . Its something that can really have a big effect. You know, it is very data dependent to do it well. It also is very differentiated. So done correctly, you want students informed in ways that take into consideration their geography, their achievement and their local market options. And again, i think its very important for students to understand net price, so the difference between the posted tuition and financial aid, students need to understand meaningful differences about how effective different colleges and universities are. Youre not going to fine a student who say they dont want to go to a good college. The problem is that students often cant distinguish between institutions based on their grad ways rates or resources per student. I want to come back to the class size, when youre done, if we could. Last question from me is going to be about, one of the things you mentioned, closing some of the really terrible places. Is there a federal rulebook in closing and in sort of supporting states, localities in making sure the Community Colleges are available, so you dont end up not having a place for them to go at all . I think there is, you know, the human cost of institutions where, you know, my favorite, there are institutions out there where the ontime Completion Rate is actually less than the default rate. That should be probably a clear indication that an institution isnt functioning as intended, and is probably not using title 4 aid well. I think it is imperative not to let these institutions go on too long in this situation. The accreditation mechanism is nominally supposed to address this. I think it is wholly ineffective and probably wasteful in the administrative time it takes, you know, its a lot of paperwork burden and not identifying the poorly performing institutions. All right. Question . Hi. Ive done work for the department of education. Im curious what you think of some of the work that ies has sponsored, the clearinghouse, has that made a difference . Has it impacted choices . And also the role of the Regional Education labs, where is that going . And what has been its success rate . I think sarah and i both feel that ies has, again, compared to what came before, has contributed to marked improvement in educational research. And its not while eis does fund the controlled trials, thats not all it does, contrary to some people might think. I think the labs are a mixed bag. They, for a long time, they had their own lobbying agency. They put a fair amount of money put aside just for them. Im not so sure thats the best way in fact, i think its not the best way to use scarce dollars. I think more competition for funds makes more sense. Again, im in the same view about that. I would emphasize on the ies grant funding. At its best is the education the ies is investing in a portfolio of projects. And they wouldnt actually be taking enough risk if all of them had big positive or had, you know, all showed positive effects. Part of this is to actually take good ideas that are theoretically driven, look at the data, come up with a good way to assess whether something works, what its costs are relative to benefits. Im actually less certain that the clearinghouse has had a big impact on practice, but i think it has forced some discipline on researcher activity. I want to come back to a notion you made in your remarks. Again, this idea that collaborations may be really high return, both among states, among districts, where youre going to get an economy of scale, that you cant get in innovation and System Development if you expect every small metropolitan area to, say, develop a teacher Performance Review program independently. Theres got to be enough similarities between des moines and topeka, you know, where there are gains from collaboration there. And thats worth funding. Question there . Last question. Keying off of dr. Summers chipping paint thing this morning. Environment is a very good thing for kids to be motivated or willing to learn. Its also a good segway to helping them go into the Junior High High School year. It seems to me theres an opportunity to both, well, to try and couple some policies with some local efforts to improve physical infrastructure, physical environment of the school, as well as some of the social environment as well. I think a lot of research has shown social environment has a lot of impact on Student Success. Are there real policy ideas, structural ideas that can be brought forth from that . Sure. I mean, having schools, kids and the adults who work on them want to be in, seems like something we as a country can truly afford and do, and we havent done. Many of our schools in boston are more than a hundred years old. I think that wed better move on. Im sorry we didnt have time for more questions. But thank you so much. This was an informative panel. [ applause ] betsy devos nomination to the education secretary advanced today. Very early this morning in the senate, with a party line 5248 vote to move to a final confirmation vote set for early next week. Two republican senators, Susan Collins and lisa murkowski, have said they will vote against confirmation. But both voted to move ahead with the nomination. Live coverage on cspan2 of next weeks senate action. Sunday night on after words, radio talk show host hugh hewitt talks about his book. Hes interviewed by New York Daily News columnist. What should the gop do to avoid just sort of sitting on their power, and not make the most of this opportunity, which could be over in two years, who knows . Great observation. The democrats thought they had a long time. They thought they had super majority. They did the stimulus, the obamacare and dodd frank. All of that will be gone in two years. It will all be swept away. There will be no trace of the obama presidency. The 850 billion you cant find actually. When i talk about investment. Infrastructure investment. I want to build things. Sunday night at 9 00 eastern on after words. More now from the conference on Public Investment in the trump administration. How the implementation of the initiatives might help impoverished areas. Were going to start our