>> sarah, if you are subpoenaed, will he go before congress? mueller: no questions. >> coming up shortly, house judiciary chair general nadler -- jerrold nadler holds a news conference on the mueller report. the statement, and what comes next for congress. representative nadler speak to reporters live starting at 2:00 p.m. eastern on c-span. we have an economist and a senior fellow at the hoover institution. authorently helped an study with educational inequality across the past century. for some terms to get us on the same page. what do we mean by the term

opportunity gap and achievement gap? guest: achievement gap is what we studied, and that is how well our kids are doing from different kinds of families. and, what we are particularly worried about is whether kids from poverty families today are likely to be poverty families tomorrow. and, they are likely to be poverty families tomorrow if they do not get the skills in schools. we are looking at the achievement that we have. host: how do you measure that? guest: we have had a number of tests that allow us to judge how well we are doing. we have something called the national assessment of educational process that has been testing a sample of kids in the u.s. since the early 1970's. and then, more recently, we have a couple of international tests -- that allow us not

only to know how our students are doing over time but to compare our students to german students for british students, or what have you. we follow these tests over time and see what has been happening. host: we want to hear from students and parents, and educators in the segment. if you want to call in all lines are open. for parents, 202-748-8000. for students, 202-748-8001. educators, 202-748-8002. take this discussion until the top of the hour at 10:00 a.m.. what did you find over 50 years of studying that data? guest: nothing has changed. because, forising, some of us we remember lyndon johnson proclaiming the war on poverty, which was aimed at trying to improve the education of poor kids.

and, through that improve their future lives. we have had consistent policies at the federal, and state government, and local governments to try and lift the poor kids up and close the gaps between rich or kids. host: what does that mean? does it mean nothing is working or that some things are working and it is getting worse? guest: as far as we can tell, nothing is working. you can always have offsetting forces, but if we think of education as coming from two sources, one is parents, which are important for kids learning, and schools. as best we can tell, the parents have gotten somewhat better. we have had more educated parents, smaller families, and we have some negatives. we have more single-parent families. on net, it is hard to say that

parents and the families have gotten worse. on? you ask, what is going if we are doing all of this to try and improve schools, shouldn't we be seeing something? host: where does the achievement gap start? early as yoully as can because we have we know there is an achievement gap. we know that parents are influential. the early years, it is all parents. you get the differences. there is a huge difference a saturday --t in between breakfast in palo alto and people drilling their kids on colors and objects around their kate -- on their paper. -- plate. these are differences not being duplicated elsewhere. kids come with different skills.

ist we have always thought that schools can take a role in lost educationr in the home. that is surprising and discouraging. host: when you look back at all of the different programs from headstart to know child behind -- no child left behind, do you see the data moving at all, and there were forces pushing against it to keep the gap the same? guest: there is a funny thing. if the gap is constant over this if ad, that might be ok rising tide is lifting everyone and it is getting better. what we found when we looked at that was that little kids seem to be getting better up until middle school over time. the end ofat kids at

schooling, at the end of secondary schooling, we see the same flat story for the last quarter century. as kids are going out into careers, and college, and out of school, they look the same as they did a quarter of the century ago. host: the headline from " forbes" talking about your study. the achievement gap has not budged in 50 years, now what? how do you answer that question. guest: we have to just start looking and seeing whether programs are looked -- are working. historically we have taken the view that if we just get more money into the schools for these purposes, things will get better. beentunately, that has not something that has not happened, and we have to look at which parts of our system are really being effective and when are they effective, and which are not. you have to be ready to reroute

programs that are not working toward ones that are. host: eric is a senior fellow taking your calls and questions until the top of the hour. parents it is 202-748-8000. students, 202-748-8001. educators, 202-748-8002. at others, you must call 202-748-8003. barbara is on the others' line. good morning. caller: good morning. the studyomment about that started in the 70's. when i was back in high school in the 60's, i was part of a group that took children out from different economic classes to see what their hopes and dreams were and how education would affect them. and, the long and short of it is that these students from the

poorest economic class, when i asked them -- one of the little girls what she would like to be when she grew up, she said i cannot be nothing. my daddy says i cannot be nothing. input think that parental , if we do not pay attention when these students are younger than kindergarten, and look at what is happening with the families, we lose them way before they get into the later high school or elementary school ages. guest: barbara, i could not agree more. what we know is that from study after study is that parents have children,act on their their motivation, on their dreams, and learning. what we have to do is intervene

boost thesery to kids up from the outside, and have a continuous program of school improvement that makes up for poor family backgrounds. host: if you got to figure out where the dollars go that get spent on education in the united states, where would you put the money? guest: i think right now we are putting a chunk into headstart for preschool. the problem there is that we do not follow-up. whenever we study headstart, which is every five years when congress -- we are sitting in this shadow of congress -- when they reauthorize the headstart program, they call for another study. every five years we are told it is not working, then we put more money into exactly the same way of doing things. so, i think of we do as barbara

suggested, we have to pay attention to kids early in life, but we have to make sure that they are getting quality programs and right now, we do not follow up on that. the federal government is a minor player in the education business because the states money, states the and localities. they do a lot of the same attempts to have early childhood programs in many places. is tryingody actually to assess which ones are working, and which ones are not. they just say we did that yesterday and might as well keep

doing that again. host: michael and grand rapids, michigan. good morning. caller: one, you say that you keep throwing money at it, but nobody is evaluating. i question that because it is continuing. number two, here in michigan, and throughout the country, and states are the primary funders of education. here in michigan, funding from the state has dropped. 20%,ed to be students paid the state kicked in 80. now it is the skate -- the state kicking in 20% and the students have to come up with 80% for college. defunding education. --say that they are putting throwing money at education and it is not working, you are not throwing money at education, you

are taking money away from education at the federal and state level. host: you are bringing up -- guest: you are bringing up interesting points, but they are a bit to the side of what i am talking about. i am talking about the system that prepares kids for the higher education that you are speaking about. that is fully funded by state, local, and dollars. long period, which we try to do in our study, there have been increasesery dramatic in the funding of schools since the war on poverty began with lyndon johnson. we spend four times as much per pupil today as we did then, in real dollars, after we at adjust inflation. you would hope with additional resources going into schools that we would get some take up in the performance, particularly

trying to close these achievement gaps. host: another parent, from montgomery, alabama. andrew, good morning. are you with us? go ahead. caller: thank you for having me on this program. what i am going to say is that we don't need educational equality. -- we need military expansion to prove we are the boss of all the universe. we do not care about educational equality. parents waste too much money for other countries. host: this is john in tampa, florida. good morning. caller: one of the best predictors of the outcome of a child is whether or not they come from an intact family, a mother and father married to each other through the course of their lifetime. basically from 1948 to 1965, only 5% of white children were

born to unwed mothers, and only 25% of blacks were born to unwed mothers. you had that, and there was busing. busing, the supreme court ruling of the mid to late or 1960's, forced children away from the parents being involved with the schools, both black and white. if i am a black student in a black neighborhood, my parent could be involved with my school. now i am far away. my parents can't be involved. that ruined the public school system forever. you saw that the grades, the scoring that american public school students did in math, reading, and science started plummeting in the 1970's. now it is very poor. to 1965,gh from 1948 relative to other industrialized countries. you had supreme court rulings that big money in political campaigns amounted to freedom of speech, first amendment.

the reagan tax cuts, no strings attached, 1982. and you have bill clinton, the first president to be all in the pocket of wealthy bad actors who make big contributions -- guest: well, education is amplex, and it is obviously political game in many places. there is all kinds of pressures in various ways. --point is a very simple 1 that the future of the u.s. really depends upon improving our schools. our schools, as you point out john, are not as competitive as they should be internationally. we are just slightly below the israge of the oecd, which composed of rich nations. we need to bring that up, because it is going to affect our future. the: as we talk about opportunity gap, the achievement gap, i wonder your thoughts of the possibility of including an adversity score in current

tests. "the washington post" writing about it recently. when students sit for the s.a.t., the admissions office might also get a number that rates the level of adversity the applicant faced, based on crime and poverty data and other demographic information about the neighborhood and high school. guest: i don't see any reason for doing that, frankly. colleges today get lots of information on students, and they know who has had adverse background. this is providing new information to most -- no information to most colleges, that are trying to open their colleges up to bright kids from all different backgrounds. so i don't think that that is going to do anything, other than maybe heighten the political debates. host: 10 minutes left with eric hanushek of the hoover institute, a senior fellow there. .t is hoover.org

for folks that are not familiar, what is the hoover institute? guest: the hoover institution is in the common vernacular, but it is part of stanford university. the position of the hoover institution is that scholarship can in fact be used to improve public policies. so it is aimed at public domestic policies and international and security policies. it is a group of scholars who do research, such as what we presented here, in the hopes of informing decision-makers on how to improve things. when you say "we," who else joins you in this study? is a hooverpeterson institution senior fellow and a professor of government at harvard university. laura toby is a researcher, a

young researcher at stanford. ussman is aw professor of economics at the university of munich. host: we will get as many calls as we can. russell is in houston, texas. good morning. caller: good morning. thank you for taking my call. i grew up in the foster system in ohio, and i noticed -- i am in my 70's now, but i notice there has been a large increase in foster children. i wonder, is the institution doing anything to look at the problems that foster children have? frankly, that has not entered into much of the education research. that is in different areas and that is a little outside of my area. backgrounds,mily written large, are extraordinarily important to the future of children. host: that line for parents,

mark is in norfolk, virginia. good morning. caller: good morning. i agree with a lot of your callers. sometimes, i think we overthink the obvious. the couple calls for me -- when he was talking about busing -- a lot of people think that may be racial intent. african in america, i think he is absolutely right. now, we are in a situation socially where we are about to wonerations gone -- t generations gone that really know anything about solid parenting, because a lot of the issues the previous caller had mentioned. i think the 800 pound gorilla in the room that we are not bold enough and courageous enough to talk about is we do have a strong need for boarding schools. so for those parents who are not quite equipped right now, there should be systems all across this country to where we can

have at risk children in boarding schools, to where they can have an environment 24 hours around the clock, 5, 6 days a week, where they can come and be secured and be acclimated to emulatesne environment and looks like, so they can learn. guest: we do have some experience with boarding schools, and they have in many instances proved to be successful, but they also proved to be very expensive. and in all of these decisions about education, we are always faced with trade-offs. we can find things that might be better that are very expensive. do we want to put our resources in those things, versus other programs? that is what is behind our work here, to try to suggest that we actually evaluate which programs are working, and which programs

are getting the most for the dollars that are spent. host: on that, this is a story from last year from "education week." a program funded by the bill and melinda gates foundation, and awarding bonuses for good performance to specific teachers . department of justice policy prevented from bringing charges the special council demonstrated president trump is lying. he is