America's Education Crisis: Pursuing Academic Excellence

We knew you all would come out here because I don’t think we could have a more distinguished panel to talk about this most essential issue at a incredibly interesting moment where I think that the election is probably – is about to pivot much more towards the topics of – that we are going to be discussing today. We have two candidates who style themselves as reformers and education is one of the great reform issues of our time. And so if they are true to – they are true to their – the way that they figure themselves then, education should play a monumental role in this election. I wanted to thank ED in ‘08, our partners today, they have been doing the Lord's work keeping the education issue at the forefront of the debate and like I said we have an incredibly distinguished panel. I could spend the next hour and half reading you their CVs and it would probably be an education in and of itself about this topic. We have super-delegate and Chairman Roy Romer, who served as – who is governor of Colorado and then bravely threw himself into the melee of education by running the Los Angeles County School District and did some amazing things there. We have the Superintendent of PG County Schools, John Deasy and we know that he is committed to education reform because he left the palm tree confines of Santa Monica and the warm weather to come to the Washington Metropolitan Area to take on the PG County Schools and he has been doing some incredibly innovative things there and grateful to have him. We have the Chancellor of the New York City Schools Joel Klein and ED in ‘08 is a partnership of the Broad Foundation and the Gates Foundation and I am not sure that the Gates – that anything that had the names affixed – Gates affixed to it would have invited Joel Klein to it in another decade, but the Gates Foundation and Joel have been doing amazing things in education and hey, it’s all for the kids. And he has just done amazing things in New York City schools. I mean it has – it has been a long time before – since New York City schools have been the envy of the rest of the country. But they are on their way to being that now. We also have Chester Finn who really set the terms for the debate that we are having now on education and was – in a lot of ways the godfather of the Standards Movement and just did a tremendous amount to – to set the – to lay the intellectual groundwork for the present debate. He is President of the Fordham Institute and we have Mike Feinberg who the Co-Founder of the KIPP Program, the Knowledge Is Power Program. And they now have 57 schools around the country and he is a true product of the reform movement starting Teach For America and creating this incredible network of schools that have received rave reviews. And the impresario for today’s event is Frank Sesno who is a special correspondent for CNN where he's – he has covered education extensively over the years and is a Professor at George Washington University where he teaches media and I will now turn it over to his capable hands to have this – what will be a very, very interesting discussion, thanks. Thank you Frank, it’s always a pleasure to – from one Frank to another, to be able to take a hand off like that. As Frank mentioned I have been watching this event very closely for a very long time. I covered the 1982 report, A Nation at Risk, I have tracked education issues down through the years, heard this conversation ongoing, attended the 1989 summit, and we are talking nearly 20 years ago, the President the other President Bush held, where governors were invited, in fact I went back and I pulled the joint statement on the education summit with the governors in Charlottesville, Virginia before coming over here in a month, the things that were said and Governor Romer I am going to turn this first question to you, here is what they said 19 years ago, 'our competitors for opportunity – our competitors for opportunity are also working to educate their people as they continue to improve, they make the future a moving target’. Here we are 19 years into the future, the target is still moving. Can the United States of America compete in a global economy if it’s losing the arms race in education? No, and this is a very sophisticated crowd. And so I think we can get into this very quickly. You all know the changes that have occurred internationally in the last 20 years. I mean I am floored, where South Korea used to be where Mexico is and now look where it is, right second from the top. Poland, I mean – out of 30 industrial nations we are 25th from the top in math for 15 year olds, 21st from the top in science, and it’s not that we have gone backwards in the last 25-30 years, it’s the rest of the world has made such great progress. And it is a very, very challenging issue for America. I constantly think politically as follows. Economies are tied to skills and knowledge, and as we look to the next 20, 40 years in this nation. We have got a very, very challenging and sobering experience if we do not radically – radically improve our educational product. And the – I think that we are thinking that children can learn, but we don’t yet believe it as the way we act it out. And I just feel that the consequence of failing to improve this country’s education is potentially disastrous. One final paragraph, the race for president is being run on four issues, you know, the economy, global warming, national security, health care. Any president after he is elected calls his advisors in, is going to look at those four issues and say, I cannot move this nation on the next 10, 20 years unless I simultaneously or if not first put education right at the top of my policy list. And that – economically one last thing, Hanushek made a projection that if we could increase our educational achievement just at the average of those 30 nations, we would increase our Gross National Product by about a half percent a year. And over 30 years that would produce enough income to pay for the total educational budget of this United States. Joel Klein, do the various constituent groups, the parents, the students, the teachers, the principlas get it, this urgency? I think it depends where you are in a spectrum, I mean -. In your experience? What Roy says is right except – one caveat on that, we have got to disaggregate where America is actually at the top of these global tests, is on the difference between our highest performing and lowest performing kids. And – so when you ask do people to get it, people in America, even in a city like New York, have very varied experience in public education. And they are focused on – quite frankly what’s going on in their school, their situation. Now what you see is racial and ethnic achievement gaps that are really fuelling this global achievement gap that Roy is talking about, do people perceive that that is such a mission critical issue as Roy says? Of course not. If they did, people would be talking about it in the election, we would have a much more frank and open discussion about it, but let’s be candid, by and large the people who get the short end of the educational stick are the people who have the least power, are the people who – you know the people in communities that we are aware, by and large are able to navigate the system to find reasonably good outcomes for their children. The people who are suffering most are what I call the voiceless, in education. And that discussion is not necessarily a political winner; especially when it’s clouded by a lot of interest group politics. But Roy is absolutely right. If we don’t have a very different discussion and a much more open and public discussion with a real sense of leadership and urgency about these issues, we are going to be missing the big bet. If you haven’t read it, Bloomberg's speech, this summer at the Urban League was the kind of speech that we should be seeing on the national stage and there should be much, much more discussion about the racial and ethnic achievement gaps. He talked about a lot of important numbers, and numbers people glaze over. Katie Haycock nailed the number in that 15 year old -- in that 15 year old test that just came about African American kids in America were outperformed by Mexico and Mexico was always number 30 in the OECD countries. That gives you some dimensions of the inequity and the challenges, now 54 years after Brown Vs Board and 25 years after A Nation at Risk. Mike Feinberg, Joel talked about the voiceless there are 1.2 millions kids or so who drop out every year, talk about voiceless, what addresses their issues and these issues from that next administration? What is the – what does the federal government and the next administration need to do in your view? You know it's – this is a – it can be a very complicated issue. At the same time I think you can boil it down to some – some very simple ideas. Our schools work by and large because of great teaching and more of it. Now high credit culture, where everyone is going to buy in and the parents the kids the teachers all – all want to be inspired be part of that, it certainly can be a little bit more complicated, but it was great teaching and more of it. And when you – and when you even dial into that one, in this country where we have great teachers and great school leaders, we have great schools, we have lousy teachers and lousy school leaders, we have lousy schools. And I don’t care about the funding, I don’t care about the condition of the building, I don’t care about the technology, I don’t care about the curriculum, it comes down to that simple; great teachers, great school leaders, great schools; lousy teachers, lousy school leaders, lousy schools. So to address those 1.2 million kids we need to give them, we need to make sure that – that we are attracting great people into the – into education to become teachers. We need to make sure that our training program of how we – how we train the next generation of school leaders, truly trains people on how to be leaders and great managers and not just children but have adults and set that system up for success. John Deasy is a Superintendent sitting here in Washington DC. What does – what do you look for or expect or want from the next government – the next administration in this town? So I mean, I am struck by how interrelated Governor Romer’s first comments were and actually how the Chancellor picked up on that. It isn’t just simply having a conversation about healthcare and one about education. I mean I need to be able to keep my youth alive, so many of them do not have healthcare, so many of them come to school in such compromised conditions, that the conversations need to be both end. So what do we – need. I'm gonna just kind of cut this at – at a simple kind of five point piece, the whole conversation in this country around standards I think needs to become very unified, instead of very agreed upon American standards higher, fewer and deeper. What do you mean by that? That means that what the youth learns in algebra, in my county, and what the youth learns in algebra in San Francisco and what the youth learns algebra in New York City needs to be the same high quality algebra, and needs to be a common understanding of that curriculum; so higher and fewer and deeper standards. Assessments that measure those standards at a level that is benchmarked against the top 10 countries choose piece on that assessment if you want to. So you have a world class of kind of benchmarking piece around that. Teaching, teaching and teaching; so I mean teaching needs to become the iconic profession of this next century. We need to be able to produce teachers in far greater quantity than we are doing right now and much greater skilled than we currently have. And the investment in the teaching force is absolutely essential if I am going to be able to do my job and that investment needs to be first in our schools of greatest poverty. And lastly this notion of alternative and differentiated forms of compensation for the teaching force making tenure meaningful and in significantly increasing the attracters to this profession. I think those issues are first and foremost – at the front of this. And we are going to drill into all of those in some detail, but before we start doing them I want to come over to Chester and get your overview on this? Well, you know historically education reform in this country has oscillated between a quality anxiety and an equality anxiety. And right at the moment we are not doing very well on either front. We have on the one hand this enormous achievement gap – or whole set of achievement gaps and drop outs, many of them poor minority, and the equality part of this isn’t going at all well. The quality point is – as I think Roy made at the very beginning, internationally and domestically we have been running in place while the rest of the world has been accelerating for quite some time and so we need to harness these two together that I know tried to do that, it needs – needs an overhaul in my view. But the – menu that has been laid out here in the last seven minutes is – is actually pretty good. But it’s also revolutionary. Let’s – let’s be honest. What – what’s on the table right here is completely different approach to teachers and teaching and the recruitment training compensation and deployment of people in the schools, a completely different approach to school leadership, a completely different approach to national standards. And the only thing that hasn’t been added that I would add is families need options so that kids can leave bad schools and go to good ones and we are not going to fix all the bad ones tomorrow, so let’s start more good ones like KIPP. So let’s – let’s go into some of these, let me – let me layout some of the questions that we want to explore in – in this conversation here. The question of having a model of 50 states with 50 different standards, that’s been touched upon, question one. Question two, how we deal with the issue of the two million teachers who are soon to retire and replacing them and – and addressing this teacher core and finally related to – to the methodology of teaching itself is just simply how much time our kids spend in school, and what they do with that time. Governor Romer we have 50 states, you are governor of one of them. How do you get governors, 50 governors on board with something like this? Chester and I began this conversation in 1992 on a panel called INCEST. Excuse me. It was National Committee on Standards and Testing or something like that. Education Standards and Testing. Yeah – yeah. Somebody should rename that panel. Yeah. But here standards, I watched in this political year very hesitant for a federal office seeker to go out to a state and say, I want to tell you how good is good enough for you and I want to tell you how to improve your schools. They just won’t do it. The conversation is blocked because they are worried about state's rights. We need to have a different conversation, we need to have a President go to Iowa and say I want you Iowa and 15 other states to get together – well let me put it this way, the next President whoever it is, the first 30 days in the White House, ought to call 50 governors in and 50 state school officers, and say I want to make a new deal with you. I want you to benchmark your standards to the 10 best nations in the world. Start with 15 of you. It would be voluntary; you come back in 90 days and give us a model set of standards that you will annually benchmark against the 10 best nations of the world. You decide how good is good enough and commit to go there, if you do that –. Could you get 15 –15 governors? They are already doing it. And they can agree on that. There is the Achieve Organization, and others affiliated are now building that – that combination. And what that does to a Governor like Colorado or anyone else, it gives 'em strength; they are not standing there alone. They can save costs and they can have strength. But the point is if they voluntarily decide this is how good is good enough, then a President can come to them and say, I will give you the tools to get there. And I think some of the tools in this instance ought to be, one I will give you more time under Leave No Child Behind because reaching to a higher standard. Two, I will give you money to help design more authentic assessment so we get rid of this bubble stuff. Three, I will pay for the administration of your tests. In that way you then have a federal government not intruding and demanding that you do it our federal way, but the federal government is there like in consumer protection. I am going to guarantee that your eighth grader is going to be equally prepared as the Dutch eighth graders in the world they are about to enter. It’s a paradigm shift that we need to make. So I – I want to pick up on that for a second because I think what you are suggesting is a very interesting – a new consideration for a federal role in education. So it’s a convening role and it’s a catalytic role as opposed to a highly regulatory role, and a role of – of direct control. So the notion of being able to do exactly what becomes it is a – is a pretty remarkable grant bargain, so states actually get relieved of the cost of doing this high quality, very necessary work in – in lieu of their opportunity to create a set of American high benchmarked standards. And the assessments that go with those standards – and you are letting the professionals in the field much like the other professionals such as medicine and law, create these benchmark standards. I think from that flows a very fascinating conversation about the quality of teaching and learning, which I think is very, very positive. But this notion of a President in a federal education that convenes and catalyses is what really significant. How would that trickle down? Long ago Bill Bennett said – said we'll never have national standards, said that Republicans won’t do national and Democrats won’t do standards, right? And so what everybody is trying now is to figure out how to circumnavigate that political conundrum. What is amazing to me – we sit here and – Chester just said this, we sit here and we all talk about national standards as if it were a no brainer right, but if you left this room the discussion is exactly the opposite, right? It’s all about protecting state’s rights and everything like that. And local rights -. And local rights. So what you are seeing is – and Chester and a lot of other people have documented it in various states, a race to the bottom, inadequate standards you know, the easiest way to improve public education is to just lower the requirements and we will get more and more people graduating. I am always astonished; people think that you can compare the graduation rates in two different states. It’s nuts. It depends what the requirements for graduation are in those different states. And we don’t live in a state based economy; we live in a global economy. Our kids are going to have to compete in a global economy. We should have national standards and national assessments. How we get there? I hope this achieve process and this convening process works. But if there is not real federal teeth in this I think the political imperatives at the local level will dominate. So for me at a minimum, the federal government ought to condition it’s willingness to put entitle one another monies on really meaningful benchmark standards. But I think we'd be better off if they were national and if the assessments – think all of all the money that the 50 states spend on various assessments. When – if you would put that together and have real national assessments – a real set of requirements for what it meant to graduate high school in America, you can make that so much better, so much more sophisticated. I think it’s going to take real national leadership, but I think if we have this discussion we can change the paradigm and someday hope that Secretary Bennett eats his words. You know I absolutely agree with what you're all saying and there does needs to be federal teeth, that’s coming from the top – pushing from the – up from the bottom though is also – as Chester said about creating more choices out there, we see this playing out in Houston right now, with KIPP and YES starting more schools in Houston. Actually the school district has started conversation with KIPP and YES on standards; on how can they be learning from us, how can they be creating a college going culture in their schools as well. So it just helps to kind of frame the environment where people are now – people are now more open to talking about expectations and standards at the school level, I think that can also help push up with what the federal government needs to do as well. Chester, I’d like to ask you about the possibility of creating sort of a culture of high expectations nation wide when you are dealing with this incredible patchwork quilt? Well, I think everybody up here is talking about reaching towards some kind of national standard and what we are mildly disagreeing about is the mechanism of – for getting there, and to what extent the US government needs to drive it as opposed to the states coming together and with some private organizations and figuring out how to do it. Which ever way it's done – and it’s an important decision which way it’s done, the culture of high expectations only works if A; there are consequences for not meeting them, and B there are resources for meeting them. Otherwise you have a kind of impossible aspiration situation. And right now in spite of all the yammering about No Child Left Behind and it’s got a lot of flaws, there actually aren’t any consequences whatsoever for kids not being proficient, schools are supposed to be reorganized. That’s really the only consequence right now for kids not being proficient. And there is also an obvious lack of the personnel and the wherewithal to make a whole lot more schools be highly more effective than they are today. And this comes back to questions of leadership and personnel principles – I think technology, because I don’t think we need three million super teachers in this country. I think we need a number of super teachers and then a whole lot of technology and a whole lot of teacher aids in order to deliver this mechanism, keep in mind incidentally as we shift toward teaching, that the teaching population in this country has tripled in size over the last 50 years – tripled. Kids – the number of kids went up by half, the number of teachers tripled. We now have a teaching work force of three million people and I don’t think we're gonna get three million super stars. So back to the culture of high expectations, and a culture of high expectations if it's coming out of – starting with 15 governors, spreading to 15 states, moving down to all the cities – towns and municipalities across the country. Yup; it takes each city and town to buy into that partly because they see they need to, partly because they want to and partly because it’s painful if they don’t. You got to get all of those things aligned. You got to tie that culture to the economy of a family. I think that a lot of conversations around the dinner table and which – they are serious – can our children – will they be able to afford the house we now live in? Are they going to have a job? Are they going to be competitive? Yeah, let me take Mike’s point of being very simple. I just think that if you had an eighth grader who went to school and had on one blackboard the level of math that’s being achieved in 10 best nations of the world, the other side of the room, the level of math in this classroom as compared to that, which would probably, a year, year and a half below, and then on a third blackboard an extrapolation of the economic cost to that child’s life by that differential. That’s the kind of information a family has got to look at. But you know in all the years I have been going to Back to School Night and Teacher Conference I have never once seen that on a blackboard or a whiteboard or anywhere else. That’s what I am saying. We got to connect the fact that – I mean everybody – you know the sub prime crisis and everybody says – you got to take more in than you pay out, well the way you take more money in in this world is to being more productive which means being smarter, better – more educated. John -. Let me ask you a question Roy, because you have been at this a long time now and you have been doing ED ‘08 and you are banging on this drum and everything you say seems obvious. And yet there is no national discussion. Where is the disconnect? Why is it that we can’t get traction on these fundamental issues you are talking about? We are not telling the truth for ourselves in America. I yesterday was making a personal decision, not – not an organizational one, about what I am going to do on the presidential race, and I wrote out some words and – and I used truth telling. I mean – and somebody exed that out of my copy because it implied that others were not truth telling. You know but – but I just think we got to tell the truth about the real circumstance in America, and we are kidding ourselves. I went to the Des Moines Rotary Club in Iowa, you know and had a discussion with them about their education, their eighth graders, they rated 65 percent proficient, you know. NATE says they are 35 percent proficient. If I compare them to Singapore they are 25 percent proficient. But they are sitting there happy as a clam and their child’s future is at stake. I had 18 grandchildren. I worry about those youngsters being able to compete in a world in which there's going to be an awful lot of very skilled people. Can I – can I just challenge you in this for a minute when you say we are not truth telling, we're not out there, we have been telling the story for decades. I remember going out and doing a story after the Nation at Risk report in the early 80s, I went to a – I went to an auto repair shop, computers were new and you needed to be literate on a computer in order to align the wheels on a car. And we – we did that story then. We have been screaming about this for decades. No I mean – culturally; in a community we are not truth telling, we don’t really let - You don’t think we just get it. No we -. We tell the truth at the macro level and not at the micro level. We don’t tell people about their own kids, we don’t tell them about their own kid’s teacher, we don’t often tell them about their own kid’s school. Look at the way we grade. Alright, John let me come back to the community, let me come back to this question about – about standards. They talk about teeth. At the local level if there are teeth, if there are consequences, how does that play with the parents? So, I am glad you used the word consequence because right now the only affiliation with No Child Left Behind is punishment. And there is a remarkable perverse incentive – to doing well in No Child Left Behind, you actually loses supports that actually got you to improving. So the notion of thinking about consequences, consequences also is to incent improvement and to actually provide supports when you do better, as well as significant consequences when you don’t. I mean every parent wants the absolute best for their child. When we had this conversation a few moments ago about truth telling or knowledge, most parents don’t have that information – particularly parents who live in circumstances of poverty. The notion of real information in my opinion is the underground currency that marks privilege versus poverty. So those people who live in circumstances of privilege have a lot more information. Than those parents, and those families who live in circumstances of poverty, this notion of very specifically, what is high quality work for students being quite explicit about that, posting that and helping people understand that, first in their language, second in English, is part of the absolute work of leveling the playing fields so that people can understand what high quality is. When you talk about that blackboard piece, I mean that can be done and is done in many good systems, very clearly around student work. This is eighth grade algebra and this is now a world standard of what eighth grade algebra looks like. Here are our classes. This is why it doesn’t reach it or this is why it exceeds it. Being very clear about that is critical, and being very clear about that to parents who are struggling to keep a roof over their head, struggling to put food on the table and desperately struggling to provide their youth with immunization, basic health care is essential if we are going to be serious about an all kids agenda. Back on parents for a minute with you. How do you deal with parental upset if you are laying out these standards and if their students don’t perform up to those expectations? First will you be clear about what we're – my responsibility is to facilitate your child to be at that level, you are honest with the community about what the cost is in doing that, it’s not cheap. And what I mean cost, it's not new money, it’s the money of having highly effective teachers in your son or daughter’s classroom. That’s an expense versus lots and lots of unqualified, non-credentialed faculty in our poorer schools. And – and third is you create opportunities for good public education. KIPP is – I mean I know that you are sitting here, but it is a remarkably effective opportunity, good public alternative for students when they get that choice, and you say here is a way to be effective. We got to – we got to just – the precondition to this discussion about consequences, positive, negative is meaningful accountability. And this goes to Roy and truth telling, you know. Look – if your school in need of improvement right? People don’t understand what that is. In New York City we have an A to F that we put on our schools, right and we – we put and believe me, it’s controversial. It’s what Roy would call truth telling and – and it gets an appropriate reaction. We grade them A to F largely based on growth, we have some other factors, but we look at how much and we – we have enough schools that you can actually say this is a cohort of 40 schools, 20 just above you, 20 right below you, that are your peer cohort. And if they are moving the kids with the same money and the same overall system, then why aren’t you moving yours. And – and based on that. So you see some schools that are traditionally high performing don’t do as well because they are not moving their kids, some schools that are lower performing do well. Then we come in behind this with two or three sets of consequences. First of all we close schools and well I – I agree with Chester on this, it’s the toughest thing politically. People don’t want to close their schools and the politicians don’t want to close them. But we have closed 70 in the last several years and now that we have this A to F system we have announced that if you continue to get Ds and Fs, we are going to close you – remove the principle, whatever we need to do; but you've gotta have meaningful sanctions. Second of all if your kid's in an F school, we give that kid fundamentally a voucher for the public school system. But we give that kid an extra set of dollars so that she is attractive to the higher performing schools, so that they will want to take them and try to create more choice within a public school system. And third of all the schools that do best, we actually give them extra dollars to invest in them in what they are doing, which is one of the things that never happens in public education. In fact the worse you do, the more money you get in this system. But I believe if you don’t have a strong, meaningful backbone of accountability, then it’s always going to be a discussion of well, why don’t we try to – put in a little more of this, a little more of that and then turn it around. And in the absence of that backbone, I don’t see how you can do this work seriously. Mike, can I swing over to you for just a minute, because in the KIPP schools you – you have managed to create, and certainly promote this culture of – of high expectations. What's the blueprint for that? The – it basic comes down to our – our five pillars of more time, choice commitment, power to lead, the high expectations and focus on the great results. I think that the base of that is that we have heard, I think the governor talking about is – it starts with a belief. And as I said we don’t – you know all children can learn, that’s a nice fluffy statement that’s in most of our schools and people don’t believe that need to get out of our schools, but it – it can’t stop there. We change can to will. At KIPP its ‘all children will learn’. And that’s how – that’s how we approach it when we start our lesson planning before the kids even show up on day one, already thinking you know our – our pre-K three year olds are the class of 2022. We know that, the parents know that, the kids know that, they're still learning how to count to 2022, but they know they're the class of 2022 and that’s that single north star focus that we – we keep, that we keep focused on as we hire teachers, as we work together, the teachers make their lesson plans, we talk with the parents. It’s all focus on giving the kids to and through college. Let’s talk about teachers for a minute. We have talked about accountability to grade the schools, about the teachers – how about holding teachers accountable? Absolutely. I mean it’s – in every profession people are held accountable. You have got to have reasonable accountability metrics. I mean we just went through this – John and I were talking about this morning. We just went through this; we wanted to take teacher value into consideration as part of an overall calculus when granting tenure. What does that mean? Meaning basically you want to look at how teachers have moved their students forward. What always strikes me when you look at the numbers, it’s so powerful. When you see some teachers who will move a class that starts, let’s just say on a four point scale, the average of the class is 2.5. That teacher will move those kids to 2.8. Another teacher will move them to 2.3. Those swings are enormous. I don’t know who mentioned Eric Hanushek before; I guess it was Frank when he set up the panel. But when you look at those differences, I mean Erick’s work shows that over three years you could fundamentally close the achievement gap if you have those teachers and those are the people who work at KIPP. The essential indispensable ingredient in KIPP is he's got high quality teachers. He kills himself to get high quality principals and high quality teachers and he measures their performance, he is not afraid to measure their performance. How do you measure their performance? As Chester talked about by – by seeing with the – the kids who started in each of the classrooms and where they are at the end of the year and measuring how far the – the kids have grown and – and making sure that’s tied directly to what the teacher value has been or has not been. Is that teaching to the test? Oh absolutely not. It’s – because we are – again if – if we were simply focused at the end of the day on whether or not our kids pass the local state test and then if they do the confetti drops and still we have a party, we would be. But our ultimate goal is gain – gain the college banners on our gold walls and that – that’s what we are focused on – the task is just one piece of what we measure to the end goal of getting the kids to and through college. John -. I do want to make just three points here. So teaching to the test, it’s an obligation to teach what’s on the test. I mean you have a right to know the material, if they are going to be competitive. So teaching to the test is – is a bit of the pejorative statement. But teaching what's on the test in ways that youth can demonstrate they know that, consume that and use that, is absolutely essential on this piece. I mean this notion of teachers – I think that there is the – the conversation of what you really can’t, have a serious conversation about meaningful tenure reform and you can’t have a conversation about alternative compensation – that is just not true. You can have those conversations. I think the idea of accountability in the teaching force in this country, I am very, very – strongly believe that it’s a reciprocal accountability. I get to hold you to very high standards of student progress, personal knowledge – you have to be able to know your material, you have to be able to teach your material, and there have to be results to that and you get to hold me accountable for providing you the development to do this job well. I mean there is a reciprocity to this. That conversation cannot be absent in the institutions of higher education. It simply can’t be. I mean I look at Joel, I knew Roy in Los Angeles – myself here, I cannot do this one alone without the academy present at the table. There needs to be a serious thought about the way that we are preparing teachers. And I think that there are as many great opportunities around tenure reform, length in tenure, make it significant monetary when you achieve that. You want to look at the results of students over time who have had teachers. All those things need to be in – in part of the conversation, so as the preparation teachers. I see you shaking your head –. No, I am thoughtful – I wasn’t shaking. Okay. There is something – and a lot of the time I spend – I haven’t got my hands on and that is, why is it we are where we are? I mean when I went to LA, I had not been in the system before – I was there six and a half years. Most everybody that worked for me, I had 80,000 employees, had tenure of 20 years – 30 years. They thought it was a pretty good system; it was a terribly producing system, you know very low producing. I mean they had convinced themselves that this was what’s possible. They didn’t believe all children could learn and it is – in fact that city had not built a new high school in 30 years. I mean it just – this is a stone's throw from some of the most affluent structures, buildings and people in the world, Hollywood. And I could not believe what it is about our culture that let’s us drone on. Now let me switch to the current political climate. And there were 400 questions asked at the debates for President before one was on education, and that question was who is your favorite teacher. Something is wrong here. What should the question have been? The question should be what kind of leadership are you going to provide as President to help this nation be competitive in the world of education? And what should the answer have been? Well, the – I mean the answer - I believe the answer should be we need to elevate this priority, and we need to give a much more personal leadership, and I as a President am going to do it. Here is what I'm going to do, I am going to focus upon raising expectations, I am going to focus upon a new way in which we can get a good teacher in every classroom and third we are going to spend more time on task frankly that sounds like KIPP, but I think that's a start. Yeah, John let me come back to – to you for a minute, here is a fact – here is - hey, you should have run. It’s not too late. Third, fourth, fifth party? I was – I was asking about his boss earlier today, you know this guy by the name of Bloomberg but I guess - that’s not to be. I am going to tell him Chester said it's not too late. Tell us what he says. Here is a fact, more than seventy percent of the math teachers in our middle schools and in our high minority middle schools, lack even a college minor in math or a math related field, you are in a minority, majority district. Correct. How are you attracting these competitive qualified teachers to your schools, when you've got competition from what some would see is more affluent school districts around you? Well I mean first of all it's a national – If that's somebody important we'll wait. I wonder if that's a recruitment call. Cause I - If that's a math teacher I get him not Joel. I mean part of it is to make a better deal than Joel is offering in New York City, that’s actually I mean, we have to compete - and – and for me it’s a large geographical – it's Boston Atlanta and that area is teachers are very aware that the conditions for teaching and learning matter greatly. And so it's the package of recruitment so it's – that's number one. The second thing is I can’t - in Maryland we do not produce enough teachers for me to hire. So I have eight physics opening last year three teachers graduated with a degree in physics - and I'm just one county. Wait, wait, wait give us that again, you have eight physics opening– Right, so a highly qualified teacher are teaching physics from the University of Maryland system, I could hire all of them that produce and I would still have vacancies and I am just one system. So we don’t have enough faculty coming in to this area. Your statistic I just want to cast something slightly different about that statistic was you know, the percentage of teachers who are not qualified teaching math, but that is across the nation, that statistic is much, much higher in communities of great poverty, and so in schools where the predominant population are youth who live in circumstances of poverty it may be a hundred percent of teachers, do not hold a credential in mathematics who were teaching that. So that is raises the issue of how we think about the distribution of human capital, so when I get a highly effective and I hate this term highly qualified, I want this to be a highly effective teacher, when I have a highly effective teacher in mathematics the teacher has to first go to work with my youth who are in the greatest issues of compromise. So this is an area where when we talk about sort of the irrationality - irrationality system, every college and university knows that you don’t pay math teachers the same thing that you pay teachers in other disciplines. The supply demand curve doesn’t intersect at the right point and systemically we are not going to draw the number of people into the profession, it's not people say to me well why do you prefer math teachers to physical education teachers, it's not that I prefer, it's that my kids need them and they are not getting - So you need to have pay differentials to be competitive – How do you – how do you get that? How do you get that through the unions? Well we've negotiated several of them in fact to deal with John’s problem I now pay people if you come to New York City and you are effective in math we will pay you an additional for three years $15000 if you make a three year – So what are you paying that teacher? What am I paying? Yeah. Starting teacher - Starting teacher now in New York is about 45,000. I want to come back to how we pay teachers because we got the whole thing back loaded, if you saw this study that came out in Denver, on where the money in teacher salaries is going and how different it could be if you front loaded it. But putting aside, the course of a teacher's life time and how we – we remunerate them. The differentials have got to begin to permeate, so we pay and then we have a thing called the lead teacher costs 50 - we pay them an additional ten thousand. But there is a program that we have in New York it's a privately funded program called by Jim Simon hedge fund guy its called ‘Math for America’ and he is paying private moneys to all of these very qualified teachers. And he is doing what John's doing. He is giving them intense education at the same time and then deploying them in their schools, I was in one of my schools yesterday where one of these people has become a mentor and a coach, for all the other people, but if we don’t use our resources intelligently and tie most of the money to seniority, then we are never going to be able to transform the teaching force. Chester let me read you something the Michael Barber who is a British education expert many of you know, told the New York Times the top performing education systems around the world and I'm quoting here select their teachers all select their teachers from the top third of their college graduates, whereas the US selects its teachers from the bottom third of graduates, this is one of the big challenges of the US education system he said. And then he asked the question what are you gonna do over the next fifteen to twenty years to recruit better people into teaching, I mean that – that sort of nails it right there. Now you talked about you can't have three million super stars, but you gotta address this, we got to move from the bottom third it seems to the top third. We do and if we could do it over again, let’s keep in mind that if the – if the number of teachers had risen at the same rate as the number of kids in this country instead of twice as fast, the average teacher salary in America today would be more than a $100,000. If we took the same money we are spending. The average teacher salary would be north of $100,000 and a completely different group of people would be seeking these jobs. Than are seeking these jobs today. So that’s historically, going forward the – the since I don’t think we are going to reduce the number of teachers. The thing we have to do is differentiate, pay differently, deploy people differently, reward them differently, tenure them differently, pension them differently and expect to and – and credential them differently in the sense that right now we keep out a lot of people who might like to be teachers. But who - and who don’t want to jump through all of the certification hoops, most of which make no sense in a rational world anyway, so we've got a lot of changes to make on the teaching force if we want to address this problem. So all of the items that you just spoke about are once we have the teachers. I'd like to just address the possibility that -- whether or not we're gonna get three quarters of a million of great superstars I think the answer is this country has shown that we can do that, so we have a whole service academy which chooses our best officers in the military. We could actually have kind of the gold star service academies for producing the best teachers in the country, the government could incent an opportunity to create these academies whether at higher education or businesses could run these academies on the national standard, these teachers come out work in our schools of greatest need across this country have the opportunity to be paid at a very significant differential and I think you could begin to put into the teaching force, a remarkable opportunity for kids who never get teachers like this, and of course they recruit from the top third. So the entrance level is the same as medical school and that would be one way that we can begin to think about this on the entry level, not necessarily what we do with them. Because I think - plays out issues that absolutely have to be discussed if we are going to transform the teaching profession and make it an iconic profession. Under the heading of the actual proves it possible, look at Teach for America, a decade ago, you had about three thousand kids applying outta college every year took for about five hundred spots, this year there's nearly twenty five thousand applicants, ten percent of some of the top colleges and universities in this country the student body is applying to Teach for America, they are showing this can be done – you can attract a more talented group into the pipeline that’s one part of it. The pay is also part - then how are we going to keep them when we get there pay as part of it. But also just I would say contentment and joy in the work place. Is also another big thing we have to work on, what are the systems going to do to – once when the teachers get there and keep them there. Those things are interrelated Michael because people - successful people create successful environments and successful people want to be part of successful environments, the wonderful thing about high standards when you meet them is the non monetary income is very high, let me give you the simplest idea which I think would have a big impact. For example, on my - we have a thousand Teach for America teachers. Why don't we create two pay scales, take the current one where you have very extensive benefits and a defined benefit pension plan which only exists in the public sector, doesn’t exist in - and then take another pay scale in which you front load, so you monetize the long term value, you give different benefits you give them a 401K or more modest health care plan whatever, and then you monetize that value so that in the early years your teachers instead of making forty two or fifty or fifty four they can start get up to sixty five or seventy and then put another ten in there for let’s say performance pay and maybe another 10 for hardship pay. So that in your forth – fifty - You got a $75,000? 75- $80,000 teacher in New York City and let people take their choice if they want to be on – Alright let's say you want to do that? Cause I - and I want to move on to the school day and the school year in a moment but before we do, so there - you have great really interesting innovative ideas here. You want to do something like that. What’s the union going to say? Well so far it’s obvious right? But no but I mean but this is what worries- But stay on the union here for a minute. The union right now would resist that and the reason they would resist that is they think the sine qua non of what it means to compensate teachers is this to find now – In your – in your experience what are most effective ways to address the union as an entity and its concerns? I think it takes leadership, I think we have had some incredible changes. We went from an involuntary system where 3000 teachers transferred every year in our system and went to a school where nobody wanted them and they – they just showed up and had a right to be there to a system where we have an open market, that happened because the mayor was willing to hold tough and negotiate tough and go to the public and push the issues. I think – So it’s going to the public? And there are issues of leadership you've got to have people out there who are willing to say now if you were to say to all the teachers you can have a choice. If you want a defined benefit plan sure just that cost different differential – You have to offer that plan through the union, you have to talk to the union. Sure, but you've got to build consensus forward and you have to get you know, editorial page writers, other people talking about it you got to have a national dialogue. But it’s impossible to see how it wouldn’t benefit teachers because they would have a choice. So what you are saying is the union has to be engaged in this conversation in a public way engaging the public in a sense on the other as one of the parties. If you can get it done privately that's all to the good. Your perception on this? My experiences have been very, very positive with unions and I – I acknowledge that – that is not always the case for my fellow superintendents but I – I think that building an opportunity that this is going to be – not about adults this is going to be about youth, being very clear about what we desire and finding ways to try to mutually serve the membership and the youth in the system at the same time giving people I mean the whole notion that you say is giving opportunity of choice inside the system for adults just like we advocate for youth is very, very important on this piece. No blame I mean we – we - this is about results this is really not about shame or about blame, it's really just about results around that piece. Let’s turn to time and support, let's turn to time spent in school year and day. So most schools are about a third of the way done for the day so this is – we have the shortest school day and shortest school year, it is stunningly remarkable how little actual time we spend in the act of instruction in this country. This is interesting. Most countries ahead of us on international assessments keep their students in school longer each day in school and is session for more weeks during the year in fact by one measure these competitive schools are keeping their kids cumulatively in school a full extra year over the course of their 12 years in school as we know. Now, you have longer days and longer school years. 7:30 to 5 o'clock during the week, four hours on Saturdays, half the summer, and a couple hours of homework a night– I was in China about an year and a half ago. I went to a very remote rural town where a school had just been built for kids with a big wealthy corporate sponsor, in this town there was – there were barely any computers, anything. These kids were coming in 7:30 going home for lunch and coming back til 5:30. How do you incent your teachers to do – be teaching this longer day. Well, we are finding the – the teachers are already doing this, as we have heard, as Chancellor Klein talked about, there are great teachers out there that already have their car in the parking lot at 7:00 in the morning and their car in the parking lot 5 o' clock in the afternoon. They are just doing it in isolation we – we motivate them to come to KIPP where all the cars are there at 7:00, all the cars are there at 5:00. We also do pay our teachers more, our teachers get paid about 15 to 20 percent more than what – the what they would be making in the traditional school system. And you connect that to the time spent in classroom? Yes. So they know it? Right. Can we do these things without enlarging the – can we do what you want to do without enlarging the school day? No, I mean we should extend the school day, we should extend the school year and – we have done that I mean it cost, we – we negotiated an additional 150 minutes a week for our kids who were struggling the most. So now there are about 300,000 students in New York City who get an additional 37 and a half minutes four days a week and in classes of ten or smaller. Think politically for a moment. Can a governor, can a superintendent, can a mayor go to a community and say we want to your kids in longer, we are going to maybe bust your summer vacation or bust your the day as you've gotten to know it? Yeah, you can do it, but there is resistance you know there is an industry out there called the tourist industry that will have different ideas but you can get it done. The -- I think the leadership is one of the key issues here. I – I just think there is a whole lot of in my experience in LA is many, many youngsters have got to have more time. There's pressures out there for kids to be doing more extra curriculars you know burnishing their college resume for parents to have them at home or what have you? But there is also incredible pressure for after school care for families that need it for their kids and there is incredible pressure to find something for the kid to do in the summer, because there are no parents in the house. And I don’t think this necessarily has to be compulsory. I think that – that a school it may be that school A has KIPP like hours and school B has traditional type hours and you explain to the parents the relative sort of cost and benefits of each approach and then they pick which one do they want. Has KIPP actually demonstrated that the longer school day, school year leads to better achievement? Well, 90 percent of our kids in Houston are going to and through in college and I think – Do you – do you make that actual connection for the parents and your kids? Oh, absolutely. And that’s you know we have a 3,500 kid wait list of to Checker's point for kids who want to come to our schools in Houston without marketing. That's just you know, first of – they realize the end goal success, they realize that there is a need for them to figure out what they're going to do with their kids on the weekends, in the late afternoons in the summer and I think a lot of the parents see this as a win win. How are you approaching this – I just want to argue that it is not just going to school longer it’s also what’s happening during that period of time. Sure – sure. So I mean I think that’s a given so the – the notion is extending opportunity for both before and after for youth. First of all I'm in greatest need and so that this is not a one size fits all a conversation where it is -- is of course in – in our schools with that greater percentage of youth in poverty Title One schools we're able to provide those additional services. It's however - I do want to drive back to your first point, it is the quality of teaching that occurs during that period of time that's gonna make all the difference in the world. And so I think that if I had, which we all do, finite resources and infinite needs it’s going to be in the basket for improving the quality of teaching and learning first then lengthening the day second for me. I agree with that but the other thing, what Checker said, we've gotta think in a differentiated manner, so it’s not just you know, some of my kids are in a 5th and 6th grade and they are reading at a second grade level. I have got to get them to a fifth grade level where this is not going work you know you can’t catch up in the kid's senior in high school because he is gone by then. So that’s one, I have some kids who are performing at the top of their game and I can offer them very different academic experiences, I was with a group of kids recently who were down at an architecture firm who were actually in an enrichment program and so you know, and then Chester brought up this thing which we haven’t touched on but the way we use technology in education is extraordinary. John Chambers the head of the Cisco came to me recently, they were working on a report he said, just think about the following, if a doctor went to sleep 50 years ago, surgeon, and woke up today we'd never allow that person in a hospital, right. On the other hand if a teacher went to sleep 50 years ago and woke up today we'd welcome him back into the classroom. We'd make him grade level chair– And – and but, I say that because we Chester’s point at the outset was an important point you know, as we try to solve the quality of teaching challenge which John and I worry about much more so than – than you do Mike because you are able to basically say to people you can get great results and that value attracts a certain kind of people but when you have a large system it's you've gotta think at a different level. But if we started to use technology in a very different way, did more distance learning, did many, many more kind of inquiry based educational experiences for our kids, then I think we could start to differentiate in a way and use our resources more effective. Checker quickly on this one. What is the way in your view to drive the not just the discussion but the decision making on the length of time of the school day, school year, it’s not just as we said the – the quantity of time it’s the quality of time. And meeting the needs of families, parents and kids and explaining how this will both bring your kid up to a great level and deal with your daycare need, and I give you an opportunity to give your kid whether it’s a music lesson or an extra literature course or – or a athletic activity. You can build the extracurricular into the longer day but I do think this needs to be a menu for kids and parents and a bunch of different approaches not just a one size fits all rule– I want to take one more pass around here with a little focus on the statement federal leadership component here and then open it up to those of you in the audience for some – for some questions. I'm looking back at the – at the communicae that was produced by the 1989 education summit and I am thinking as the – as not just the person who has watched this over the years but as the parent who has experienced it. And I want to know where is the outrage, why – why are we still having this same conversation in these same ways. Here are the goals that were laid out in the – the communicae lo those many years ago by performance we mean goals that will have achieved guarantee that we're internationally competitive, it says you are including performance of students on international achievement tests especially math and science, reduction of the drop out rate and the improvement of academic performance, the supply of qualified teachers, all the same things we're sitting here discussing now. Now what – what has to come from that bully pulpit in terms of the partnership between federal, state and localities to move this ball forward in a meaningful and urgent way. Well, I think that we – where is the outrage, we have just gone to sleep in America where the life has been good and easy and we have not been working hard enough. Effort counts, I just believe it starts to the reconsciousness of this nation with making a connection with what the lack of achievement here is going to do to the lives they are about to live. I just think that we have got to connect that economically and socially and – and in the international comparisons are one of the places to – So how does the federal government and what role does it play in a state, this is traditionally a local issue as we know and as we have discussed, how do we proceed? I don’t think you can say this is a local issue. I think this is a national issue, everything people are talking about here is this is a future of our nation, it's not like Binghamton New York. It's an economy unto itself, and nations solve their employment challenges, and our educational challenge, if we don’t define this as a national issue. And I take the point that how we get at it whether it's to achieve or other thing we've gotta define it in those terms and then the second thing we need to do is we need leadership, I'll give you an example outside of the field which has always had a big impact on me. When the mayor in New York had a tough economic time put in place a smoking ban in all our restaurants and bars all hell broke loose. Right, everybody said you know, his poles fell, everything was wrong, you can't do this. It will hurt the restaurants people want to smoke and everything like that. And you know what’s happened now in Paris, unimaginable in Paris they have a smoking ban and what – I thought you were going to say they were recruiting Michael Bloomberg. They are doing that in London I think actually if you if – no, no it's not you, you need people who are willing to speak the truth and are willing to make the bold proposals and then do the hard work of building the support. But it’s your – that but -- what you just laid out is precisely the issue - it is local, it was your mayor who did this. No, no. It wasn’t your Senator, it wasn’t your President, it was the mayor. But what the mayor always says which is right. He says that's because we have a default and that’s what’s going on, we need national leadership on this issue. Forgive me, I don’t think this is going to work by an end run. I think Roy, God bless him, is killing himself, he is trying and he's going he's going to Iowa, he's going to Nebraska, he is trying to force the issue. This is too big, nobody would say we are going to leave global warning to the localities to resolve and as we need national leadership. You started with those four issues, right health care etcetera, etcetera. And the reason I think people think you want to see local solutions is because they perceive default and what we need in national government is a government that’s willing to step-up and address not just the education issue but the other issues – Quickly on the federal state local and then we'll - As for the outrage in this country when we have a hurricane approaching the coast or God forbid a blizzard approaching Washington DC in the winter time, there is just this huge preparation. A massive amounts of energy went to that because we know that lives could be lost and lives could be ruined around this piece, where is the same energy around youth who do not read at the end of third grade. Lives can be lost and lives will be ruined, there is no difference. How do you get - Incarceration rate in some cases beats graduation rate. And we know that as early as third grade the energy of trying to understand the consequence around this, I think has to be at the bully pulpit of the Presidency and then I think there is tremendous opportunity at the local level to act on it, absent that I think it becomes fifty at best, different conversations, we kind of been there. Address the school, address this question from your place inside the school? Right it's got – it's gotta be straight from the bully pulpit from the top down at the school level I don’t think the outrage is there for the same reason that we don’t get outraged when we see some guy just won the $200 million lotto. We are not thinking, we're not mad how come I didn't win it we are thinking that’s – that’s one lucky SOB over there, right. We have to and the same thing with school when the thirty five hundred kids with this lottery to get into KIPP, people are not mad that their kid didn't get into KIPP, they're thinking those other kids are lucky, but if it comes to a point where suddenly- my neighborhood kid get a great education. The family in the church pew right over here their kids get a great education, my coworker's kids get a great education. At some point we start thinking hey wait a minute what about me? Are the governors key to this? Yes the – there is two keys, one I want the next President to use that bully pulpit, I'd like to have them return to the FDR fireside chat, every Friday evening the President has a conversation with the families in America on a different topic, math is on this Friday and you do it realistically where they can begin to understand the consequence for their family life and their children’s lives if they don’t do better, that’s one thing. But governors are key because the President has got to be President not just to Congress but of fifty governors and he has got to have a personal leadership there. This is just too great a crisis? I mean look how excited we get on – on homeland security you know, my goodness the greatest problem of security of this nation is the lack of education progress not all that other thing. Now that’s a controversial topic.