Thank you so much, for that kind introduction. I don't know if you wrote that or my mother so I appreciate it, I apologize if my mother sent those notes, it's a real honor to be here and to be in the newspaper today the remarkable progress that California is making as a state so please give yourselves a round of applause. It's a good way to wake up in the morning and see those kinds of results statewide, I want to begin by thanking the alliance alliance in these kinds of partnerships are absolutely critical and what I have been arguing from day one is the school systems alone to get where we need to go, we can't do it by ourselves, we need leadership from the top, from the Mayor, we need the business community, we need the philanthropic community we need a non profit to social service agencies, the religious community everyone rallying behind our children, I mean that video did a wonderful job of capturing how critically important is that every sector of the society making sure that our children have a chance and that San Francisco is getting so much of it right, I want to thank that Mayor Gavin Newsom for his leadership and I'd like to ask that Superintendent Carlos Garcia to please stand and please give him a round of applause for all of his hard work. It is really fun to see the sense of energy and the alignment to have all of you here today that makes me very, very hopeful about what's happen here going forward. Secondly we are trying to build a really, really strong team and I hope I don't get shoes thrown at me here but we've recruited a lot of Californians to be a part of our team in Washington and I just want to mention them Tony Miller, Martha Kanter, Thelma Melendez, Russlynn Ali, Joann Wise, Bob Schime and Mike Smith California is more than well represented I would probably get in trouble. But this is a state of many, many assets and one of those biggest assets is these people and these are people of extraordinary talents if you guys have lived and worked with them and I couldn't be more proud of a team we are building people who are passionate, who are committed, who are without ego, they see the magnitude of the opportunity, they understand the challenges ahead of us but they thrive in those challenges and working together we have a chance to do something very, very special. I wanted to keep my remarks fairly brief and then open up for questions afterwards, I know you have lots of questions but I wanted to start by letting the folks understand the magnitude of the opportunity we have before us. We have never had a President like this President, we have never had a congress this supportive, we have never had resources a hundred billion dollars to work with and we may not see these kinds of opportunities again in our lifetime and so it's a huge, huge chance to push what I think has to be a dramatic reformed agenda. These resources alone are not going to get us to where we need to go, we are not going to spend our way to better school system, yes money is important, yes money is in very short supply here in California and around the country. But investment in the status quo is not going to move the ball down the field for all the progress here in California four in ten children in the color still don't graduate, there was a lot of work to do here, there was a lot of work to do around the country and so investing in the status quo is not going to be enough and so we want to couple unprecedented resources with unprecedented reform and Rahm Emmanuel has a great, great line he says never waste a good crisis and we're in a real time of the crisis of our country you know economic meltdown, the toughest times since our depression, California is you know the difficulty of issues you are dealing with now is staggering but its times of crisis where you can break through and get that kind of fundamental dramatic change that is desperately needed, as I go through my remarks and I will close with that and I want you to think about how you use these times of crisis to get where we need to go, so where are we pushing, how do we get better, we are trying to invest at every level of the education world five billion dollars in early childhood education and it's a pretty compelling argument that can be made. It's a pretty compelling argument that can be made and that's the best investment we can make and we are trying to do two things there, we want to dramatically increase access, we have far too many children and particular children who don't come from wealthy families, who enter kindergarten and haven't been read through they don't know the front of the book from the back of the book, I wonder how our best prepared kindergarten teachers in the world can teach that wide disparity and ability levels when some children are reading fluently and some children barely know their colors so we have to make sure we dramatically increase access, secondly we have to drive up quality and too much of early childhood has been sort of glorified baby sitting and we can't be ashamed to say we want our children with our literacy skills intact and socialization skills intact, ready to hit kindergarten learning and ready to read so I am going to push very, very hard on those. I am going to come back and talk about K-12 more extensively with seventy billion dollars K-12 and then on the higher education side over thirty one billion dollars to increase access and opportunity and this has been so important to me at a time when going to college has never been more important, its never been more expensive as you know our families have never been under more financial duress so just a huge influx of resources thanks to the Presidents leadership and congresses support the most money going to higher education since the GI bill and we are trying to make sure that we perpetuate this for the next ten, fifteen years and every year putting billions of dollars and additional resources into children, stop investing in banks, stop subsidizing banks, continue to drive up Pell Grants and Perkins Loans and tuition tax credits. I worry so much about not just our juniors and seniors but our fourth and fifth and sixth graders who are smart and capable and committed because mom might lose a job or dad might take a fifty percent pay cut, they start to think the college just isn't for me and those dreams start to die very, very early, we want every child in this country to know that if they work hard if they want to go to college, four year universities, two year community colleges, trade vocational training whatever it might be that opportunity is going to be there for them. We have been critiqued for having too broad an agenda, early childhood, K-12, higher ed and I wish we could just focus on one of them it would be much easier but I think everyone in this room knows that you have to look along that education continuum and we have to push a very, very strong reform agenda in every single one of those areas and so as we put out money particularly in the K-12 side you know billions of dollars for California in stimulus package we want in return for that massive of investment a real thoughtfulness around reform and everyone here knows that for the progress you read about today in the paper for the progress seen around the state, this state has a long way to go in fact that I am worried about some of the places, some of the places I think the state is going directionally and I want to talk that through. So how do we get better, what are the set of reforms that we think are critically important. First we want to make sure we have comprehensive data systems, we want to be able to check student progress throughout their academic career from the early ages all the way through high school then hopefully college graduation, we want to be able to not to lose children and we want to be able to track students to their teachers to understand how effective teachers are in helping students learn. We know that there are tremendous variations in the ability of teachers to move students. Some teachers do an extraordinary job are absolute heroes, some teachers are actually part of the problem, we as a society and we as a state don't know what that correlation is. It was very interesting with the conversations today folks talked about in the state the word that was used with the firewall, a firewall between student data and who the teachers are. Firewalls are supposed to protect children from fire, this firewall is part of the problem and I want to challenge the state to think about this in very, very different ways. You have three hundred thousand teachers in this state, thirty thousand of them take the top ten percent, thirty thousand of them amongst the best teachers in the world, they are doing absolutely Herculean work often under resourced, often in very tough communities but sadly no one in this room and no one in this state knows who those thirty thousand teachers are and you can't identify that. You have another thirty thousand at the bottom they probably need to find another profession where its just simply not working, you don't know who those thirty thousand are, the only way we start to get there is being transparent with data and this state has to find the political will and the courage to understand that, all teachers, all principles are not created equally. Secondly we want to think about common college ready, career ready, international benchmark standards and this year I think California can be very, very proud, lots of progress, very high standards, always room for improvement but I think California is really part of the answer here and we are really trying to build coalitions of states to work together so that we as a country come up with standards that make sense and I would love to see California as part of that conversation and part of that coalition because then I can rest easy at night knowing that if California is happy and satisfied, and now the folks are rising to meet California's bar and not being dummied down then as a country we are going to get to the right place. One of the problems I have with No Child Left Behind is we have had fifty different sets of standards, fifty different goal posts all over the map and where that has lead is to a dumbing down of standards and dumbing down of expectations and in far too many states we were actually lying to children, let me explain what I mean but luckily this isn't happening that much here in California but because of political pressure those standards have been dummied down, students who are told they are "meeting their standards" they think rightly so logically that they are on track to be successful and far too many places those standards are so low that children who are "meeting their standards" are barely able to graduate from high school and are absolutely inadequately prepared to go to competitive university let alone graduate and so California can really play a leading role and drive in the college towards common college ready, career ready international benchmark standards and you are voice at that table would be very, very important to me, that's also important to think that higher standards don't necessarily mean more standards and I think sometimes it's a temptations among academics is thicker the book that the tougher it must be and so I want the state to think about do we need more standards or do we need to go deeper, it's the idea of fewer and higher and clear I think it makes a lot of sense and its something for California to think about as it takes the next step in that journey what that might be. Third and this is just a constant thing I want to come back to talent matters tremendously Third and this is just a constant thing I want to come back to talent matters tremendously extraordinary difference in students lives, we have seen around the country in the poorest of communities inner-city urban, rural, where we have great teachers, where we have great principals and you see students beating the odds consistently in going on to do extraordinary things. As Hydra referenced in my biography I was lucky enough to grow up an environment, where children from very tough backgrounds grew up with the highest expectations and there are set of children I grew up from absolutely you know devastated neighborhood, very, very tough families, no money, one is a Hollywood movies star, one is a brain surgeon, one was one of my senior managers in Chicago, one is one of IBM's leaders nationally, why, because they had my mother and others in their lives who really believed that they can be successful regardless of where they are coming from. We have to start to take those models to scale, we have to start to look at those great schools, those great districts that are making a difference, invest in them heavily and move those islands of excellence, those pockets of excellence, to systems of excellence. Education is one of the only professions where we are scared to reward excellence that is mind boggling to me, in every other profession excellence gets rewarded and let me be clear, no teacher, no principal goes into education to make a million dollars, they go in because they have the best of motives, they are altruistic, they want to make a difference but if we can start to identify talent and reward that talent its going to keep that great talent in our profession for years to come. Secondly we have to think about how we get our best teachers, our best principals to take on the toughest of assignments to go to those communities that have been underserved again inner-city urban, rural, historically there have been very few incentives and lots of disincentives for folks to do that and want to get people thinking very, very differently about how we get the best talent to the children of communities that I would argue have a historically underserved often not for a year or two years or five years but for ten, twenty, thirty years for decades, we have to think fundamentally differently about that. Third we have areas of critical need, math and science foreign language, I think we should pay math and science teachers more, I think we should pay foreign language teachers more, I want to stop talking about these shortages and try to solve them so I was thinking differently about how we reward excellence, how we get the best and brightest to go where we need them and how where we have areas of shortage, we start to build a talent pool so that children have teachers who know the content, they can instill in them the love of math and love of science and open up those opportunities for them longer term. And then finally for schools that are really struggling I think we need think differently. One of the things No Child Left Behind did wrong, did some things right, some thing wrong, one of the things I don't like is I thought the instrument was too blunt and that there are many, many schools who are labeled as failures and the story is very, very different amongst those schools, some of those schools are actually improving every year some of those schools are making real progress and very, very tough environments and we label that school as a failure it was actually getting better, it is demoralizing, it is wrong against the tremendous disincentive for folks to go into those communities and so we did think differently about that, you have other schools that are struggling by getting better and we need to get teams to support them, but I want to stop for a minute and think about what I have been talking about is the bottom one percent of schools, lets say we have about hundred thousand schools in this country, ninety five thousand rounded up to a hundred thousand, think about the bottom thousand schools. California I think it is about ten thousand schools think about the bottom hundred, those schools where sixty, seventy, eighty percent of students dropout, their dropout factories, those schools that year after year don't just have absolute test scores or much bigger believe in gain but their gain scores are very, very low, students are falling further and further behind every year with that small sub set of schools not the ninety nine percent, the one percent of the bottom I think we have to think very differently and we have to think about bringing a new team for teachers, new principals who have the highest expectations who can really challenge the status quo there. We have done lots of tinkering around the edges, lots of things around the margins and unfortunately year after year after year we as educators become part of the problem, we perpetuate poverty and we perpetuate social failure and we don't give students a chance to take that next step and so I want us collectively to think about – think about that strategy and get California to think about leading that. Where we are at as a country but where the state is that is absolutely fascinating to me, its an absolute fork in the road, there is never an opportunity that's going to come our way in our lifetime again like this, we will never again and I am little biased we will never again have a President and a first lady and a Vice President and his wife who is passionate about education. The President and the first lady were not born with silver spoons in their mouths, they came from very humble beginnings but they are leading our country and are the leaders of the free world today because they worked so hard and got a greater education. We will never again have a hundred billion dollars of new money coming into education. Their leadership, the support of congress, what we have lacked is not just resources though, we have lacked the political courage and we have lacked the will to do the right thing by children, our dysfunctional adult relationships have hurt children far too many places. On top of the hundred billion dollars in stimulus we have unprecedented discretionary resources. Five billion dollars in a raise to the top fund, five billion dollars in school improvement money, five hundred million dollars in teacher incentive fund going forward up to five hundred million dollars to replicate the Harlem Children's Zone what we call in promise neighborhoods and communities around the country. Well north of ten billion dollars in discretionary money, I heard from Secretary Paige, I think he had seventeen million dollars, we have ten billion, think about the opportunity, well let me be really clear this money will come and this money will go, we want to use this money as leverage to drive reform, that will change public education in this country for decades, this is not a play for the next two, three, four years, eight years, this is the play for the next ten, twenty, thirty years and what I would ask California and all of you collectively to think about is do you want to lead that change, or are you going to retreat, we are going to work with a set of states, we are work with the set of districts, we are going to lead the country and what we call the race to the top, I think its far too many places we have been engaged in the race to the bottom and California has been the leader in so many ways whether its Hollywood, whether its high education, whether its Silicon Valley, California used to the lead the country in K-12 education but not unlike the country California lost its way, somewhere along the line, what you have is a moment of opportunity, you have a moment of crisis, use the crisis to drive the kind of change you need, we would love to have California literally shaping the nations agenda in driving this race to the top. I am concerned that this might be too much change for California and that California might retreat and take a step back and watch history passing by so this is a seminal movement in education, I want you to take a minute and think about that, you will not have collectively this kind of opportunity for decades, I promise you that, think about taking this time and think about taking this opportunity to make the kind of changes we do, we need to make and if we can do that we can change our life, that our children's lives for ever, we can make sure that every child has a chance to fulfill their dreams, we can really eliminate the achievement gap, we can dramatically drive up graduation rates, we can try and eliminate job loss, we have to do it now, we have to do it over a real sense of urgency, we want to do whatever we can to partner with you, we want to work with you but I am going to challenge all of you to find the courage, to find the political will to do the right thing, to make the tough calls in going forward lead the country where we need to go, thank you so much for your commitment, thank you so much for your hard work, thanks for having me. On behalf of this great city of our San Francisco we really want to thank the Secretary of Education, Arne Duncan, Nuestra casa is your casa. Our house is your house thank you for bring here. Keeping in the fine tradition of the San Francisco Unified School District of hearing student voice we have this great opportunity so Hydra. Good afternoon Secretary Duncan, we are all honored to have you here today, my name is Dennis Sze and I am a Mason Scholar and a senior at Balboa High School. This fall I will be attending Manhattanville College in New York, at school I have played three sports, basketball, swimming and wrestling. Outside of school I am in this great program called summer search. This program is a leadership development program that offers low income students, year round mentoring two full scholarships to summer programs and college counseling. With summer search I went to Utah for wilderness expedition and lived with a host family in Italy. Through this experience I became a leader, I am more open minded and committed to giving back to my community. My peers who were not involved in these activities were less engaged, they didn't take positive risk instead some of them turned to drugs, dropped out of school and very few actually plan to attend college. I know you were introduced to youth programs at a young age by your mother's after school programs so my question is as a nation how can we incorporate powerful youth development and leadership skills into our public schools, especially for those young people who are in need of the most support. I don't know if that's a question or a call to action. I like it. A couple of thoughts. The more at the earliest ages possible we can engage our students in activities and enable to see themselves as leaders and role models and its been so interesting to me historically, I am a big fan of service learning, I am a big fan of programs that really give our students a chance to be leaders, historically public school students are always the recipients of service and the private school students will be givers of service and so we have to sort of reverse that and get our eight and nine and ten year-olds or eleven year-olds, our high school students understanding what those kinds of opportunities are so we can't do enough of that and there are so many different areas where our students can find their voice, find their passion, find their skills and that motivates them, that keeps them in school, that keeps them thinking about the career in going on to college and so there are many, many ways you can do that one of the things you hit on to me that was so important as you talked about what was going on during the summer and one thing I have been arguing as we have to think very, very differently about time, I think our school day is too short, I think our school week is too short, our school year is too short. And more time doesn't mean more of the same I think our schools have to be open longer hours but I think our schools in the after school hours should have a whole host of activities provided by the community, drama and arts and sports and music and chess and debate I know San Francisco is doing a lot to open their schools GED, ESL family literacy nights in the summer not more the same but getting students from the city into rural areas, students from rural areas into the city, opportunities to engage in the community, opportunity to visit colleges, I think our fifth and sixth graders all need to get on college campus and start to think they can be a part of that and so the more we can think very differently about how we use time and to push on this one again I am just not trying to fill ideas we have over ten billion dollars in title one money that we are putting out states in new districts, ten billion dollars in new money and I would argue title one money historically has been the area where we have not spent as wisely as I think we should have and so I love to see those kinds of opportunities become the norm rather than the exception thinking about time differently in using title one dollars to create those opportunities, I think we will make a huge difference in students lives like your and congratulations to your hard work. Good afternoon Secretary Duncan and I am very honored to be here and have this opportunity, my name is Bella Berry I am graduating from Galileo High School here in San Francisco, I am also a Mason Scholar and a summer search student as well and I am concerned about the high school curriculum about how teachers rush through so many topics within one school year to achieve high test standards but students are left behind and they don't have the time to grasp the material. In addition the material covered is not relevant to tests such as the SAT. When I took the SAT I didn't recognize any of the material from my classes which leaves myself and many students in a state where we feel unprepared for these tests and for college. Not to mention the cost for the SAT preparations are very un-meetable for many families so I wanted to know what is your vision of how high schools can provide preparation and clear pathways from a high school to college. These are all great question or couple of different pieces, one you talked about sort of rushing through the curriculums or time again is part of the theme getting more time during the school day after school to do what's important is I think a huge step in the right direction. Secondly actually we worry about a narrowing of the curriculum, I worry a lot about music and arts and other things being lost as we sort of focus just on testing and so we want to find ways to broaden that out and as we talk about sort of fewer, higher clear standards again the idea of more depth rather than breadth not testing to a hundred different things its really raising the bar and it goes that every child ready to go on to college or ready to go on to a career and continuing to raise the bar which again I think California has done a good job on that, but can continued to improve is very, very important. The final thing I would say is just we have to raise expectations and that I was convinced in Chicago that our expectations for our teens were far too lower over high school students, I was convinced in that because we survey them and that's what they told us, year after year after year they were asking to be challenged more, I will just give you one quick story that I think relates to this, one of the things I was most proud of is that we double over the past five years and a number of students taking and passing AP classes. But the fact of the matter is that if you want to be honest to yourself the students in that fifth year were not twice as smart as the students in that first year then in fact on my watch, on our watch children historically would deny those kinds of opportunities and not surprising the numbers had doubled and tripled where African and Latino young man, those are students who normally don't get to those higher level classes so we talk about not being prepared I think a big answer is adding rigor, challenge the students more and I would love to see every student taking some kind of college level class before they graduate, AP or whatever it might be and the more we provide those opportunities the more students are going to really believe that they can be successful in college so I think we have to ultimately raise their expectations. My name is Alberto Calle first of all I want to thank you Secretary Duncan for this opportunity and I welcome you personally to San Francisco, I will be graduating from Galileo High School and I am also a summer searcher. My dream is to attain Ribbon College in Wisconsin this fall and I am actively seeking for more financial assistance to scholarships to achieve this dream. My backup plan is to attend City College if Ribbon becomes impossible. In school I am passionate about economics, literature and American Government. I have two questions for you but they are quick, first, I hear you are a basketball fan, who wins the pick up games President Obama or you. What's the second question? My second question discipline, responsibility and commitment are the skills I have learned in soccer and these have held me to succeed in school and have given me the confidence for the next steps after I graduate, how has basketball influenced your career in life choices? Couple of questions so when President and I played we had some fin together, I will leave it at that so we have really a good time. Obviously you come from a sports background I think this has been so helpful and just the ideas of teamwork and I have being unselfish and working towards long term results have been hugely important in shaping my life and again for me it was sports but for other kids its going to be art or music or dance or drama, chess and debate and the more we provide that many options for high school students and lets students find their path, I think we can't do enough of that but actually you didn't ask but I want to go back to the first part of your question the scholarship money you got to get a huge, huge deal that I talked about thirty one billion dollars on the table now we are trying to dramatically increase Pell Grants, Perkins Loans, tuition tax credits, I am trying to make two year community colleges I think they have been hugely under valued resource and Martha Kanter is really going to drive that work for us, make that a much, much stronger option now going forward but we want to continue each year to increase those resources, there is actually a fascinating debate going on now, we have talked about stop subsidizing banks, we have been administering loans, take that money and to give it to our students that would save us a minimum of – we thought it was sort of commonsense I'm understanding how controversial it is now so this audience gets it but we are actually going to have a real battle there in congress with it but if we do that, if we make that move in how we change, how we pay and how we take care of our students going to college that will save us a minimum of four billion dollars a year going forward so we continue to keep Pell Grants on par with you know rates of inflation and actually try and stay a percent above that and so the more we think differently about how we use our resources we can do that without charging one more dollar from our tax payers so I get and hit so hard and so we are trying just letting you know we are trying to fundamentally think that what business we are in, we want to be in the business not a subsidizing banks but making sure college is absolutely accessible and affordable for every student who wants to go and if we can get this passed of 2010 budget we will be able to basically mandate that and doing it in perpetuity going forward but there is a lot of balance right now and that's a very, very serious debate going on and I would love you guys to be able to think about and to weigh in on it ultimately. Secretary Duncan, I am the first generation student who has the privilege to graduate high school and go into college with Federal Financial Aid but we both know that sixty five thousand students that are undocumented are graduating from high school each year but are ineligible for Federal Financial Aid. So many of my peers are in this situation, they work hard, they are extremely successful, but they are undocumented. One in particular was accepted to five prestigious college including Santa Clara University, Seattle University and Knox College which is just outside of Chicago. Unfortunately he is dependant on private scholarships but they are not closing the financial gap causing his future to be in limbo. Where do you stand on opening up more opportunities for promising, for these promising young students? This is obviously just another area of a lack of political will and really thinking back was about what's right for children and for children who have worked hard who happen to be undocumented to basically deny them the chance to go on to college is crazy and if we don't allow them to and if they can go on to college and get a good job and support a family that's the American dream and if not basically we are going to end up you know jail cells, what's going to happen is our priorities are fundamentally wrong so two things, first we are trying to push states very, very hard to at a minimum charge in state tuition to those students and in many states that's not going on they are charging them sort of the rate for foreign students which is three and four times and more which makes it absolutely inaccessible and then secondly I am a big proponent of the dream act and worked very closely with Senator Durbin back home in Illinois and I think with this Presidents leadership this is an area where we have to fundamentally change course as a country and give children wherever they might be from, wherever they were born and a chance to fulfill their dreams.
