 Morning, everyone. My late mother would love the noun icon. My goodness gracious, that's overflattery. Dennis, I hope I can generate the kind of passion you just did. You kind of, as a matter of fact, I love your metaphor, campfire to brush fire. Of course, it basically is something I'm going to steal and I'll attribute it to you. I'm really thrilled to be here for a whole number of reasons. And Larry Cuban and I, when we did our book, Powerful Reforms with Shallow Roots, back in 2002. Essentially, many of you have read Larry's stuff through the years and he's a much better wordsmith than I am. And the metaphor, Powerful Reforms with Shallow Roots, I think defines the Achilles heel essentially of the various waves of educational reform that have drowned us over the last three or four decades. And one of the reasons I certainly would corroborate what Dennis had to say is that the kind of work that you folks are doing in your 20 cities are terribly, terribly important and as far as I'm concerned, has to be the wave of the future. Reform of this system or non-system, fragmented, decentralized American school system with the federal government in 50 states and 14,000 some odd school districts and 90,000 foxholes called individual school buildings is so fragmented. Everybody's responsible and nobody's responsible, which is one of the problems. But what you're about is reform that is bottom up as well as top down. There's basically been, I think, a very false essentially polarity between whether reform is top down and bottom up. The reality is in this system, reform has to be top down, bottom up, diagonally, it has to go in a hundred different directions. And I think the role of the NEA Foundation is a catalyst to kind of generate the grassroots reform that this initiative essentially reflects. Collaboration is very difficult. As a matter of fact, in most places around the country we're at the cutting edge of rhetoric on foundation, on collaboration. It's an extraordinarily difficult process, particularly at a time when economic resources are constrained, people are afraid to put their head up over the trenches when they're worried about jobs, they're worried about their own budgets and schools basically are competing with social service agencies, with health agencies, pension funds, et cetera. And you seem to be doing it in these communities and it's only gonna happen at the local level. Personalities vary, leadership varies in many places, you'll have teacher unions providing the leadership in other places, you may have mayors, you may have city councils, you may have business leaders and so forth. So I think if one thing this administration hopefully has learned is that top down exclusively does not work. And my thesis is, and some of this you'll agree with that we have to rethink the basic governance structure, systems change, not only in terms of schools, school boards, school administrators, teacher unions and so forth, reassessing what they do, but even more fundamental is the need to reassess the chasm and the separation of schools from general purpose government. And this is quite controversial, particularly in light of the pleasant developments in Chicago recently. And one of the incredible unfortunate developments is that when people talk about greater involvement of general purpose government, city council, mayors and so forth, when it's couched in terms of control, essentially it generates all kinds of opposition almost immediately. But what we're seeing and I think is embodied in the work you're doing in your 20 cities is greater influence of general purpose government, which I think is absolutely inevitable. And what I'd like to do is quote from an article by Alex Kotlowitz in September 16th, New York Times. Talking about the Chicago situation, and I think most of you will agree with this. After speaking with teachers on the picket lines, it became clear and I'm quoting, that it was about something more fundamental and something worth our attention. Top notch teaching can't by itself become our nation's answer to a poverty rate that as we learned the other day remains stubbornly high. One out of every five children in America live below the poverty line. In Chicago, 87% of public school students come from low income families. And as if to underscore the precarious nature of their lives on the first day of the strike, the city announced locations where students could continue to receive breakfast and lunch. We need to demand the highest performances from our teachers while we also grapple with the forces that bear down on the lives of the students from families that have collapsed under the stress of unemployment to neighborhoods that have deteriorated because of violence and disinvestment. And we can do that both inside and outside the schools but teachers can't do it alone. Now some years ago, some brilliant educational researchers figured out that by the time a kid turns 18, that youngster will spend only 9% of his or her time in the formal school setting. Which means obviously, without being a mathematician, that 90% of a kid's time is spent in front of the tube on the computer, mauling, M-A-L-L-I-N-G, whatever they do these days. And it's apparent that schools in light, and there are some super schools that are overcoming in teachers and teacher organizations. One of the first things I've learned, lesson in terms of American education policy, whatever you say is true, whatever you say is false, depends where you look. There are many, many schools in which kids are overcoming these kinds of handicaps. And I'm not an apologist for schools that aren't doing their job, but the reality is that with the changes in the economy, with the need for two incomes, we still predicate our school day on the notion that it's nine to three and mommy is there when Johnny and Jane come home from school and she'll give them cookies, she'll supervise, play, et cetera. That world is over, it's gone. And somehow or other, if we're gonna build the kind of after school programs and so forth that we have to, essentially we're gonna have to reassess this relationship between schools and other agencies of government. And my viewpoint is that some of the most prestigious mayors in the United States or most visible mayors is probably a more apt way of saying it. Whether it's New York or Chicago or Washington, DC or elsewhere have kind of blown the mayoral control issue because it's become so politicized and volatile that we've lost sight of the most valuable contribution mayors or general purpose government can do, which is essentially to push community school concepts with the social and health agencies and the other agencies that the mayors do control that we can create new sets of relationships, better payoff on our investments by basically having greater mayoral influence or city council influence and synergy with the schools. Otherwise, I think the schools are being set up as scapegoats if you will. John Gardner, one of my heroes, some of the AARP crowd in the audience may remember John Gardner. There was a wonderful secretary of health education and welfare in the Johnson administration. I talked about the anti-leadership vaccine. Dennis was talking about leadership. And we face in this country kind of an unprecedented challenge because there's no confidence in leadership at any level, at any level, maybe at the local level, on the ground, where people are interacting with each other. And there's this mindless anti-government syndrome that's so pervasive. And schools really catch hell here because people are frustrated and where can they vent most immediately and most directly? And it's at the school level. And it's at the school board level. It's at the local level. Now I would contend, as you all know, that all our institutions are changing. Globalization, technology, economic competition, demographic change, and I'll get back to that in a minute because I think this is very, very, very central in terms of Dennis's point early in light of what's happening to the student body. And most of you folks are from communities where you live with the profound demographic changes every day of your lives, of your working lives, in classrooms. Massive changes outside of schooling have radically changed the context of school governance and demography. I have a grandson who goes, who attends the D.C. public schools. We still define a school system in which over 90% of the kids are of color, these kids are minority. Now I'm not much of a mathematician, but our definitions of what a majority is and what a minority is has to change. My grandson is very much a minority at Wilson High School. And until we begin the majority, the existing majority, increasingly, as you all know, better than anybody because you're on the front lines of the demographic changes with the young kids coming up, a majority minority. Our major megastates, essentially, California, New York, Illinois, Florida, Texas, our either majority minority, our language has to change. Our semantics have to change. The Latinization of the population, the incredible growth of the very diverse Latino population all over the United States, not just in Texas and California and Illinois and New Jersey and Florida, everywhere. South Carolina, Iowa, Idaho. I mean, I don't think anyone's here from Idaho. I didn't mean to stress that particularly. But we have to be more cognizant of the special immediate and direct needs of kids coming from very different populations. It isn't 17 and 18-year-old white upper middle, the class kids going on to college. Some, I won't get into the higher ed issue. Maybe Tony Carnivali will address that. But it seems to me that colleges have to be a lot more aware in terms of K-16 of a very diverse population which offers all kinds of tremendous opportunities. But the schools are the front line of this issue and the future of the country. So we need new approaches. We need new collaborative approaches. H. L. Menken, that very sweet guy who spent most of his career up the road on Route 95 here, the columnist, said that for every complex question, there's a simple answer and it's invariably wrong. The mayoral control issue is a beautiful textbook example of this. I'm agnostic about structural panaceas. They come, they go, I've been around long enough. I got gray hair. I really don't pay much attention to them. But in many ways, we have to basically build from the inside out. Urban school governance has been called the Vietnam of urban politics. The governance system is in many ways broken. Jerry Weas, preeminent now retired superintendent, and he looks wonderful since he's retired from the superintendency. And I think is really enjoying life. The urban superintendency is called the Mount Everest of Public Service. And in many ways, it's a very, very, very difficult job. So what about leadership? Dennis mentioned leadership. I think we need a new definition of leadership and you people are the first wave coming in on D-Day in terms of what you're trying to do in your community, because you're living it every day and you understand the complexity infinitely more than people like myself will fly at 30,000 feet in Washington DC. Leadership is making connections, crossing boundaries between fragmented sectors and groups, and breaking down the institutional isolation and insulation of schools, the fortress school mentality. It's not the fault of educators. A hundred years ago, we basically separated school governance from general purpose governance as part of the municipal reform movement in the United States and it made a hell of a lot of sense at that time. And again, I'm not an advocate of mayoral control I'm not an advocate of, again, I'm agnostic on it. What I'm saying essentially is that in community by community and by community, we have to reassess the sets of relationships that exist or in most school systems, unlike yours, do not exist between schools and these other agencies. And it requires school people, educators, someone to kind of break out of our shell and recognize that indeed in light of the demographic changes, technological changes and so forth, we have to view our systems much more broadly and inclusively. So that's the definition of leadership. The Committee for Economic Development, a very prestigious group that has business leaders that has been involved in generating some very significant education reports through the years, particularly in the realm of early childhood education, did a report some years ago, putting learning first. And there's a lot of criticism of my kind of rhetoric. You know that the schools have to be educational institutions and not social service institutions. And yes, the schools primarily should be educational institutions, but there are no other institutions that have the social penetration of schools that are in every community that are pervasive. And indeed in too many communities, it's the only institutional base on which to provide services and so forth. And the community school movement is part of this. None of this stuff is ever new. The community school movement started in Michigan through the Mott Foundation way, way back in the 1970s. But there's an urgency now in light of the demographic, technological changes to kind of begin to adopt this philosophy. And again, it will play out very, very, very differently. But what CED said, this wasn't a bunch of area educators that made this statement. These are hard-nosed business people. Social services may be placed in schools, delivered in schools, but they not be the responsibility of schools. And what this says, I think is terribly important. Again, it reaffirms from a group of business leaders, Committee for Economic Development, that indeed we have to rethink the structure and so forth. The Club of Rome, that's Rome, Italy, not Rome, New York, is a futurist group. And they identified three categories of people in terms of the future. One category was people that make it happen. A second category were people who let it happen. And a third category were people who wonder what happened. And in many ways, you guys are at the kind of the embryonic stage of making it happen. And again, in closing, returning to Dennis' metaphor of campfires to brush fires, what you're doing, it's 20 communities out of 14,000. And with the power and perversive impact of the NEA, I hope that your efforts will lead to a national brush fire so that we in education 10, 15, 20 years downstream won't be wondering what happened to probably the most important American institution historically, which are the public schools. So I thank you for your attention. And I think we have a panel coming up that can disagree with everything I've said. Thank you very much.