 I'm just doing that at the reporter's office. Is that what you're here for? Yeah, well, no. Oh, is there anything there? Is there anything? Yeah, so anyway, maybe that's the right thing to do. Yes, sir. I have been here since I was 12. Where are you? I'm just going to get out of here. Yeah, I'm going to get out of here. Yeah, I'm going to get out of here. Okay, I understand. We're going to be getting started in just a moment or two. When we get to the Q&A portion, the question and answer portion of today's presentation is such a beautiful crowd and thank you all, by the way, for that. We need to do it efficiently. So the best way to do that is for us to have you write your questions down. That way we can collate and consolidate the questions and try to get through as many of them as possible. So we have some index cards and we're going to pass these around starting at both sides of the room. So when it gets to you, please take one that's what these are for. Now I'm going to start the round. You're ready now? People have questions already. We have a chance to be done. Okay, you have your cards already. I'll pick them up now, but you don't have to feel like that. You're going to have questions. Amen, really. Thank you. Good afternoon, everybody. I'm Larry Michele. I'm the president of the Economic Policy Institute. Also the director of our education research program. I'm very pleased to have all of you here. We're really honored to have Diane Ravich here to talk about her book. As far as I'm concerned, Diane Ravich is the only good thing happening in the world with education. Wish her well and one life and health. Today we're going to have Diane speak, followed by some comments by Randy Weingarten, president of the American Foundation of Teachers. And that's a comment from Elaine Weiss, who is the director of the Rotor Boulder Post Education. And then we'll have Q&A. Randy is about to arrive, but I figure he's probably heard what Diane has to say, so we might as well get that started and not keep you all waiting anymore. There's bio information that was already provided to you, so I'm not going to get any extensive introductions to everybody. They're well-known people and we should measure people by what they said. So with that, Diane, it's all yours. Thank you so much, Larry, for hosting here today. And thank you all for... I'm happy to be a social worker. I'm not a fellow by any means. I'm happy to be here. I've done some things, but two things that came together. One was that I was being followed by David Dany of New Yorker's writing profile. He said, you're safe, and they're doing their best to ensure you don't have to lose things on their face. And I said, well, you just really get a chance to be there, so it's more fun when you're not lost, so it's really simple to write a book. So someone tells you, you write a book, you write a book. I just spent a lot of time writing a book, and now I learn to think that you're writing a book, and I've shared it with a few young people who asked me how to do it, and I said, look, I've been blogging now for, I don't know, about eight years. And when you look at the book, you don't think the book, you think, I'm writing a blog. This chapter is a blog. That chapter is a blog. It's so easy. You can write 30 blogs if you know what I'm saying. Okay, she mentioned all the funny jokes that began at the bottom of that. I bet there was a second reason that I wrote the book, and that was because at the same time that she's been reading the book she's suggesting, the Council on Foreign Relations brought out a report posted by so far in the time that she's writing, and at least they said that the American publication was quite terrible, that it had become a very brave, long-term threat. And I found that very authentic. I couldn't believe it. So I decided to read the back pages, and I see it behind her back. So those two things together, and you realize that this is a different book. The first part of the book is the back pages, the back pages, the back pages, the back pages. The back pages are not an actual book. Those kinds of things. And then the other part of the book is what I call the solution. So I'd like to begin today with just a kind of complex thought, which is what's the most admired school systems in the world do? First of all, they have public school systems. They do not have stories. They do not have boundaries. They've just been a couple of years ago, and so I'll get their emphasis there. They can have an excellent public school in every conceivable neighborhood in the country. And I think that's probably the software to be an expert on this, a case that's been aimed for escalating and without escalation. And it's just been through years. It's going to be an open-ended solution to a three-year project. You know, the rest of the book is going to slide in. The second thing that these excellent school systems in the world have is an highly effective education assessment. As teachers work hard to develop their tasks, they're well prepared to get things done before they become teachers. Actually, young people in high schools experience a teacher's career, and they apply to eight institutions. They're only eight teachers and eight institutions, and it's hard to say if they're only saying that they're someone, someone's a teacher's name. And so they apply to high school and only one out of ten is accepted, only the best for the best. And that's how they play effort and they're going to be able to do that. They've spent five years studying not just their education, studying types of matters last year and then subject to some of the safety for system ones that they're going to step on, and it's very best to be appropriate to lead their school system. We're moving in the opposite direction. So the first job in my book, and as I mentioned, what I tried to do The facts I didn't just say this is my opinion about facts I persuaded my publisher to allow me to print 40 graphs Which was unusual for come off down generally put Graphs into their books, but they agreed in this case because it was so important to be able to demonstrate We really have made incredible progress over the past 40 years and the test scores that I look at are the test scores of The national assessment of educational progress because there are no stakes test nobody knows who's going to take them No individual student takes the entire test. No student ever gets a score schools don't get scores There are no rewards or punishments attached to them and the name scores show since 1971 or so The scores have gone up and the case of black and Hispanic students dramatically in some cases But the odd thing is I hope I would follow the publication of the book until June of 2013 Because that was when the last Came out with school the long-term trend They're two different names. A lot of people don't realize this There's the one that's given every other year and that's May Nate and the framework changes from time to time And then there's something called long-term trend Nate that's given every four years and the questions never change They're very basic questions about math and reading the only thing that changes is that occasionally Obsolete terms drop out when I was on the NAGV board. We had to remove a question about SNH green stamps But otherwise it's the same test that was given in 1970 and scores went up and up and I waited for the 2012 long-term trend to come out and something's Estonishing happened the scores from 2008 to 2012 for flat So with all the emphasis that we have on testing testing testing testing the one thing that didn't happen was the scores did not go up For most of the groups there were some small gains for a couple of groups, but the kind of dramatic change We had seen over the previous 40 years went flat with the merger of no child up behind and the race at the top But the story that I found looking at Nate Main Nate as well as the long-term trend rate is The test scores have gone up steadily and significantly in reading over the past 40 years for all groups For white kids black kids Hispanic kids and Asian kids The graduation rates test scores they are the highest they've ever been in history on the way on this no-stakes test the graduation rates are the highest they've ever been in history and Again for black students white students Hispanic students Asian students and there are two different ways of calculating the Graduation rate you can take the most conservative way which the US Department of Education does and Look only at the kids who started Ninth grade and ended exactly in May or June of senior year that rate is now 70 point two percent That's the highest it's ever been, but if you look at the US census data amongst the age group from 18 to 24 90% have a high school diploma Why is that because the most conservative way of calculating does that include? Students who graduate in August Students who took five years students who took six years and students who got a GED, but they all count So dropout rates we've often heard about the dropout crisis dropout rates today of the lowest They've ever been in history all of these are data taken from the Website of the US Department of Education the dropout rates are the lowest they've ever been in history for black students Hispanic students Asian students and white students international scores Which have to understand is first international test was given in 1964 We had we took it in two grades eighth grade and 12th grade There were 12 nations that took the test and one grade we came in next the last and the other one We came in dead last In the ensuing 50 years Our nation has outperformed all the other 11 nations for every conceivable measure you can imagine Whether it's economic growth economic productivity technological innovation creativity democratic institutions a number of patents Whatever it is every number you can think of we have outperformed the other 11 over the past 50 years we've typically performed in the middle or even on the bottom quartile on the Because we don't excel at teaching test taking until recently so in the test when you hear people talk about We're number 14 or 16 or 17 or whatever number they're talking about They're always talking about the test called Pisa that came out in 2010 The test they don't talk about is called 10s that came out in December of 2012 on the 10s our kids did Incredibly well, we're getting much better at test taking Ah But so much practice we should be getting better our fourth and eighth graders Tied with the children of Finland in mathematics. That's pretty amazing And the only companies that consistently outscored us on the Thames were the Asian Tigers Singapore Japan Korea Hong Kong But they have testing cultures and it's almost every other week that I read an article in Somewhere or another or it's sent to me saying the Minister of Education in Japan China Korea Singapore Wherever is trying to figure out how they can be more like the American system and be more creative and innovative and have less emphasis on test taking So our greatest strength What has made this country I believe such powerful and successful country is Not test scores, but creativity thinking differently What one Indian commentator in my book refers to is the spirit the spirit that American students have a sense of innovation And it ingenuity we invent things we think of new ways to do things Our current regime of high-stakes testing threatens to kill the very qualities That have made this country great and it made this country the envy of the world and just the other day I was talking with a friend who just returned from five years in China He was running a chemical plant there And the stories he told me curled my hair about the lack of concern for safety and Actors labeling and things like that, but he said he had a number of wonderful young Chinese Engineers working for him. They'll have bachelor's degrees. They were well educated And he said where do you want to take your work and your master's degree and of his 15 engineers 14 of the 15 wanted to come to the US and He said why and they said freedom. It's the freedom. It's the spirit. It's a chance to do new things and be different That's what we have. Let's not kill it But we are on a harmful quest I believe To pursue through high-stakes testing the standardization of the nation and to worship credentialism Instead of nonconformity so many children and so many states will be denied high school diplomas Who might have a very useful life if we could find a route for them to get the diploma? They need even if it's a GED so that they can't participate in American life It's I saw recently estimated that a third of the children in Texas may fail the high-stakes graduation exam Same they be true in Rhode Island because they adopted a standardized test Rhode Island is the high school graduation exam and you're it's For it's actually you can foretell the percentage of kids who will not graduate high school so in the book I Described various hoaxes Sorry to use such a harsh word, but I believe they are hoaxes no child left behind is a hoax was a hoax still is a hoax I mentioned earlier and I found a station with reporters that right after no child left behind was past I was at an event in the Wellard hotel and my former boss Lamar Alexander was on the panel And I stood up and said senator Alexander Do you really believe that a hundred percent of the children in this country will be proficient in math and reading by the year 2014 and he said well no we don't actually believe that I am but we think it's good to have goals Well, it's good to have goals, but in the meanwhile when you have unrealistic goals unattainable goals people are losing their jobs People are being fired people are having their reputation destroyed schools are being closed because of goals the Congress knew We're unattainable when they passed it. That's what I call a hoax I could go on and talk about the Texas miracle that to us a hoax I Believe the race of the top is a hoax race at the top has put almost five billion dollars into the pursuit of higher test scores What if that same five billion dollars? Had been spent with this goal That the money will go to communities that come up with the best plan to promote the segregation and their district Wouldn't we have different countries today? Wouldn't they be a chance that the country would be different if we had pursued desegregation? integration Rather than higher test scores We don't have higher test scores and so many of those higher test scores have been purchased at the price of getting rid of the arts Forgetting about music forgetting about all the things that give children joy and learning and now we have kindergarten children taking bubble in Test this is insane So we have today the test scores are the goal of education and I say they're not the goal of education Private schools don't believe they're the goal of education Venlon doesn't believe the goal of education parents don't believe the goal of education Good citizenship is the goal of education. We created public education in the United States Because we knew that as a democratic society We were in peril of losing what we have which is our basic democracy And the most important thing we could do would be to educate the next generation so that they would be able to vote wisely They're going to choose our leaders They have to be able to be prepared to serve on a jury You might be in the docket and these kids will be choosing your fate They have to be able to weigh effort if they be able to think they have to be able to decide So that you get a fair trial and so that we have Good people chosen for our leaders Good test scores. I'm not against good test first. I had good test scores I'm really great test scores, but I don't think that that makes me a better person than anybody else I'll bet you that the people who are leading Enron and Madoff had great test scores Test scores are not a testament to character And I don't think and we know and one of the good things about this country is there are many different ways to be successful Some of them are a high degree whatever that is that's measured by the test But many of them don't thank goodness standardized test it turns out or a mirror a Family wealth a family education and the kids who will have the highest scores Will most likely be the kids who are children of affluence and the children with the lowest scores Who are in the bottom half of the norm curve are those who have not had the advantages in life standardized tests do not measure Capacity to learn they measure opportunities to learn and we're not providing opportunities to learn on an equal basis So the purpose of tests I'm not against testing per se But I think that we're misusing tests test should be used Ignocicland test should be used to Identify which kids need extra help and make sure that they get it test should be used by the teacher to find out What is it that I didn't teach well because the kids didn't understand it and teachers don't learn this from the standardized test Because the results come back so late that the teacher has no idea what the kids didn't learn And by the time the results come back very often the kids have a different teacher So the we had last spring the first Common Core test in New York the test were given in April The results came back in August the kids didn't even have the same teacher anymore And then when the scores came in the teachers were not allowed to see where the students had done well or poorly So there was no diagnostic purpose whatsoever in the test They were only used for ranking and rating giving labels to the children Getting labels to the teachers and getting labels to the schools so that certain schools would be set up for failure Now it's important to understand that There's no other nation in the world the test every child every year We're the only ones that do it. We are copying the Texas miracle. It wasn't We're still copying Now what I began to see as I was writing the book Was that what the testing had become was a set up for failure and particularly in those states that have Grades for schools an a through F grading system They're setting up the schools of what that will fail and it will be handed over private entrepreneurs or two Other private operators some for profit some not for profit But whichever it is it's a transfer public funds from Public from the public private management the a through F grading systems are notoriously unreliable In my own neighborhood in Brooklyn the neighborhood school was an a one year and everybody came to celebrate and say the school should be made Larger and it was had a wonderful mixture of kids from the projects and kids from the brown stones and it's a wonderful school Six weeks later the grades came out and the same school was an F And I want to see the principal. I said, I don't understand what happened. He said neither do I We have the same principle, you know, I'm the same the teachers are the same the kids are the same Nothing changed and we went from an a to an F That's how crazy this is and it's insane that state after state is doing this And it's demoralizing to schools and does nothing to help them and imagine if your child came home from school With a report card that have a letter on That doesn't make any sense and a whole school is that it's not lots and lots of kids You cannot judge an institution with a letter grade so we have this outrageous misuse Overuse and abuse of standardized testing which is now used to label children fire teachers and principals in closed schools It's what I call a tsunami bad ideas That's being used really to wreck American public education. It's wrecking their profession First of all by Pretending that any experienced college graduates with a few weeks of training are highly qualified That's just what was added to the budget deal this week that five weeks of training And a college diploma is all you need to be considered highly qualified Thanks Congress That's that's the value of having teacher America staff enter woven through the congressional offices to take care of teacher America Which has 300 million dollars in the bank? Part of the this dismantling of the profession is the pursuit of a metric that can evaluate teacher quality This is a pursuit that will fail You can't say who the best teachers are and who the worst teachers are based on test scores You can say who's best at encouraging kids to Who's best at teaching to the test? But if you're teaching kids who are autistic you're not gonna have high test scores if you're teaching kids who are English learners You're not gonna have high test scores if you're teaching gifted kids who are already in the ceiling You're not gonna see big test for gains either So there are all kinds of problems and the kids are not randomly assigned So the research is overwhelmingly opposed to the use of test scores to evaluate teachers The main thing that this method does is to demoralize and discourage teachers Single most obvious cause of low academic performance is not the teacher We are not overrun with bad teachers contrary to the belief of race at the top The single most obvious cause is poverty Our country is number one in child poverty amongst the advanced nations of the world 23% of our kids with them poverty the numbers even higher amongst African American children and Hispanic children When I heard How's he solvered speaking a couple of weeks ago here in DC? He said he wanted to propose a thought experiment He said suppose you switch the teachers of Finland were all highly trained With the teacher of Indiana who are a mixed lot some of them are excellent some are not excellent whatever but switch them He says I predict there would be no difference The reason being that the highly trained teachers in Finland would be simply overwhelmed by the poverty of the children in Indiana They would not know how to handle the social problems the tremendous problems that begins bring with them to school and the less well-trained teachers from Indiana would simply blow When faced with the wonderful teaching and learning conditions in the schools of Finland Where the poverty is very low and that would not be one of their problems so I think we are Trying to we're not trying to solve the real problem. We have which is child poverty family poverty community poverty Returning education or trying to turn education into an exercise of big data Recently been reading books about big data The idea being that you can make decisions about people and institutions by never actually looking at anything just numbers And I recently was sent by a friend in meridian, Mississippi an editorial from The local newspaper they had constantly been complaining about the high school and how it was a terrible school terrible scores terrible kids Violence in the whole ways everything that they could possibly write and my friend was invited to be a member of the editorial board And he invited the whole board to come with him to see meridian high school Which apparently they never been to and he walked them through and they wrote an editorial saying we were astonished to discover dedicated principal well-behaved students Wonderful teachers clean hallways everything that we thought was true was wrong They had only looked at the data. They hadn't used their eyes So I'm a great believer in the combination of data plus eyes data without eyes is blind So the test in my view have become a tool for the privatization movement Setting schools up to fail and to be closed But I personally believe That there are very few if any failing schools in America term failing school didn't even exist until the late 1990s And one of my former graduate students did a Lexus nexus surgery term failing schools and didn't appear until the late 1990s People seem to understand people before the late 1990s had much more sense than we do today They understood that schools with low test scores need help That the students need more support. They need more resources. They need smaller classes. They need more supervision They don't need to be closed closing them does not help children learn to read Closing them does not teach anyone math and closing schools as a cop out when any school district closes The leadership of the district should be held accountable for their failure So on the question of choice I'm very much because of my advanced age the words that George Wallace keep bringing in my ears and Strom Thurman and many of my younger audiences have no idea who George Wallace and But I know who they were I lived through that era I went to segregated schools I remember what choice was choice meant that the black kids went here and the white kids went there If you changed and head for ground decision and still had choice of like kids go here and the white kids go there It's all the same thing only they chose to do this what we're doing now I'm afraid is to recreate a dual school system of publicly funded schools One set of schools getting public funds is free to exclude students with disabilities Free to exclude English language learners and free to kick out kids who are difficult to teach The other set of publicly funded schools will be the dumping grounds Where the kids go it didn't get into the first set or got kicked out of the first set I don't think that's right. I don't think that's a merit. I don't think that's democracy that I don't think that's equality of educational opportunity I would also suggest and I know that it's controversial to say it, but I don't mind being controversial When you reach 75 you can say things you couldn't say when you were 73 Charters are not public schools and the reason I say this is it's true that they get public money But so does Harvard Yale and Princeton. It's so does Boeing. I can think of lots of places to get public money Who that are not public but in the case of charters They have actually gone to court and argued we are not public institutions In the Ninth Circuit Court in California Where an employee had sued the charter school because his rights were violated the charter defense was we are Not a public agency. We are a private institution and the courts agreed your private. You're not public In Chicago where a group of teachers the Charter School voted to organize they wanted to join union The Charter said you can't we're not subject to state labor law. We are a private Institution they went to the National Labor Relations Board which agreed the Charter School was a private not a public agency In New York the charters resisted being audited by the state controller They said you have no right to audit the public funds. You give us because we are private agencies Okay, and then just a few weeks ago There were charter founders in California who were convicted of misappropriating $200,000 from their charter schools and the California Charter Schools Association and an amicus brief and said Charter schools are not public agencies. They cannot be held at the same standard It's as public agencies. These laws do not apply to them They can use this public money. However, they want Okay, you know if the charter schools keep saying they're private. I'll go with that. They're private. It's okay So what we have here, and I think this is the serious issue is the question of consumerism versus civic obligation I think with the charter movement despite the fact that there are some good charter schools It encourages us as Americans to believe That where you send your children is something consumer choice and you have no obligation to support public education because it's where the other kids go I think we all have an obligation to support public education Whether you use it or not whether you send your children to private school religious school or have whether they're home school Or whether you have no children at all Because a public school is like to me it's part of the commons like public beaches public parks public roads It was a responsibility on the part of the public to maintain public education Just as we have a responsibility for all of those other things. We cannot make it into a consumer choice So the big issue now and there so that other people can speak Thank you The big issue is And the one that I find is not just is when the reformers say that poverty is just an excuse for bad teachers Poverty is the elephant in the room and as long as we have this dramatic income inequality that we have in the United States There's no school reform that's going to change that we're not going to save children one at a time from poverty We have to make big changes in our country. We should not tolerate Having 23% or more or 40 in some cases 40% of our kids living in poverty. That's the big issue not school reform Thank you This is the only things I'm taking off Yeah, so far So I was speaking I Was furiously emailing my staff. No, I was not tweeting and I was not not paying attention to actually Get a couple of facts as I was going to do this Including the fact that The Boulder broader coalition about three or four years ago was it three or four years ago was five years ago They actually put out a Really good plan for how to do what I'm now calling reclaiming the promise of public education Because I do think we have to do and I think Diane has been spectacular at Deconstructing the arguments on the other side who have done essentially the following They basically have used The austerity and recession that we were in to create further austerity To cut the budgets of schools and When you cut the budget of schools, then you don't have to go back to the taxpayers and say You actually have to in a tough time. You actually have to pay for the choice of investing in education So it pretty much goes like Do huge cuts to schools? start the public schools particularly those of Kids who need the most talk about that in a second Then say over and over and over and over again In a way that nobody can say anything else will break through Schools are failing schools are failing schools are failing schools are failing schools are failing and schools are falling some more and Then all of a sudden say and parents deserve more of course parents deserve more Of course kids deserve more and then say people like us are the status quo Who you know are fighting for these failing awful schools that parents deserve more for or more with and so the only thing left is these reckless sorry they don't say reckless the only thing left are these alternatives that are now cropping up and when you follow the money cyber charters if you have mass closures all sorts of franchise charters or now vouchers and then they never actually say because these things have been around for about 10-12 years and look I've started some charters I'm unengaging I engage in these movements as much as I can because I try to find common ground but then when the evidence is out there that says wait a second I told you I promised props this was not written by anyone I employ from Politico Stephanie Simon saying vouchers don't do much for kids this was not written by anybody we employ that says the walk to a better school that puts lives at risk by MSNBC doing an intensive study into what has actually happened in Philadelphia this year with all the closures of schools and if I sound angry I am angry I've been in that district I've seen what Corbin has done to those schools and those kids whether I was in jail or out of jail this is out there to DC and throughout the country what we're seeing people that are promoting this are just doubling what do we need to do instead to actually educate all of and yes I am invoking God I'm not letting the other side be the only ones to invoke God what are we going to do to help educate all of God's children and so I am very grateful that Diane wrote this second book on these topics because if you don't break through and actually challenge some of the mythology then you don't actually get to what the Boulder Coalition is trying to do or what we've tried to do which is answer the following two questions and now let's again question number one is what set what is or three questions what is the purpose of education frankly the purpose of public education and our judgments is three four things yes of course it is the propeller of economy of course we need to help figure out what skills and knowledge children need so they can be the economic citizens they need to do to propel our economy the skills and knowledge children actually need so they can be great civic citizens in the greatest democracy in the world the children themselves what does I need so that they can live a great life so they cannot they can both dream their dreams and achieve them we have all three purposes are all three purposes then the second question becomes okay what do we do to get there to help enable not only access but opportunity but second I'm sorry this is the third question what's the accountability system around those goals so what we're saying about how to get there is that's part of our reclaim the promise of public education we have you know we have four or five prescriptions welcoming safe collaborative environments first you start with great neighborhood public schools not that they're all the same from pre-k to various multiple pathways to graduation that could include great career tech ed high-quality schools but welcoming safe collaborative environments number two something Diane said a lot we have to have well prepared teachers who are supported have time to collaborate and the tools like lower class size to do their jobs and look if they can't do their jobs they shouldn't be there but we have to have a good enough evaluation system that actually helps assess that number three curriculum what do you call it standards I know standards in curriculum are not the same but the standards have to be aligned to what kids need to know and be able to do to be successful in life but there has to be an engaged curriculum underneath that that is also about engagement of our music science but it also has to be engaged enough and deep enough so that we are actually teaching critical thinking problem-solving teamwork and doing something that actually I think is more important now than anything else which is persistence and resilience because what we need to do with kids particularly for poor kids is that we have to actually help them get up when they fall and help them have the confidence to know that they can and the confidence to be able to then live life like that it's not my words this is Paul tough and others and last is and Diane said this too and this is look Larry Michele will love that I'm using this fact Ed Muir has gave me this fact a week ago and it is roiling in my head talk about poverty not just the fact that Lindsay Layton this week talked about how we see I used to use statistics that says one out of two kids in our public schools are poor Lindsay this week told me that I was wrong it's greater than that in the West and South what's happened in America the largest income gap that we've had I don't know since before the great recession great depression thank you for a hundred years going farther than that but this is what this means retirement security for families that are close to retirement households that are close to retirement the median average savings the median savings for these families $12,000 you think about the stress in that household retirement there's a new word a RP told me for retirement it's called work and all the new income generated in the last four years from 09 to 12 95% of it was generated by the 1% so don't tell me poverty doesn't matter here in the United States America right now so the question becomes what do we do in schools to deal with that because we are the great opportunity engine we are the only real highway so that's what we said let's do wrap-around services around schools like it says that I like in Syracuse so that we try to address social emotional issues like we try to make sure that kids have a place to go after school that's what we're talking about in terms of the plan of promise very similar to the Boulder initiative but then the third piece is this whether we're right or wrong or others are right or wrong what's the accountability system around the kind of skills and knowledge we think kids really need to do and around the purposes of education and that's the accountability system we all should be working on not people doubling down on whether testing is good or bad and I would argue that in this period of time of massive dysfunction in the United States government where there will be no re-upping of ESEA in the next few years at least my prediction let's spend the time figuring out what are the purposes of education how do we actually do those things in a public square using the evidence that we see and also opening things up for great innovation and then third what's the accountability system around those purposes around the skills and knowledge that kids really need so that once and for all we stop the stupidity of kids being test scores thank you so thank you Randy also for not putting the mic too high for me before today I believe that Larry really really liked me but now that I realize that he made me talk after Diane and Randy so I want to also thank Diane so much on behalf of EPI on behalf of BDA for writing an amazing book an important book a book that is both long overdoing could probably not have been written one minute earlier oddly enough it busts more myths than I can think about that really needed busting it has more charts busting those myths than I can think about the evidence especially on the multiple impacts of poverty and race and segregation and economic isolation are tremendous and really show how they are the big impediments in teaching and learning and that's critical it's critically important that this comes from a real education scholar so that we start to reclaim I think what education expert means and it's very important that it marries those very cogent well-constructed critiques of what's going wrong now with what could go right has gone right and I think will go right going forward I want to put out to all of you a thought experiment that this book inspired in me I was talking with a colleague a few weeks ago and trying to describe where I thought we were kind of where we were with respect to teacher evaluation and reform and I said you know the best way to describe what I see frankly as the lunacy of where we are is to apply it to a different profession so let's kind of all take a step back for a second and imagine that instead of talking about education we're talking about medicine so the equivalent would be because I'm from Maryland I'm going to be biased and choose Hopkins that we've got this great doctor of fear the cardiologist of the year and he resides at Hopkins and he does these amazing surgeries and can see people's lives and he's remarkable and has this retract record he happens to have 10 specialized nurses for operating theaters endless resources at his disposal and his record is amazing well seeing this the medical profession jumps in and says you know we have a cardiology problem in Alabama that's where we need you so you know what we're gonna do we're gonna remove you from Johns Hopkins and we're gonna move me to Alabama and he says great that sounds good and they said but we don't really have the same resources in Alabama so we're not giving you for operating theater we're gonna give you a large air-conditioned tent and then they say and we don't really have all the same specialized nurses that you have at Johns Hopkins but we're gonna give you like four high school graduates who are really enthusiastic and we've taught them about sterilization and we are going of course your patients will be a little bit different oh we don't have a waiting room but it's okay so while you're doing the surgery you're gonna have a few distracted people who are you know having slight heart problems sitting around and you know waiting for you to operate on them in great levels of distress and we're gonna expect you know more or less the same track record and we're gonna look back over here and see how you're doing oh wait oh and we forgot to tell you that most of the patients you're having are not going to go home to support the families with great ways to make sure they check their blood pressure all the time you should probably expect that they might not actually take any of the medicine you're prescribing and any of them can't afford it and they might not have anyone to help them put their feet up at night or eat what they're supposed to be eating and in a year from now we're gonna grade you and we're gonna see we assume that you're gonna be able to have exactly the same record that you have Baltimore that actually I think is a pretty fair analogy to where we are with testing accountability and I what it really made me scared of was to think what if we did apply that in the medical profession I think it would scare all of us to death I think it should scare all of us to death and I think part of what I think part of what Diane has done in this book is to kind of make some of that clear and make this accessible to us this book also comes out a really opportune moment Randy noted this very I don't even know what to call it shocking and disturbing study that just came out in case anyone haven't seen it I know this probably isn't big enough but the main statistics look like this and basically what they show us is that just over the last decade we've gone from being the richest country in the world in which in four states which by the way is still completely unacceptable in this country in which more than half of our students qualified for free and reduced lunch more than half of the students in the entire states are poor only 11 years later that number up to 17 and that number now includes every state in the south except for Virginia and Maryland if we still consider them southern and virtually every state in the West and a bunch of others and also includes most of our really big states and by the way the states in which not more than 50% of the kids are poor almost all of those states at least 30 if not 40% of the kids are poor and the only state in the whole country that doesn't fall there is New Hampshire so it is really hard to think of a time when we more need information and evidence about the impacts of student poverty on education because boy do we have an excess of student poverty of course from my personal perspective as the coordinator of the broader bolder approach to education thank you Randy for multiple plugs this book was also a fantastic thing for us because it had our home what we've been saying for several years and it really dovetails with two big reports we put out this year and I'm gonna talk very very you know give a couple sentences on each because I think that they really affirm a lot of what I am talking about earlier this year we put out a big report talking about outcomes student outcomes in the three big we'll call them pioneer reform cities New York City Chicago and Washington DC we looked at Nate's scores which they ended a fantastic job of explaining why we should be looking at Nate's scores and found that rather than counter to these fantastic clans of the reformers not only weren't these students making huge gains they made the smallest gains of students in any big high-poverty heavily minority city in the country not only did they make the smallest gains but overwhelmingly what small gains they made occurred to the wrong students the reformers were telling us this would be great it would narrow achievement gaps that would help minority students it would help low-income students who are the only students who benefited by large kids who are already doing better the white students did better the higher-income students did better the Asian students did better and on top of that devastating statistical information the school closures were destroying neighborhoods were devastating kids were disrupting lives that were already heavily disrupted later this year about a month ago we put out a report on race to the top that obviously applies to more states 11 states and the District of Columbia looking at the first three years of implementation now of course we're not yet looking at Nate's scores although we'll certainly be interested to see when they come out to look at the next batch but what we did find was the same mismatch the same kind of lack of reality between what was being said at the state and federal level and what was happening at the district and school level where these glowing reports of fantastic teacher evaluations in great systems and wonderful data and huge student progress were being proclaimed by the Department of Education Arne Duncan wrote a pretty big blog in Huffington Post if anyone didn't see it proclaiming success in Tennessee even though Tennessee made no progress on they've been four years whatsoever and at the district and school level we talked to people they were as distressed as I've ever heard people talk about and especially in Tennessee where it was extremely intense where test scores are being applied place after place not just at the teacher level and the student level but to principals and to entire schools and to entire districts and to determine schools to be closed and determine districts to be punished and how they even incorporate them into students grades and you know it's just like a media and parents are set up and are protesting and the day after our report was released more than half of all of the superintendents in the state of Tennessee wrote a letter to their governor saying we have had it cut it out you'll get rid of our commissioner or tell him to stop it so I don't want to go on because I think we have some great questions for Diane I guess my question would be my two questions for her would be a how can we all use this to convince more skeptics and my second one would be where do we go from here and I want to end on a very hopeful note because I was going into my third year here and I've seen to me at least and I think Diane seeing some of it and I know Randy seeing some of it huge change in the last year or two where really the tide has turned so tremendously to our side and I think what I would have said three years ago was a bunch of disparate attempts to do what Diane's doing Randy's been not doing is now really coalescing into any a really really powerful movement I think with the potential even to overcome the amount of money that's still on the other side and so I want on that note thank you. So we need people to take their cards with the questions and pass them to the aisle and this young man Christian will like them I'm going to start out with a question which I want to tee it up because Diane you had a lot of passion for the critique and one of the great things about your book and one of the motivations was to be able to lay out an agenda a positive agenda so the question is why do reformers not acknowledge poverty and what does education policy look like if we acknowledge the role of policy and incorporate it and you know such that we're not living up to what we're accused of saying which is we'll deal with make better schools once we have socialism so what can we do first of all thank Elaine because during the course of writing the book I frequently would shoot her an email and I would say I need the answer to the question I needed tonight and she'd say can I have 24 hours and I said okay 24 hours but I certainly used a lot of the wonderful research that she's done and it became one more evidence I was working through the book that what mattered most was that schools can't do it alone I believe passionately in schools I believe the teachers make a difference in the lives of children and I know that they cannot do it alone it requires a society-wide effort I have a series of recommendations towards the end of the book in which I suggest we should have prenatal care for all women who can't afford it because they will is the evidence shows and I have research for all of this women who don't have prenatal care or have to have children who have cognitive delays cognitive deficiencies and who will be placed in special education and not only will their lives be ruined but will cost our society hundreds of thousands of dollars where a small investment up front would have given them healthy babies so that's a good start there are many many other programs some of which are early childhood education the old the evidence despite what you may have read yesterday in the Wall Street Journal is overwhelming every other country in every country in Europe and many countries around the world I have very high quality early childhood education programs when the economists did a ranking they found that we were number I think was 34 out of 45 amongst the countries they ranked in terms of providing a good prenatal care quality the UN ranked this number 131 out of 184 we were tied with Somalia I mean this is disgraceful so we there's so much that we can do in the society I also happen to think and I didn't get into this because I'm not expert enough to do it now either to Larry to do this we have to change the tax structure in this country I think it's a terrible thing I mean it's nice for them that there's so many billionaires I think a person should be able to have a pretty good lifestyle with only a hundred million you just don't need 10 20 30 billion dollars that you know you can't have enough lifetimes to do that I also think that a lot of the nonprofits that are actively engaging in political action on behalf of destroying our public school system should be tagged it should not be tax exempt they should be taxed like you know any other kind of political action group as far as improving the lives of children it involves both schools and society schools that have the kids who have high needs should have social workers psychologists guidance counselors libraries librarians they should have vibrant program of the arts kids need to have a reason to come to school they don't want to come to school just to be tested and prepared for the next test and yet these are the schools that's who often lose their arts programs and it's the first thing to go which is pathetic on and I do think we have to direct directly address the problem of poverty and also racial segregation as Richard Rothstein has written so much of the segregation racial segregation our society was created by federal policy and by state policy it should be undone by federal and state policy and that's why I just wish that the race of the top had focused on particularly on segregation because that would have been we would have seen measure measurable progress over the past few years whereas we're seeing virtually none and race the top will go down as an entry in the Museum of Failed Educational Ideas but I think there are many things that our society can do to help children but it requires giving them and their families the supports that they need to have healthy lives and to be able to hold their heads up with dignity to have food on the table to have the medical care they need I'd like to see Bill Gates or you live wrote open a health clinic and every poor neighborhood in the country that would be a good start to add anything on how do we take into account poverty and formulating the only thing I would add if the big argument we hear as Larry said is that we hear many first we hear poverty is an excuse which I think we hear a little bit less because it's becoming harder and harder and then we hear that's fine you know but we need to fix this first and I think our biggest point is that the most inefficient thing possible as they am just that if we if we try to fix school before we try to address the issues of poverty that will continue to have half our children come to kindergarten unprepared so then we're automatically putting these even hypothetically great teachers in a terrible position of teaching three grades of kids in kindergarten we have these fantastic teachers and if we don't address health issues or nutrition issues a quarter of their seats are empty every day so we have these great teachers teaching empty seats how is that cost-effective and then at the end of the year for all those kids who have no worry to go in the summer no enrichment no will to non they lose all the ground that these great teachers gave them so the most inefficient thing we could possibly do would be to separate the sort of both and that we talk about the in-school and out-school work together it's really it's ludicrous it's cost-inefficient it's just frankly the stupidest thing we could do but it's unfortunately what we're doing now so as long as as Elaine was answering I was actually remembering back to one meeting I had this year which I found the most interesting which I found to be most interesting it was a private meeting with many mayors from across the country and I expected them who are members of the League of League of Mayors and I expected frankly to be peppered with the same questions of you know why are you against vouchers and why doesn't market philosophy and test based accountability and all these things work and I expected a fairly you know a debate what happened instead Barry is that they were asked concerned about the issue of poverty as your question suggested and trying to really think through how you do a both end strategy here because we do know as Diane said as Lane said that two-thirds of the achieving gap is based or rooted in social economic issues so if that is true we have to actually have high-quality public schools with real attention to what can we do to help mitigate and help do things that are about issues that traditional public schools have never addressed and that's part of the reason why I think that there's three or four things that one could do that we have research on right now that's why I think there's all this kind of push on early childhood education but frankly done right I think it will be a real problem if kindergarten becomes test-taking and I think it's the notion about early childhood is these are when kids minds are so subtle that you actually do what we need to do in terms of the things that kids need which is relationship building engagement and so early childhood three four five-year-olds really important but don't developmentally right and full day pre-k really important because of an attention to the custodial obligations we have in schools and the second thing is this whole notion of wraparound services and making the school like the old settlement house making the school the center of community I saw a school actually in Florida high school where the gym is actually used for the the seniors in the community when it's not being used for kids and the gym becomes of the gym becomes a center of community so the last thing I'll say is one of the things I was most disappointed about in terms of the mayoral control initiative that many mayors did around the country including our own was that they didn't use the authority they then had to create wraparound services really easily really quickly in terms of this and so there are and that gets me back to that's what these mayors were saying how can we actually address and mitigate poverty but I would argue because you look at ghosts and make schools public education the center of communities where we do the wraparound services and do a lot of these things so the schools become the center to do a lot of these things you know what people sometimes say what can the private sector do to help and I think of all these corporate heads who say we can't find the talent we need and that's why we're sending all the jobs overseas they should stop sending the jobs overseas so they'd be good jobs for kids to grow into once they graduate and the other point if I may make it they can hit the town after just willing to pay a little bit more sure they want to have been sure they can hire for $25,000 a year workers who pay for who work as they do in China for $10 or $15 a day and Americans don't do that but the other point is the one that I quote from John Dewey in the beginning of my book where he says what the best to my says parent wants for his child is what we should want for all the children of a community anything less is unlovely and act that upon destroys our democracy when I hear people who went to the very finest private schools where they had one teacher for 12 children where they had beautiful campuses wonderful arts programs saying that these kids those kids the kids they don't identify with should be in a boot camp where they have to walk the line look straight ahead and act as if you're in the military when they're only 10 years old well I'd like to see them switch places I'd like to see that these kids our kids all of our kids have the advantages that the children of the very wealthy have in their school they know what they want for their children they should want for all children here's here's another question for you Diane what are the ways that the profiteers are taking over education and what results are they getting well there are probably the worst scam of all of the online virtual charter schools there are a number of states that have them they provide a very inferior quality of education but they're incredibly profitable the biggest of them is a company called K-12 it's still the New York Stock Exchange makes a lot of money was founded by the milk and brothers you may remember Michael milk and the just one came he's now an educator and he enrolls I forget how many thousands of students and 50% drop out every year they get low test scores they have low graduation rates they're not good schools and yet they make a lot of money to see you where the company has paid $5 million a year his educational background is McKinsey and Goldman Sachs so that's one way another way is that in Michigan more than 80% of the charter schools are operated for profit and the governor of Michigan has given several districts that fell into deficit instead of helping the districts out he gave the entire district to for profit charter chains which will extract his profit exactly what the deficit was and it just by coincidence all these districts are districts populated by black children he wouldn't dare do it to a white suburban district Diane you've been going around the country talking in many many different cities what strategies have you seen by those who want to defend public education that you see as most effective with tactics are they using where the organizational forms you have any examples you want to offer of places which are you know in the lead in resisting well interestingly enough the most effective resistance has come to us for in Texas where when they extended the high-stakes testing to everybody instead the 15 kids had to pass 15 tests in order to graduate high school and that got to the suburban moms in the legislature could ignore the inner-city moms they didn't care but when it got to the suburban moms the suburban moms and the urban moms got together and legislators couldn't go anywhere without being button-pulled by somebody some parent and the moms formed a group which is has an unpronounceable name it's called Texas advocating Texans advocating for meaningful student assessment it's known as much as moms against drug testing the activism of these parents the legislature rolled the testing back from 15 to 5 I think we're going to see the same kind of activism in other parts of the country the Providence Student Union which is a high school group has been unbelievable in terms of their political theater they've done demonstrations and against the standard use of a standardized test for high school graduation they did a zombie march in front of the Rhode Island Department of Education that got a lot of attention then they got together 60 accomplished professionals to take the kneecap it's called blue it or not this is called kneecap which kneecaps the students so they got 60 accomplished professionals people were architects journalists legislators writers whatever to take the test with me composer released items and 60% of them failed high school graduation so you know it's this kind of political activism that gets attention that builds the resistance I think this coming spring because of the misuse of testing we're going to see a huge numbers of parents saying I'm not gonna allow my child to take the state test and frankly since I've come to believe that the testing provides the data that feeds the vampire it's like the blood that beats the vampire I encourage offing out I wouldn't have done that three years ago I thought that was crazy I don't think it's crazy anymore I think we have to stop this machine I've even started quoting Mario Savio I don't know if you remember Mario Savio was a student leader of Berkeley in 1964 and he said sometimes the machine becomes so oppressive you have to throw your body on the machine stop the lever stop the gears make it stop make it stop and I have to say I don't agree with it Randy about I agree about so many things Randy I love Randy such a wonderful person I agree with her about accountability I think accountability today means punishment we do not need to punish teachers we do not need to punish children we do not need to punish schools if you ask the people from Finland how do you hold teachers accountable they say accountable but we know our teachers are responsible people should know that then we'll be signing books after and there's someone outside and all right selling books so this way if you want to say something so let me just say I actually believe in 360 degree accountability and that there has to be communal responsibility and there has to be collective responsibility for all of our kids and the accountability systems right now totally broken but I do think we actually have to have we we actually have to have a long-term accountability system that has credibility from parents teachers community in order to actually have a credible public education system I don't want to ever see the kind of situation happen as has now happened aware the public square has to own public education again and that means that people have to feel like the accountability system the responsibility system whatever you call it is really something that is communal collective and something that we're all behind I think that's the way I mean I know I had the same umbrage for the current accountability system as Diane does but we do actually have to have a way of making sure if we're spending a lot of money on public education which we should that taxpayers parents and the collective knows that we're spending it for a good reason and we're actually helping kids get what they need to get so I don't think we totally disagree we disagree on the nomenclature but not on what is happening right now I want to hold the governor's accountable right now the polling that we've done what's interesting is that we've done a lot of polling of the public and of parents they most trust teachers and they least trust governor's MCS but the point I wanted to get to is because I'm also really afraid that we don't tea party we are a lot of our folks are really really really angry about what's going on and I'm gonna say the same thing to everyone in this room as I say when I am out you know kind of summoning up the troops which is the polarization around these debates are very very negative on our side and on other sides I hate what the Jeff bushes of the world do I really hated what Chris Christie did from the floor of the Republican and we are educators and I don't want us to fall into that same routine and so I try to be really careful about that even though I try to be pretty stark I try to be really careful about that the point I wanted to make though is I think Diane is right about the kids and the moms in in Texas and the kids in Rhode Island but I would also look at the moms in Florida who actually push back at parent trigger twice because they saw it as corporate trigger and they saw it as a way of really hurting their public schools and they actually got both Republican and Democrats to fight back about that as well and I would also look at that two weeks ago we had any a opportunity to learn many of the other community groups we had over 600 people in LA including the folks from Seattle including folks from Philadelphia from Chicago from New York all across the country 25 28 states and 25 cities in particular so working together on principles of unity of what parents what looks like community during reform that actually really help all children succeed and so you have a movement that Diane and others have sparked in one regard but what you're also saying is people like Kia hitting the parent from Philadelphia who's working with lots of student unions and working with our union and fully coming up with positive prescriptions for change as well as calling out what's wrong coming out with this and so you're seeing real mobilization on ground all over the place and I think what you'll see is at the beginning of December we're going to see a nationwide action in terms of mobilization all over on these issues. I'll finish off by saying if you want to see some interesting there are real there are blueprints out there that our community you know really coming from the grassroots of New York City the New York City A plus coalition has an entire blueprint from basically bringing together the best evidence from scholarship and combining it with what the public really wants and doing it in a really community-oriented way in Philadelphia a coalition who's happening is PCAPS really has done the same thing bringing together real evidence of what works and what doesn't work and I think putting one of the most coaching criticisms of what's going on in Philadelphia combining that with how that same money or even less money could be used to make education actually work for all kids in Philadelphia especially the kids who need it most so there's really exciting stuff going on and the people I mean these are real education experts these are teachers these are parents these are students people who are in schools every day who are affected by what happened are taking you know taking things into their own hands and making it work. I should add to on the accountability front we have a book called creating education by Richard Rosting which lays out how you can how they do accountability in other countries based on an inspectorate model not on you know I'm an economist I love numbers but I don't think numbers actually help you all that much and the voter voter approach also had a task force on accountability which laid out a vision for accountability that is not the narrow test-based accountability that we all find disruptive. Okay, another question, Hemeshek argues that money doesn't matter what say you, Diane? I think he's right if you have money it doesn't matter. If you're poor it matters a great deal if you're teaching in a school where the kids come to school and they didn't have breakfast and they're not sure if they'll have dinner and they have never been to a doctor and the vision problems and hearing problems and mental problems it matters a great deal so when you know my first vaccine is correct if you had to those people have a lot of money it really doesn't make a difference they have it. That was great so I'll do one more question. So you mentioned the reinstatement by Congress of the qualified teacher provision, what impact will that have on the profession and what should we be doing instead? So a couple of things are really craven about what happened. Number one is this was about putting the government back together. It wasn't about putting other little things on it and in fact you know there were a couple of things about fixes for the ACA that were part of the original deal bipartisan deal that came out of the Senate and those things actually got jettisoned by the House of Representatives in the light of day and then this was privately put on and that says something about the power of TFA to deal with you know it's particular little issues why did TFA want it so much because think about it this way under no child left behind you actually had to have credential to be highly qualified this basically says that the TFA folks are exempt from that provision of no child left behind so let's just call it what it is now the real issue becomes if you look at Finland you look at Singapore you look at the places that out compete us and you think about common sense or you think about the the great analogy that Lane gave us before in terms of medicine those who are prepared for the work that they try to do professionally I'm going to do better in terms of that work and this basically sends the opposite message where all the research basically says if you really prepared for the work you're going to do as a professional you're going to actually do it better so that's so you know it's so you have a so you have a political piece here that really should have raised a lot out of gross and you also have something that's running against all the evidence that all these folks say when they say oh see pizza but it is this kind of picking and choosing that Diane was talking about and I would add something I think that's important because Randy said point out this was not this was under the shadows in the dark and under the light of day and I think it speaks to something Diane said which is the enormous contrast between what is being wasted on people in education versus what actual people parents do not ask for this you never go to a cocktail party and hear a nice liberal parent with their kid in a great school saying I went to my principal and I said you know what these TFA teachers are so great I asked for one in my kids class or I asked for my kid to have spelling drugs for three hours a day because it works so good in inner city Anacostia you know this is not about what the public wants this is not about what informed parents want this is not about what's good for students and we need to any I mean and Randy said it should be a huge flag for everybody anytime the word those kids come up these are all our kids every one of these kids is our kids and what's good for the kids who are doing the best is even better for the kids who are not doing well and that's all we need no one's asking for anything special no special dispensation or whatever we just want the same stuff and that's what we're not getting and you know that that that's what happens why we have these kind of backhand deals so I'm still waiting for the study they go that it's been suggested to us that we do it but it's not really an economic policy institute kind of thing to go to the schools that the people funding the charter schools all those you know what what are the what are the schools that they send their kids to and what do they have so I I want to suggest that and with that I also want to thank the hand