 Now I'd like to have Linda and Patricia come up. We're going to have a little bit of a highlights of some of the work being done right now. Linda and Patricia are going to, yes, please, are going to come up to each give a little 10-minute presentation of their recent research. You can find their reports in your packet. And then later on we'll have a broader conversation with some discussions of the research and some of the implications. So, Linda, I'll start with you. Thank you. With any luck at all, we will be queued up and I will just press a button and there we go. It works as meant. So I really want to start with where Wade Henderson left off. Deeper learning has long been contentious and viewed as not appropriate for all students. And that's part of the history that we are needing to confront as we move forward. I was recently talking to somebody about a school that's kind of a progressive school that has been engaged in a very inquiry oriented curriculum for a very long time. And their label is 21st century education since the 19th century, right? Because some of these ideas are not new. But there has been a long tug of war about who is going to get access to a thinking curriculum. To a curriculum that is empowering, as Wade said, true education opens us up to our full potential that empowers us, power with a capital P. I think that's a really good way for us to think about it. He mentioned WB Du Bois. Well, Du Bois was in a tug of war, rhetorically, in a discourse about the education of black children with Booker T. Washington. There was a very big, well, it wasn't, and Booker T. Washington was not the only person representing that point of view. But in fact, in building schools for black children in the south, philanthropists were also struggling with whether those would be focused on menial work. So that there would not be access to the classics, to a liberal arts education. But there would be a lot of coursework around literally sweeping and plowing and doing the menial chores that were viewed as the appropriate life aspirations for the black community. Right here in Washington, D.C., Anna Julia Cooper, a wonderful black educator, started the M Street School, which was actually one she was a friend of Du Bois. He was involved in that work, and it offered Latin and Greek and a liberal arts education and an empowering thinking curriculum focused on critical thinking and engagement in the debates of the day. And she encountered tremendous opposition, and ultimately that school in the face of that opposition was closed. So these are issues that go way back. At the turn of the last century, only 5% of jobs were knowledge work jobs, and who got tracked into the tracks for that kind of learning was very associated, as it still is today with race and class and assumptions about what different children can do and should do in their lives beyond school. So this issue of equity and deeper learning is a longstanding issue, and it's one that today we really want to bring up, call it out, think about the dimensions of the problem, and make progress on real solutions. So what do I mean by deeper learning? As Rafael suggested, there are all kinds of definitions and ideas that bounce around various terminologies. What I mean here is that students learn content. First of all, this is not a content-free idea. Certains learn content deeply in a way that they can apply it, in a way that they can use it in complex real-world tasks. So it's the core concepts of the disciplines. It's the modes of inquiry in the disciplines. The reasons we have different disciplines in the classical education idea was that each of them has a different mode of thinking and a mode of inquiry, scientific investigation, mathematical analysis, etc., social science inquiry. So those modes of inquiry, as well as the ideas, facts, and concepts need to be applied. An understanding of the meaning and the relevance of ideas to concrete problems. Capacity to transfer knowledge and skills to new situations, to build on them and use them. There's a lot of cognitive research that suggests that when you learn pieces of information disconnected from other pieces of information and you don't apply them, you only regurgitate them perhaps for a test or something like that, and then you leave them alone, that about 90% of that information is not usable for you later. It's what we call inert knowledge. And so we want active knowledge, knowledge that we can't access when we need it, know when to apply it. So transferable knowledge and skills. Communication of ideas, collaboration and problem solving, and ability to learn to learn that metacognitive skill is becoming increasingly important. The demand for skills is changing in our economy. There's a huge increase in the demand for complex communications and expert thinking skills. There's a decline in the demand for manual and cognitive skills that are very routine. Those jobs are being digitized and outsourced and sent overseas as well as being turned into computerized tasks. Right now you can have a computer check you out at the grocery store and check you in at the airport. In Silicon Valley where I live there are driverless cars driving around. I know it's kind of spooky but anything that can be automated will be. The other thing that's happening is that knowledge is growing really quickly. And as a Stanford person I don't like to quote people from Cal Berkeley. However, and probably somebody's in the room from Berkeley because they almost always are. But so these professors there who are doing this series of studies and one of the very important findings that they reported was that between 1999 and 2003 there was more new knowledge created in the world than in the entire history of the world preceding. Think about that for a minute. Knowledge is growing exponentially. Technology knowledge is doubling every 11 months and that's increasing in rapidity also. So we can't just say memorize a bunch of information, spit it back and you'll be ready for your life young person because they will be working with knowledge that hasn't been invented yet. With technologies that haven't been discovered yet solving big complex problems that we have not managed to solve. So they need to get the concepts and facts in their education system in a way that allows them to continue to learn where they can get information. If you go to Google right up the street from where I live they will not use your transcripts or your test scores to decide whether to hire you. They used to do that. They did a big study. They found it did not predict success in their institution. They will actually give you a bunch of performance tasks to evaluate your learning ability. Your ability to find information, take it, weigh in balance, evidence, figure out what's important, work with other people to create ideas and solutions, test them and continue an iterative process towards the kind of solutions that they're looking for. So that's what we mean by deeper learning is getting to those kinds of skills. And deeper learning, as I've said, is inequitably distributed. The challenges are many. Growing child poverty, food insecurity, poor prenatal care, poor health, housing instability, violence, pervasive and persistent stress. All of these things we know from much research influences learning. And one of the things that can happen when kids come to school, there's a lot of talk about how low income students have about a third as many words as middle class students when they enter kindergarten quite often, is that teachers will often think and schools will often think that they need to be placed in a separate kind of curriculum and remediated with low level skills. And without being challenged to think, my own kids went to school not too far from here in Montgomery County and later in Westchester County in New York, where we fought hard to get them into the gifted and talented program, right? Anybody have this experience? I'll bet a few of you do. People are nodding around the world. And in that program, they were using the curriculum. I remember going into the elementary school and there were a set of classrooms. There were mostly black students in one set of classrooms and all white students in another set of classrooms. This set of students was getting the math curriculum that I happened to know about because I'd worked with the person who designed it that would lead you to higher order thinking skills in math and to a track for mathematical learning over the long run. The other kids were doing memorization of math facts on timed worksheets and didn't make any meaning out of the math. And they were headed, because we knew from a search, to a brick wall in fifth grade where math wouldn't have much meaning for them and as they went into higher order math, it would not make a lot of sense to them. At the end of that was a magnet school which divided kids then into a math magnet and if you didn't have that gifted class at the beginning. So I went to the principal and I said, why is there this different curriculum? I want my daughter in that class, not in that class. She said, oh, you have to be highly gifted for that class and we test for that in kindergarten. My daughter was already in first grade. I jumped up and down. She gave her the test. We finally figured she became the first black student in that track and one of the only ones in the magnet school later going into calculus on the way to high school and so on. And the resources allocated to those two different tracks were utterly different in terms of the qualifications of the teachers, to computers, etc. This goes on all of the time and it's subliminal. I persuaded her that that curriculum had not been designed only for highly gifted students who had to test into it. It was actually designed for urban school students in St. Louis. It had been tested and found to be a very effective curriculum for leading to higher order math capacity. She said, okay, we will try this for everyone. They gave the teachers a couple of days of professional development the next summer and brought it to all the classrooms. I was like, yay, school reform, we did it. Then I came back with my second daughter a few years later and it was back to the way it had been. Both in terms of the tracking and the racial disposition of those tracks. I asked the principal what it had been. She said, well, the teachers felt that the curriculum was too hard to teach so we could only offer one section and we therefore had to track it and then we had to decide who would go in the tracks and so on. So this happens over and over again in every aspect of elementary and secondary education all across this country. And quite often what we offer kids is what we think teachers can teach, not what children can learn. And if you look at the European and Asian countries that have risen in the PISA results, one of the things they did was detrack substantially to get a common curriculum and then train teachers to be able to teach that curriculum to all kids. So we have challenges with respect to inadequate school funding and supports that are needed to support this kind of work. Segregation exacerbates everything. We are more segregated today than we were in the 1980s. Tracking and presumptions about what students can learn. High stakes tests that are focused on low level skills. We need assessments that focus on the skills that we're actually trying to develop in a variety of ways. And the tests don't have to be focused on low level skills but there's an economic imperative for testing companies to keep it easy to score with Scantrons. And so that's part of the challenge. Educator training is always a key issue at the base. The costs of inequality are huge. I like this quote that actually comes from some evidence from McHeneshack that was published in For Each and Every Child, which was the Excellence in Equity Commission report that if Hispanic and African-American student performance could be comparable to white performance and remain there over the next 80 years, the impact would be staggering, adding $50 trillion in present value terms to our economy more than three times the size of our current GDP. This represents the income that we forgo by not ensuring equity for all of our students. And the schools that develop deeper learning, we document in this report, have certain characteristics. There are schools that serve predominantly students of color and students in low income communities that are graduating students at rates above 80 or 90 percent that are sending 90 percent of kids to college that are developing the kind of learning through performance-based assessments and project-based learning that allows them to be successful in college and in fact in a number of these schools based on studies done by the American Institutes of Research as well as the Stanford Center on Opportunity Policy and Education, a number of these schools send kids to college and keep them there and graduate them at rates almost twice as high as the average American student. And when you interview the kids, they'll say, it's because they've had a curriculum focused on deeper learning where they've had to investigate and inquire and learn and revise and meet standards and defend their work throughout their school experience where they have had supports for social-emotional learning including an academic mindset and a capacity to feel like they can grow in their intelligence and in their learning as well as to manage their relationships and their perseverance and their resilience where they have had connections to the real world through internships and community service where there's a culture of respect and responsibility where in fact rather than zero tolerance kids are taught to be responsible and to grow in that way and to revise their work because that is actually the way that we learn most powerfully. That all happens in personalized structures where advisors and others are connected to the kids and the families regularly all the way through the end of high school and no student can fall through the cracks. Educator development is a key piece of this. It's both important both in preparation and ongoing professional development to learn to teach in heterogeneous classrooms. One of the things that causes the tracking is that teachers don't know how to teach in heterogeneous classrooms. There are strategies that can be taught and learned to do that. They need to know how to organize well-designed collaborative learning and they need to work in school settings that give them the time and the opportunity to plan and collaborate together to have common classroom norms so that kids go from class to class and in fact they experience the same expectations and the same practices which allows them to grow at a much faster rate and to understand how to succeed in school. Finally, we identify a set of policies that will be important to move us towards equitable access to deeper learning including funding policies, both the ways in which we allocate funds to schools and also some incentives to develop new school designs. Many of the schools that we studied and that other researchers have studied received the small schools grants from the federal government that allowed them to redesign their schools or used other federal or state funding to redesign their work. Human capital policies are important. How educators are trained, what the standards are for educators, how they get access to meaningful professional development and evaluation. More than drive-by, spray and pray, one-shot workshops but sustained collegial work around planning curriculum, trying it out, coming back together, refining their work, looking at student learning and growing this kind of very sophisticated pedagogy for their students and finally instruction and assessment policies that bring us to new systems of assessment and accountability allow, as Wade said, the commitment to accountability and to knowing how kids are doing and to tracking their progress and to knowing how all kids are doing in a way that presses towards the skills that we need and that provides informative information for school people to work with. We urge you to read the reports and to be in contact with us about this work going forward. And Patricia, thank you. Good morning. I want to thank Linda and the others with LPI for the invitation to talk with you for a few minutes about a group of students who I think are oftentimes overlooked. Viewed as not having a whole lot to offer, lots of problems but not a lot to offer. And yet I'm going to argue are perfectly poised for a reform effort around deeper learning. So immigrant and English learning students, who are they? One in four children in the United States today is the child of immigrants. These are unprecedented numbers. Most of these children speak another language at home and in their community. You'll hear that about ten percent of our kids are English learners but that significantly underestimates the numbers of children who are having a very different linguistic experience in growing up and who come to the classroom differently, not in a deficit sense, but differently prepared for the classroom. These kids are very diverse. I'm going to come to that in just a second. But almost 75 percent of these children who are the children of immigrants speak one language, Spanish. The next largest group is Chinese at about 4 percent, actually less than that. I make this point because oftentimes this is put up as a smoke screen. In our district we have 140 different languages. What do you expect me to do? I really can't do anything about this. I can't do regular kinds of bilingual programming because I have so many different languages. The reality is one language is heavily concentrated throughout the country and in only a few states it's overwhelmingly one group. But that's not to say that for several of these groups we couldn't be doing much the same thing. Let me also just clarify too. These children are oftentimes referred to as immigrant students. In fact, 90 percent of these children and more are actually born here in the U.S. When we talk about immigrant students we're really talking by and large about the children of immigrants, children who are growing up in an immigrant household. This is important as well because there are kids. There are U.S. citizens. There are kids. There are responsibility. And I don't think we can shirk that by saying that they're from someplace else. Also a little bit of a stereotype breaker. Asian immigration is now growing faster than Latino immigration and soon will overtake the numbers. So this is a diverse population. I want to point out to you something else about children and immigrant families. Oftentimes these children are compared one with the other and saying that while some of these kids are just doing so exceptionally well and others are not, it must be their culture. It must be something about a culture of learning or a culture of aspirations that differs among these students. I just want to give you a real quick look at the kinds of preparation, kinds of background that immigrant children bring from their families that differentiates them greatly. Take a look at the children who are the children of immigration from Mexico and the children of immigration from Cambodia. They look very similar with respect to socioeconomic status. The percent that are at or below poverty, or near or below poverty, very, very high. And the percent of their parents who have a high school education or barely less than eight years of education. And then look at the children who are from South America, South American countries, which is somewhere kind of there in the middle, and the children who come from whose families come from Taiwan. They're almost exact opposites. I think it's important to acknowledge this that the problems here are the differences not about culture but differences of opportunity. Overall, how are these children faring in our schools? Well, I pointed out that two-thirds of them are living in poverty which has obvious impact on how they do in school, which has been mentioned by Linda. High school dropout for this group is about double what it is for every other group. And those who are English learners score lower on all kinds of tests than any other subgroup except special ed kids. But I want to point out that this is largely, not wholly, but largely because these tests were not designed for them. And about 65,000 students every year come of age without citizenship having spent most of their lives in the United States. This is a huge and growing problem. Children who were brought here at a very young age who this is the only country they know, and yet once they turn 18 they become extremely vulnerable because they actually don't have citizenship here. So as a result of all of this, immigrant students are oftentimes framed as a problem, a problem for the schools, defined by what they don't have, a strong command of English and of the U.S. culture, and made to feel that they don't really belong. And there's a lot of research on this issue. If you feel like you belong, if you're made to feel like you belong, you will prosper in school. If you're made to feel like you don't, that you're marginal to what's going on, that's very highly related to the dropout rate. So I want to argue that we need to reframe these English learners and these immigrant students, not as children who are seen through a deficit lens, but as children with tremendous assets. And there's at least five areas, and I think we could probably come up with more if we put our heads to it, but there's at least five areas that I think make these kids not only extremely poised for the deeper learning that Linda's been talking about, but also ready to add so much to this nation and to this culture. Let me start just with the most obvious language. The bulk of our students who are immigrants bring to us one of the world's great languages, one of the languages that has spoken all over the world, Spanish and Chinese, in this case, or the two highest. And that's a tremendous asset that they're bringing along with the cultural skills that accompany those languages in those groups. It's critical that we take advantage of this, acknowledge this and take advantage of it now because we are losing these languages in these children faster than we ever have historically. By the third generation, they are gone, and we no longer have this asset. So if we're going to take advantage of it, we need to do it quickly. We need to decide that it's important to do so. And why is it important to do so? We've done quite a lot of research on this issue about the asset that language is. And in a new book that we published on bilingualism, The Advantages of Bilingualism, we cite a number of studies there that show that full bilingualism, full biliteracy is associated with higher earnings. It's associated with higher education level. Among Latinos, it is associated with a greater probability of going on to a four-year college, which becomes really, really important. And in surveying employers, we find that across all sectors of the economy, two-thirds of employers say they will give the advantage of employment to those individuals who are bilingual or multilingual. So it makes these young people highly employable. The second area is diverse perspectives. They bring to us different cultures, different ways, different lenses through which to see. And putting these together, we know also from a lot of research that when we bring different perspectives to the problem, we also increase creativity. Resourcefulness and resilience. These young people oftentimes recount to us, even though they're, it's the parents who immigrated, they live with this experience of immigration. They live with this experience of marginalization and isolation. And they have had to overcome this to get into, to survive in our schools. And this has a very deep effect on these young people. And one of those effects is immigrant optimism. Incredibly, in spite of all of the challenges that these young people face, a number of studies now have shown that the children of immigrants are simply more optimistic about their schooling, about their future, about their potential and outperform those young people who are now third and fourth generation. And fifth, these young children of immigration bring with them collaborative cultural orientation. There was wonderful work done by Uri Treisman. It's going to be 25, 30 years ago now, on which he built an entire math intervention program when he noticed how the Asian kids tended to study together, help each other, work with their peers, and how this was so much more successful in learning than what the other kids were doing. Both the Asian immigration and the Latin American immigration bring with them cultures that are very collaborative that like to work together towards deeper learning. I want to point out, in fact, as just another stereotype breaker that we oftentimes think of the children of Mexican immigration as being problematic and doing so poorly in our schools. But in fact, research has been done over the last several years by Jennifer Lee and Min Jo has concluded that contrary to popular perception, these children of the Mexican immigration are the most successful immigrant students in our schools because their intergenerational mobility is greater than for any other group. Think about that for a moment. It's turning its on its head. If your parents had a fourth grade education and you graduated from high school, what you have accomplished is significantly more incredible than for the typical student. And so finally, what are the policy implications of all of this? One, we need to build on these children's assets rather than view them through a deficit lens. Two, they bring these incredibly important and useful languages to us. We need to exploit that and provide dual language instruction for all students. If I had another 10 minutes, I would love to tell you about the research on this and how time after time we are finding that those fully biliterate individuals are outperforming anybody else in the schools. We need assessment that is sensitive to language and cultural differences that doesn't simply paint these kids again from a deficit perspective. We need a campaign to attract and retain highly qualified bilingual teachers. There is no reason why we cannot have these teachers in all of our schools. We have the population out there. We simply have not seen this as a priority. We need federal support for the institutions of higher education to prepare linguistically and culturally competent teachers for English learners. Up until now, new child left behind, we actually had federal funding to do this that disappeared with NCLB. We need that money back. And we need a pathway to citizenship for these immigrant students, the 65,000 kids every year who are entering into a highly vulnerable situation but who have all of these assets that they can contribute to this country. Thank you very much.