 Good afternoon. I'd like to get started. Welcome. I'm Susan Collins. I'm the Joan and Sanford Wildein of the Gerald R. Ford School of Public Policy and I'm really delighted to have everybody here with us this afternoon for what promises to be an extremely interesting event on a really important topic about private public partnership in a K-12 location. This is an event that is sponsored by one of our prominent research centers here at the Ford School, the Center for Local, State, and Urban Policy, better known as COSA. You'll hear a little bit more about that later on. If my professional title rang a bell for you, that shouldn't be a surprise. We're delighted to have Sanford Wildein himself with us here today as one of our panelists. Sandy and his wife Joan endowed the deanship that I hold after very generously contributing to the construction of the building that we all enjoy on a daily basis. And so we're delighted to have Sandy with us here today. Sandy, your passion for improving education at all levels and around the world is really inspiring and I know that our faculty and our students are really engaging with you this summer throughout the day. We're really delighted to have you as part of our panel. Sandy and the other panelists will be introduced a little bit more formally in just a moment, but I do want to welcome the group to the Ford School. In particular, we have Michael Flanagan with us today. He's a superintendent of public instruction for the state of Michigan. We have Rick Hess, who's director of education policy studies at the American Enterprise Institute. We have JD Hoyn, who's president of the National Academy Foundation, and my colleague Deborah Loneberg-Ball, who is the dean of the School of Education. We're delighted to have all of you with us here today. We're also delighted to have a very special friend of Sandy Wiles with us, Fred Lopan, welcome to the campus and especially to the Ford School. He's, as you know, a distinguished graduate of the University of Michigan, a friend, and all of the sports fans among us, perhaps best known as the principal owner of the New York Nets, so we're delighted to have you with us here. Now I'd like to introduce our host for today's panel, Professor Brian Jacob. Brian Jacob is the Walter Annenberg professor of education policy. He's also professor of economics and director of close-up, as I mentioned earlier. His research spans the fields of labor economics, of education policy research, and a program evaluation, and a lot of his work at the moment focuses on issues of the labor market for teachers. Brian's done a terrific job with the first year as director of close-up and in particular helped to launch this education policy initiative, of which this event is one of the pieces this year. So once again, thanks to all of you for joining us here today. I hope that after the panel you'll join us in the Great Hall for a reception. Please help me welcome Brian Jacob. Our highly distinguished set of speakers. I'm going to introduce each member of our panel now in the order in which they will speak. And I would ask you to hold your applause until the end of these introductions. So our first panelist today is Rick Hess, resident scholar and director of education policy studies at the American Enterprise Institute. Dr. Hess is a former high school social studies teacher and a former professor of education and government at the University of Virginia. He's written numerous books, journal articles, and other publications, including a recent book titled Educational Entrepreneurship, published by Harvard Education Press in 2006. Among his many other positions, Dr. Hess currently serves as executive editor of Education NEX, the Journal of Opinion and Research regarding education policy, and sits on the review board for the Broad Prize in Urban Education. Next, we have J. D. Hoyt. J. D. Hoyt is the president of the National Academy Foundation, network of over 500 college preparatory career themed academies in over in 40 states in the district of Columbia. These small public school based learning communities work in partnership with 2,000 businesses and have career themes and finance, tourism and hospitality, information technology, engineering, and in the coming years, the healthcare industry. Ms. Hoyt has an extensive background in education prior to joining NAF. Earlier in her career, she was associate superintendent of Oregon's Department of Education, where she managed the office of professional and technical education and community colleges. In 1994, she was selected by then secretary of education, Richard Riley, and then secretary of labor, Robert Reich, to head the new federal office of school to work, where she played a major role in developing and implementing education policy at the federal level. Next, we have Sanford Weill, chairman emeritus of city group, founder and chairman of the National Academy Foundation, and of course, namesake of this beautiful building in which we're gathered today. Mr. Weill is served as a director of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, as well as serving on the boards of numerous major corporations. In 2002, he was named CEO of the year by chief executive magazine, and his extensive service also includes his role as chairman of the board of overseers of the Jones Sanford Weill Medical College at Cornell University, as well as serving as trust emeritus of the university. His recent book, The Real Deal, My Life in Business and Philanthropy, is in New York Times and Wall Street Journal bestseller, and he's been married to his wife, Joan, for over 52 years. They have long been close personal friends of the Ford family, and of course have been wonderful benefactors to the Gerald R. Ford School of Public Policy here at the University of Michigan. And our final panelist today is Michael Flanagan, State Superintendent of Public Instruction in Michigan. Mr. Flanagan directs the Michigan Department of Education, chairs the State Board of Education, and advises the governor and other elected officials on all aspects of education in Michigan. Mr. Flanagan's work is informed by his extensive background in education. He has been a teacher, principal, local district superintendent, regional superintendent, and executive director of several statewide education associations. I'm also pleased to report that he has been an extremely supportive and active collaborator with faculty here at the University of Michigan in studying ways to improve education for all children of the state. And finally, Deborah Ball, dean of the School of Education and William H. Payne Collegiate Professor at the University has graciously agreed to serve as our discussant today. Dean Ball's academic work is grounded in her real world experience as she gained as an elementary school teacher. Her research focuses on mathematics and instruction, and she's a nationally recognized expert on teacher education with a particular interest in how professional development and experience combined to equip teachers with the skills and knowledge necessary for effective practice. In addition to her other duties, she currently serves on President Bush's National Mathematics Advisory Panel and is co-director of the Center for Proficiency and Teaching of Mathematics, a research and development center aimed at strengthening professional education in the field. So please join me in welcoming our distinguished panel of speakers today. And finally, I would like to thank the many staff members who have helped organize today's event. Laura Lee and her staff in the Communications and Outreach Office, Beth Johnson and her staff in the Development Alumni Relations Office, Bill Kelly and Dan Norton in the Facilities Group, and Stephanie James and Tom Avoco from Close Up have all been instrumental in organizing today's panel. And so the structure for today is we'll have each speaker talk for about eight minutes followed by Dean Ball who will have a few minutes to make comments and remarks on their presentations and then we're going to open it up for questions and answers, questions from the audience. And so without further ado, I'd like to invite Rick Hess to start off our panel. Rick? Thanks, Brian. It's a pleasure to be here today. It's a pleasure to be among such distinguished colleagues. It's always one of those moments when you wonder, what am I doing up here? So you can tell me, hopefully. I'm just kidding. I've got lots of good stuff for you. My name is Rick Hess. I'm Director of Ed Policy Studies at the American Enterprise Institute. I'm going to give you just very briefly and very quickly a couple of highlights from a forthcoming book I've got called The Supply Side of School Reform. Our topic today is the role of private entities or nontraditional providers or for-profit entities in the case of schooling. I want to talk just in real broad strokes about why they're important, why it's a fundamentally different question from what we often debate in the Academy which is school choice and how do we think about this in the larger context. First thing is that many of us, now I realize we're in a policy school, so some of this might be words you're not used to in the education context and we can come back to that in Q&A. When we talk about school reform, the favorite tactic for the last couple decades has been, is what we call different iterations of capacity building or structural reform. The idea is that we need to invest in professional development, in mentoring, in coaching, in curricula, in pedagogy, in these key elements of what you do in classrooms. We all agree that this is actually what schooling is about at the end of the day. But what I want to suggest is, if you look at that picture on the, on your far right, it's a little bit like if you're coming into one of these decrepit rotting buildings in the urban core, you one approach is to say, you know what, if we buff the floor, if we put up some nice windows, if we paint the walls, if we bolster the ceiling, my goodness, then we can worry about furnishing this thing and it will be a happy home. I want to suggest it's actually not the optimal way to go about doing business. It's particularly not the optimal way to go about doing business when we're talking about organizational improvement because the reality is whether we're talking about public agencies or private organizations or what have you, that this thing takes place, which is called organization culture. And we want it to be malleable, we want it to be easily adjusted on the fly to our needs, but that's not usually the way the world works. What we know from decades of organizational sociology, from business management, is that organizations take on a cast, they take on a culture, they take on a set of arrangements based on when they were founded. When you were set to tackle certain kind of problems in a certain era, that tends to shape your mindset. This helps us understand why IBM, when offered the chance to buy the Microsoft software in 1981-1982, said no, thanks, we're going to lease it, we don't see the market potential here. It's why Univac, when they did their projection of how many computers were going to be sold worldwide between 1950 and 2000, in 1950 the biggest brains in the world at Univac projected a thousand computer sales worldwide by the year 2000. It's because Univac was based on a model which projected these huge room-sized computers, these old school mainframes, which turned out not to be a good prediction. It's why when Michael Dell tried to get some people, some of his professors at UT to invest in his startup out of his dorm room in the mid-80s, they said, nah, that's crazy, we're not going to do it. Fact is organizations not only have a mindset and a culture and talent was recruited around a certain set of challenges, but they are also, the reason you can't change that culture is because those things are also looped into the way they do business, how they hire people, how they recruit people, how they compensate people, the contracts they have signed, the market niches they're established in. Our public schooling was built around a labor market where educated women were going to be teachers, and so we built recruiting systems, hiring systems, compensation systems around that assumption. It's no longer the case, it's not easy to just say, geez, we need to be sensitive to the new market. It actually requires that you fundamentally unpack a whole bunch of deals that have been struck and routines that have been set, and that's very hard to do. How hard is it to do? Well, what we can talk about a lot in education, we talk about restructuring and turnarounds as the edgy version of capacity building. Well, this is not a new idea. We've actually been trying this in education under different names for 40 years. We don't study it very much, but in the private sector they actually study this stuff. They got this thing called total quality management, which has been a craze for a while now. Well, two-thirds of corporate turnarounds featuring TQM have fallen short of their goals. Maybe a third succeed. When it comes to corporate re-engineering, the projected success rates have been typically as low as 20%, the highest estimates are 50%. So even under the more agile, more forgiving circumstances, the private sector where it's easier to maneuver around statute and legislation and political constraints, you're happy if you connect on this stuff maybe a third of the time. What that suggests is turnarounds aren't as easy as we'd like them to be. Well, a certain sector of educational thinkers has noticed this and they said, aha, this is the case for school choice. Can't fix these systems. We've got these rotting girders. Let's tear it down, right? Let's go ahead and we're just going to topple this thing. Problem is, it doesn't really work like that in the marketplace either. You don't build on rubble. It's not a particularly good strategy. What's interesting is even market thinkers who get quoted in the education debates get quoted out of context here. Even folks like Milton Friedman never suggested, eh, you know what, if you topple the administration in Iraq, you're going to see functioning healthy markets 18 months out. Because we know that markets are a man-made construction. They're a way in which we channel ingenuity and energy and talent and the rules of the game matter and it matters whether the rules are transparent and fair and whether the incentives are healthy and whether it's human capital that's available and whether financial capital is available. And we actually tended not to think about this very much in the choice debate. The result has been that we have tended to talk about school choice in a relatively unsophisticated and pretty destructive way. Notice that when we talk about choice in trucking or airlines or telecom or anywhere where we've been reasonably happy with it, we talk about deregulation. We talk about changing incentives for suppliers. How do we encourage them to find ways to meet the demands of consumers? And we talk about choice, which is the demand curve of that famous supply demand curve is part of the equation. But it doesn't become a notion, we don't have the notion that it in and of itself is going to solve these problems for us. So what I want to suggest is when we talk about moving outside the conventional sector, we have to do this because a conventional sector has baked into these organizations a number of assumptions and routines and ways of doing business which cannot be readily fixed through our conventional toolbox. But I want to suggest it's not enough to say, well if we have choice things will fix themselves. I think both of those are non-starters. So what we need to do then is actually move beyond the simple question of choice and move into a more full understanding of entrepreneurship and education. And entrepreneurship is premised on a real simple solution. It's that we do not know what the future solutions are going to look like. We can research, we can generate ideas, we can create R&D, we can figure out what seems to be working where and why, but we cannot predict what is going to work. This for the same reason that Univac couldn't get its estimates right, for the same reason that there were 200 automakers in 1900 and four in 1950 and nobody could have told you which four were going to be the right ones, for the same reason that people lost a fortune on pets.com in 1998, while choosing not to buy eBay or Google, because it is hard to know in the moment which of these things are going to work and how people are going to make them work. If that's the case, then what matters is not picking the right ones or proving the right ones in advance, but creating a supply side and education where creative dynamic problem solvers are going to come to the table, where they're going to be able to get their hands on resources, where they're going to have opportunities to succeed, where we are going to create the conditions where a new generation of problem solvers is going to be able to come forward. A couple of key ways to do this. One, we've got to think about human capital in this sector. Two, we've got to think about financial capital. Three, we've got to worry about barriers to entry, both formal things like licensure requirements and informal things like procurement systems and the way business is done. Fourth, it means we need to think about quality control and research and development. Actually, I was told I had 10 minutes, so I need actually two more minutes. All right. Quality control and research and development. Quality control metrics which go beyond grade three to eight reading and math scores, which frankly aren't very good at telling you whether somebody's finding a way to attract more effective teachers or leaders which aren't very effective for figuring out whether an IT system is effective or not and thinking in terms of R&D, in terms of generating new solutions which are going to be useful. There's also a whole set of next generation questions about how do we think about uncoupling funding streams, assumptions about geography, and assumptions about niche provision in a way that lets us be effective. What else? Just flag here real quick. One, Mind Trust in Indianapolis, Google it. It's a national fellowship for entrepreneurs. Second, Charter School Growth Fund, modeled on the New School Venture Fund out of the Bay Area. Funding and subsidizing mid-continent charter schools to help them expand and overcome some of these barriers. Third, the Market Maker operation that Joel Klein is running in New York City and whereby they're creating new kinds of purchasing collaboratives and agreements. Finally, the development of targeted quality control metrics, particularly the stuff that Tony Breik is going to be launching at the Carnegie Foundation later this year. What I'm talking about then is ultimately supply side in which we are not fixated on either particular schools or districts, but we're fixated on at least five pieces of the puzzle. One, human capital solutions. Two, tool builders, folks who are developing the technology and the tools that can make for a more effective next generation. Third, the kind of infrastructure. Again, notice we're talking inside and outside of districts. I think these for-profit and non-profit lines have gotten in our way. Frankly, textbooks, buses, consulting, pencils, buildings are all purchased today from for-profit entities. It strikes me that what matters is are they serving the interests of the kids rather than are they on this or that side of an arbitrary notion of who's making a buck out of it? Here's our school builders, which we tend to obsess over, but which are only really one-fifth of the puzzle. And finally, the investors, freeing up money to support all these new ventures and make them effective. Thank you very much. Good afternoon. You thought he'd talk fast? I've got to talk twice as fast because Sandy and I are both filling the amount of time he had, so hold on. Good friend of mine said, listening to me sometimes is like taking a drink of water out of a fire hydrant, so I'd be aware. I would propose to you from the standpoint of the agenda this afternoon that our educational system specifically are K-12 system, but more importantly from the perspective of the National Academy Foundation, focusing on high schools, that our educational system is doing exactly what it was built to do. It is performing exactly as its design would suggest it would perform. It would target a percentage of students to move on to a post-secondary experience successfully and a small percentage of them actually successfully matriculating through that post-secondary experience successfully and the majority of students leaving high school, not necessarily with a diploma, but with a trade that they could actually market, earn a living, raise a family, buy a house, etc. And I think the issue that's before us is that we have never fundamentally taken apart, as was just presented. All of the issues associated was, if in fact, foreign policy follows function, what if today's environment has shifted so monumentally, what is it that we need to reframe be it culture, be it infrastructure, be it investment principles to actually begin to produce what we now believe school should be producing in terms of more young people successfully matriculating to post-secondary experiences and clearly a much more global competitive connection between what's happening in Ann Arbor and what's happening in the rest of the world versus what we traditionally did, which is maybe looking beyond our city to our county, maybe to our state, maybe to our nation, but rarely to our world. So what the National Academy Foundation suggests is that we can't take it all on and fix it all. But one of the things we do believe in is that high schools are the place to start and to be focused on strategically in terms of this private public partnership. And it takes a very simplistic and yet I think strategic statement and moves it to application, which is that young people, especially in the high school years, you can pile more and more content on them, but if you do not do it in context, it won't stick and it won't be able to leverage their learning to apply it into their future and leverage it for their future. So what the National Academy Foundation believes and fundamentally targets is having industry vetted curriculum aligned with academic curriculum and standards, suggesting that actually having an internship experience in the high school where you actually get to practice what you believe you think you might want to do before you actually are in college trying to prepare to do it, and often parents suggest that college is a very expensive career exploration experience. So many would argue that knowing why and you should go to college and targeting your college for a purpose based on some experience versus just theory makes some significant sense. And lastly, that in fact we have an opportunity to have a business partner rather than a driver for what we think about when we talk about improving high schools. And in that context, we at the National Academy Foundation target, as Brian mentioned, financial services. We target hospitality and tourism, IT, engineering and aspire for health sciences. But what's it all mean to a learner? And I guess from my context, it's good to talk about system design. It's good to talk about system change. But at the end of the day, I always come back to the learner. My predecessor used to ask the fundamental question is what we're talking about good for kids. And I think at the end of the day, when I talk to young people in our academies, what comes back to me over and over again around design principles for change is personalization. The degree to which we are leveraging their network of adults to access opportunities that they cannot access through their family, their peers or themselves. And are we in fact assisting them to navigate, which has become a very, very difficult thing to do in terms of options and good choices that they can make today for a future that they can't predict and we can't tell them what it will look like. We believe and we have some experience which Sandy will lay out to you in terms of statistics, be it random assignment, longitudinal studies that suggest if you get this type of experience, you are more likely to graduate. You are more likely to go to college. And fundamentally, if you are a male of color, you are more likely to make $10,000 to $20,000 or more than your counterpart. There is a powerful connection if the intent behind the connection is partnership that's good for kids and making choices for their future and for the nation as a whole. Thank you very much. Terrible cold and a lot of you have suffered through this day with me. So I appreciate that. But basically, I have been very interested in education for a long time. I retired from a city group as CEO of the company four and a half years ago at the end of September of 03 and then started spending the great majority of my time in the not-for-profit world. I'm chairman presently of three pretty substantial not-for-profit institutions. One is the National Academy Foundation which we started in 1980 and it's grown from one school in Brooklyn with the one product financial services to somewhere over 400 schools in 41 states with about 50,000 people. And right now we have three programs and we're going to start a fourth program in September of this year. Programs currently are in information technology, hospitality and tourism and financial services which was the original one. And we're going to start a program in engineering in September of this year in 13 high schools across the country. When you think about what we're teaching, we're teaching the areas that are still growing in this country. We're teaching kids about the opportunities for advancement and the opportunities to really do well in what our country needs to really continue to be a leader in the world. And when you look at the match that we've had historically and JD talked about it of what we teach in high school and relating that to where the opportunities are, there really was no match. When our high school didn't want most of the kids to graduate them to go back to their family farms, we wanted them to take unskilled jobs in the factories. Well, the family farms have merged. The unskilled factory jobs have gone off shore so we want them to do something different. And we think that we have a model that works because all of the young people in their junior year in high school and all these cities that we operate and get a summer internship, a paid internship at a company that has some of these services. And they learn through this program and through mentoring that education is really going to be the key that unlocks the door to their future. And an amazing thing happens. All of a sudden these kids want to graduate high school and they want to go on to college. And we have a program that's been around now for 27 years, about 90 some odd percent of our students graduate versus around 50 percent in comparable schools in the same cities and close to 85 percent on the go on to college. So we have something that works. We've gotten, thank you, we've gotten the support of the Gates Foundation who sent a consultant in to look at what we were doing and help us develop a business plan that would be more workable. And since that time, we've been able to get a lot more support. And I think that we're really excited about the opportunity and with JD's leadership to really work with young kids. We have 2,500 companies around the country that participate with us in these local communities and we want to do a heck of a lot more in improving the educational system from ninth to twelfth grade. I've also been involved in education at Carnegie Hall. I've been chairman there since 1991 and we recently set up a partnership a couple of years ago with the Juilliard School where when you think about young people that graduate from music schools we have about 10,000 graduates a year and about 150 openings in the best orchestras in the United States so there's no match. Also, we don't have many teachers that want to go into the public schools and teach music which is really part of our culture. So we created a fellowship program with Juilliard which started with 12 people on a work up to 36 next fall where we pay these young people for two years after they graduate. We help them continue their music education and work with them in getting the ability to perform in chamber music and to put together orchestras that they can play in places like Carnegie Hall but also they have to spend half of their time in the public schools and you mentioned Joel Klein's name. Joel Klein was a major supporter of this right at the very beginning and so the New York City public schools have embraced this program and if you want to think about looking at how young people can do a great job teaching our kids in our schools about music education these fellows are doing that and we're now spreading that program around the world. We also work with the State Department in distance learning where we have programs with high schools in New York or New Orleans and match those with schools in New Delhi or Istanbul or Mali or South Africa or Alaska where the kids talk about their high school experience and talk about and listen to music that is from the local communities and it's really a pleasure to see and they get to learn more about this world of ours and how important it is to make this world a place where we all get along with each other and finally in my medical school where I've been chairman of we were the first school to started in 2001 in the Middle East in Qatar we're going to graduate our first class in May 8th of this year and young people there have done as well in their school grades and as well in their medical tests as the young New York which I think is a phenomenal thing for the first year and we hope they're now in the process of having their match where they try and match where they're going to do their residency all but one of them want to come to the United States and have my fingers crossed because it's going to be decided by next Tuesday as to that this match works but when you want to think about how do you bridge a cultural divide between different cultures this is a heck of a way of doing it and because we were the leader and the first ones to do that institutions like Texas A&M built a school of engineering in Qatar in Education City then came Carnegie Mellon then came Georgetown and finally Northwest and building a school of journalism so lots of things are happening in this world we got to work with educating the young people so that they see they have a future in all these countries and the future is a heck of a lot better than thinking about what's going to happen up there and blowing themselves up so I think we have a wonderful opportunity and it's been a pleasure to have an opportunity to talk to you for a couple minutes I was I went to New York City Schools and I'm thinking of using my time because I wanted to grow up and either play third base for the Mets or the Yankees I didn't care at that time so I'm thinking of trying to catch some ground balls or something here and see if it's too late that Deborah would have a heart attack so I'm going to do the real stuff I'm kind of the establishment guy in one sense I mean I'm the governor said at our cabinet meeting yesterday that Mike you know you realize you're more responsible for the system of education in this state than any other single person including her and that's true because I have constitutional authority and can do some things unilaterally and she pretty much has to get the legislature and others to buy in I'm not appointed by her I'm independent and in accepting this position one of the things was on the condition that we would radically try to change the system and because we have to get out of denial you know when districts and I was responding I was guilty of this myself for a while but when you're debating whether or not your dropout rate is 40% or 50% or 20% for that matter it's not a worthy debate and it's just saying it's far too much and to tell kind of what everyone Sandy said at last but this world we're in right now the Michigan story is kids thought they could well not thought you could drop out of high school get a job on the line have a place up north when I first moved here I told my wife this is as far north as I'm going huh but they get a little cottage up north and all that and those days are over and so one of the first things I did my first year we worked it through the legislature but frankly we had a position that we thought we could do it unilaterally if they didn't agree and that was to increase the rigor in our schools to get past this myth that those kids can't do algebra because when I surveyed the districts I had been a local superintendent and it was astounding to me that most of the districts in the state didn't require even algebra one to graduate that's when we decided we need to get in the business of deciding that for them and then giving a lot of local autonomy on how we get to that point in terms of all kids reaching proficiency but I really couldn't believe it when people just kind of said to me in passing because I was head of the superintendent's association for a few years Ken knows it was my cushy job and it was one of those things that people would come up and say Mike you know they can't do it and those kids can't and let's face it there was racism involved here some of this was about poor rural kids it was mainly a socioeconomic argument that they just felt poor kids couldn't we're going to do this in Michigan we're going to lead the country because everyone else who hasn't had it as tough as we've had it is kind of falling asleep at the switch here so we've kicked in rigor but I'd like to mention a few things about in terms of the private sector let's face it we get high quality products from the private sector now and we do it on kind of a basis of determining which are the best products we get software we get textbooks hopefully those are going to be antiquated pretty soon we get buildings you know and we make decisions with the private sector but some people in my field don't get that and the second you talk about the private sector involved in the learning part they freak out you know that's for the public business well it really we can find the same partnership there and this doesn't mean giving up our public duty and responsibility but for example it may mean that you can go into a district if I started as a super like a real superintendent again I think I'd take half my schools tomorrow and make the performance contract schools with some folks in the private sector we'd still be public because I'd be the superintendent there would be a board but we would have performance contracts and we'd measure them and we'd probably give some of those performance contracts to teachers who I believe would rally from that very district and say let me have one of those let me get out of the system that is on the other side of the equation and I'll pick up one of those schools and we'll build our own and I really think it would foster some really interesting work and we would get to the point where all kids could reach high levels of achievement because they can and just as an aside for those who don't who really haven't clicked on the globalization problem that we have all of our kids have to reach higher levels of achievement for us to compete with just the top kids in China China doesn't have to educate all its kids we do and we can't give up on them too early and I'm going to battle in Lansing right now because behind the scenes there's some lobbyists trying to do away with our high school requirements and I called them out at a session recently because we're in the first half of the first quarter of the game this year's ninth graders are the first ones that are expected to reach these high levels of achievement we've only gone through one semester and people are freaking out and it's partly because the system hasn't adapted there are some kids who will learn algebra in a construction trades course with agrarian theorem that will never learn it in a traditional course and the system has to adapt our system is mainly around adult convenience as opposed to student outcomes so this is something we need to but we need to do it in a way that's sensitive to the practitioners for instance if I could ask one thing of the business community I did it to our chamber state chamber recently that really has worked they have the same goals in mind sometimes we're seen to be pitted against each other but they obviously want our kids to succeed they need a workforce if nothing else but I said do me a favor and don't bash teachers bash me I'm responsible for the system but it's a self-fulfilling prophecy if you bash teachers my daughter is a brand new teacher but she was pulled at every angle not to be a teacher because the profession has lost some of its luster because people beat it up and you know so it's a self-fulfilling prophecy that if even people who are disgusted with the system make it a teacher issue we're never going to get out of the problem that we have because ultimately it is about teachers with kids I think we need to with the private sector we're very lucky in this state we've got tremendous relationships with Microsoft and with Verizon and with Mott and some of those foundations have been very helpful but ultimately we need to get over this hang-up that we can't actually allow the private sector to help as I said with kind of almost performance contracts another area I would add is we can't get early childhood done in this state and the governor asked me to head a team of legislators and some association leaders we met last night and we're going to look back in 10 years if we're not careful and even though we know all the research is clear that early childhood is the key to change in the dynamic especially for poor kids all the way through the system we're going to look back in 10 years if we're not careful because we're fighting over the status quo and keeping our stuff and we're still not going to have any system that's supported and it's the one thing we know we could do differently we spend about a billion dollars a grade now in this state but we can't lap off a lousy 50 million to try to get something going in the early childhood arena so maybe there's a way that the private sector can actually help us I don't know Sandy and the finance gurus of the country bond or do whatever we need that we won't want to maybe not fare sterns we won't use for this but we some of the other outfits to get up front figure out how we can because the cost this will pay for itself in time if we could find a way to get this financed up front because it's hard to get it out of the system we would I think see spectacular results we'd have fewer going to prison we'd have more kids graduating and paying taxes and it would pay for itself so maybe there's somewhere in there that the private sector can help us which is kind of the theme today I really JD I think talked about the work she does and I know it I think go lightly in some of the schools and Ken was are affected by that I just left the school that Eastern Michigan does with Washington our intermediate school district today and I was at one at one that we're pitching a hospital in Pontiac on last Monday and the issue is that we have financed now five year programs at the state level where you can take five years and in that fifth year with that you not only get a high school diploma but you get a community college degree and in effect you double dip and you do it around themes so one's the hospital we have health systems a Henry Ford health system right now has kids there's a kid whose parent can't even imagine themselves making $12,000 a year and this kid at 14 is already guaranteed and signed a contract that if he stays with it for five years he'll come out as a respiratory therapist and make $50,000 when he's 19 years old this is making it relevant this is helping kids connect to what we really need to do I was going to show a short video but my time is up so I'll wait for some interchange that we have here thank you thank you all of you this was provocative I know people in the room are waiting to ask all kinds of questions and make comments I'm going to speak from a kind of invisible expertise that I think is ironically missing from the discussions we have as we have this incredible sense of passion and urgency about the fact that our schools in this country don't work and as I think you said they do exactly what they were designed to do so it's an interesting way to put a problem but the expertise I'm going to speak from is that of having been a third grade teacher for a great deal of my career and it's pretty interesting that as we move into a space where we want to think what is it that it would take for schools to work we don't want to leave out of these partnerships complicated expertise it takes to actually get young people to learn something totally not easy not natural not easy I would defy that most people in this room if faced with a group of 38 year olds would be quite frightened and would find it very very difficult to get them do anything at all let alone engage in an apprenticeship or do any of the very worthwhile things we heard about so I want to talk just briefly when we think about partnerships and we think from the sense of urgency that we have what will be the partnerships that it will take in order to accomplish some of what we've just heard about I think it's exciting to think that perhaps we would be able to engage a much broader swath of our society and thinking about what it takes to build schools that work it makes complete sense that kids opportunities to learn ought to relate to the quote real world it ought to be related to the skills and competencies that they'll really need it makes sense that we should nurture them and engage them in apprenticeships that we should figure out how to get far more kids in this country to go to college and to go to college for good reasons and it makes complete sense that we should take advantage of resources in the private sector to do this I can't imagine arguing against that we share an urgency that the way schools work as they were designed is unacceptable but you know we're not the first people to think about this we're not at all the first people to say American schools could do something amazing for this country in ought to you know in 1840 the common school reformers had ambitions that sound just about as exciting and passionate as ours do now and it would be important to have a bit of humility about why each time a group of reformers takes the country by storm we end up as you said not accomplishing very much business as usual and I don't really want to be here 10 or 20 years from now with business as usual I don't think our panelists do either so I'd like to point out a few things that would have to be part of these partnerships to realize the ambitions that you have as you express them and I think that doing that means that we've got to continue to have some pretty tough discussions about what it really means to be educated in the 21st century so I'd like the word education and educated and educating the verb, the adjective, the noun all to stay in the conversation because only if we do that we'll be able to harvest the resources you're talking about so if you think about these partnerships we'll have to have real expertise in the partnerships of people who know how to analyze the competencies and engagements that young people are going to have as they move into the adult world in the 21st century what are the underlying skills that it will take to do that we can't just assume that by having them engage that they'll actually develop those skills so people who know how to look at the things people are required to do and analyze what it takes to perform those are going to be needed whatever you want to call those people they're going to be content experts they're going to be people who know how to analyze practice and can figure out what you have to learn to do that because experts are notorious at doing marvelous things that kids can watch maybe even sort of partner with but experts aren't very good at unpacking what it takes to do that work so don't assume for a moment that if you engage kids with experts wherever they are in the business community wherever that those experts will be very good at doing something crucial which I'm going to call the design of instruction even if that's old language think about it metaphorically it has to do with identifying what has to get learned and breaking it down in ways that people have no idea what to do can begin learning it so that's identifying what to learn and also scaffolding and structuring the opportunity to learn that and if we don't do that we can do some things that are exciting but only halfway there I love the idea of the baking in of the sort of traditional structures that make it impossible to reform but I also don't want us to do things that are half baked either so as we bake and I don't mean that Rick you're saying something half baked but we really have to think carefully about what we're trying to bake here we're trying to bake a system that would really educate an incredible variety of kids much more varied than the common school reformers for all their worries about the immigrants to this country all that they were worrying about we really have a lot we've got to figure out how to take what competent adults know how to do and break it down that really lots of different kinds of kids can learn it whether it's algebra mic or whether it's learning to read which is probably the most difficult thing I can think of to teach anyone to do and I think kids are going to have to continue to learn to read and we're going to have to be pretty responsible about attending to the fact that adults who work with young people need specialized skills to do that I don't care about talking today about licensure or all the specifics about that but don't put people working with young people who don't have skills to help them learn we wouldn't do that in any other occupation in this country we don't put people in your kitchen repairing the disposal who don't know how to work plumbing and we don't have people building bridges who don't understand engineering and I don't go to someone to cut my hair who just likes to use scissors and has nice ideas about style and neither do you so I'm not even going to mention surgery because you really don't want anyone going to you know do surgery on you who says I have a great idea about how plastic spoons could improve on it and I'm not being facetious at all I'm just saying it's easy and that's why I started by saying I'm speaking from an invisible expertise we don't name very often that of having been a third grade teacher that the expertise required to teach is non-trivial so in whatever settings we design these new forms of learning let's not forget to think in new ways about what teaching is going to require because we won't get there if we don't it won't happen by assuming that learning occurs naturally because we have so much evidence that it doesn't so I'm glad I've had a chance to be in this discussion I look forward to further arguments together thanks okay well I'd like to thank our panelists Sandy and JD are heading out hopefully Sandy can get some rest and get better soon but Rick, Debra, Michael thank you Rick, Debra and Michael are here to answer questions and if Debra would like to come down and join us here on the podium and so I'd like to open up for questions and we can go from there sure let's go to that my question deals with curriculum and might be directed towards the superintendent I'm a graduate of Utica community schools in suburban Detroit and I am a product of AP programs my community schools has a great a good deal of those classes and I was wondering I have a general idea that once you challenge students they rise to the occasion and I tend to disagree with people who assume the lowest common denominator in student bodies and I was wondering what your guys' opinions of maybe tending towards a more challenging curriculum because I believe that students as I said previously tend to rise to the occasion and perform better on things like standardized tests and other performance tests like that requirements were a lot of people thought all kids couldn't reach these higher levels of achievement I'm a product I have great parents but I was one of eight and it wasn't until a teacher when I believed that a teacher believed that I could do it that really kicked it in for me and I think that's true across the board except for the most severely cognitively impaired kids and even the so-called special needs kids it's a myth I mean we kind of box kids in little areas here there are some kids who really aren't going to be able to write a sentence but are going to be able to excel in math and the brain's a funny thing so I think you've made a brilliant point I couldn't agree more it's about high expectations and if we haven't for our kids one reason I'm so ticked off that some of these people are trying to do away with the new high school curriculum before we even give it a chance because it's just it sends a signal to some of the kids right now we don't think you can do it All of you have emphasized giving students context for their content through partnerships that help to motivate them to give things more depth but my question is is the movement towards standardized tests a useful as a yardstick across schools so that we can in fact see which ones are doing better and thus evaluate public versus private different schools within the public system or is in fact this movement a quite destructive force towards entrepreneurial activity and that we shouldn't require it of private schools because in fact it is destructive rather than helpful and we need to get better measures of output to truly reflect what you are saying needs to be done as part of instruction unquestionably we need better measures so I don't think anyone here is going to say that the measures we have measure things we care about should we have differential expectations about whether we try to assess whether we're making a difference that's a complicated question because in the end many people have great ideas about what can help kids learn but we do have to figure out some way of understanding whether we're having an impact and you're pointing to a great conundrum because the things we have to measure it you know there are all kinds of problems they don't measure what we care about things that we care about occur over long periods of time and yet to say that in the face of that we release the responsibility from doing that seems to me something we can't afford to do so we have a pretty significant agenda that we're only barely scratching the surface of which has to do with developing sensible ways that we could responsibly account for what kids learn so I think that's only partly addressing what you're saying so I'm letting my colleagues pick up too I mean I don't disagree with anything they ever just said certainly the notion that I mean it's inevitably the case that having some kinds of metrics is going to get in the way of some people who are trying to provide a service on the other hand you know Mike referred to kind of bare sterns I mean the reason that you care about regulation and transparency is because you get all kinds of moral hazards and all kinds of slip shot behavior if you don't structure markets in the right way so we're talking about people being able to try to serve 50 million kids and get a piece of 500 billion dollars that we're putting up there I absolutely want metrics and there's absolutely going to be some trade off in terms of markets and that's just the way life is that's not a problem on the other hand it matters a ton how you configure these metrics so if all we're focused on and I would argue all we've been focused on in the last six seven years is grade three to eight reading and math scores and graduation rates and particularly race-based and socioeconomic achievement gaps within those that it takes out of play a whole bunch of provision and important services which becomes much more difficult to explain or sell or market because people aren't looking at these metrics so if you're the new teacher project for instance and you're trying to help districts figure out ways to attract high quality math and science teachers at the high school level well the appropriate metric is not what happened to those kids test scores over the next nine months the appropriate metric is what is the talent pool that you're putting into that district look like to what would have been there absent your service if you're school net and you're serving a data warehousing capability and an IT tracking capability to districts the relevant metric is not do those kids test scores happen and go up the next spring the question is what's happening in terms of the use of data in terms of the amount of personnel or spent on this so the key is not that we don't want the key is not that metrics are problematic but we need the right metrics we need metrics which measure the service that's being provided by a non-profit by a for-profit by a district what have you and we need those metrics to map onto the things that we care about and the problem is we've spent we've got a couple hundred real smart people in this country worrying about test scores and rigor and design and validity we have hardly anybody I would argue we don't have more than five or six people who actually spend a lot of time thinking about these questions and that strikes me as a misallocation of intellectual energy your school board member and Ann Arbor and you and Todd if I were in your spot I would try to think of at least testing out in a school some metrics that the school thought they could live with teachers in particular as a team and then try to determine growth over time so some of those would be standardized tests perhaps and then maybe reward those and money's not the only way although it is a way because I think I guess I'm still stuck on trying to impress the Metz guy over here even though but it's like baseball I mean we don't measure a player based on just home runs we look at strikeouts who look at RBI's we look at their temperament you may not want a guy on your team who's actually produces all the numbers but he's nothing but a pain in the clubhouse and brings a team morale down so I mean it's a little bit like that and it's why it's one of the downsides of no child no child the spirit of no child is great it's got to be reworked in terms of the kind of the aggressive nature of measures and you know I was on the phone yesterday a conference call with the secretary spellings because they've announced kind of a new way that supposedly we have flexibility so the whole public thinks that we really do but we really don't I mean it's kind of a complicated I think they're just trying to jam in their last few months something that looks like is this going to Washington by the way is I think spec states used to be cynical so it's okay right no I think deputy Simon spoke at length and I think he's genuinely trying to find ways to bring more flexibility to the testing system because he's been there but we'll see you know and whatever they come up with then they're gone January one so then we're back to the drawing board that's part of the problem with the way we get a new sheriff in town before you know it we're starting another system I just want to maybe two things that as someone who studied test based accountability a great deal I agree with that the the panelists have said I think two things are important to know that I think they're never a substitute for kind of capacity building or training or development or the other hard work of education but a compliment and also I think one of the problems one of the disadvantage of the kind of focus on test based accountability in its current framework is it's kind of diverted some attention from other forms of testing kind of diagnostic or formative assessment that are really tremendously important and can be tremendously useful although I I think I agree we definitely don't want to go back to the the world where we don't look where we don't focus on outcomes every country has educated children and there seem to be a few countries who do that reasonably well most of them in east or southeast Asia and if we look at the design of their systems I think it seems to have features that are quite unlike much of what we've heard this evening they have a national curriculum they have a professional ministry of education which is stable across political regimes and they have a professional culture of expertise and a well-developed system of teacher education and I would just like to ask them for example Rick to say something about why these these countries are not their education is not driven by market forces at least not principally by that and so you seem to be proposing a quite different kind of dynamic and structure to move us to a different place but one thing that business does I think successfully is to emulate success and since we do have some interesting models why aren't we looking to some extent in that direction sure no it's a great question and there's two responses here one is not necessarily that I'm advocating we not go that direction but that I don't think we're capable of getting there through the route we've been trying to travel for instance if you look at Singapore or South Korea one of the ways in which they're able to afford and maintain a culture of teacher professionalism is you routinely have class sizes in the 35 to 42 students per teacher range this is actually we've done this exact opposite way in the US between 1973 and 2003 we actually reduced class size the ratio of teachers to students from 23 to 1 to 15 and a half to 1 which effectively doubled the amount of money we were spending on educators if we had made a different decision if we had emulated say Singapore and South Korea we could have actually essentially doubled teacher pay and maintained static class sizes we chose to go the other direction this high intensity of human capital versus students strategy is one that's actually much more characteristic of low achieving countries Luger-Vustman's actually done some great stuff on this using the piece of data and international stuff so one the question is that you know that we have chosen not to go those design routes and I would argue it's partly because of the way decisions are made the political forces it's much easier to sell class size reduction in the US context and alternatively so if you want to actually see those kinds of changes made in the allocation of resources again I think it's very difficult to do it through the established machinery it's much easier to do it by allowing again a new generation of providers whose assumptions are built for a different labor market to step in and do this two quick factoids on that context worth noting one at the average lifespan of a Fortune 500 firm in the United States is less than 50 years so from birth to death the typical Fortune 500 company doesn't make it a half century right now you know Debra mentioned before Horace Mann came into Massachusetts in 1837 right and Horace Mann's tenure at the Mass Board of Ed was 1837-1849 basically that's the predicates of the system that we're working with the normal colleges which are our institutes of higher ed teacher training 1300 teacher programs most of these were established at least a century ago so what we're working with are very aged very well established organizations which have enormous difficulty re-engineering their assumptions so that's one the other way to respond to your question which I'll just throw out there is that when we think about nations like say you know Bill Bennett's funny I asked Bill Bennett about the times he went to France as US Secretary of Ed but when we talk about France we talk about Japan we talk about other in Singapore certainly nations with strong ministries and strong unified cultures of education they are working off a particular set of political and organizational relationships a certain sets of history in a way that the labor market's evolved we are actually trying to do this in the US in a very different context the points come up repeatedly that we have our system one of the reasons it doesn't make sense to beat up on educators or principals is because for the most part they are doing what that we expect them to do what we're trying to hear is get a system disequilibrium and the problem is that the nature of federalism the nature of governance and local control in the United States the way we have massive sunk costs in terms of commitments and resources and contracts all of which makes it very difficult to simply try to emulate say a Swedish or Finnish or Singapore or South Korea or Japanese model on the fly therefore again whatever the kind of reinvention that one has in mind what I want to suggest is that systemic reform is unlikely to be a route that will get us where we want to go that blind hope that choice if we let people choose things somehow that's going to get us there is nonsense the way to think about it is the way we think about deregulation in most of the U.S. economy which is how do we create opportunities for smart people to operate under regulated kind of transparent conditions where we are going to figure out new ways to solve problems we haven't yet solved I just want to make one beef comment I don't want to I think we should get more questions and I think one thing that's striking in your response which I mostly agree with is how much you're building on to the basic basic ways we think about capitalism and how it can work and trying to figure out if we can tool that I think your answer about systems companies don't last more than 50 years is fascinating but I observe in recently thinking about this that so much of what we would need to do if we really wanted to make a system work is to do things actually quite un-American so your answer doesn't quite get us to that I think although I agree with it for instance we would actually have to not continue to believe so romantically that learning is just natural because so many of our solutions still pick up that very American idea that learning will just happen if we design environments and we put kids in them they'll learn which echoes what I was trying to say earlier so you know in other countries they don't actually think that teaching and learning are natural and that's part of picks up the question because they build a professional culture where you assume that in order to educate people you really need skill and knowledge so I just want to put out for us to think about that we would have to do something even more radical in part with what you're saying because we would have to take up norms and values that actually really are antithetical to so much about American people about learning let me push back on that for instance it strikes me that some of the schools which have been able to kind of grow up so say Ed Vigin's collectives say Don Chalvey's Aspire schools in California actually you know certainly say high tech high I would argue I certainly actually take the heart though what you're talking about that they take pedagogy and instruction very seriously and in fact you know high tech high has the nation's first non-institutional higher education based ed school because they're frustrated that rather than trying to get generically prepared teachers they said write the Japanese assumption we want to prepare people who understand our ways of approaching pedagogy and instruction so I guess I wonder is it necessarily is there necessarily a conflict between these kinds of entities being able to grow a coherent and consistent approach to teaching and learning and educating is that really necessary I guess I don't I guess I don't see that as necessarily juxtaposed to what you're talking about it's not necessarily juxtaposed I just urging you to think about the fact that some of what we'll take for this to work will require some things that actually run against our cultural assumptions about learning so your examples show cases where we've been able to do that presumably but it will take overcoming some of the long historical thoughts about the way learning occurs in this country that I don't think you see in other cultures so I'm just urging you to combine that into the model rather than that it's juxtaposed but I think we should yeah let's get into it unless Mike wants to Okay here well I'd like to I congratulate the Ford School and others for holding this I'm a member of the fact of the business school and I'm looking around I think I'm the only one here from the business school I don't see any of my colleagues here this is the kind of event that only happens at a university like this and what drew me down here was the role of the private sector in education and I spend my life thinking about the private sector so it's really interesting to hear what are the aspirations and expectations for the private sector just listening carefully I think I heard two things and I'd like to just reflect that back and then have you reflect reflect our reflections back to me perhaps I heard two things one is that there's a set of assumptions about what goes on in the private sector in terms of the capabilities that the private sector has or its functions of our ability or incentives or competition who knows what that when applied to public education will somehow transform it and make it make it better so we just take the for-profit sector or sensibilities from that sector and bring it in and it will be better off and then I also heard that perhaps in the extreme corporations can be involved in curriculum development or less extreme can serve as a home for students we've heard Sandy White talk about students can do internships in the lake and they can get closer to vocational choices vocational preparation in the lake so those are two different models the first one I know a little bit about what Joel Klein has been doing I think of that as the Joel Klein bucket of taking business sensibilities and bringing it into education the second one is a little more more amorphous as to how deeply involved we want corporations themselves to be in education so could you reflect back on what it is we're looking for when we think about the private sector in K through 12 education we want both of these if so how much of each and I guess as from someone coming from the business world or such as at least some from the world that studies the business world you don't dress like this and make a good job in the business world I'm just curious what the limits are I'm pretty alert to the competitive environment of corporations and how limited they may be with especially with respect to that second model so I'm just curious about the pitfalls and the concerns if you go too far Mike, want to address that? Okay, the analogy I used in the brief remarks were along the lines that we use the private sector now all the time we just don't think about it that way and that's why when I've heard debates I mean for example if I had my way we would be a lot more open to virtually all the non-instructional areas being privatized that doesn't mean not under the control of the school board I think that has to happen and they have to award contracts and it has to be done honorably and all that and that's pretty much what's happening anyway large amounts of the non-instructional stuff but I think once we have faith in that to build our buildings to feed our children to do all that why would we not at least think about the other step because the business world can also be entrepreneurial teachers who form a group to decide to put a performance contract together was kind of the point I was trying to make earlier they could be XYZ company and the way we've seen I think technology just blossom I think the young folks are more likely to help us reinvent education in the virtual world than someone like me my first year as state superintendent my daughter was first year as well actually she was in her in her student teaching year and it was kind of amazing that I'd come home and you know she'd ask me about stuff and I'd talk and then she'd look at me like I was a total idiot because you know she's in a real world situation and part of it was that even her kids four years she's high school but four years just four years removed were on this curve of technology use and comfort and all that and then we're still kind of in this Ferris Bueller world you know uh anyone anyone you know with the jewel and stuff so I'm the reason I'm more open than I might have been 10 years ago is I think it takes some entrepreneurial educators and often young who can help us rethink that and I might envision this to be as I said earlier that Ann Arbor might encourage its teachers to think in that way and it could be that they just charter existing teachers under the same salary schedule but I think if you opened it up and say how many of you might want to form your own entity now can that transfer to like Microsoft you know you'd know more than I would in that regard but theoretically yeah these things could grow and multiply and train do professional development for their staff but to me some of this is also trying to give I think there's a lot of good parts of the existing system that don't get recognized and it would be interesting to contrast it with kind of this a different world that had a heavier hand in the from the business community and then take success where it leads us I mean part of this from my point of view is just I said this earlier but getting over the denial you know part of the reason folks like me who've been doing this for a long time it was harder to get to this point is because we it you just keep getting beat up you know people think it's easier than it is and then we start getting defensive and say oh yeah well how about Enron you know and so we go back and forth you think we're bad how about Enron and in a way we just can figure this out together because we're all of our interests are at stake and I think that's what'll start to happen if it can't just be this agrarian model anymore camera yeah just a couple of times one I mean I would certainly say there's nothing special about the private sector private sector for one thing however when we think about for profit entities one advantage they have is there is enormously clarifying force within those companies which is right especially you know whether they're privately held or publicly held that shareholders have very clear pursuits at the end of the day which allows them to focus which is much more difficult in public agencies so the Mike's you know kind of points which are well taken is that particularly if we want to try to solve particularly could clearly conceive problems there is real value in the way in which for profit entities as opposed to nonprofits or government agencies are likely to tackle particular problems assumptions and capabilities nothing special about for profits they have a set of tools you know which I think are in some ways distinct partly because they pyramid expertise and personnel who are different in some ways and in terms of preparation orientation and folks in public agencies in the abstract nothing special about them given that the way that we have traditionally recruited and staffed and approached things in the public sector particularly in education there is utility to bringing in ideas and individuals who have not been employed as far as curricular development I mean all curricular development and testing for instance today is already created by for profits I mean there's three major testing companies are all for profit but we're actually don't think oligopoly which is part of the problem rather than anything which is actually what I would argue is the key issue here though if we think about what's the real value about the private sector it's nothing they do and nothing that private sector individuals are it's simply that in the private sector we're comfortable with the idea that in fact every quarter one out of every 20 U.S. firms is destroyed is either opens or closes in the private sector every year roughly one out of every five entities opens or shuts and stores this process we're talking about the renewal the fact that organizations kind of outlived their assumptions something special about people in the private sector it's the nature of the sector itself allows this regenerative process to take place in the public sector whether it's healthcare education we because these are things or public entities organized by public policy we tend to inhibit that regenerative process so rather than say what's special about private sector individuals or private sector firms indeed it's the nature of that political economy has certain advantages when we're trying to make sure that we figure out how to create room to reallocate services and solve new problems and I'd be happy to talk about that in terms of dollars or what have you but let's just leave it there I want to just only go through just real quickly if you can state your question very briefly we've got a few questions out all of them together just a quick statement of the question and then we'll get everyone's thoughts okay I'll see if I can make it brief in discussions about the private sector's involvement in education I think the conversation and the language that gets used tends to be around competition and defining what's good for students in terms of sort of their economic well-being and I'm wondering if we can how you would see we could broaden that discussion to involve the private sector more in conversations about the public good and civic education okay great given your perspectives and experiences and knowledge is there anything in a private sector education partnership or ideas moving between that we should not consider for education okay what if we're not as interested in potential privately held company shareholders views on what mathematics say kids should know as we are in experts or our tradition or mathematicians use of that same subject okay yeah I mean last question last question this is my question but I think it's simple that if you're providing like your curriculum that's a hell of a show how would you know if this is working talk a lot about what if you don't care how would you know if it's working how would you know if it's going fast enough I think that's possible today it's a whole bunch of things that have been wrong okay civic education what things about the private sector should we not emulate how do we know if it's working and the who determines the goals of education to the private sector determine those goals or what mathematics do we need to know that's might be statement but please go ahead why don't we just each of the panelists comment briefly Mike well I think that's I think public boards are still the ultimate answer to that that the fact that a publicly elected board may choose to go with a private outfit over some period of time that's what I meant by performance contract they'd have to they'd have to satisfy those folks ultimately superintendent team and the board so I think the part about the public good is a good point and I wouldn't be in favor of kind of runaway private sector you decide what math is important because ultimately that can and should be done by university and K-12 people and like we have pretty we have clarity in the state now about what the content expectations are for algebra and that should be the same whether it's Marquette or Monroe and there could be a performance contract around that to say help kids get to these higher levels of achievement and some of that would be demonstrated with the last question based on to know if it's working I mean some of the big numbers we need we need to have real diplomas number one because even even the it's just even in a system we know this that to pretend that kids who are graduating are all where we really expect them to be there's some phony diplomas out there and by that I mean that they really we move kids along they've gotten a diploma but what I'm getting at is if you can start to establish in Michigan let's talk Michigan that these these content expectations have been met you can do that through what we talked about earlier variety forms of measurement then you can say those are real diplomas and number two it's gone up to 95 percent of the kids are getting them and then from that 90 percent of those kids are going on to some kind of a post high school experience probably college at least two year but possibly trade school so those are how it would be working but I think the spirit behind this about the public good is something we can't lose because the private sector particularly if it gets the big private sector the shareholder piece that can be driven by strictly profits and you could you could at least imagine where maybe the interests of the kids aren't the foremost perhaps but that's where you know keep the boards involved make sure that if you did that you'd have teams and board administrative teams that would be would be measuring what works best rather than trying to reinvent it all the time and that's where you could allow some of that on well I know it's interesting that Heather said that so much of this was framed in terms of competition because of course indeed some of what's been getting talked about is dramatically about competition but some of the theme today is also dramatically about partnerships so those two things are two ideas that I think we're trying to wrestle with because in part the sentiment is that if we expected to build a school system that could actually work and was designed to do what we hoped it would do it would actually require engagements of new kinds more sectors of society I think we're struggling a little bit about what would be the structures to make that possible but I don't hear this is all about competition in fact I was trying to suggest that what we have to think about as we forge these partnerships is what sorts of expertise will it require to do that you know just to take your comment about the mathematics agreements I mean there's still kind of a tension there in a sense because part of what we're hearing from the private sector is we want to tell you what sorts of skills and knowledge we want people to have and in that sense the voices of mathematicians have a role to play but so do other people and we haven't figured out how to have that conversation yet and we won't immediately figure out how to have it because on one hand I don't know that we haven't talked about this today I don't know that we're ready to abandon the goals of liberal education badly as we do it right now the idea of whether we want to give up the idea that there are things worth learning that one can't immediately tie to demonstrable skills in the real world doesn't strike me as likely that's why I wanted the word education to stay in here we have long traditions of thought around what it means to be an educated person on the other hand the idea that mathematicians alone would determine on the basis of that history what it means to be mathematically proficient doesn't seem promising either so I think we're venturing into a model in which we're trying to reinvent perhaps really for the first time different kinds of partnerships I don't think this is easy at all if you ask what we shouldn't emulate I mean that seems to me maybe too simplistically obvious but the products we're talking about are kids and it's a little frightening to think about how precariously we might experiment with on one hand knowing we don't do a good job now but realizing that for a particular kid moving through a school system that's experimenting it's that kids education I mean I feel worried enough sometimes when my own kids have novices teaching them and realizing that was their fifth grade poetry unit you know too bad but you know if you think about major experiments in school systems these products here kids they're not things you can decide oh well we're not we're tired of that product we're not going to produce it anymore that's not a choice so what it means to experiment in this multiple private public sector and thinking about how the private sector can contribute there are things to manage about the difference of this product environment compared to some of the others and I'm sure Rick has ways to think about that but I I think it matters and I think this is presumably in the best read could be about trying to forge new ways to build bring more people to the table but we don't have the norms or the history for this yet so it's an ambitious agenda that shouldn't be taken too lightly if we were going to move further in this direction just a few few of the last few remarks sure yeah I think this question about economic well-being is I I guess I just if you could talk about that whether we're talking about public school boards and public officials whether we're talking about using non-traditional for profit providers question is what do we want schools to provide they're spending tub public dollars that we're paying they're educating our kids as long as those are the kind of the guiding parameters whatever the exact bodies are once you're kind of overseeing and making these decisions it's going to be quite it's going to be decisions we make and I'd like to think that it will always that we will always remember that education's about more than what are projected lifetime earnings but I'm not sure actually that strikes me that some of the for-profit providers in this space actually are sometimes more attuned to those issues because they're more sensitive to what families are looking for then some of the that some of you know the district officials or state officials that you'll talk to as far as you know the math professionals making choices or not again I mean I would suggest you haven't spent a you know if you spend a lot of time watching urban school boards make decisions I would argue that you actually see a dearth of math professionals there and even you know when state boards of education are weighing curricula there's a lot of folks at the table other than people who are deeply versed in math this is so it's a problem it's a problem in democratic control I would actually argue again that some of the for-profit entities at Edison schools for instance I would argue spent a lot more time and effort wondering what math experts had to say in its curricular design than the typical publicly governed district or state because they had proprietary interest again clarifying reason they would care about having the best math am I saying private sector is better at doing math? no absolutely not I'm saying that there are different tools in the toolbox and that we have generally not availed ourselves of them because of the structures that we operate in and the assumptions we've baked in and who determine goals we should determine the goals because they're our schools and we can regulate and we can structure as we see fit okay thank all the panelists and thank the audience and welcome to continue the conversation and to join us out in the great hall for the reception actually I just wrote a piece I'd love to share with you