 And as shown here, we're at a much worse point than we've been at any point in the last 50 years. So that's the first thing. I also wanted to show you this. So this is what's happened in recent years with more detailed data. Now we don't have income achievement gaps with this level of data. This is an eight minute state test coordinated showing the black-white gap over the last 20 years. You can see we've made very slight progress over the last 20 years or so in terms of black-white test score gaps, whether we measure it by name or whether we measure it with a state test. At this rate, it would take about 75 years for the black-white gap to go away. So this is by way of saying we're not there yet in terms of racial achievement gaps, but we're certainly closer than we are in terms of economic achievement gaps. Third thing I want to show you is this. This is the trends in college completion for high and low income children from high and low income families over the last 20 years. So this is cohorts of kids who were born in the early 60s compared to cohorts who were born in the early 80s. And so we've made very little progress at the low end. If you look at low income students, college completion rates have come up very modestly over that 20 year period from 5% to 9%. Whereas for high income kids, college completion rates have come up dramatically. So the gap in college completion by a family background is widened over the same time as well. This is similar to the picture of Lincoln. So why has this been happening? Well, one story of course is income inequality. This is the share of all income in the U.S. going to the top 10% from earlier. So Lincoln would be the top 4%. This is the top 10%. And of course in the 50s and 60s and into the 70s, economic inequality was very low. The top 10% were about a third of all income, now they're about half of all income. Here's a different way of looking at income inequality that's particularly relevant for children. This is the ratio of the income of the 90th percentile family to the 10th percentile family. Among families with children, and so I'm thinking about school which kids, this is the population we want. Back in 1970, that ratio was less than 5. A high income family earned less than 5 times as much as a low income family. That ratio now is almost 10. So the gap in terms of dollars of income of children growing up in high income families is roughly double of what it was 40 years ago. So why has the income of achievement gap been growing? Well, let me suggest a few possible reasons. Is it because schools are getting worse? That's sort of an obvious answer. Let me show you this one first. So this is a study where children were followed from kindergarten all the way through eighth grade, and at each number of points in time we measured the gap between high and low income children in terms of their achievement. Now, if we thought that schools were responsible for producing most of this gap, we might think that the gap would start out relatively small when children got to school, and then get a lot wider over time. What we see here is that the gap between kids and their kindergarten, and in a different study even when they're age four, the gap is one in a quarter standard deviation. So that's enormous. And it doesn't get a lot bigger by eighth grade. So most of this gap between high and low income children is happening in early childhood. Schools aren't getting worse now. Now, they're not going up as much as we would like, but schools aren't getting worse. In fact, if you look at fourth graders in math and fourth graders in reading, of course, have grown up substantially. The average nine-year-old now has math scales equal to the average 11-year-old 30 years ago. So math skills are going up substantially, reading skills less, and not so much progress in the later grades. But there's no evidence here that test scores are going down in any subject or at any grade level, which suggests that schools aren't getting worse. It's not to say they're as good as we want them to be. If we looked more carefully at this by a family background, we would say they're going up faster for high income kids and not going up as fast for low income kids, which is why we see that gap that I showed you before widening. Another thing that's been happening over the last 40 years is that income segregation, residential segregation by income has been going up dramatically. Residential segregation by race hasn't changed a whole lot in 40 years. It's moderately lower than it was 30 to 40 years ago, not dramatically. But segregation by income has gone up substantially. So this shows you the reds and the blues sort of indicate the kind of income level of a neighborhood. So the reds are very poor neighborhoods, neighborhoods with median incomes well below their average of the natural area, and blues are ones that are very affluent. They have median incomes well above the average of the natural area. And what the vertical dimension shows you is what percentage of families live in such neighborhoods. So in 1970 about 15% of families lived in either very affluent or very poor neighborhoods. And two thirds of all families lived in very mixed income kind of middle class neighborhoods. Now over a third of all families up from 15% live in very affluent or very poor neighborhoods. And only 43% of families down from 65% of families live in these sort of mixed income neighborhoods. So as income inequality has widened, so has the sort of spatial presidential segregation between high and low income families, which then has implications for the kind of schools they go to, the kinds of preschool and childcare opportunities they might have access to, lots of other features of neighborhoods that matter for kids development. So this may be a factor that's contributing to it. The last trend I want to point out is that families are increasingly spending lots more money on their children. This is sort of a long 20th century trend where childhood has become sort of more and more important. Families spend lots more time and money on their kids. But that's much more true of high income families than just low income families. So this show is in 2008 dollars, the average amount of investments in enrichment activities that families spend on their children. And so in the early 70s, high income families spent about four times as much as low income families on these enrichment activities. That ratio now is about almost seven per seven times. So now high income families are spending almost seven times as much as low income families. So while we've seen increases in spending on children in general, we've seen much more about high income families. So that may help explain what's going on in terms of early childhood and this widening gap. So what does this all suggest? Well, I think it suggests that the defense one is that the academic achievement of high-income kids is growing dramatically. And that's a big problem because the labor market increasingly rewards high levels of educational skill and high levels of educational attainment. The returns to a college degree are much greater than they used to be. And so if the children of the rich increasingly do better in school and if those who do better in school increasingly have access to the high wage jobs, we end up in a society where the American dream becomes sort of less and less possible. It's harder and harder to sort of move from a low income background to one where your children can experience all the fruits and benefits of the American economy. And so this sort of really calls into a question, I think, potential for the American dream to happen. It also suggests I think that investments in early childhood are perhaps the one place that I think seriously about. It's going to be much easier to prevent these gaps from happening in early childhood than it's going to be to try to remedy them after kids have entered school. And while we should do certainly more in K-12 schooling to reduce these gaps, I think it's unrealistic to think that schools alone can reduce the gap. I'm going to stop there and turn it over to Peter. I'm going to really quickly just note that all of these presentations will be available on our website starting next week. So for all of you who are taking fantastic notes of the actual slides, we'll be up there for you. Thank you so much and it's a pleasure to be here. I'm a person of different knowledge. I'm not here as an education person. But Sean, of course, laid the total and perfect groundwork as we strategize for what I'm going to say. I'm the poverty guy, right? And so I want to just start by saying what I hope is obvious is why BBA exists, which is that we need to really desperately, to all of us who care about children, care about poverty and care about education in particular, since that's the entry point of the discussion today, to get on the same page. And that is that it's time to stop arguing about whether schools can do it all. This is about, we're going to have a proper future for our children. It's about wonderful schools, schools that are successful, and it's about full-scale attack on poverty in our country. Both, and not either or. Wonderful schools can do a lot for children who come from very, very low income background, but they can't do nearly as much as they would do if we had much less poverty. So I could stop right there. That's my main point. But in thinking about who's responsible for what, those of you who work on schools need to be part of a kind of public dialogue that makes that point that I just made over and over again. Others need to do the heavy lifting and the advocacy of some of these other areas. There's some things that BVA talks about that actually should be going on in schools that will help low income kids do better than in school. But there's a lot, and Sean really referred to it, really bustling in what he told you, shown you, that is very, very big stuff or different from large frame. So just to emphasize a few points about what we need to be concentrating on, other than Education K-12 or P-14, what I would say, other than the early on that's so important, other than, or now here I'm getting over to what I will talk about, the mobility piece. We need to recognize that very significantly we become a low wage country. And that part of what needs to happen is serious focus on that. We generally think that people are, in particular economic combo, the third incomes are low, twice the poverty line, which by the traditional measure is below 44,000 for a family of four. That number, most of you wear this to those who already know, I apologize. There's basically 103 million people, a third of the people in our country, that incomes below twice the poverty line. And that's just increased phenomenally over the last 40 years, and especially over the last 10 years. So one is all that while, while I see Larry Michelle sitting out there, he's always called EPI's numbers, the wages for the median level job, or it's half the jobs in this country, have just been stopped. All of that, things that you saw that you know about the 99% and the 1% and so on, I don't know that people are really focused or understand how stuck the wages are for more, I've shown that it's half the jobs in the country that I'm talking about. You know, we can go through all the reasons for that, it's a lot to do with the low jobs, the fundamental way of technology and other countries, but it also relates to unions and the stagnation of the minimum wage and so on. So the wage adjusted for inflation of the median job in the country has gone up by 7% in 40 years, a fifth of a percent a year. That's astonishing. That median job now pays $33,000. Half the jobs, half the jobs under that, a quarter of the jobs in the country pay less than the poverty line or, finally, for less than $22,000. So we need to get that out on the table. I think that's a very politically salient number because there's so many people out there who are hurting, who don't understand that what's hurting them is structural. It's not their fault. And looking forward, there's a debate that we have to have shown expressed out that obviously many people have about where the economy's going, but have a lot of low wage work. And so one of the reasons why we need the top 1% to pay the fair share although that's not the only place where we're going to get the resources that we need is because we have to talk about how to get more income for all of those low wage workers. The first place to get it is from employers. And so that's about the minimum wage and each of these would be a longer conversation. Sorry, finally, now again, actually, that we had in the first part of the last decade, state level campaign surveys and then one place, that's good. And anything that we can do to strengthen unions would be helpful. And then we need to think about all the different things that we need to do anyway that have an income effect. Because if you get health care for everybody, that has an income effect. If you have assistance with child care, that has an income effect. With housing, with the cost of going to college. Even if we do all of those things, I would suggest we're going to have a shortfall. And that's why we have a plate supplementation at least for families with kids and then mainly income tax credit. And of course we find now along with the attack on food stamps that Elaine mentioned, we have people saying, well it's just terrible that almost half the American people don't pay federal income taxes. Well, there's a reason why they don't. They don't have enough income. And at least that's a piece of public policy you saw, the story of the New York Times saying that you didn't pay tax credit. So that's a very, very important thing that works. Along with food stamps, it's a public policy success. And the fact is if we're going to be straightforward and honest about our situation with so many people struggling with low wage work, we need to say that to understand that we're actually not going to get everything that we want over the coming years in wages. We're going to have to add wages to the public policy. So there's that part of it and then there's the safety net side where food stamps is a tremendous public policy success. And we now have 46 million people on food stamps, and thankfully we have that. We've totally destroyed, almost totally destroyed cash assistance from others and children. Temporary assistance for needy families. We now have states where it's almost non-existent. In the state of Wyoming, there are 644 people in the entire state on Canada. That's 4% of the poor children in the state of Wyoming. Unbelievable. 19 states where less than 20% of the children are in families receiving cash assistance. It's just not only that the benefits are low, they always have been in those states, but that it just literally doesn't exist in so many states. And so you see the work that Jason DeParle did a couple years ago where he found that there are 6 million people in this country whose only income is from food stamps. That's a third of the poverty line. 6 million people, 2% of the American people whose only income is from food stamps. Totally astonishing. And yet you have people running for president, people in particularly the House of Representatives saying that people are using this program at all of the states who of course know better than anybody else. And it's an ugly politics that has absolutely no substantive basis. And what we should be talking about is that we need to have a decent safety net for the people at the very bottom. All those people. We now have in deep poverty that's an income below half the poverty line. In other words, below $11,000 for that family of four. We now have 20.5 million people. And even when you take the public benefits that are not counted the way we measure poverty, it's still 14 or 15 million people with these unbelievably low incomes. It's gone up, it was in 1976 it was 3.3% of the American people who were in deep poverty. And that went up in 2010 to 6.7% double in 40 years. So we need to be looking at wages, we need to be looking at the safety net, we need to be focusing on price because again, Sean, you dramatized those figures about the increased segregation and we know there are concentration effects connected to some of the worst problems in school to the children growing up in those neighborhoods. And of course we need to have race on the table overtly in our conversation along with everything else and the question of race in the 21st century is very heavily the question of education as well as in the function of our criminal justice system. So very short message, if you will, that we're not going to get to where we want to be unless we add to combine our efforts on the schools, everything we're doing and doing that better, but doing everything that we can do about the schools unless we combine it with the final impact on the news. Okay, anyone here? Okay, good afternoon. So I'm going to pick up what Sean and Peter and Peter said about what these schools do. So I have a very short period of time to discuss the question of what can our public education, our public schools, our public education systems do about poverty. And along the way I guess I'll raise or get into a little bit or at least implicate this sort of crazy debate we're having in the United States now on education circles about whether it's poverty or whether it's education. So let me start out since I'm in Washington D.C. to remind everybody that the public education system in the United States is a state matter. This is the ultimate state's rights issue. It always has been. We have a tradition of mythology about local control, but the truth is the state's on our public systems. We have no, and like other countries in the world that were put out there, we have no national right to education and our U.S. Constitution is everyone knows. And as a result of the Rodriguez decision back in 1974, there's really no federal even compelling interest on the United States Constitution in terms of educating the nation's youth. So we have a state system. Kids have a constitutional right to education in the United States, but it's embedded in the 50 state constitutions. The states run the systems. Frankly, all the issues regarding education policy are controlled by the states. So the issue of how schools are governed, charter schools, school districts, all of these things may not control. There are matters of state policy. The extent to which we rely on property tax to fund public education is a state decision. So the way to think about it, we need to kind of remind ourselves and oftentimes here in Washington we sort of act as though we have a national education system. We don't. We have 50 state educational systems and frankly the problem we have in public education is that we have so many of our states that are dragging the whole country down education in terms of those achievement gaps. We have a number of states that have actually made investments in the type of talk about where I'll point out are relatively hard performing even on international benchmarks, but we have a lot of states, a lot of states that are not making the investments they need to make and are essentially taking the whole country down and drain education. So the question is how are states dealing with poverty in schools? We also have a crazy debate about is it outside school factors, inside school factors? We need to get past that. The question is how do states construct equitable systems of public education, of public schools that ensure that all kids have access or have the ability to achieve the kinds of educational standards that are necessary to get them ready for the workforce and for college, including low income kids, kids in poverty, English language learners, kids with disabilities and the like. That's what I mean by equity. And so the question is what are states going to address concentrated poverty in our schools? And I want to start out with this slide which is a bit of a take from Sean's poverty data to look at concentrated poverty in public schools. The fact of the matter is what's happening with this growing poverty that's been talked about is the concentration of poor kids in public schools and public school systems. And frankly, in entire state systems is growing. That's an enormous issue we have to confront. So we have so many districts across the country where the poverty concentration in free and reduced price lunch terms for educators is 40, 50, 60, 70, 80, 90 percent. And we have whole states now in which almost the public school population is well above 50 percent in terms of poverty rates and even growing. California, the biggest public school system in the United States, 6 million kids, 51 percent of those kids are in poverty. Now, the backdrop message is growing concentrated student poverty in our schools and frankly in the education today that we have today, we're not talking about how difficult it is to get those achievement gaps narrowing when you have such concentrated student need in schools. I can't emphasize that anymore. It's not on the discussion. It's got to be back on the table. It's how hard it is for teachers to deal with boosting achievement gaps when 60, 70, 80, 90 percent of the kids are coming into the school every day or low income or English language or both and have other special needs such as disability. So, I want to talk about school finance though. I want to talk about school finance because it starts, Linda had the pie thing, it starts with school finance. Our school finance systems are not have never been and to this day are not built to deal with concentrated student poverty. So, I want to talk about how our states funding your schools. It's so critical to having the staff programs and services you need to deal with schools serving high concentrations of low income students. So, here's a definition that we use in this report and some of them out in the front. Our national report card that we issued funding fair looking at the 50 states. So, what you want to have today if we're going to get to where we need to go are state finance systems driven by student need. So, in other words, if you have a district or school with higher concentrations of student need i.e. poverty, the finance system should be constructed so as to deliver more resources, state and local to those schools, right? That's what they do in those high performing countries that we're compared to. So, you want to have finance systems where poor kids get more, poor schools get more. And frankly, the national sort of scandal, if you will, from the last 50 years is that our state finance systems provide more resources in low poverty schools versus high poverty schools. So, if you're in a more affluent district that has all those enrichment advantages that Sean put up, you're actually getting more resources from the state finance system than if you're in a school that has much greater need. So, a progressive system that does allocate more resources driven by student need regressive is the other direction that I just mentioned and flat is you're just flat. So, this is what it looks like. So, this is the way we should be looking at the state finance systems. What we want to do is move to systems that are like the green line. So, the kids that are in high poverty districts are guaranteed the extra resources they need for the extra programs they need including early childhood, full day kindergarten and the like. So, that as the New Jersey Supreme Court said back in 1990, we can wipe out the disadvantages that kids bring with them to school as much as a school can. Obviously schools can't deal with the safety net issues and all of that and Peter's exactly right. But we do have this responsibility to build systems of schools, of public schools that address the effects of poverty when the kids cross the schoolhouse door every day as much as they can. So, here's some of the states and you know it's a very sad, this is a very sad state of affairs. Nevada, regressive these are all low spending states by the way. Colorado is a state in which the school trial judge just about two months ago ruled that the entire state finance system was unconstitutional for the reasons that I just talked about. So, these are system states that do not spend much and are deeply regressive. This is an interesting one because you can see the New York, New Jersey comparison. New Jersey has made by court decision a lot of investments of state dollars in high poverty schools so that the tilt goes upward it's an aggressive state. New York on the other hand is very high spending deeply regressive. So, if you're in Utica, Rochester, Buffalo, you're getting substantially less in your schools than kids in West Chester County or Long Island. The south is just, I mean they don't spend anything on education, basically. Not a house to stay in. And they're regressive too. So, they're regressive. So, if you're in a poorer district, you're typically getting less than if you're in a middle class or more affluent district. The out west is the same thing. California is now this is 2009 data so it's not picking up the effects of the recession. These are going to get worse. It also doesn't show what's going to happen but we expect to see when all of the federal money goes away or has gone away. Illinois is the most regressive public finance system in the United States. Poor kids in New and Illinois are really in bad shape as are kids of color. Deeply regressive. And this gives you the these are funding levels you can see at the top what Wyoming spends down to the bottom, Tennessee spends on its public system. This is a distribution across the poverty curve. 30% poverty translates into free and reduced lunch for all of your educators around 60% free and reduced price so you can see some of these different. Illinois, $11,000 typically if you're in a zero a low poverty district goes down to 8,700 if you're in a high poverty district. Think of Chicago as a state funding metro area. Chicago doesn't have enough money to compete in its own teacher labor market for quality teachers. Funding effort is, so we always hear the state politicians and the folks here talk well they know we are taxed and we can't afford it. The truth is many of these states spend very little of their state economic GDP on education. So a lot of these low spending states actually have a lot of capacity to, they can do substantially better than what they're doing today. And you see that the states that put out actually tend to have more equitable finance systems. Now, I don't want to make the argument here that putting money in automatically results in test score increases. Please don't take what I'm saying for that purpose, but if you just correlate name scores against funding equity on our measures the states that put the money in, particularly into the low high poverty districts, and remember unless states are driving their state aid into the higher poverty low wealth high poverty communities that's necessary to offset the reliance of our finance systems on the property tax. So these are states that not only raise more state revenue they also drive it towards higher poverty settings. And it turns out that these are the states that do the best perform the best on date, and actually as I mentioned earlier do very well on international benchmarks against all the high flying countries of the world. States like Massachusetts New Jersey, Minnesota, Vermont these are states that do perform high on international benchmarks. Top 5 some instances are more and they do very well on name it's just that these other states are really as I said before driving the whole country educationally down. I took these from Linda this is what happens when you do invest we invest it in a lot of New Jersey in high poverty schools under the Abbott decisions and you can see that everything's kind of the gaps are narrow everything's going up but the poor kids are going up faster than the other kids. So you start to see the gaps narrow question whether this is going to happen continue to happen because a lot of what we're talking about is now under attack in New Jersey but you can see about how we have to build stronger systems for the future of the state of the state's economy so it's it's a tough question and I would say it plays out between different places. I want to take at least one or two more questions before we wrap up and I think there's someone here at the front row who's been ah sorry here right here who's been waiting patiently Amanda Brown of the Public Education Network just as an aside actually our member of local education funds have been doing a lot of work and been quite successful in some high poverty districts and trying to engage the public in some kind of discussion but there are some practices and some models out there. My question to the panel is really just a much broader one which has to do with how did we get here the pay review laid out some really stunning data about increasing poverty and Sean as well and you know David the conversation about education and how did we public education become the whipping boy and what is your term and there's so many alternatives that are proposed that really increase that disinvestment you talked about anger, Peters and anger is it apathy how did we get here Well how we got here I guess I have basically an answer that relates to the economy more than anything else going back now over 40 years in the descent starts on the political side with Vietnam and Watergate people used to be very very had great respect for government there was a lot of custom government and it's been going pretty much steadily down with the bump in 2008 and not too much else so that those blows to our components of government are go hand in my view go hand in hand with the deterioration of the economy for most Americans over the last 40 years well the rich was enriching were enriching themselves and what unfortunately makes me pessimistic is that you have the most interest in the country gradually getting more of a stranglehold on our politics so it becomes a self-fulfilling increasingly self-fulfilling Prophecy Citizens United is both the consequence of that power because who are the five justices that voted for it and how did they get there and then a further cause for the stranglehold now I don't frankly how it is that these very very powerful people who are only so successful because of the quality of the structure that we have in this country both economic and political would not see that it's in their self-interest for every child in this country to be educated well and so I would hope that with some effort over a period of time we could get there I guess I'd say one is that they would see it as in their self-interest maybe totally not but the other is we have had times in the history of this country where people finally did say like in the movie national I'm angry and I'm not going to take it anymore and so if you look at the progressive era that's what happened without the benefit of the great depression or the World War II which were other times that instigated great progressive change in this country so I think there could come a time where people get so angry for the right reasons as opposed to some of this guided anger right now and you have a different politics which is really what you need I would add that I would add two things the first is that I actually think that this the issues that we spoke about today the inequity the basic ignoring of poverty's impact of education has been something that really hasn't mattered to many people it's only until now that we've actually or it's only recently that we've seen research like Sean's that actually prints a light the implications of what is being practiced in our nation's schools and it's only recently that we've actually seen how those implications naturally play out and directly affect each and every one of us but up until now there are a lot of the statistics that we've spoken about and the sobering data that has been shared that it's not new this has been a circumstance for many children of color just about all children living in poverty just about all children who have disabilities many kids who are learning English this has been their circumstance for decades and it's only now coming to light because of the research that's been highlighted here so I think that that has to be kept in mind this is something that that we as a nation are just waking up to now but it's been in our own backyard literally for many of us for my times at this point what I suggest is that the conversation regarding education and how to address the things that have been discussed today is incredibly short-sighted there are very few venues that will actually get passed in the false dichotomy school reform versus status quo or as someone who is a proponent of teachers union versus someone who is a proponent of charters these are incredibly short-sighted conversations that were clearly very profound and in terms of how to actually reach and engage people we actually have to deepen the conversation and actually show if people want to engage in this conversation I think everyone should and we also have to understand a lot of the intricacies of it this isn't just a matter of teachers union this isn't just a matter of charter schools neither are the enemy of the prosperity of public education and neither are the salvation of it so we need to actually understand the intricacies of these things we actually have to have cooler conversations than especially what's going on here in Congress I'm actually going to bring this publicly to a close I want to let people who have been incredibly patient and are legitimately tired of talking about poverty well I want to give the few people kind of brave and patient souls come up here and talk with the panelists I want to end this of course with a thank you but I want to end on a note that I think is sounds pessimistic but I think oddly might be a response to how we get through this and how we make this an issue and they sound like two athletes but I think that they may be leverage points for how we get some traction on this the first one is the reality that a lot more of us are poor and have been in a very long time so being poor and being lower in class and living just around 200% of the poverty applies to an awful lot of people in this country that in itself is a really bad thing at the same time it really unites people in a way that hasn't been in a long time because all of a sudden the poor are not them they're us and if they're not us we are awfully close to it and a lot more aware than we haven't happened before that we are really close to being there we're paycheck away or illness away or a car crash I think that really gives us an opportunity to unite in a way that we haven't and the other thing I'll say because people ask me when I go to a med school how are you going to get past all this about how poverty is not and I say you know the bad thing is I think the fact that the policies so called reforms that are being promoted are including so openly at this point and are so lacking I don't think that the military base really needs to get anywhere I think that itself is not obviously not how we want to get past all this evidence about what works and that hasn't got us where we want to get but if the objective is getting us where we want to get and if the failure of other ostensibly effective policies is what advance us there the bottom line is that we are going to get there so I think all of us part of our job is to talk about the fact loudly, openly, and assertively that we need to look at the discussion we need to be more honest we need to be a lot older than we have been and I think everybody, especially the fantastic panel welcome to anyone who is still about you know energy life and quality of life thank you Sean mentioned, research indicates that lower income toddlers and infants actually come into school testing lower on cognitive assessments than students than infants and toddlers from higher income families in 2008 the event drop out rate for students living in poverty was about four and a half times higher than students from higher income families and even looking at district funding they've already went through some of the state level issues but a recent report by the Department of Education knows that per-people expenditures often vary considerably across schools in districts and that nearly half of all districts have per-people expenditures that were more than 10% above or below the district average so with each of these steps with each of these points of inequality children are actually being pushed further from the mainstream of society those children that are pushed further from the mainstream of society by lack of education opportunity become those who are completely disenfranchised from society so the first step that federal education policy can take towards addressing the impact of poverty on education opportunity is to retain the strong rule of federal government and this has been a really contentious conversation in DC and also across the country and we can talk about the foibles of current laws accountability framework and the one-size-fits-all nature of NCLB but the idea that federal law requires all schools to serve all students equally in receipt or in exchange for federal funds is a precious idea that we need to maintain and we need to maintain how comprehensive that is and how comprehensive that is and as a product of the idea of civil rights journals the federal rule ensures that that will happen the second step to addressing the impact of poverty on education opportunity is to acknowledge and affirmatively address the disparities that exist between schools economic disparities among others are actually some of the most important because they have the upfront issue of the primary schools of the opportunity to provide students with equal access to books and technology, other necessities but there's also the issue that economic disparities to private schools of the opportunities actually compete for and attract to retain and develop fully prepared and effective teachers and David touched on that during the last portion of his presentation, Chicago for example can't compete with other districts in its periphery for the best teachers so you have a whole bunch of schools that are poorly funded within Chicago schools that simply don't have access to a high fully prepared and effective teachers and we can actually we already know the results of that you see disparate outcomes the fiscal fairness act which was actually introduced here in the set and in the house this session will actually address economic disparities between schools within the same district by improving and strengthening current laws comparability framework the first step to addressing the impact of poverty and education opportunities to make strategic investments in lower income communities and the schools within them David already spoke about the need for high quality full day preschool we need to make sure that high quality full day preschool is actually democratized and all students who live in lower income communities should have people access to high quality full day preschool and it shouldn't be dependent on whether that state wins the competition for additional federal dollars we need to build space within Yankee within codified law to make sure that all students who are living in less wealthy circumstances have access to highly effective full day preschool wraparound services such as healthcare clinics and the provision of social services also need to be integrated into schools in less wealthy areas and along with the support staff counselors or social workers need to be included in schools in numbers that ensure manageable case flows for those staff members and meaningful interaction between students and staff additional learning opportunities primarily through extended learning programs that have track record for success in promoting student learning and summer learning opportunities that not only evade the loss of knowledge between school years but also expand student horizons need to be provided through codified federal law the time for innovation matters in education after a time act which has bipartisan support is something that needs to is a law that a bill that needs to actually get authorized and be supported because it provides a great framework for doing this the fourth step is actually one that's pretty familiar so I'm sure a lot of people do and that has to do with teachers in school years so as a bigger background before controversial amendment what is inserted into continuing resolution in late 2010 current law required that teachers who are not yet completed the certification program were not allowed to teach low income or minority students that did proportionate rates as a result of that amendment bill which was sufficiently inserted into continuing resolution such teachers teachers who have not completed their certification programs are now permissively titled highly qualified and in the eyes of the law there's almost no differentiation between them forget about if you're a parent or community member and you want to try to find and teach you as more experienced in a classroom or has some development expertise and information is effectively masked because of the amendment so in addition to the experienced teachers though there's also the problem of churn or turnover within the school's teacher staff and school leadership and students of color bear the brunt of this and this is revealed through the most recent civil rights data collection and students of black students are actually twice as likely to have teachers with only one or two years of experience than white students who are in the same district that's within the same district these are kids who probably go to school in very close proximity but they are worlds apart in terms of the education opportunity provided to them so we have to face the fact that however motivated they may be beginning teachers are still learning the fundamentals of the craft when they enter the classroom but our most vulnerable students need access to the most effective and fully prepared teachers on day one and research backs up this idea we've all heard the summaries of research that indicate that teachers become more effective as they improve years of experience in the classroom and we need to make sure that federal policy ensures that when teachers enter the classroom they're fully prepared to do so the focus of these measures should be to ensure that students who need access to fully prepared and effective teachers students who are either living and low income households or students who have special needs should have equal if not better access to those fully prepared and effective teachers and again there's a list of federal policies to actually agenda this change we want to make sure that teachers of record when they enter the classroom are fully prepared to do so and that requires federal law to set a high bar for entry into the profession and the classroom the assuring successful students who are effective teaching after or asset act provides a great comprehensive role as well and it provides that all students especially students from lower income homes, students of color, students who have disabilities or students who are learning English will be provided by teachers who are fully prepared as soon as they enter the classroom and who wants them to improve themselves to be effective it would also provide some national meaning to the definition the federal definition of high and qualified teacher which again was eroded by the Department of Education controversial amendment that was slipped into the continuum resolution in December of 2010 it would also ensure that teachers who are fully prepared and effective would be equitably distributed so again there would be a huge push in terms of equity to make sure that fully prepared teachers and effective teachers are democratized and lastly in order to thrive teachers in the instructional leadership and mentorship from other teachers who have proven themselves to be experts at promoting student achievement and I'm talking about student achievement broadly defined by multiple measures we're not just talking about test scores we can talk about the completion solution that test scores actually lead to significant gains and that test scores are the best way to measure student performance teachers also need leadership from principals who are shown that they know how to manage and develop staff also creating educationally sound and positive learning environments and Congress's will to support these measures will have really far-reaching effects or reauthorize ASA does not contain these measures we'll simply continue to see the growth of disparities that are already being described and as those disparities deepen the chasms between people in our society will broaden as our late president and director council and OCPP of the defensive educational like John Payne often said our nation's democracy is based on the idea that all people are including we the people there should be no more democratic or inclusive institution in our country than public education but to realize this value to arrange true to the civil rights core of ASCA we have to make sure we take the liberate steps to address the inequitable inputs and inequitable outputs of our educational system and we have to make sure that we actually provide all students equal opportunities to learn Thank you all so much I obviously don't need to emphasize how passionate all four of these panelists are about what we're talking about today or the critical importance that they place on this issue I really want to get out to all of you in the audience ask questions so I have three pretty short ones that I think are kind of the requisite questions that an auditor should ask the panelists the first one I think really hit very very well so you're welcome to go ahead and provide another response but this is really directed to the three of you so there are really two signature federal pieces of education legislation I'm going to start narrowing here and get through all of your questions these two signature pieces of legislation that are really being discussed now ASCA five and then the other is raised to the top one really drives state level and district level decisions through money the other one really drives it a lot through much smaller money but a lot of incentives and publicity I'm going to ask each of you limited to those two pieces of legislation if you could pick the single most important change you would make as those are reconsidered and reauthorized what would it be this is a little bit different from what I told them I'd ask them so let's see what happens oh come on you guys have a lot of things well you know I'm not a big fan of either as I said before I think we need a whole new vision of what federal education policies should be but these are both of these are focused on the wrong or let's put it this way there's a lot of focus in these on schools and cheat now teachers turning around low performing schools 5% low performing all this teacher evaluations when these laws should be rewritten to focus on the states making sure and really focusing on what the states need to do to build systems of strong public schools so strong teacher workforce systems it's the only way we're going to have the teacher equity and all of these sort of local problems one thing I would do is I would I would put metrics in one you could do it you like to see a race to the top I don't like competitive brands but if we're going to do competitive brands I would do it around school finance reform let's have a race to the top in terms of creating more fairness in our funding systems and offer money to states to compete for that so that they can build the kinds of system finance systems that we need another thing I would do is put in some metrics that require states to at the very least maintain certain levels of effort of state and local resources in return for getting federal dollars I don't get into the details of that metrics about that I'd want to see federal law say look we'll hand it up we'll give you a title one money or a race to the top money or whatever it is but at the very least you can't cut your budgets can't cut stating out of those budgets because that always serves the poorest kids and poorest schools you've got to at the very least maintain certain levels of effort if you want this money and I'd like to see some metrics that are tied to what I've put up on the award that would sort of push states incentivize states to do a better job of moving towards these what I would call standards based finance systems that ensure all kids the kinds of resources they need to achieve bigger standards so one of the features of pilot pine the current ESE law is its emphasis sort of on accountability based on quantifiable outputs generally standardized test scores and what it assumes is that schools and districts just sort of aren't trying hard enough and aren't being innovative enough and that if pressured to perform they'll figure out how to do it and as in any profession when you have 3 million teachers there probably are some who aren't trying as hard as they could but what's more happening I think is that folks don't either have the resources or the capacity or they're struggling with an overburdened system and so I think what we still need to measure outcomes because I think they're really important they let us look at how we're doing in lots of ways but I think what we need is a set of policies that are focused more on making sure that schools and teachers have the right resources to enable them to do the job they want to develop people don't go into teaching because they're going to make a lot of money teaching is a profession that many people go into because of its intrinsic rewards it's enjoyable to teach it's enjoyable to help young people grow but asking any teacher it's often hard to do that in a system without a lot of resources and a lot of teachers who are idealistic ambitious people who get put into disadvantaged systems and often struggle mightily trying to figure out how to do it it's not that people don't want to do it or they're not trying I think I think it's a matter of providing the right resources providing the better training things like that and so reiterating one of the points that I made during my presentation there are actually a number of policies that are in federal law right now that come close to doing some of the things that we just discussed there are concepts like comparability and maintenance of effort that are part of Title I that actually call for comparability between schools within the same district and there's a rule that actually calls for within comparability provisions of Title I 10% parity but again that hasn't been enforced by the Department of Education and you can argue about whether retracting federal dollars from school districts that they're not going to be distributed funding in the first place is a good idea but the point is that there's a very important role for the federal government to be present in those decisions and to make sure that there is some version of accountability that's exactly upon states and school districts that either cannot or will not do quite by schools and students and the idea that these policies have come under attack which has actually happened in full point in the houses here the most recent proposal that's been made regarding Title I completely decimated Title I and it shoved a whole bunch of other areas of the ACA into Title I, made it a block grant got rid of maintenance effort opened up Title I funds to a whole bunch of other funding areas which were then by virtue of opening them up, diffused those funds which are already scarce the idea that those policies that ensure that there's some degree of equity within the system under attack is an incredibly scary one and I think that if I have to respond to the question I'm just going to I would reiterate that there is a need for a refined and incredibly strong role for the federal government to at the very least ensure that there is a minimal level of service provided to every kid who attends school that receives federal funds even though, you know, given where we are obviously we have to talk about federal policy and it matters a lot as far as some funding and so it's just a bully pulpit instead of a stage as we all discussed how our stakes are where the action's happening David actually went into this, I think it's some really really nice detail I'd love to hear from the others of you probably because I think there should be some right and it's even a very somber hearing about what amount of stakes that might be good the states have really weathered and gone through and made decisions in the recent recession in very different ways and I'm wondering if any of you could speak to a set of decisions that you think has been particularly helpful and can serve as a model for other states going forward that's done a better job of protecting children, protecting education and protecting low income families and communities both because as we go forward states are continuing to face issues of cuts and because this will happen again the student will be smarter and it does less damage and it would be great to have actual concrete examples I can try to take it off so I'll start with the disclaimer that all of my work focuses on the federal level so there's only a certain degree of detail that I could provide you talking about states one of the biggest things that's happened this year is actually the provision of waivers to states from certain provisions of more child behind accountability framework and there have been a whole bunch of applications that have been submitted from states I think 37 already there's another round coming up in September and then there's also a word that dispensation from federal accountability laws released and directed to districts so there's a lot that's happening but one of the bright spots is that some states have actually tried to move past the federal level required by federal law and create different indexes that would look at different school outputs and outcomes and one of the states that's done this the best is Massachusetts and we've already heard how high performing states Massachusetts is already but one of the pieces about their waiver application that I would want is that they move away from a focus on standardized test scores and there's we can argue about whether there's a place for standardized test scores but current law actually requires a laser light focus on standardized test scores and because of that focus I think all of the educators here know there's been a huge number of spillover effects all of them are negative in international education policies and practices so Massachusetts has created an index that allows them to evaluate schools based on a number of different indicia that we've actually promoted our school climate so discipline rates one of the spillover effects of no child left behind and it's laser light focus on test scores is that teach students have been pushed out of school because they're being threats to the school's ability to perform so if you have students with disabilities, if you have students who simply are in the different nation you can't work with those students because they have to hit certain pacing they have to hit points within the sequences of lessons and then they have to prepare students to perform on the test when a school doesn't perform no child left behind front-size-fits-all capability favor slammed down on them with complete and blinded sanctions so Massachusetts has actually moved in a really positive direction by diversifying the metrics so idiosyncrasy to the way that schools are evaluated there's a number of different ways that districts can actually evaluate the schools that the states propose to do so so I would submit that moving away from standardized test scores is something that Massachusetts has done well let me get one more nomination here and then what I'd like to do is open up to the audience for two things first of all there's people out there we'd like to talk about districts or states go ahead and just raise your hand to pose a question we've got two kind of moving microphones out there for you these national trends that we started looking at which states are looking better over time on these outcomes but we just started that project and to try to figure out which ones are doing a good job not just raising achievement but sort of narrowing the disparities there's a wide variety across states and how fast they're narrowing the disparities or in some cases widening them and we're just trying to figure out if we can tease out which policies in those states seem to be most responsible for that so let me have a comment on this one thing I want to say about comparability comparability point is that just quickly the issue of funding disparity is largely an issue between district disparity in states not within school you know to some extent comparability I'm all for it but in many places because of the high poverty concentration in the districts and the disparity in the states systems which we point out which is among districts comparability will kind of be a bit of moving vectors around the Titanic we're saying we're going to have middle class schools and middle class neighborhoods that have to get rid of AP courses we shouldn't be having that conversation it should be about lifting everyone's votes up so common vote is okay but it's not going to take us where we need to go secondly about the states if the goal is equity the states are going in the wrong direction there aren't a lot of models right now in fact there's a lot of what I would put up there as sort of going down even going further down the path towards inequity, desegregation whatever you want to call in Louisiana right now part of coming to Louisiana is that over 20% of all the kids in school age are not in public system and the income differential between the households that are in public schools and in non-public schools is almost three in one so all the wealthy folks who run the state don't use the public system so the unwillingness of these states to make the kinds of investments in systems that are increasingly dominated by poor kids is leading us down these paths to these what I call real distraction solutions that are not going to build the kind of equitable systems that we need these kinds of crazy teacher evaluation programs based on use of tests voucher programs I can go on and on and on it's not going to take us where we need to go so I'm right now in the states it's kind of grim up there frankly and there are not a lot of models like Massachusetts and New Jersey they built up some equity it's all under attack New Jersey it's under attack we're doing a pretty good job of kind of hanging on but I don't see the sort of proactive aggressive agenda in any state right now that says we have to build this strong equitable system throughout the state for all kids and begin to make the investments both in fiscal capacity and human capacity education, local school districts, etc etc to get the kind of ongoing instructional improvement that we desperately need so raise your hands really high because remember they have to see you from behind I'm Jerome Dance as I'm a retired mathematics professor and the view from the colleges is that students are showing off more considerably less arithmetic and algebra than they did 10 years ago and 20 years ago now I agree with I agree with almost all that I've heard from the panel but there are things which I think are underneath the radar which I've been curious to what extent that you're aware of now to close the racial gap or any education gap the hard way is to raise up the bottom the easy way is to pull down the top and that's largely what's been happening and in fact I can say in my state of Maryland a number of percent of students know arithmetic when they get to college the gap has been closing that's because well considerably less blacks than they did 10 years ago the percentage of whites who don't know arithmetic is even larger now since we're we're talking about the government I want to make sure when you ask a question it poses a question for you are you aware that the federal government has been financing big times education programs which downgrade arithmetic they don't say that we're going to have teacher arithmetic with technology so students are all doing it with calculators and they're not learning arithmetic are you aware that the federal government is financing big time educational programs which downgrade arithmetic and not financing programs that upgrade arithmetic no I'm not aware of that but more importantly well I understand that many of us feel like schools are going down every time when we look at an age which is giving the same math test to children since 1978 to the present day the average fourth grader now the average nine-year-old has the same level of math skills but the average 11-year-old had 30 years ago when you look at the why the gaps are narrow between blacks and whites which they have dramatically it's because black scores have gone up astronomically there used to be a state of deviation below white scores in 1978 black scores now are higher than white scores were in 1978 as blacks have entirely closed the gap that existed in 1978 and white scores have gone up at the same amount of time though not as fast as black scores and that's why the gap is narrow nobody's scores have gone down even now so on a national level using the same test over the last 30 years it's simply not true we need another question I think we've got one right there Hi, my name is Allison I'm an associate doctor of teaching for change and we provide resources for teachers who are looking to teach beyond the test and also work with parents and my question, you all have all talked about standardized testing teaching evaluation just the current climate of ed reform which is pushing policies that we both know aren't effective at really getting through the problem but also aren't policies that are in place in the schools where the people pushing these policies send their kids so my question is you can talk about assessments not in the term, not in the sense of accountability but when we look at what kids are actually learning and you know we say race has to be on the table and we're talking about the content of standardized tests and we're talking about the content of the curriculum and the kids who really really need the most help they don't see themselves in the curriculum so I'm wondering and this may be a little too deep in the weeds for some of you all but if you could talk about what teachers can do and if we're going to talk about education and a lot of talk about the core curriculum where we need to also move that so we're not just focusing on just reading advanced scores in these standardized tests but what else can we do particularly when so many students in poverty need to be reached in different ways we have standardized tests but we tell teachers that they need to teach to multiple intelligences which is a complete contradiction so if you could just talk about other ways that we can reach students meaningfully I'm actually going to take this real quickly for all of you to make kind of a plug for or explain why BBA takes this issue so seriously in addition to all the things the items that we think need to be included in education to address poverty a really big concern of ours is that the single-minded focus on math and reading skills impoverishes education precisely the kids who need to be enriched with the most that it's not it's kind of a no brainer but if teachers, entire incentives for our track based on math and reading scores that's where they're going to focus I mean the same would be true of a lawyer a doctor, anyone in any profession seriously just ABA it's a very direct line and that is really our concern for that reason we say first of all we need to stop that kind of single-minded focus we're very concerned we need to re-enrich our curriculum and we need to broaden it and the other thing we say is we need accountability systems that measure things and that particularly do not provide just as incentive as they do now for teachers to teach the kids who want them to teach to the extent that test scores incorporate everything related to poverty, how well the child's slept how well the child eat, how high the child's stress level is when a teacher is punished through that child's test scores we're teaching children who are highly stressed and hungry and homeless those teachers aren't going to teach those kids anymore and they might get fired so it's really really important for us to put this into context for what it means to get and retain great teachers in order to teach schools for that same reason we advocate for a much broader system of accountability, things like inspectors that are complicated but that look at all aspects of the school that look at all aspects of the child that don't focus singly on the teacher and especially not on an individual teacher because we know that great teachers and great teaching act as teens and with the whole school on the finance side of this the reason you want to have strong finance systems you want to ensure that kids in poor schools have access to a rich and rigorous curriculum common but to our kids in more affluent schools you know so that's why the funding is so important in order to ensure that you're not just doing reading and language arts and mathematics but physical education visual and performing arts social studies and the like so the issue is the issue with finance is so important to ensure that kids in poor schools have access to a rich and rigorous curriculum and a variety of content not even to the educators but the debate over the whole issue of assessments but part of what the standard of testing push has gotten us away from it's kind of distracted us away from the sort of fundamental issues are we getting poor kids in poor schools a very rich and rigorous curriculum a variety of content there is a lot of richer things that maybe you're not reading mathematics but if these are going to tie against the school keep them in school or get your curricular activities sports and stuff like that I know we've had at least three other questions one here and then one here sorry one there and then one here my name is Berg Weitz I worked in the House and Senate for about 2000 years my son, the daughter-in-law are in the trenches in New York City in these issues and they've explained to me how kind of productive the federal teachers behind left act is but my work on help was in education more regarding civil rights but the experience up there has led me to want to ask a broader question and it really is relevant very recently I was at a different session in New York about how in the post 9-11 era there have been problems in the decline of civil liberties against national security and the checks and balances these really executive and there were a lot of suggestions programmatic suggestions but to me the real question is how do you get the public aroused to influence the people in Congress the terrific panel terrific suggestions so I would apply the same broader question here with the concern about the deficit people in middle class they're in poverty because of 401K get the third and the deep part against federal involvement at the local level how do any of you think we can get the kind of public involvement of concern voiced strongly enough in Washington as we have in past reforms to get members of Congress going to stick their neck out let alone fight for all these great suggestions I think we got to help people realize how much it's in their own interest no matter where they are no matter to support high quality education for everyone the economy depends on it increasingly the economy relies Peter says we have a lot of people who work in low wage jobs but the growth in the economy in the future it's going to depend on America graduating lots and lots of people with sort of high levels of skills going to the sort of high tech jobs where the future of the economy is so how do you get the public I think you have to keep going you have to go out and talk about how much the economy needs education to be good for everyone our educational system is actually quite good if you're on a high end of the income distribution or if you're living in Massachusetts or New Jersey in Massachusetts or New Jersey which are quarterly but the education system is good for everyone the economy needs it to be good for everyone and I think that message maybe needs to be spread more you're asking even though all of us are deeply devoted to this that's the question that's the gazillion to gazillion question and there isn't really anybody who knows the answer to that question there's some people who make money and advise in candidates they pretend they know the answer to that question but what we do need that we can do something about that we can do something about is people you know I could talk about movements and I could talk about organizing and I could talk about the enthusiasm that we had in 2008 and how really a lot of people were just going to be headed in the right direction and one of the things that happened is that a lot of people said well now we'd like to grab a bun and take care of it and go back to what we were doing but all of us if we want to do something about it the kind of people in this room is we have to find our own ways to express ourselves that's what we could be whether it's through organizations we're part of or somehow groups that we join or what we say ourselves and in our own work as well everybody up here in their own way is obviously working very hard on trying among other things to get some thought qualities out to the public but I think too many people you know this is just a little sermon and I don't think anybody in this room probably needs it anyway but just get busy and we can somebody else do it or it's not that important and just everybody's got to take it on themselves to figure out ways to get these points out there and it's not going to battle because people are very angry in this country right now and it really really really there's a barrier to break through to get them to listen to what's actually in their own self-interest for what we need to do instead of an easy sell that we should invest in our children it's now become a harder sell because there are a lot of people who get a lot of attention who want to destroy everything it's totally irrational and that's to say you also have to deal with the issue of using those investments effectively efficiently in all those issues but if you do that we can start to narrow some of those gaps I'm not going to take up Sean's question of whether we can ultimately close the other thing I want to talk about is preschool let me say it this way because I'm running out of time and I'm going to pick up on what Sean said we are not going to close achievement gaps in the United States in our K-12 systems unless we get all three and four year old kids and particularly low income kids and low income kids in high need communities into well planned, high quality preschool starting at age three it is a pipe dream as Sean pointed out to think that the current school reform agenda which is focused on testing and teacher evaluations and changing governance from public schools to charter schools I'm not here to argue about those things but those things are not going to we know we've been down this path before those things are not going to bring about these equitable investments and building strong systems of public education for all kids and frankly the other thing we have to do is we have to start public education at age three what do I need my high quality preschool we did it in New Jersey one of the big investments we got was in our added preschool program class size of 15 developmentally appropriate curriculum linked to K-12 standards we could use Head Start blending Head Start child care and public school programs together in a unified system full day, full school year I could go on high quality, it's got to be high quality all the researchers tell us if we don't do it on a high quality basis it's not going to pale so we have this is from Neer from the National Institute of Research on Early Education Research we have very low participation rates in preschool four year olds I didn't put up the three year olds all the nations in the world that are going past us have all their kids in France, Spain, take your pick this is a critical, critical issue so what can we do? fair school funding, we've got to get the reform back on the reform agenda as I said it's the key to teacher quality all the things we talk about in education I want to say that the resistance to this reform in state capitals is deep it's long standing it's always been there we've never had a golden age of equity in the United States and it's bipartisan it's tough it's an important issue and frankly this is where federal policy needs to change the federal government puts education aid into the states the form of title one idea in these funding they just hand it over with no attention to what I talked about whether these states are putting up for their kids and their poor kids they hand it over and what the states do is they turn around and cut their budget in other words the federal government education policy subsidizes, facilitates inequity as far as poor kids are concerned we have to have a conversation here in Washington about changing that's not on the agenda of ESEA reauthorization and it's going to be a while until we can get this back on the agenda but we have got to start talking about a new set of federal policies that incentivize the states to make the improvements in their finance systems to turn them towards the progressive diet and the other issue is preschool this is where federal policy and I'll stop at this point federal policy could really we have an incoherent federal policy on if you want to even call on that on the care and education of young children it's time that we had a serious debate about unifying head start childcare and public school programs at the state level and at the local district level and a set of federal policies and national policy that drives the states to do that this is really where the federal government could say we are going to set out on a 5, 10, 15, 20 year campaign to get the states to rebuild their systems of preschool early education in which they are incentivized and supported in building the kind of unified preschool education programs that we have to have and I'm not going to mention capital that's a whole other story but I'll stop there good afternoon everyone good afternoon so I have the honor of trying to comment on each of the panelists different presentations and I think it's going to make people really really smart because I think these people have touched on very very important and obviously pressing issues that we need to intend to immediately and I think David really set me up pretty well because I think that the base of this, this is an equity issue equity is at the core of this discussion and the problems that we're describing today the research and findings discussed today actually illustrate an alarming and strong contrast to the purpose of federal education policy and as Lyn said at the beginning the elementary and secondary education act in particular was started during the war on poverty in 1965 specifically to offset the financial burdens for districts who had to want to educate concentrations of children living in poverty and in fact all education in federal education policy is aimed at creating equity in gender equity at least that's its goal I'm sure that David we're going to have to differ with that but that's the idea that's the intent behind it so you know in this way at their core U.S. game federal education policies are civil rights laws they're meant to ensure that all children are educated and provide the same services on an equal basis today however that value and that