 In 1991, Massachusetts joined a handful of other states in completely reforming and reorganizing its education system pre-K through 12. And one of the centerpieces of that was standardized testing, not a very popular idea with some very popular with others. It still remains controversial these 20 years later. But it's very much a part of our current system. And one of the reasons that people pushed to get standardized testing was because they wanted to ensure that young people as they leave schools were able to, at minimum, do the basics and hopefully to do a lot more than that because what was happening was the employers were finding that people were coming in and they didn't even have the basic skills to be able to perform effectively in their jobs. And so the business community rallied to push for ed reform and part of it was to develop standardized frameworks and then ask the school districts to come up with their own curricula and to come up with their own teaching methods and but then to have a set of standardized tests to measure that the students had in fact mastered the subject matter. Well, again, as I say, it's very controversial, but it is still in place and the federal government has actually joined in this through their no child left behind. They've also called for national standardized tests. One of the things that has now occurred is 20 years later the same business community that was pushing to get standardized tests is now saying the students are coming out so much better prepared and they're doing really well in the basics. But now what we're worried about is they're not demonstrating the capacity to be creative and innovative, to work together in teams, to be able to identify new ways about thinking about old problems and old issues. And as a result they're asking now the education community to figure out how to get creativity back into the discussion and back into the classroom and back into the outcomes and result of a good public education. This opened the opportunity for us to start a conversation and that conversation is now going to be taking place at the state level through a piece of legislation that I filed and was able to get passed into law through the last economic development bill, setting up a creative challenge index. And the objective is to have a commission, a very representative, broadly constituted commission of educators and non-educators alike come together and identify the elements of creativity and innovation that can be taught and the types of experiences that students are having in our public schools here in Massachusetts and beyond and to identify opportunities and to catalog them and then to communicate across the commonwealth to all school systems how they measure up on an index of creative opportunities for their students. And it doesn't only take place in the arts. Creativity and innovation can come through studying science and math as would be reflected in science fairs by participation in debate clubs which would clearly be influenced by study of social science and history and culture and it can also of course come to us through the arts as students participate in ensembles and in classes on music, art, poetry, dance and wide range of other experiences that they can have. So the idea behind this is not to create a new test, it's not to create a new standard that you or a new mandate that you must meet or you must do. The idea is to collect the best experience around the commonwealth and beyond in providing opportunity for young people to experience things that will help them develop their creative side so that they will be able to work individually and in groups to identify creative solutions to problems and engage in creative thinking, analysis, critical thinking and action. And so we're hoping that over the next four or five years we can start to see an injection into our public education system and our public schools, increase discussion and increased action and activity, providing opportunities for children from the earliest grades all the way through high school to be able to have experiences and come out with the skills and the interest in becoming involved in and being involved in activities of creativity and innovation.