 I'd like to welcome our panelists. You guys have the biographies for all of them in your packet. So after a really brief introduction, we'll get right into the discussion. So you've got more time to hear what they have to say, and you can find out a little bit more about them in your packets. Beside me is Rita Pinheirs, Director of Education Policy at the Southeast Asia Resource Action Center. Next to her right is Janelle George, Senior Education Policy Council at the NAACP Legal Defense and Education Fund. Next to her is Stan Littow, Vice President of Corporate Citizenship and Corporate Affairs for IBM and President of the IBM International Foundation. Beside him is Michael Patrilli, President of the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, and Linda and Patrice are going to stay up with us until, oh, I'm sorry. I totally skipped over you. Apologize. And the lady in the middle is Laura Evangelista, Principal of the Flushing International High School. I want to open this up first with a question for all of our panelists to sort of respond to what we've heard. Talk a little bit about the best leverage points you see in your work for how to increase equal access to deeper learning for students, particularly some of the students that we've heard about with so much potential and the ones who are so often left behind. And we'll start with you. OK. Can everyone hear me? OK. Just make sure you fucking hear me. All right. I thought I was actually going to be last. So in terms of, I think, some policy levers for increasing deeper learning, I think resource equity is certainly one of the biggest ones that we need to address in this country. Just the idea of having adequate resources for our students, especially those who are most disadvantaged. And I know Janelle wants to talk on this, so I'm not going to focus too much on it. The other two levers that I really want to address is that we need to better understand who our students are in the classroom. I mean, this is, or last year actually, was the first year that students of color became the new majority in the United States public schools. And so we have to address that changing demographic. We have to realize that there is such huge diversity, but we don't have good data on our students still. So we have an outdated system of looking at students by categorizing them into major racial categories, of not looking at the intersectionalities of race and gender, of English language learner status and race and disability in English language learner status, for example. So at CIRAC, we've been really pushing for more data, more disaggregated data, to look at the different Asian-American categories, for example. I mean, Patricia's presentation really gave a nice example of how you can have such diversity within the communities, especially within the refugee communities. So for example, we have over 1.2 million Southeast Asian refugees here that have arrived to the United States. And yet there is very little data out there in the schools about them. I mean, growing up, most people assumed I was Chinese. And so it was one of those things where I think the data also lends to being able to teach in a culturally and linguistically relevant manner, which I think is another important policy lever that we need to have that sort of training for all of our teachers, not just the ones who are teaching English language learners. Because we don't know exactly who's coming into the classroom, right? We know that the population is extremely diverse. And so we have to have all of our teachers and our principals and administrators prepared to address that diversity. Great point. And can you guys hear me too? Yes, you're good. Okay, great. Thank you for the introduction and thank you, Rita, for your comments. And I'm actually going to follow up pretty closely on those comments. So I work for the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, or LDF, which is a civil rights organization founded by the late U.S. Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall. And LDF successfully litigated the Brown versus Board of Education case. And I just want to quote a portion of the majority opinion, the unanimous decision, Justice Warren, because I think it's relevant to our conversation. And a lot of ways deeper learning is about quality education that all students should be able to have access to. And Warren wrote, it's the very education is a very foundation of good citizenship. It is a principal instrument in awakening the child to cultural values and preparing him for later professional training and in helping him to adjust normally to his environment. And it's doubtful that any child may reasonably be expected to succeed if he is deprived of the opportunity for a quality education. So again, that's really what deeper learning is about. It's about equipping students with the skills to succeed in society, in the economy, to be contributing citizens. And so that's what we really advocate for at LDF and we're talking about equal quality access to educational opportunities. We're talking about education that prepares students to really participate fully in our democracy. And so a couple of levers that I just want to mention that we see as Rita mentioned, definitely resource equity, but resource equity in the term equity does not always mean equal. So we're not talking about equal funding all the time across the board. Equitable means fair. So it means providing students, schools and districts with the services and supports that they need. And disproportionately we see, particularly for low income students, the need for school-wide services, wraparound services to help mitigate the effects of concentrated poverty. So additional supports, additional services, and also things that help promote positive and inclusive school climate as well. And also really working towards another approach that we're taking and looking at whether it's current legislation or other local and state policy, it's really helping to dismantle the test and punish approach to really see, without moving away from accountability, to really see a move towards dismantling that infrastructure really that undermines promoting broader curriculum, broader engagement and broader learning and really independent student thinking and really allowing us to have a little bit more space to learn in new and creative ways and give teachers a space to promote different ways of learning without fear of sanctions or other things that might be imposed as a result of that really broader approach and really a student, and I think Rita was referring to this, a student-centered approach that focuses on the students. And I also think that this is reflected in the reports, not an approach to teaching this very narrow design, narrowly and really not multi-dimensional, but it's just designed to respond to a test, but approach that's richer and broader and really will serve as students well later in this increasingly diverse global competitive economy. Right, well, first I just want to thank Linda and Facia for their papers. Can you talk a little louder to your, yeah. I want to thank you both for your papers because when I read them, it was so exciting to see all the work that we do in our school and our school community every day outlined. This is what we truly believe in our community and that we've been doing with students for over 20 years. There's over 20 international high schools and academies that work with English language learners across the country now and we follow truly a student-centered and whole-child approach with our students. We use a performance-based assessment system that really reflects the deeper learning skills with our students. So mastery of content, critical thinking, problem-solving, communication, perseverance, and knowing how to learn. We also use a mastery-based assessment system even within our school so that we can give ongoing feedback to students on those skills and how they're growing in those areas. The key to our focus is really looking at the student and seeing what they are bringing into the classroom as a resource. We don't focus on what they don't have. Okay, so they don't speak English when they come to us. But they are fluent in a language that many of us don't know how to speak and often it's not just one language that they're coming with, they're coming in with multiple languages already. They have resilience and I know that many of them bring in life skills at a young age in our high school that I didn't develop until much later on in life. Our classes are focused on collaborative group projects, looking at things deeply in complex ways, connecting things to the real world. This teacher-created curriculum is experiential. It crosses the disciplines and it results in authentic products that students have to defend and speak about to an audience. These are often projects and skills that are emphasized maybe in more affluent schools, but we know that our students can do. Again, just because they don't speak English doesn't mean they can't think in complex ways and have high level engagement in interesting tasks. We believe that our students' native language is a true resource and should be brought into the classroom and continue to be developed. They're exposed to English through language and content integration. There's no need to separate basic skills from rich content. That's where people learn language best is in context and using it in a real purposeful way. We have students collaborate with each other, they reflect on their learning, and again, for us, they graduate through a series of performance tasks, an original research paper, an original science experiment, a literary analysis paper, a math model, a personal statement. They all complete career internships and do internship exhibitions. They have a native language project that they present and also an arts piece because we feel that arts is also a very important part of the curriculum and the development of our students. These are the skills that we know they need to be successful in college and career, and so that's what we focus on in our classrooms daily. In addition, the other high leverage piece that I think we focus on in our school is providing the social-emotional supports that we know our students need. Many of them are coming from very traumatic lives either in their home countries or from coming here or dealing with the difficulties of poverty, family separation, so many issues that our students and challenges that they have to handle on top of learning a new language, a new culture and content and preparing for college. So we provide those supports in schools in our schools with as many wraparound services as we can, but we have things built in like an advisory program where all students meet regularly with an advisor where they can talk about some of these issues and get support in these areas. We use a restorative justice approach with students and restorative practices throughout all of our work, and we have many partnerships with outside organizations and CBOs. We really, it's funny that you talk about not belonging because I feel like one of the things, there's a giant mural that our students created in our doorway and it says where we belong, and that's what we really try to do at our schools, create that culture of belonging for students because we know once we feel that they belong, they're gonna stay with us, and then we can do the work and the skill building that they really need for beyond our doors. We know that this cannot be developed without developing our staffs, and so there's real capacity work that has to happen with teachers and that has to happen a collaborative way just the way that Linda described where teachers are looking at work, giving each other feedback, trying things out and not afraid to make mistakes, and working together to develop these complex tasks and curriculum. And I'm here because I really wanna tell you that this is possible and it works, and we've been doing this for a long time. In New York State, they struggle to get 35% of their Ls to graduate within four years, and at my school and across our schools, we regularly graduate students in four years at a 70% graduation rate, and when we're looking at five and six years, we're in the high 80s. All of our students apply to college and are accepted to college. Many of them enroll, again, some of them have to wait because maybe they may be undocumented, and financial issues, but many of them go on to college and are successful there, and this is just, I wish I could see this more broadly in more schools because I know every day that our students can do this work. Thanks. Okay, I'm gonna talk a little bit about economic opportunity, and it relates directly to the papers that were presented. I work for the IBM company now. I was deputy chancellor of schools in New York City. I did run an advocacy organization. I did work for the mayor. I did work for the governor, but from the standpoint of a large company and U.S. competitiveness, we really cannot wait in terms of solving the problem of providing more equal opportunity for more young people. And there is a role that the business community can play. It's interesting because when I was preparing for IBM's Centennial a couple of years ago, I went into the archives and there's a very interesting story about how IBM opened its first manufacturing plant in Lexington, Kentucky, which was segregated below the Mason-Dixon line. There were no integrated work opportunities in that part of the United States. And at that point, the CEO of the IBM company in correspondence with the governor indicated if the plant wasn't gonna be integrated, the plant would be in California. And he relented. The plant opened. It was integrated. And the schools in Lexington, Kentucky were integrated in 1955 before the Civil Rights Act. So that was an activity that was based upon an important transformative action, but it was based upon an economic imperative because the company thought at that point that it was important that they be able to attract large numbers of people in a variety of different racial and ethnic groups. And it would be a mistake to do this in one part of the country different from the large corporate policy across the United States. So here we are now in the 21st century and we look at our workforce and our needs. And the technology community in the United States is not well representing low income and students and young people of color. That's just the fact. We do better than any other technology company in the United States, but we don't do good enough. And we're not gonna be able to recruit waiting for students at the top and then looking at the cream and seeing how much of the cream you can attract compared with a variety of other companies. So we determine that we would need to focus in on high school transformation. And what we did it is through a program called P-Tech. We started with one school in Crown Heights across from Albany Houses, which is the toughest public housing project in the city of New York from the standpoint of crime and drugs. And we opened this school, P-Tech, in the fall of 2011. And it was important. It's not a charter school. There's no exam to get in. It's an open enrollment program. 90% of the students are free lunch eligible. All of them are children of color. It has the highest percentage of African-American male students of any school, not just high school, in the entire city of New York. And the results are that at the end of four years, six of the students actually completed their high school degree and their associates degree in computer science. All got job offers from IBM. Half of them accepted them. The other half went on and took full scholarships to four-year institutions. At the end of year five, about 35% of the students will complete five years or less their six-year program. All of them will get job offers. Their grade point averages on college courses, 50% of the courses, they either got an A or a B. That's better than the rates for all students in the City University of New York. As you probably know, graduates of the New York City Public Schools who go to colleges in New York City in the CUNY system, 80% take remedial courses. None of the students at P-Tech take remedial courses. So there are now 40 P-Tech schools across three states. In September, it'll be up to 65 across six states and the first sites opening outside of the US and Australia. So what's different? It relates directly to the research papers that we reviewed. Number one, we look at the workplace skills that are critically important for jobs at IBM and we embed them directly in the curriculum. This is not your grandmother's vocational education. This is an opportunity to say there are certain skills. Some people used to call them soft skills. We like to refer them as essential skills and they're about problem solving, they're about writing, they're about presentation, they're about collaboration and they're embedded in every course. So if you went to P-Tech and you went into the algebra class, you wouldn't recognize it because the students would be presenting, writing, collaborating, problem solving in every single course. Every student gets a mentor. We train all the mentors through an electronic site that we created called Mentor Place to make the mentoring directly connected to academic experiences. Every student gets paid internship. The interns get paid 12 to $14 an hour. They work and prepare about three months for their internships. The evaluation that we did of managers for the interns demonstrated that their job skills and performance was equal to juniors in college even though this was the summer between their junior and senior year in high school. And then when they complete with their associates degree, they're guaranteed first in line for jobs at IBM. Now why is it first in line as opposed to a guaranteed job? Because our lawyers said you can't guarantee a job. On the other hand, every single student who has the skill will get a job. Now there are 80 other companies sort of following this model. Why is this important? It's important because in 1970, 6% of low income students at age 24 had a college degree and 45 years later, it went to 9%. So it's just not working. Only 6% of low income students at the end of six years get a STEM job. That's where the high wages are. That's where the real economic opportunity is. So it's just not working. Now the students that we hire with their associates degree in computer science, their starting salary is $53,000 a year. They all got $1,000 signing bonuses when they start and they're doing great. It's a career opportunity and it's a real pipeline. We're not looking at students who finish high school, go on to college or creating an integrated experience. And that's why I think it's important because if you look at the slide that was up there on the economics of it, by increasing college completion, not high school diplomas, college completion, you're gonna create larger and larger numbers of students who can get high paying jobs. And we're not talking about preparing students for one job. We're talking about a career ladder and opportunity. Now the young people who will come to IBM to work with their associates degree, if they wanna go on and get their bachelor's degree, that's great, we'll pay for it. That's an opportunity for young people that they don't have. So I don't think it is good for us to focus in on only a top tier number of students to provide real economic opportunity. For the US to be economically competitive, we have to significantly increase the number of young people who not complete high school, but complete college and are career ready. And that's what this is about. Thanks, Mike. That's a tough act to follow. I love PTEC, such an amazing program. Incredible work standpoint. So first of all, I should say that when Linda asked me if I would speak, I admitted to her that I was a little bit skeptical about people. But I agree to do it for one reason, it's because I want Linda to owe me. Because my young boy is five and eight, really wanna meet her son who was on American Ninja Warrior and was amazing. I mean, if anybody's seen it, you should go Google this. I am glad to be known as his mother. So I hope we can maybe arrange that. Yeah, we'll work it out. Very inspired by the obstacle course abilities, not to mention he's also incredible, a law clerk, et cetera, et cetera. I do have some skepticism about some of what we've heard today, but first let's focus on some common ground. Which is that throughout the K-12 system, we can all agree that what many kids are getting is terrible, because a way to boring is way too low level, is not challenging. You know, when we look at elementary schools, Linda was exactly right. You see these schools that are doing this so-called remedial education that not only is boring and not motivating, it doesn't work, right? And I think we can find some real common cause around the elementary school curriculum and say, when kids come to school, particularly low income kids, and talk about the vocabulary gap, you know, what works to appeal that gap is not to suddenly do a bunch of flashcards and teach them vocabulary, right? It's to teach them a content rich curriculum. And it was great to hear this definition of deeper learning as putting content up front and center. Because I would argue, especially in the elementary school, that is what is so essential that we're gonna dramatically change these numbers that stand out. That the reason that many kids are not learning to read, in particular, it is no longer because they're not learning to decode. We've gotten a lot better at that. That's good, that's good news. So a lot of those reading wars back in the late 90s, those are over, we now do a better job helping most young people learn to read. So the reason that we continue to struggle with reading is that many young people do not have the access to learning about history, about science, about art and music and literature so that when they pick up the piece of text, whether it's nonfiction or fiction, they can't make sense of it. And so the Common Core standards and other high quality standards are very clear. They say what we need in our elementary school curriculum therefore is a content rich curriculum to go back to elementary school teachers being, as David Coleman says, the guide to the universe for these young people who are, as Wade Henderson said so eloquently, so eager to hear about history, to hear these stories about our heroes from the past, to hear about far away places, to learn about science and to learn about the way the world works, they are eager and yet what are we doing in those elementary schools? Minutes a day teaching history or social studies or science or art or music, minutes. What are they doing? Instead we're endlessly teaching these so-called comprehension strategies. Find the main idea of this text, how boring, right, and it's not working. So I think we can find some real Common Cards there and likewise in the high school, when you just see these kids going through the death march of one boring class after another, right? I mean clearly we can do better than that. What makes me nervous about some of the way deeper learning is sometimes talked about is a couple of things. First of all, I think we really do have to differentiate between elementary school and secondary school. And I think a lot of this conversation is about secondary schools and makes a lot of sense there. In elementary school again, I really think that there's a balance between say teaching kids the content and then the focus on the application or the project-based learning model that my read of the research is that the focus has to be very heavily on the content. By all means, we can have little kids to figure out how to apply what they learned. And I hope that at Milwaukee Elementary School, after they got Wade Henderson's signature, there were different ways for them to apply what they learned about the civil rights movement. But before they can apply it, they've got to learn, right? And we continue to skip that step. And particularly for little kids, I think that's the sense that we can't let go of it. And that's extremely important. The other thing that I think we need to focus on is rather than jumping into a particular approach to teaching and learning, a particular mix of different pedagogies, at least from a policy perspective, an item of policy is the item of policy wants. I think the focus has got to be on long-term outcomes. What we are trying to do is help many, many, many more low income kids grow up to climb the ladder to the middle class, to have the economic opportunity to interrupt intergenerational profits. And so I think the question we have to constantly ask ourselves is, does this approach work in getting those young people on a pathway where they can do research? And my sense is that once you're talking about high school, I think something like P-Tech works great. I think the kind of school that we're hearing about from Laura sounds great. I don't think that means that every single high school has to look exactly like that. I love what's happened in New York City in the last 10 years with the small schools movement, where you have hundreds of different schools, all of them small, but in lots of different flavors. Some of them would probably match up better with the definition of teacher learning. A lot, most of them probably, but some might look a little different. Some might be more traditionally academic, saying, we are gonna prepare kids overwhelming for the traditional college experience. And if they do that really well, fantastic. So I just think we need to keep the focus on the long-term outcome, which is that for most low-income kids to have opportunities, they need some kind of post-secondary, that means inter-technical credentials, that means inter-academic credentials, and keep pushing ourselves to say what mix of these different approaches works best. And it's not gonna look the same for everybody. And we shouldn't try to say that because some of these, quote, deeper learning high schools are really exciting and promising that therefore, every single high school in the country has to look exactly like that. I think what we need to ask is, how are we designing high schools to be engaging and help young people on their path? To respond. And then maybe Patrice, you'll have, ooh. We'll turn that down a little bit. I just wanted to pull out a couple of policy threads from some of this conversation because when you hear about the great work at international high schools, which it turned out, Patrice and I both wrote about in our papers not knowing that the other was doing so because they're so successful, the P-TECH schools and so on. What are some of the policy implications of this? And I think to Mike's point, the question about what did kids get access to in terms of curriculum is a key issue. There was a lot of research done during the last decade about how with the high stakes testing around English and math, a lot of schools, particularly low income schools, got rid of science, got rid of history or really squeezed it down to the minutes a day. The arts left, the libraries disappeared because fiscal budget cuts were converging with the pressure to get scores up on reading and math tests. And Edie Hirsch, the Core Knowledge Foundation, made the point years ago, which Mike was reprising for us, which is a really important one that you actually learned to read by knowing about the content. It's your life experience and your content knowledge that allows you to develop the literacy skills. So losing that rich curriculum has been a challenge. And one of the policy issues we have is to replace a full rich curriculum in all of our schools and make sure that kids are getting access to all the different disciplines and the ways in which we learn, which are, as I said, sort of modes of inquiry in and of themselves. And then doing that in a way that what they're learning is applied. And your comments, Mike, made me think about the Core Knowledge Schools, which I've seen in a number of states, which have wonderful applications of deep knowledge that they're engaging in. So then how do we get to that? Well, we have to rethink accountability in a couple of ways. And I just wanted to mention one or two things that are emerging. A number of states are going to more of a multiple measures approach to accountability, where they include a variety of kinds of academic outcome measures. Sometimes tests that are emerging to be more thoughtful and open-ended and calling on more problem solving and critical thinking abilities, along with English proficiency gains, along with, it would be nice if we had everybody at a bilingual seal of literacy as California has, which is another way to maintain both 11 other states. That's great to know. But we're also, in California, for example, in that system, measuring the number of kids who complete high school having succeeded in a college-ready curriculum and having completed a whole sequence in a career technical high-quality curriculum that meets a set of standards. We're looking at whether schools are offering a rich curriculum as an accountability measure because we have reason to believe it will translate into these other outcomes. So I think as we worry about how to scale up these great programs, we should begin to think about what will be the new levers for encouraging states and local communities to really tackle these issues that we know are important. Well, I have a suggestion. Right now in the United States, we fund all career and technical education through something called the Perkins Act, and it distributes about a billion three around the United States, and it goes out purely on a population basis. So if you have lousy programs, you get the same amount of money next year that you did the year before based upon population. There is a movement to reauthorize Perkins and to change how the money goes out. And instead of saying just based upon population, you should get it if you link your programs to labor market information, like where the jobs are, that might threaten some cosmetology programs, but that might be okay. Not in Hollywood. Number two. Grow those programs. Number two, to be able to have some metrics for performance. Number three, to align your high school program to your college program. So you're actually creating a scope and sequence that's gonna lead to a degree, have real employer engagement and involvement in the program, and the coalition that signed up behind it includes all the business organizations, but also the NAACP, student organizations like Young Invincibles, the labor organizations like the AFT and the AFL-CIO. It's a coalition of about 350 or 400 organizations. When you talk about going to scale, can we get from 65 P. Tech schools to 200 or 300? Yes, we can, but that's not a solution to the problem. If you change how the federal dollars go down and you create an incentive for people to do different, then you won't have the same vocational education programs that you had. When I walked out of the New York City, public schools as deputy chancellor in the early 90s, about over 20 years ago, when we began the process of creating P. Tech in New York City, I looked at all the vocational programs, 95% of them were exactly the same as what I left. Now, why would you do that if the entire economic structure in the United States was changing? You can't do it without adapting, and that's what I think changes in purpose. And to your point about wanting to hire young people in the business, there are a lot of U.S. companies that would like to be able to hire more U.S. students and are tapping global marketplaces. I was with yesterday, former executive from Cisco who said, that's our goal is that we can begin to hire more U.S. students rather than having to fight for H1 visas, which in California in one day, all the visas for the year are gone. And there's a line of companies trying to get more. I want to pull back a little bit because I was really struck when you were speaking about going back after you thought you had made great reforms in your school. And it turned out that the teachers weren't ready to do it. And so it all kind of collapsed back to exactly the same tracking you had seen when you initially came in. And we've now had 15 years. We've had a couple generations of teachers now trained and coming in in an accountability system, a curriculum system that is much more focused on not necessarily the deeper learning, not necessarily drawing in a whole lot of different content. And while we're starting to look at that again, I'm interested in what supports are needed for teaching capacity to actually prepare the teachers to carry those reforms forward. I'd like if you could talk a little bit about what you see. I mean, in terms of what's needed before the teachers, I mean, the ongoing professional development has to be, as was discussed, meaningful and collaborative and really reflect the student's needs, right? It has to be student-focused. Who's in the classroom? Teaching a, like I was mentioned, a heterogeneous classroom, right? So a lot of folks, I mean, as I was a teacher and I remember I was not prepared at all for the students that came into my classroom from very low income families who thought that they could not survive or live past the age of 18, right? I was not prepared for that. That's something that could have been that I needed professional development on, right? It's teaching to those students in terms of supporting them emotionally, supporting their needs that are brought in from outside of the classroom. The majority of our students now are low income and they're very diverse and we need to have the teacher preparation and the professional development address that. How do we teach so that we could accelerate learning quickly and rapidly in every single classroom, right? It's not, you know, you can't expect to not have a high need student coming into your classroom. So we have to change that professional development to reflect that. Laura, could you talk a little bit about how the process of evaluating students in this competency-based and project-based format in their school? How that allows a different kind of professional development for your teachers? I mean, I myself was a teacher in one of our schools for many years and I always say that for me, the process of evaluating students through our performance assessments was the greatest professional development that I ever received. To have to sit with my peers, often looking at my own work that I, you know, used with students, my own activities and scaffolds that I was working with students in order to prepare them for this work, to sit down, look at the students' work norm across common rubrics, which we've developed across all of our schools and are aligned to the common core standards, that forced me to think back and reflect on my own practice and what I was doing in my classroom to prepare students. And I wasn't teaching in isolation. I mean, we were all looking at each other's work all the time and there's no greater accountability than that to sit with your peers and think to yourself, you know what? I didn't do right by the student. I could have done more. And so that's built into everything we do. I mean, one of our core principles at our schools is one learning model for all. So we ask teachers to do what we ask students to do, work together in groups, think deeply. I mean, we continue to develop the deeper learning in our own staffs as we're doing it with our students so that they're then working with students to build in those reflective practices to think about how to keep improving. I mean, this work is not, it's very complex. It's not easy and it needs continual development and revision just like our students are doing. And so that's, it's built into our structures. We have a lot, we consider all of our collaborative time as ongoing professional development. And we use our budget to make sure that we've created schedules where teachers can meet regularly and do talk about their work beyond just when they're sitting on panels and students are defending their work before that, before that whole process. How are we getting students ready for that culmination? And Patrice, you wanted to respond to that. Commonly, the response to what do we do about the teachers and bringing them up to speed on these things, the response to that is professional development. But I'm afraid we don't interrogate enough where does the professional development come from. And if we're not investing, at state and federal level, we're not investing in building this knowledge in our institutions of higher ed that are producing the teachers in the first place, we don't have the folks out there to provide the appropriate professional development. I think we need to go back to that looking at what we're not doing about investing and developing those kinds of skills. That a lot of money gets spent on professional development for things that I'm not sure are really all that useful. And I think there really needs to be a refocus on the preparation of the research base and the preparation of folks who can do it well. We recently were surveying teachers in, we do this periodically, we were recently surveying teachers in the Los Angeles School District around their skills and how prepared they felt to teach diverse students, particularly linguistically diverse students. Overwhelmingly, they told us, we haven't gotten the preparation for doing this, I left my teacher preparation program without these skills and now I am scrambling to try to get them. I just want to piggyback on that and say that one of the key pieces of this Deborah Ball has coined a phrase that you learn about practice in practice. But you don't learn about practice in practice by yourself by trial and error. You learn from expert teachers who already know. And so this is an issue for both pre-service and for the way we structure in-service education. There is a move, there are these teacher quality partnership grants at the federal level. They have shrunken size, but they've supported some really strong partnership programs between universities and schools, residency models, where you have a full year of student teaching or apprenticeship in the classroom, expert, urban teacher, or whatever the location is. In a school that serves diverse students, new English learners, as well as other students who represent what our majority is today, while the coursework is wrapped around and integrated with this very strong clinical experience. And what we see when that happens is that teachers come out knowing how not only to think about these issues, but how to do the things that are needed to teach English learners with sheltered strategies or whatever the strategy may be, or it may be in a bilingual immersion. In San Francisco there's a set of programs like this where two universities are working with the schools in bilingual immersion settings, training special ed, math and science teachers. Some of them are in international schools. Learning these practices that are rare and need to spread so that the next generation will come in that way. But that means dramatic change in teacher education, regulation and accreditation, and all the other levers that one can apply because when teacher ed came into universities in the 1950s, it became very much coursework, theory, very tenuous relationships to the field and some places have changed that. But one of the things we're doing in California like some other states is getting outcome data about schools of education from their graduates. Did you learn this? Were you given this? Did you get these opportunities? And from employers, can your teachers do the things that are needed? And we're gonna be using that as some other states are in looking at universities and other providers because districts are also authorized to provide teacher education in some cases, charter schools and so on, to say who's producing the kind of teachers that we need. Teacher performance assessments are used in our state as well that evaluate this in performance on the job. And we have to encourage universities that have not yet evolved to strong clinical practice to do so and if they don't care to do so to get out of the business. I know that a bunch of you wanted to respond to that but I just wanna go to Janelle for one minute. I mean, we're at a point of a whole new wave of litigation on equity and on adequacy and we're seeing the courts start to consider a lot more even aspects of pedagogy, aspects of teacher training and salaries and more about the meat of what's going on in schools than we have ever seen before. And I wonder if you could talk a little about where you see that going and what role we could expect the courts to be able to play in this sort of equity and deeper learning discussion. Yeah, I think that that's a tough question. I certainly think for advocates, it's important to emphasize the value of quality learning, deeper learning and have that as a component in terms of talking about what resource equity looks like. And I really wanna go back to that phrase deeper learning is an equitably distributed because that's such a key part. So LDF litigates a lot of cases including one point I did wanna make in terms of smaller schools, we actually did file against New York specialized high schools because they were actually excluding a lot of students, particularly students of color. And one thing I think we do have to be careful about when we are promoting great models is ensuring that we're not excluding certain students from even gaining admission or access to these great schools that are promoting that because they do become in high demand and people wanna have access to them but we have to do it in ways and ensure broad access. So whether that's a lot of charters were concerned about some exclusionary admission policies. Again, the specialized high schools in New York City where we have litigated because it's just really an issue of lack of access to these quality learning opportunities. So we have certainly advocated and shown course of value in terms of outcomes of being able to access these programs and elevating it. I think it's really hard to say where the courts will go in terms of weighing that. I think that that's a battle that we fought decades even before Brown where we argued that even having equitable resources, them being separate in and of themselves was inequitable. So really emphasizing things like the value of diverse classrooms, how both students, all students of races and all races and ethnicities benefit from that. A lot of people talk about Brown versus Board of Education and the value of desegregated learning environments, diverse learning environments for African American students but we also argued in that litigation that white students also valued really benefited from diverse learning environments. So I think we really have to take a look at access and ensuring that we don't exclude students and that has been a huge focus of our litigation but also ensuring that courts understand and see the benefit, what are the long-term benefits and the long-term consequences of lack of access. Thanks. I want to open it up, I want to continue this conversation but I'd like to open it up in case anyone has any questions. I think there's a microphone in the back. I don't know whether it'll be brought around or when there's another one over here. So if anybody has any, while we're waiting I know Stan wanted to respond to that. Well I was interested in the conversation about professional development because I agree with everybody that it's uneven in terms of the way it's distributed but from the way people think about it they think about it as really a high cost option and that you've gotta provide a significant amount of money and that there aren't the quality of people who could do mentoring or master teaching or advising and that the coursework isn't enough and that you need to support teachers on an ongoing basis. One of the things that we've been thinking of doing we're actually in the process of it is using this new piece of technology called cognitive computing. You know we used it to win the game show Jeopardy on TV but it's not a game, believe me. We're working now with a group of oncologists at some of the best cancer hospitals in the United States to actually create an advisor for oncologists so that they have easy access to all clinical trial information, all cancer diagnostic and treatment plans converted using data analytics and natural language and when you think about that that can be actually a teacher advisor and you can load into the supercomputer as much content as you can find about teaching practice, curriculum materials. You need the cooperation of people to vet it and make sure it's high quality but then you can actually respond to individual questions that a teacher would have and have a personalized mentor or tutor using cognitive computing without asking for name rank and serial number and getting people nervous about teacher assessment but that could reshape teacher professional development. Thanks and could you say your name and who you're with? Yes, good morning. That's what you're looking at. Had to do with underlying what Wade talked about in terms of stage rights and underlying what Linda talked about in terms of which students get which kind of education is a very old American stigma of inferiority in race and class and you can talk about methods all your life but unless we finally do address that these things will not change in terms of political will and one of the solutions that I strongly encourage as we look at everything else is to infuse it to the students themselves and understanding of who they are and what their power is, politicize them if you like that term so that they themselves reject that stigma as well as the institutional framework in which they're working. It's got to start at the top but it's also got to start at the bottom and together maybe we can finally eradicate that stigma which as long as it continues will poison everything else that we're trying to do to some degree. The other point I wanted to make about professional development is what people have sometimes called professional learning communities help us mitigate the fact that probably each and every teacher will not be a general education teacher who also knows special education who also knows English language learning who also knows how to prepare students in terms of wraparound services and soft skills but together, one, if respected and have a power of balance within that professional learning community within the school can support each other and make up for each other's lack of specific knowledge around those things. That's what teams are for. Teams of learners and teams of teachers. That's a lot to unpack too. Thank you very much. Can I, I'd love to jump in on one issue around equity and I wanna make an argument that probably won't go over well but I'll try it anyways which is that in the cause of equity that what we actually may need more of is actually more gifted and talented programs and more tracking. All right, now let me play this out. It's been 30 years since Genie Oaks came out with her book about tracking and that we've been hearing these arguments about the bad sides of tracking and of which there were many. What happened in reaction to the anti-tracking movement though was that generally schools in, let's call it blue America, in urban systems, they got rid of gifted and talented, they got rid of tracking, they listened to Genie Oaks. Schools in the suburbs, maybe in red America but especially in the more affluent suburbs did not. So the situation we have today is that if you are poor and high achieving, you are likely attending a school in the city where there is no gifted and talented program, where there is not the ability once you get to middle school and high school to be in advanced tracks with other advanced students, whereas if you are white and you are rich, you are still attending schools in the suburbs or private schools where you have gifted and talented programs, where you have those advanced courses, where you have that tracking. I understand the impulse to say let's get rid of it everywhere, okay, but for 30 years that argument has not won the day in the more affluent parts of this country. And so the argument is what can we do for the high achieving low income kids and high achieving kids of color who are denied this opportunity that they would not be denied if they were affluent and living in the suburbs. And I think that is another way of looking at this equity issue for your consideration. Mike, can I get a follow, I have to do a follow up on this. Yes. There are, as you said, gifted and talented programs in advanced curriculums in the suburbs, which the low income and students of color in those schools still don't have access to. So what have you found to change the policies and practices of systemic and often unconscious racism or socioeconomic bias? Great question. I mean, first of all, look, I am acknowledging what is a terrible truth in this country, first of all, is that many of our schools are still very segregated, right? So in a lot of those suburban schools, there aren't that many poor minority kids, right? And in the urban schools I'm talking about, there aren't that many white and affluent kids, okay? So, I mean, it's one thing when you're talking about diverse schools, it's another thing when you have the de facto segregation we still have in a lot of places. All right, the other issue is what, look at what's happened in New York City, for example, the current policy for gifted and talented is they have one cut score for what it takes to be gifted and talented across the city. And not surprisingly, in the much more affluent areas in the Upper East Side, there's lots more kids getting into those programs. A different way to say, instead, let's take a top 10% route. Let's say at every individual elementary school, we're in some kind of measure, we're gonna identify the top 10% of kids and make sure that they have access to special programs. And that would be a way to get lots more poor minority kids opportunities for acceleration, for et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, that they would not otherwise have. This is such a big topic that we could spend more time than we have, but I just wanna offer one thought. First of all, that's how they used to do gifted and talented in New York City, pre-Bloomberg, so we can go back to another time. But the real issue is, I remember when my, I fought to get my own kids in those programs because the curriculum was different, right? And you go to back to school night and the teachers will say, this is where we give your kids, we teach them to think. And I always would say, well, what are you doing in the rest of the programs? And the real question is, why do we deny access to a thinking curriculum to kids in every classroom? Totally agree, totally agree. And so we're on the same page. Totally agree, totally agree. And I think Common Core helps, right? Can I just say one thing that we can't ignore to the comment that was just made the role of race in this. It's not accidental why certain children ended up where they did. It's deliberate placement. In years prior, decades prior to filing Brown versus Board of Education, there was a lot of debate, whether we focus on access to quality resources or we focus on integration and diversity. And so we know what the ultimate decision was, but we can't ignore the intentionality. And as you noted, the institutionalized and systemic racism that continues to fuel the policies and practices that we see today, that's really, at bottom, what it's about. And that's what we're trying to dismantle. Again, we filed litigation against the specialized high schools because certain students were not getting access to them. You can walk in the doors of many New York City schools. And even though students of all races are in the same building, they're still essentially segregated. You walk in one classroom and another classroom and it looks like segregation is still very much a lie. That's very intentional. When certain students have access to the means to prepare for these entrance exams to certain schools or to get access and tutoring in order to succeed, and we can't ignore that. Well, the fact of the matter is... I want to get one more question in because we've got, and I'll give you the last word. This was saying that saying we're going to invite you all to let me speak not with the national or the lead cat, necessarily. I am from Kansas. My parents, grandparents, and people who came before them were all educated in a segregated high school that prided itself on an effort that was named after Charles Sunder. I know he has a space here, or there's a building here named after him. What I grew up in in Kansas City was a focus on academic excellence. The principals, the doctors, the lawyers, all lived within our community because it was segregated. I'm a child born in 1968. I stand on the excellence that came out of that school and the belief that everyone in that building had to be educated. We did not have the luxury of not educating some of our children because that was the way out. What I am struggling with as I approach my 50th year is that I think we lost something with Brown versus Board of Education, and I think you spoke on it. We got integration. We lost access. We lost access to information. We lost access to tools. Things were reconfigured and folks were left out who don't have access. What is happening in suburban schools now, in which I live, is that young people who are black and brown and lack social capital are not getting access to information about the strong classes in the schools. They're not necessarily called gifted and talented, but there may be math classes in after-school programs that are only for those kids who are really, really strong or whose parents fight. There are classes that are given in the summers before school starts that are for young people whose parents are fighting for them to get in or are deemed as really smart by the teachers who only believe in those few children, but don't believe every child can learn. That is what is happening in the suburbs in New Jersey, and I would posit to you, is happening around the country. Black, brown, and under-resourced kids who lack social capital aren't even given the chance to get access to those strong classes. That is what is happening across America. My question to you is, how when are we going to demand and support educators in believing that all children have the ability to learn? What can be done to ensure that, because other than that, we're going to continue to parse our children into those who have access to opportunity and those who have access to just pushing a widget? What can we do? Have any of you, yeah, if any of you have had experience specifically with ways that break down those kinds of barriers and create better access for students to better courses? So there are some examples of how we can address this, and I think it requires real leadership at the district level and with the principals to acknowledge that the problem exists and that they have to take a step to address it. So what I've seen is in federal way, in Washington, there's, they have a fantastic... That was organized by the administrator, which is an opt-out policy for their AP courses. So they use a regular cut score and then they say, anybody who has, you know, who's aboveically is enrolled in an advanced placement course, they counselor and he counsels in terms of why they do not want to be enrolled. And so a lot of students, Hispanic, African-American students who may not have realized that they were AP quality students, are getting enrolled. Now the school at district has put in place also the wraparound and support services for these students so that they get supported in terms of study habits, taking an advanced course, all the different things that are needed to help them with defeating in these classes because they never had access before. And so I think, you know, you can look at those sort of policies and think about replicating that and demanding that across the country. So why are we tracking students and deciding who gets up and who doesn't? We should be trying to figure out how we support it so that more students can actually get into the class. And Patricia, I'll give you the final word. Well, I'm gonna let Linda have the final word, but maybe I just have to, this is like burning, okay? I have to say something. Because we're talking as though we got integration and we didn't, okay? We got some integration in the South and the South is turning back. The rest of the country is increasingly segregated. We sort of talk around it and passed it without really discussing how do we equally distribute the resources of schooling when our schools are so incredibly segregated in themselves? So I know I have to hand this back to you for the final word. But we need once again a renewal of the curriculum, the equal status curriculum. What we haven't talked about is what peers learn from peers, which is incredibly important. If you sit next to the kid in class whose parents know something about how to get to college, if you sit next to the kid who has these kinds of aspirations, you're going to learn that whether your teacher tells you or not and probably won't. We have got to face up to the incredible segregation that is going on and that the courts have continually helped to foster more and more. Before, I think we can really believe that we're going to have equitable outcomes for all of our children. And yes. And I just will add a footnote to the comments that were made. I have worked with a number of schools that have detract and that have also created in segregated settings where all students of color and low income student settings deeper learning curricula for all the kids where with great heterogeneity. And a part of that is the policy that not only says you can opt out above a certain score. You have to opt out of it but says you can opt in from anywhere. But it's also teacher development. And I used that little example earlier about teachers not being able to carry that curriculum in that situation in Montgomery County. But it wasn't because they didn't want to or couldn't have ultimately done it because they got a couple of days of drive by spray and pray workshops that were not adequate to enable them over time to learn a new way of teaching. And these deeper learning skills require a very different kind of pedagogy. How do you teach for inquiry? How do you keep the content solid? And we've had the curriculum oars between back to the basics and project based learning. And if either is done badly, then kids suffer when the skills are brought together with the content and the inquiry in a sophisticated careful way. Kids benefit that requires we invest a lot more in the capacity of teachers to learn that pedagogy. And as you noted, we have a generation of teachers who have not really had that kind of training because they were being trained for a different kind of teaching and learning. So at the end of the day, yes, we have to fight the battles to return to integrated settings, heterogeneous settings where kids can learn together with teachers who are skilled and leaders who understand the policy framework to allow that to happen. Join me in thanking our panel. And I'm going to bring up Charming to do the closing remarks. I can't believe this never happened before. Well, thank you everyone. And I would ask again, if you could please join me and giving a round of applause to our presenters, panelists and moderator. Each of them did an exceptional job of discussing the importance of deeper learning and equity and the policies needed to realize these ideals as Wade Henderson referred to earlier. One couple of quick housekeeping notes because I want to be very respectful of your time because we've went a little over time, but this was a great conversation. The video from today's event will be available next week on the Learning Policy Institute's website. And I would also strongly encourage you, if you have not done so already, to please visit JFF's website. They have an entire series of reports that are dedicated to deeper learning, looking at various kind of thematic issues. All of them very important. I really would encourage you to take a look at the entire series. Thank you again for joining us. Please stay tuned. Check out the LPI website for our upcoming work. And again, thank you for your commitment for coming out on a Friday morning to have this conversation. Thank you. Thank you.