 It is now my pleasure to welcome Dr. Linda Darling-Hannond. It is such a pleasure to be here with the most important people in this country, and I'm so privileged to follow on the heels of Marian Wright Edelman's wonderful admonition and inspiration to us this morning to continue to raise the cause of children to the nation's attention. So I've been asked to speak a little about what we know that will allow us to act expeditiously in this field, and I'm going to piggyback on some of what Marian has already gotten us to think about. First I have to figure out how this keyboard works. There we go. And I want to point out that the challenge for us as educators in this era is a more complex challenge than it has been in the past, because in addition to all of the issues that are raised by the neglect of children and the growing poverty gap and income gap in this country, we're also being asked to teach young people in ways that were particularly reserved for a few in the past. The new Common Core State Standards, the Next Generation Science Standards, look for deeper learning for children to be able to apply their learning in more critical, problem-solving oriented ways. The kind of education that used to be reserved for the kids who were allocated to the gifted program or the advanced placement or the honors courses is now being asked for and expected for virtually all kids. And so it's a form of deeper learning that we need to be able to cultivate. And I want to start with a hopeful message that our students are capable of deeper learning when they are well taught. And I'll give you an example of how that can unfold. I am a former English teacher myself, so I like to collect examples from English teachers' classrooms of the kind of teaching and learning that many of us worry about. So I'm going to give you some examples of how children can illustrate for us the path to deeper learning in the teaching of the concept of metaphor. And initially, of course, we know when students encounter something for the first time, their attempts are more shallow. They are not necessarily fully understanding deeply what the concept means. And here's an example of the beginning of the process. He was as tall as a six-foot-three-inch tree. Okay, there's the word as in there, but this is not yet an example of deeper learning. But here, with a little bit of work, we see a pace forward. John and Mary had never met. They were like two hummingbirds who also had never met. There's a glimmer that the concept is being understood. But with a little more work, a little more teaching, you can see progress being made. She walked into my office like a centipede with 98 missing legs. But don't give up. There is hope. There is the possibility of deeper learning, and we can see it here. He fell for her like his heart was a mob informant and she was the East River. That's a New York kid, gotta be. So deeper learning is possible, and we can see how it unfolds. Even in his last years, Grand Papi had a mind like a steel trap. Only one that had been left out so long and had rested shut. And this is one of my personal favorites. He was as lame as a duck, not the metaphorical lame duck either, but a real duck that was actually lame. So you know who this kid is, the one that doesn't want you to write cliche in the margins, right? She grew on him another favorite, like she was a colony of E. coli, and he was room temperature Canadian views. I think that's an example of deeper learning. The plan was simple like my brother-in-law, Phil, but unlike Phil, this plan just might work. A final example where you add a touch of irony to the concept of metaphor. Her vocabulary was as bad as like whatever. Our kids are capable of deeper learning. We are capable of helping them learn deeply, but there is a lot of work that needs to be done to help us get to the place where that will be routine and where the conditions for that kind of work will be in every school and every classroom. Much of the conversation around education these days is about achievement scores and rankings and among the things that we hear about a lot are the international assessments, the program for international student assessment or PISA, and the OECD countries participate in this survey of student learning. It is a little different than the test that we often give in the United States because two-thirds of the items are open-ended, requiring students to write a response that applies their knowledge to a new situation rather than bubbles in one answer out of five on a multiple choice test. And what I've highlighted here are the rankings from 2012. The countries that are in purple print are the ones that we're used to seeing at the top of these rankings, Singapore, Japan, Korea, Finland, Canada. The ones in red were surprises in the last round of PISA. Ireland, Poland, Estonia, and Vietnam also Germany had been doing much less well and regained prominence in the list. You can see that the U.S. ranks much lower at 21st in reading, 32nd in math, 23rd in science. And often these results are put forward as evidence that the U.S. system is failing, which I think is not the right inference to be drawing from the data. But it's also interesting to see what is happening in the countries that have over 30 years really improved the quality and equity of their outcomes. And I'm going to talk about both of those things. One of the inferences, however, that I do draw from PISA is that on average over the 12 years or 15 years almost that we have been implementing No Child Left Behind, we've seen no improvement in our average scores on this international assessment. So the theory of reform behind No Child Left Behind, which is simply to test and apply sanctions to the failure to meet expected targets on the test, has not proved to be enough to make a major difference overall in student achievement. In every one of the areas tested by PISA, math, science, and reading, we're a little further behind in 2012 than we were in the year 2000. However, if you look at how the U.S. does by poverty rates of schools, and this is the point that I'm going to just jump from Marion's talk and piggyback upon, in schools where less than 10% of the kids live in poverty, we ranked number one in the world in reading. In schools where as many as 25% of kids live in poverty, we ranked number three in the world in reading. Even in schools where as many as 50% of kids live in poverty, we are way above the international average. So our teachers are doing some things very, very well because in the high-achieving countries, all of the schools have fewer than 10% of kids in poverty because they don't allow children to live in poverty. And so we're being compared in this country against societies that are making the investments in children that are not being made here. And what we can see from this chart also is that the place where we have a real drop-off in student achievement is in schools where more than 75% of kids live in poverty. And I can say to you in California where over half of the kids in our public school system live below the poverty line. And many, many schools have 75, 80, 90, 100% of kids living in poverty that that is a growing number of schools in our country. And segregation, which has been increasing over the last 20 or so years, is increasingly layered on that intense and concentrated poverty. And that is the issue that we have to address is the concentrated poverty and segregation. Well, what do we find when we look at these high-achieving countries and those that have dramatically improved over a period of time, are factors that are associated with this high achievement? The first, and I just will piggyback right on the last talk, is the societal supports for children's welfare, including early childhood education. You find in these higher-achieving countries equitable resources with greater investments in high-need schools and students. In the United States, our highest-achieving state in New England spends $18,000 a kid. Our lowest spending state is at $6,000 a student. Within each of those states, the highest spending districts are spending three times as much as the lowest spending districts, typically speaking. So these dramatic inequalities in the allocation of resources to schools, which stand in the face of our rhetoric about equity, are not present in high-achieving societies that tend to spend the same amount and add money. They call it in Finland affirmative discrimination. They add money in schools that have more immigrant students, more students, from lower-income backgrounds. Very substantial investments in initial teacher education and ongoing support. If you wanted to become a teacher in Finland or Singapore or many of the other countries that are at the top of the ranking, Korea, you would come in to a teacher education program that was very high quality with all of the costs paid and a stipend while you go to school so that everyone is well-prepared and enters a profession which pays as much as the funding going to other college graduates without a mountain of debt. We have to address all of these issues. Schools are designed to support teacher learning as well as student learning. I'll come back to that. Students have equitable access to a rich thinking curriculum. We don't begin tracking in kindergarten and first grade as many of our schools do or in middle school as others of them do. They focus their assessments on performance assessments rather than multiple-choice tests. We are the only country in the world that tests primarily with multiple-choice tests or that tests as much as we do every child, every year. There are assessments periodically, maybe once or twice before high school with open-ended essays, oral examinations, even project-based assessments that teachers design and score and that are part of the teaching and learning structure. We know a great deal about what happens in high-achieving societies and we know a great deal about the specific things that could help us really master achievement. It's important for teachers to be able to speak to both the things that they themselves can do and I will talk about the teaching strategies component of this but also the context within which those teaching efforts can be the most successful. Early childhood education has already been mentioned and I'll simply point out that in the PISA data, the international assessment data, they've observed a huge performance advantage in societies that offer pre-school education and for kids who've had pre-school education, there's a 53-point advantage in mathematics and if you control for socioeconomic status and other variables, that advantage is still there. And in the societies that are doing best, those students who have the least family income are much more likely to get pre-school education of high quality than in other societies. So it's an area where we know what to do and we need to begin doing it. We know that early childhood pays off. The social benefits of high quality early childhood education are estimated anywhere from four to ten dollars comes back to the society in the form of reduced grade retention, special education placements, higher graduation rates, less incarceration, lower levels of adult poverty for every one dollar that's invested. And so we need to continue to make that case. And the most successful programs have relied on very highly qualified teachers who have a bachelor's or a master's degree in early childhood education states that have put this in place, have underwritten the training of teachers so that they can meet this higher standard. Rich hands-on learning materials, language and print rich environments, creative play and engaging collaborative learning activities, parent outreach and education. I want to say a word about the evidence regarding the nature of learning activities for young children, but this also carries on into older age groups as well. We have this press to raise test scores in this country, and we test in a way that is a very remote proxy from the actual way that you would use the knowledge in the real world. Nobody goes to work and gets a multiple-choice test on their desk where they pick one answer out of five in response to a set of questions and turn that in and go home because their work is done. There is no work that looks like that. You have to find information, you have to apply it, you have to be creative, you have to work with other people, you have to figure out a lot of things. Well, it's really important that our education system not begin to emulate the doing of that kind of test-based activity in lieu of the real work of creative engagement, communication, collaboration, problem-solving, finding and analyzing information and so on. And in early childhood education we've had more and more pressure to have kids master basic skills in the way it's represented on the tests rather than engaging in play, engaging in inquiry, engaging in discovery. And what we know from research is that in fact the more kids get to engage in play and discovery and learning how to be social beings and taking care of themselves and cooking their food and serving it as they do in preschools in many countries and engaging in the arts and learning other languages which by the way their brains are completely wired to do at that point, to that extent they actually do much, much better in later schooling and life than when they get early academics in a very artificial way. So we're going to have to continue to raise these issues about what's the nature and quality of the education that we need for children to receive. When we went to Finland recently with a congressional delegation, the people were asking how does Finland do so well? Well, of course they take spectacular care of their children in terms of health and early childhood and so on. They're very healthy. They have lots of recess. They have lots of music. They have lots of play. And this is what the teachers talked about was that yes, we do academics and it's inquiry oriented and it's problem solving and everybody speaks three languages. It's a tri-lingual country as many other countries are. And in Finland that happens to be usually three different alphabets that the kids are learning in preschool and elementary school. And these kinds of things make a difference for your cognitive apparatus. We know that when kids are physically fit and get activity, they actually do better cognitively and academically. When you learn another language, it builds so many more neurons in your brain that they discovered that when they looked at Alzheimer's patients, people who actually had had Alzheimer's but were bilingual did not show the symptoms for five years later than other people because they had so much more brain matter that they could work with. So we have to really think about both when we educate kids and how we're going to do it so that we're building smart brains that we'll then be able to engage in the kind of cognition that we need them to engage in. The other piece that's so important is equity. And one of the things that the PISA results have discovered is that high performers in the world combine quality with equity. And what you don't find, if you look at that upper left-hand quadrant, that would be where you would find countries that have high performance but low equity. And there's almost nothing up there because those who have high performance spend their money in highly equitable ways. You can see the United States is kind of lower in the basket of performance and equity. The other thing they thought is that equity and resource allocation is associated with achievement. If you spend more in schools on the education of children who have fewer socioeconomic advantages, you do better as a country. And those surprise arrivals to the top of the rankings that I pointed out earlier, like Vietnam and Poland and Estonia, did that by investing more money in the education of students with greater needs. And that is what shot them up in the rankings. So I'm just reiterating what Marion already said to us. But part of our agenda is to make funding more responsive to student needs when we think about both early childhood and we think about the way in which we allocate costs. I want to give you just a couple of pieces of information about this because since the 1980s, we've been hearing that money doesn't make a difference. That was actually an explicit messaging strategy that was adopted in the 1980s as many of the programs of the 60s and 70s that had reduced poverty, that had increased equity in schools, were being eliminated. We were being told money doesn't make a difference. We have a lot of evidence about how money does make a difference. When Massachusetts reformed its school system in the early 1990s and shot up to become number one ranked state in the country and has been at that, Massachusetts is in the house. Good to see you here. What did they do? The first thing they did was put in place a weighted student formula that put more money in the schools allocated based on poverty, English learning status, special education status and so on. And then they added standards and assessments which were more open-ended and preschool education and professional development for teachers and investments in teacher education. And that whole thing is what propelled a very complete standards-based reform forward. And economists who studied the system said it was that reallocation of school funding that was primarily responsible for the growth and achievement. Recently, just this summer, three economists put out a study which looked at the results of school funding reforms in the last 40 years in 28 states. And they found that for low-income kids who, because of school funding reforms, had 20 percent more spent on them each year from kindergarten to 12th grade. The adult achievement and income gap was closed. Was closed. So what you found was that these young people graduated at rates 26 percentile points higher than they would have, went on into college, went on into good jobs, avoided poverty, avoided incarceration and so on, at rates that essentially closed that gap. So money really does make a difference. And we just need to be versed in this literature so that we can begin to change the conversation about that. It is just not right that testing without investing is somehow going to magically cure the situation that we currently have in schools where kids are under-resourced in their homes and communities and in their schools at the same time. And you can see in New Jersey, is New Jersey in the house? No, no applause for New Jersey. That's just applause for New Jersey because they did this thing. I used to live in Philly and in New York, so I thought of New Jersey as the strip of 95 that goes between the two cities. But they, for 30 years, fought school finance reform. There was lawsuit after lawsuit. The city's Trenton, Newark, Camden, I taught in Camden, it was my first student teaching placement, had half as much money as Princeton and New Brunswick and so on. They fought it. Finally in 1998, after nine court decisions, Christy Todd Whitman, the Republican governor of New Jersey, put the money into the system to create parity between the low-funded and the high-funded districts they gave preschool to all of the low-income students in the, what they call the 30 Abbott districts. They did a lot of professional development and so on. And over 10 years, they cut the achievement gap in half and propelled achievement in New Jersey to one of the top five in the country. Number one in writing, 40% students of color in that state, more than a third living in poverty, but they demonstrated that by being smart about how to make those investments, and they partnered around, by 2007, Hispanic and black kids in New Jersey were outperforming the average kid in California. So that when you look at the differences across states, that's part of it. Now, what about our profession? What about the things we know about improving the quality of teaching? One of the things that we know is that teacher effectiveness has many components and that a number of large studies have found that student learning gains are related to teachers having a strong academic background, quality preparation before they enter teaching, certification in the field that they teach, experience more than three years, and national board certification. And in one large study in North Carolina where they were able to look at all of those together, each of them predicted higher achievement for kids, but together they accounted for more of the difference in student learning gains than race and parent education combined. Now, what would we want? We would want a set of policies where virtually all teachers have virtually all of these characteristics. But in fact, what we have is that some students are taught by teachers who have all of these features and others are taught disproportionately by people of almost none of these characteristics. And that's what causes the enormity of the achievement gap on top of these other factors. So as a policy matter, we ought to be articulating a set of policies which high achieving countries already have in place where all teachers come in with these characteristics and where we provide the recruitment incentives, the training opportunities, the mentoring that will keep people so that they do gain experience and stay for a career, the national board certification opportunities that will allow people to gain these skills. So that's a policy agenda that we need to be thinking about. If we don't do that, if all we do is focus on teacher evaluation after people get in the profession, we'll be building on a house of sand. If you got this right, if you brought the right people in with the right capacity and experience and support to develop skills like those that are tested in the board certification, then teacher evaluation will be about development rather than trying to figure out how to get rid of incompetent teachers. Still many things influence achievement. This is from one study, but there are several that find very similarly. In general, achievement is predicted by student background factors, about 60%. Teacher factors are about 8%. The studies vary between 7% and 12%. There are other school factors, and those matter as well. And if we want high levels of teacher effectiveness, we need to be thinking about not just what we do to support the development of individual teachers, but teachers' peers, collaboration, other conditions of teaching work. We know that class size and curriculum matters, that student leadership matters. But I want to point out in particular the importance of the collaborative piece because in fact several studies have found that teachers who work together over a long period of time collaboratively in teams have a greater influence on the achievement gains in the school than what you could gain from individual teachers not working in that way. And so it's very important that as we think about the quality of teaching, we not just focus in on individual teachers, but we focus in on the quality of the collaborative environment that allows teachers to grow and learn from one another. We have evidence that when you use professional teaching standards to guide preparation, development and evaluation, teacher effectiveness improves. Like when teachers are evaluated by tools or instruments that embody standards, whether it's the national board standards in the case of that certification or on the job evaluation guided by evidence of standards about practice, that teacher effectiveness improves because if you get feedback about the things that matter in teaching, regularly you pay attention to those things if you can reach out to peers and other professional development that enables you to improve. We know that strong clinical preparation makes a huge difference that in teacher education one of the things that predicts greater effectiveness of teachers when they leave is that they've had very well planned student teaching and clinical preparation. And given the time I'm not going to go into all of that deeply, but I will say to you that one of the features of that are partnerships between schools and universities, professional development schools, whatever they may be called, clinical training sites where the teachers in the school have pledged to be part of the teacher education experience as a faculty writ large where the school of education like a teaching hospital is working closely on curriculum as well as engagement in student teaching where faculty from the school are influencing the courses in the university where faculty from the university and in the school and in those settings we found in studies that teachers feel better prepared when they come into the profession they go in and stay at higher rates and they are more effective in their early years of teaching so part of what we need to do is build that capacity expert mentoring and coaching matters and I will take a moment to show you some of the features that make a big difference in professional development. We've got to do this in a systemic way where we're pulling everything together from selection to preparation to induction, recruitment, professional development and we need to do that in programs of teacher education that really appropriately emphasize the learning of how to teach your content content pedagogy, attention to curriculum attention to specific practices in the classroom, all of those things predict more successful graduates of preparation. In order to get to that we're going to have to leverage a lot of change in teacher education. These are my people I work in the teacher education space teaching adolescent development this semester and what I know is that there are some very good programs that have really done tremendous work in collaboration with school based faculty and colleagues there are some places that are doing quite reasonable and helpful work and there are some places that should not be training teachers and we have to get serious about the bar for accreditation and how one has the privilege to train teachers I think that teacher education is sacred work in the same way that Marion described teaching is sacred work because we owe it to every teacher to give them the knowledge and skills to do the job that they want to do at the end of the classroom. That's going to mean we're going to have to be very engaged in strengthening accreditation, strengthening licensure. I'm a big advocate of performance assessments for entering teaching like a bar exam that really measures whether you can teach so that we can leverage the improvements that are needed there and I will simply point out that once you get there the induction also matters for effectiveness and ongoing work and we need we know that the effective induction programs have trained carefully selected mentors in the same subject area and grade level who can work on curriculum with their mentees they provide regular in-classroom modeling and coaching being able to demonstrate as well as to advise they engage in collaborative curriculum planning and teachers have other opportunities to engage in collaborative curriculum planning. Seminars on critical topics that reduce teaching load this is what induction programs look like in places like Ontario, Canada and other places and in some of our states relatively few of them do you see all of these things in place but when these features are in place teachers stay at much higher rates in the profession and are more effective and become more effective more quickly. We also know that quality professional learning matters and we know something about that professional learning. One study that looked at sort of the experimental blue I should say gold standard studies found that you get a very large effect on student learning from professional development that on average is 49 hours a year on the same topic and that one shot workshops have no positive effects on student learning whatsoever and we all know this because we've all said in those after school workshops so we know a lot about the nature of high quality professional learning opportunities that are really focused on the content and so on and one of the problems we see and this has happened under NCLB we have actually less of the sustained form of inquiry based collaborative professional development going on than we had in the year 2000 we've actually gone downhill whereas about a third of the teachers used to say they were in a collaborative learning environment and more of them said they were getting sustained professional development now it's only 15% of teachers reporting they're in a collaborative learning environment and more are getting PD that is the one shot variety workshops so we've got to be very aggressive and assertive about insisting on the right kind of professional learning. The TALIS study recently from OECD frequently teachers reported participating in collaborative practices with their colleagues the higher their level of self-efficacy and collaboration and self-efficacy in the literature are associated with greater effectiveness as well as greater job satisfaction and we know that the nature of that collaboration also matters and so we've got to become insistent on if we want to improve student achievement how are we going to do it it's got to be a part of the story. One aspect a very useful collaboration is teacher engagement with curriculum and assessment and with the implementation of common core state standards next generation science standards a number of states are moving and some districts are moving to reintroduce the kind of inquiry oriented performance assessments that you actually need to use to measure those standards and to develop those skills the kind that many places had in the 90s that are based in standards that are expressed in rubrics where we can give students really formative descriptive feedback that give them opportunities to revise their work when students have the opportunity to get constructive feedback not a grade but information about what they've done well and what they need to do next and revise immediately in any subject area the learning gains are so much greater the effect size of having that kind of formative feedback and opportunity to revise that dwarfs many other interventions that you could engage in in the classroom so part of the work that we have ahead of us as we're taking this move towards deeper learning is to move out the opportunities in the curriculum to go deep to engage teachers in developing the kind of curriculum assessment tools hopefully in the context of a new accountability system that is more focused on assessing for improvement than testing for punishment we need to have teachers involved like they are in other countries in evaluating student work together and scoring assessments to inform their teaching decisions how many of you are in places where that is beginning to go on a small number there is a lot of work to do to help policy makers understand what it is going to take to implement these curriculum and assessment reforms productively and I think that is something we have to put on our table I have heard stories of people trying to implement the common core with pacing guides which somebody just said yes which is completely at odds with the whole idea of helping kids find their way along the learning progressions to the goals that we need to help them accomplish you can't teach kids over their heads when they are falling behind and expect to build a house of understanding that is solid and that takes the scaffolded stair steps from wherever it is they are to where they are needed we are going to have to as members of the profession talk about what it means to teach developmentally to meet children where they are to use the learning progressions grade level standards as a goal but not a straight jacket and to make these standards work otherwise it is going to be another failed attempt at reform because those who implemented it didn't understand the act of learning and the act of teaching that you understand and you have to feel empowered to speak to what it is our children need so that we really do move from sort of the assembly line in your work to the quality work circle that will allow you to collectively help students learn and improve and so that teachers rightfully engage in the curriculum and assessment development work that is the domain of professional teachers I will leave you with a story that I find helpful to me when I think about the daunting task that is in front of us and it is the story of it's a story of collaboration it's about a teacher who has been committed for many many years to creating the kind of educational setting in which all students the fifth child as well as the other four can thrive and achieve but in era after era of reform with two steps back forward and one step back it became a little discouraging so her colleagues decided to help her get some additional support and they took her to a seance for advice and they looked to a higher power for some insight and advice about how to proceed and the teachers were very pleased to hear finally after a long pause John Dewey who had come to provide some insight and they said oh Mr. Dewey what can we do to really enact our commitment to children and to build the kind of schools that we want for every one of our kids and there was a pause and then the voice of John Dewey said well it depends on whether you want to do it the ordinary way or the miraculous way and the teacher said oh I'm a pretty ordinary person you better tell me the ordinary way and Mr. Dewey said well the ordinary way would be to wait for legions of angels to descend upon the schools and turn them into temples of learning and the teachers looked at each other and said it doesn't sound very likely that that's going to happen in the near term what's the miraculous way and John Dewey said well the miraculous way would be for the people to do it themselves and that's what you're doing and I thank you