 Thank you and good morning. Welcome. So this is an event sponsored by the Learning Policy Institute. I'm Patrick Shields. I'm the Executive Director. Many of you know us because we put on these events. It seems like every few months here in Sacramento. We're a research and policy institute that goes out and tries to find from policymakers and practitioners sort of key problems in the field and then to do research on them and bring that work back to people like yourself, the policymakers and practitioners. So we were taking a look at the implementation of the new standards and the aligned assessment in California. We began to hear some things, some challenges out there in the in the state. You know the new standards as you well know ask new things of kids. They are asking for much deeper learning for students to think critically to be able to solve novel problems and to be able to become lifelong learners. And these are the kind of learning opportunities that students of color and students from low-income communities have in the past been less likely to get than their more advantage peers. And looking around the country what we find is that in some states these new standards and assessments, this effort at deeper learning has actually widened the achievement gap because students of color and students from low-income communities aren't getting the opportunities that they want. So we set out here in California to take a look at some districts that were doing an extraordinary job not just of getting high achiever to achieve higher but to get all students, students of color, but all students, low-income students to achieve high in the standards and closing that gap. And that's what we're going to focus in here today. We're going to be talking to these districts and doing some panels with the districts and policymakers. So before we get going I just want to let you know how the day is going to go. We're going to start with a presentation of the research findings from the Learning Policy Institute from Ann Podolski and Dionne Burns and that's going to be followed by State Superintendent of Public Instruction Tony Thurman who's going to do some introductory remarks. Then we're going to have a panel with the educators from the district followed by a quick lunch and then a panel of policymakers and practitioners to talk about so what are the implications of this for the state. So before I introduce Ann and Dionne, I just want to thank first the educators and the students in the positive outlier districts that opened up their schools and their classrooms to us and allowed us to come in and try to learn from what they were doing. We'd also like to thank the California Department of Education with whom we partnered to get the data to be able to do these complex analyses that we do to identify these districts. Without that partnership, the study never would have been possible. And then finally we'd like to thank our funders, the Florence William Euler Foundation, the SD Bechtel Junior Foundation, and the Sandler Foundation. And with that I'd like to ask Ann Podolski and Dionne Burns to come on up. Thank you. So I don't need to tell most of you that public education in California has been in the midst of great change. The state has new standards and aligned assessments that focus on deeper learning skills like problem solving and critical thinking. The state redesigned its system of financing schools to provide increased resources for students with greater needs and to provide increased autonomy to local communities in deciding how to allocate state dollars. In addition, the state's accountability system has shifted to broader definitions of student and school success to include measures like student achievement, student engagement, parent and family involvement in school climate. And so as Patrick mentioned, these changes were in part driven by the desire to provide more equitable, deeper learning for California students. And more equitable learning recognizes that many students have been underserved by their schools and communities and therefore increased and extra supports, resources and instructional shifts are needed to ensure that all students have the opportunity to develop deeper learning competencies. And deeper learning competencies focus on skills like thinking critically, problem solving, collaborating and communicating effectively. So these are the kinds of skills that are necessary to be successful in our 21st century system. And I think it's important to understand that we have a lot of potential in our 21st century society characterized by complexity and continuous change. So LPI had three central research questions. And we wanted to understand which districts in California have best supported student achievement during this period of great change. So our first question was which districts were more successful in supporting student achievement for African-American, after accounting for student socioeconomic status? What factors predict differences in student achievement? And in seven diverse districts identified as successful? What practices and policies to educators and stakeholders identify as associated with this success? So LPI took a three phased approach to our research to answer these questions. In the first phase, we ran a quantitative analysis looking at student achievement across the state. In the second phase, we identified seven successful districts and conducted case studies in these districts in which researchers spent multiple days interviewing and observing schools, educators, stakeholders and reviewing documents and other artifacts from the district. And in the third phase, we synthesized the learnings from across these seven districts into a cross case report. So I'll share more right now about the first phase and then Dion will provide more detail about the other two. So our first phase studies among the first in California to identify districts that have best supported the achievement of students during these first few years of the state's new assessments as well as the factors associated with higher achievement while accounting for the socioeconomic conditions of students' families in each district. And so this really allows us to better compare the achievement of students from similar backgrounds. We also in this analysis look at districts that have at least 200 African American or Latino students and 200 white students. And we focus on African American and Latino students both because research has found consistent gaps in achievement between students in these two groups and white students and also because these student groups are sufficient size to allow us to have statistically stable estimates. And so there's other important student groups that have experienced achievement gaps. We're just unfortunately too small in many districts to be able to include them in our analysis. So this figure is the initial result from our analysis. And in this figure each dot is a district with larger dots representing districts that have larger numbers of African American and Latino students. Smaller dots are districts that have smaller numbers of African American and Latino students. And you'll see on the left side these are districts where white students achieve lower than predicted when accounting for the socioeconomic status of their families. And districts on the right are places where white students achieve higher than predicted. And when I say higher than or lower than predicted I don't mean what we expect or hope for our children's future. Instead I'm referring to the statistical definition of predicted meaning that when we look at achievement across the state the data tell us the average achievement for students from a given socioeconomic background and a given racial or ethnic group. So now back to the figure. Districts in the bottom of the figure are places where students of color are achieving lower than predicted. And districts in the top of the figure are places where students of color are achieving higher than predicted. So consequently districts in that top right corner are positive outlier districts because African American, Latino, and white students are all achieving at higher levels than their peers statewide. So because district demographics vary with some districts having large numbers of African American students, other districts having mostly Latino students, and because the achievement of students from these groups can vary, we looked at the results separately amongst these two student groups. So this figure shows the 167 districts that have consistently had high achievement for both Latino and white students. And you will see in this figure the large districts of Long Beach and San Diego Unified as well as smaller districts like Hawthorne, Chula Vista Elementary, and Sanger. And I know you can't read all the names in those figures. You can see the full list of these districts and the briefs on your table. It's also important to note that these results may look different than what's reported by the California Department of Education's data dashboard because we accounted for the socioeconomic status of students' families in our analysis. So in this figure, because California has a much smaller number of African American students than Latino students, we identified just 48 districts in which African American students and white students consistently achieve at higher levels than their peers statewide. And again, you'll see in that top right corner Chula Vista Elementary as well as further down Hawthorne and again those large districts of Long Beach and San Diego Unified. So for the second part of our analysis, we wanted to better understand the factors that were associated with higher student achievement on the state's new assessments when accounting for the socioeconomic status of students' families. And we found that of the school level factors, the two most important drivers of student achievement were teacher qualifications and teaching experience. So the percentage of teachers with substandard credentials like emergency type permits, waivers, and intern credentials was associated with decreased student achievement. So for every 10% increase in the percentage of teachers with substandard credentials, this was associated with an approximately one month loss of learning in English language arts or math for students of color. We also found that students of color achieved at higher levels when they were in districts that had teachers with more experience. So now Dionne will share more about the attributes associated with these districts that beat the odds. Alright, the slides are working. Okay, thank you Ann and thank you everybody for being here. As Ann mentioned, in the second phase, we selected several districts that we wanted to investigate more closely to understand what are the factors supporting their achievement. We used a range of additional criteria in selecting the districts but we also intentionally selected districts that were of different sizes, had different geographic locations, and had different student populations. The districts are shown here and the seven K-study districts are shown on this chart here. We're very grateful to have current and former district representatives with us today. Since they're sitting at your tables and will be engaging in discussion with them later, perhaps just as I read the district names, you could raise your hands to identify yourselves and if you'd like to hold any applause until I read all seven names that would be great. So from Butte County there was Gridley Unified School District and Fresno County we looked at Clovis Unified and Sanger Unified School Districts and Los Angeles County we had Long Beach Unified and Hawthorne School District and in San Diego County there was San Diego Unified and Chula Vista Unified School District. Thank you all for being here today. So apologies for having some trouble with the slides. But in the third phase we brought together findings from those seven K-studies together into our cross-case report. We uncovered nine lessons that we think are of interest to districts and of interest to other supporting districts. We'll present those today, group together as three themes. The three themes were a strong, stable educator workforce, educated driven change, and support for all students. So we looked at the first of these, a strong, stable educator workforce. As Anne found in the quantitative report, teacher qualifications were associated with outcomes on deeper learning measures of the California assessment for student performance and progress. We likewise found in our seven K-study districts that they tended to have lower rates of teacher attrition and lower proportions of teachers on emergency style credentials. The districts that didn't wait for teachers to come in the door, they proactively put in place a number of strategies to help recruit teachers and then support them. Some of the things that they told us were effective for them were leveraging connections with teacher education programs. For example, in San Diego and Long Beach Unified and the long-standing relationships, many former district educators went on to teach as instructors in those programs and in return, many new teacher hires and student teachers came from local programs. They also set in place clear hiring philosophies and policies. These policies tended to emphasize not only teachers' academic qualifications but also their personal dispositions and orientation towards teaching students from all backgrounds. This was exemplified in the case of Clovis Unified where they have a multi-stage hiring process, sometimes involving between four and seven interviews. These are district and school levels. And principles in Clovis said to us that hiring the right people was among the most important responsibilities of principals in the district. Leadership in the district also tended to be stable. Many of the district representatives had had long teachers in their districts. And many of the there also was strong leadership pipelines. Many district representatives had previously been principals in their districts and many principals had themselves been teachers. This meant that leadership in the district had a deeper understanding of local context but also the leadership tended to be instructionally engaged. Leaders paid attention to student learning and were engaged in teaching and learning through structures such as instructional leadership teams. But the districts also supported teachers once hired. They did this through a range of different strategies that helped build teachers' instructional capacity. Things such as professional learning communities often supported with coaching cycles. A number of strategies for engaging in cross-role collaboration such as instructional leadership teams, they helped teachers develop their practice. We looked for example at Long Beach Unified there were a number of practices they had in place. Different strategies for supporting their teachers' instructional capacity. Three of them are listed here. Things like instructional leadership teams what are known as collaborative inquiry visits where principals and teachers visit other schools to find out about teaching and learning in those schools and lesson study. It's an approach where teachers and coaches collaboratively plan a lesson then observe a lesson and provide feedback on it to refine these practices. What these three things have in common is that they promote collaborative exchange between teachers and observation and feedback to improve teaching practice. Now a second theme was educated driven change. The districts that we looked at took a deliberate and developmental approach to implementation of the standards. This was aided by the space created through the state's decision to pause annual assessment for a year. The approach typically began with professional learning for teachers helping them to unpack the standards, understand the necessary instructional shifts and often to identify several power standards or essential standards. These are standards that the district has chosen to make a priority for them. In the case of Hawthorne School District for example, Hawthorne brought together teachers they worked with an external teacher organization helping teachers unpack the standards and they involved teachers and coaches closely in the process. What this did was it helped harness existing teacher knowledge. It also helped create capacity but also buy-in for the standards. So that teacher involvement was very important in the implementation of standards for their district. The districts were also using increasingly data and evidence to inform strategy in the district, to inform instruction, as well as to help identify students that may be in need of additional supports. This sometimes involved increasing their investment in the data systems, bringing together a range of information about students in one place and making it more accessible to educators. In the case study districts also worked hard to align curriculum, instruction and assessment focused on deeper learning. Now this wasn't always plain sailing but the case study districts also changed from early challenges and then adjusted their approach as necessary. We look for example in Sanger where they began with their professional learning community lead teachers providing the standards of professional learning and then shifted to an approach where they trained all teachers directly, grade by grade. In San Diego Unified early in the implementation district representatives said that they began to see some disparate interpretations emerging across schools of the desired instructional system. So they changed to a new professional learning system for teachers, they called the four learning cycles. There's one other point I wanted to add about that. What they did was they shifted midstream adjusting their approach. Clustering the standards is what they call critical concepts. They're using these two approaches the professional learning together with the critical concepts. It helped bring some more district alignment between curriculum, instruction and assessment and the instructional shifts required. This was explained to us by teachers in different ways. Some teachers told us that kids were expected before Common Core to be sitting quietly and working and now there's more productive talking and student collaboration. And I really like the way this teacher from Clovis expressed it. She said, I always think of big T, that's T for teacher a little less. Before Common Core the instruction was more teacher directed, the teacher talking, students sitting quietly and working. But now they've shifted since Common Core to big S little T. That's very student centered, student driven instruction on the district. The third theme was support for all students. And we found that all case study districts were establishing systems of supports for students. This was increasingly framed to as MTSS or multi tiered systems of support. That's the approach that brings together academic data driven interventions together with evidence based behavioral interventions and social and emotional learning. And schools established three tiers of intervention, those for all students, those for students requiring greater support and those for intense or specific needs. MTSS was important in a couple of ways for our districts. We look for example at San Diego MTSS became one of their five equity leavers. These are the five leavers that they saw as central to their instructional vision in the district. In Sanger they used MTSS in a different way. They incorporated MTSS into their standards adoption. They also incorporated MTSS into their cycle for continuous improvement. This allowed schools to pilot new innovations such as restorative justice practice and then use that cycle of continuous improvement to learn from early challenges and adjust as necessary. All of the case study districts paid close attention to social and emotional learning. We know from the science of learning and development that students' academic competencies can be supported through instruction that helps develop their social and emotional competencies also. Things such as growth mindset. In Clovis we saw transition teams. These are paraprofessionals and teams that support the academic and social integration of students as they make the transition from elementary to intermediate and onto high school. In Hawthorne the district used a range of strategies. They employed new social and emotional learning curricula. They established positive behavioral intervention and support teams at their schools and they provided professional learning for teachers in dealing with new ways of dealing with challenging student behaviors, shifting from a more punitive approach to approaches that supported and reinforced positive behaviors. As a result Hawthorne seen a dramatic reduction in its suspension rates. All of our case study districts also placed particular emphasis on supports for literacy. Literacy was seen as important not only to English language arts but also to accessing other subjects such as mathematics. And the learner centered pedagogies that I mentioned earlier these were seen as important for developing vocabulary and literacy skills for all students but especially for English learners. We saw a range of strategies in gridly unified. They had an emphasis on early literacy. There's reading recovery focused in grade one. The remaining grades of middle school used a range of assessments and interventions to support students as necessary and then tiered interventions in middle school to address any challenges that emerge. All of our districts wove family and community engagement into various aspects of their work. In Clovis for example they used not just town halls but LCAP dinners. These are events much like this with tables where they bring together educators, parents in the community. And through these events they've seen community engagement but also it's led to a range of initiatives to support student learning. In Chula Vista they established liaisons for working with their many military families and new positions called promotores. These are people that help engage especially the Spanish speaking families in the district with the existing family resource centers available in Chula Vista. Perhaps most importantly each of the case study districts had a vision for student learning. In Long Beach Unified this was an instructional vision they called the five understandings model now six understandings. But these visions typically foregrounded equity. Included statements such as those here from saying every student, every day whatever it takes. And we found that educators in these case study districts referenced these statements often when talking about their instruction in working with students. In Clovis for example teachers told us that they felt empowered to be able to make decisions that they saw in the best interest of their students even if that meant stepping outside the lines of some instructional programs. Talk about placing people first and not programs. And in Hawthorne they say students are the focus of all decisions. This was expressed very nicely by an educator who underscored this emphasis on equity. As you said, equity has been the overarching driving force of our system. Who has access to what? Who's getting supports? It's very strongly supported by our superintendent. And we look at everything we do through an eye of equity and access. I hope that that gives you just a brief overview of some of the elements that educators told us was important for the success in their district. There's a lot more to it. So I encourage you to stay and listen to the panels to engage in conversations at your table with the many district representatives that are here today. I'd like to finish by thanking the districts and the educators for taking part in the study. To the LPI staff that put on the event today. To the many members of our research team, the list of their, Taylor Desiree, Linda Jane, Chris Laura, Julie Crystal, Anne, Sean, Katelyn, Patrick and Joan. But also thank you to each of you for being here today for the work that you do in supporting students in California. Thank you very much. Thank you, Dion and Anne. So that brings us to our keynote presenter today. State superintendent of instruction, Tony Thurman. So those of you, I'm sure you know that Tony came to Sacramento with a long history of advocating and working with students and children. He was a social worker for 20 years. He served on the local school board. He served as a city council member and then of course he was assembly man before being elected to the state superintendency. And so given this experience, you know it's no surprise that Tony came to his current job with a real agenda focused on students with the greatest needs and really focusing on issues like closing the achievement gap, literacy, mathematics and the teacher shortage. And ensuring that all students in California are prepared for the 21st century economy. And so as you'll hear throughout the day, these are exactly the kind of concerns that the folks in the positive outlier districts share. And so Tony's the perfect person to get us going today to focus on that. So please welcome me and joining State Superintendent of Public Instruction, Tony Thurman. Thank you, Patrick. Good morning. Good morning. Buenos dias. All right, let's get lively in here, right? I am not a researcher. I often do feel like that little mouse though who's running on that little wheel and being observed. Because this is what I get every single day. You're responsible for all the things that are wrong in the state of education for our 6 million students. And I tell people all the time, I will accept your blame but bring a solution to help us to serve our 6 million students and to improve that experience. And what I appreciate about today and the Learning Policy Institute is to focus on positive outliers and being strength based and lifting up those who are doing the work and in spite of the gap that persists finding ways to help our districts and our students to have success. Let's give a round of applause to all the outliers who are in the room. To all the districts who are represented here. Thank you, Patrick. Thank you, Linda. You know, a lot of people have heard me say this when I was in the legislature. I talked a lot about education. All I did was listen to the presentations that Linda Darling-Hammond gave in the assembly education committee. And then I decided, okay, I'm going to do a bill on that. And I was shameless about it. And she'd come in and she'd say professional development is the key. Or she'd say we need you know, residency programs. Or she'd say that we've got to find ways to work with folks who maybe were previously retired who might want to enter the profession. And I would just jot down all these notes and then I would just introduce a bill and say that this is what we're going to do. And some of those things actually have made it. And some we're still working on. But this year the governor and the legislature put several million dollars into the state budget to support professional development for educators. And I think that is largely in part to the research and the work of the Learning Policy Institute and Linda Darling-Hammond. So a round of applause to the Charlie LPI team. And to the state board president so I get to listen to her speeches and take more ideas from her and introduce them in legislation. Everyone is talking about equity. And I appreciate that. I can't give you a definition of equity, but I can tell you that when I think about it, I contextualize it in my own story. I think about my own experience. I'm a storyteller. I think about being the descendant of African slaves. I think about being the son of a mother who came from Panama and who was herself a teacher in San Jose who raised four kids by herself because my dad was a soldier off in Vietnam who I didn't meet until I was an adult who I found on the internet. I found my father on the internet. My first conversation with him was a conversation about the trauma that he experienced serving in the war in Vietnam. And so and then my mom was very sick and I lost my mom when I was six years old. So her four kids got split up. My mom had cancer. Two of us ended up being raised by a cousin who I never met before who lived 3,000 miles away. And she took us in and raised us as her son. I was a student who grew up on the free lunch program. I grew up on food stamps. You all have heard me joke that I ate so much government cheese that I thought that USDA was a brand name. These are programs that helped my family to overcome poverty. And the public program that helped me the most was getting a great public education. My experience in politics is one that I never knew what the state superintendent of public instruction was. But I always felt propelled to help young people because of my own experience. Upon arrival at the department it seemed clear to me that we had to make it a priority to help students who were in similar experiences to mine. That we have to speak to the students whose experiences have been difficult. Before coming to the department I taught a high school class for students who are in a juvenile camp. Imagine taking your diploma behind bars. I think that is something that's intolerable that we have to change. And that's why we're sponsoring legislation that will ban for-profit prisons in the state of California because we should educate and not incarcerate in the state of California. And if we want to be serious about enacting what we learned today about the outliers we have to move from being 41st nation to purple spending when California is the sixth wealthiest economy in the world. We've got buying power and we've got to spend it on our kids because I don't know what else we're buying and they're going to take care of us. And so at the department we've named a number of priorities and they all center around closing the opportunity gap. And I hope that you all will share- I had an embargoed copy of outliers, thank you. But I hope that you'll share this broadly and widely. And I hope that you'll share it with us as we convene in just a few weeks. We're convening a virtual town hall. We've invited all 1,000 school districts to be a part of a town hall on closing the opportunity gap. We've actually decided to come at it in a slightly different way. We've held a lot of town halls on the closing the gap where we've said come and tell us your best practices. On this one we're coming at it in a slightly different way. We've said where you struggle. Because we want to do a deep dive into the data and to figure out what it is in spite of all the efforts to close the gap that caused the gap to persist. And how do we help each district individually? And so on September the 24th we're holding a virtual town hall where you've invited all 1,000 school districts. So Vernon at CSBA you know please help us spread the word. On what we can do with the California Department of Education to support our school districts who are doing the great work to try and close the gap. And we believe that what is happening here and what is coming out of this report around outliers is very, very important to that work. We've talked about professional development. We announced early on that we were going to get behind an effort to expand the number of male educators of color particularly in the elementary grades. Because we know that the research shows that when young people see an educator who looks like them that they are more likely to be successful and that all young people will be successful when they have that opportunity. I named a dozen work groups in between mediating four strikes upon my square end, running the governor's state task force on charter school reform. We named a dozen work groups that focus on things like professional development, teacher recruitment and retention. How do we expand permanent funding in our schools? And of course how do we close the achievement gap? And we'll be releasing our own report out of the recommendations of our work groups. A thousand people came together and said we want to help you have a conversation about how we close the gap, about the key issues that we address in education. Many of them are the things that you have heard that we have heard. When we talk about teacher recruitment and retention what I learned from LAPI is that one of the most important factors that we must address are the working conditions that our educators experience. I hear I get a lot of calls mostly from special education folks letting me know the intensity of the work and the lack of support and the amount of paperwork. We hear you on the amount of paperwork. But we also know that we have to improve compensation and we know we have to improve training and professional development. And we've been in conversation about how we might support legislation to expand induction programs and provide support to make sure that no teacher has to pay for her induction ever again in the state of California. We think it's a responsibility of the districts of the state to ensure that new teachers get the opportunity to have training and professional development and to change the narrative from how do we make it easier to fire a teacher to how do we make it easier to recruit and keep and support a teacher so that every teacher gets a mentor or a coach and that when you're struggling you get feedback and that we change the way it was in my school district when there was an opportunity for training or professional development this is usually how it went. One teacher at a school would get selected to go to that training and would be expected to come back to their district and do a turnaround training for everybody at the school on their own time. You know I don't know about you but where I come from they say you get what you pay for and so if we don't invest in the kind of professional development that will allow all teachers to have adequate professional development we'll continue to struggle with our abilities to retain and support our workforce. I come from the Bay Area and one of the things that I found in many of the districts that I've talked to is that many of our educators can't afford to live where they work. In the district where my kids go to school every year we lose 200 teachers. I don't know how you close the gap with that type of churn when you lose 200 and you have to replace 200 teachers every single year. We surveyed them and what we found is the number one reason why they leave is because they cannot afford to live where they work and so until we figure out compensation and better training we've been experimenting with other ways to support teacher recruitment and retention and so we've been pushing this idea for the last three or four years about having a teacher housing program building affordable housing for teachers and classified staff and thankfully I can report to you today that in this year's budget the governor and the legislature provided millions for school districts to build affordable housing for teachers and classified staff to help us have the workforce to support our students and so thank you for those of you who advocated for that and who get that we have to create the opportunities to support all of our teachers. The six million students in our state many of them have an experience that's very similar to mine in some case more difficult and I believe that each and every one of them can learn. I was told once when I was campaigning for this job well I was told a lot of things when I was campaigning for this job and I won't repeat all of them but I'll share this one with you a person said to me once Tony you should focus only on the kid to show promise and potential I told this person that I rejected that notion all of our kids show promise and potential it's incumbent on us that's a great place to put your hands together it's incumbent on us to help them to develop their promise and potential I was very cognizant of the fact that if someone had made that statement about me a quiet kid from the other side of the tracks who could have easily just fallen through that that wouldn't be standing before you I'm very conscious of what my experience might have been but for the fact that I had teachers who said to me you can do it in spite of your humble beginnings life will be better for you with this education and when I struggled the more I struggled the more my teachers dug in and said you're going to get across the finish line I'm grateful to them I'm grateful to all the educators in this room I'm grateful for all of you for being outliers let's be great outliers to help all six million of our students in the state enjoy the rest of the conference and thank you so now for the exciting part we're going to have a panel of educators talk to us so come on up as soon as we get mic'd up here we'll get going I'm going to let Kent introduce the panel these are our educators from our different districts Kent McGuire who is the education program at the William and Florie Hewlett Foundation is going to be moderating the panel Kent previous to this was the president of the southern education foundation in Atlanta Georgia previous to that he was the dean at Temple University the dean of education previous to that he was the assistant secretary of education so Kent comes to us with a great deal of experience and background in education and schooling and with that Kent take it away thank you thank you very much I'm happy to be here see Tony need to be mic'd twice get that away well it was both great to hear about the research and wonderful to hear from Tony and the leadership he's with the guys here in California it's a good time now to make the connection between research and practice and we've got best possible panel of folks who we're in the study I'm a bit of an echo still let me see what I can do about that you sound good out there they're not feeling me let me see if I can turn this down yeah you mean if I go this way thank you for that thank you for that I don't want to have my back to you you alright you know what would be good why don't you come over here and I'll sit in the middle just do a little bit of engineering how about that this better I'm going to look at you for the rest of the time alright wonderful so I'm Kent McGuire I appreciate that introduction just really spending enough time in California to appreciate the work that's going on here and I'm having a ball I finally got my wife to come out here about seven months ago we live in the Bay Area I told her that the weather was going to be marvelous compared to Atlanta it took until April before she believed me because it rained continuously and she's in Atlanta now so I'm a little worried let's see there were some themes that emerged from me through the study focus on teaching and learning find good people place them in positions for which they're qualified create support for them to learn and improve I'm talking about the adults empower them to do good work address the social as well as academic needs as students you'll actually get good outcomes for kids it's amazing that we need a study to actually tell us those things but we do it's very important I want to see now if that rings true with this panel and we'll just get right to it let me just say before I introduce the panelists my understanding of the work we're going to do over the next hour and a half or two hours we're going to spend about 60 minutes up here where I will be serving up questions for the panel we'll see if we can make that conversational if any of you hear something that another of your colleague says you want to comment on please look at me and just jump in and then we're going to take about 20 minutes to have conversations at these tables in order to try to find three or four of the most important additional questions that we want to bring to the panel's attention I will field those questions and we'll have a conversation about those and then I'll make sure that if there's anything else we should have asked these folks but didn't I'll give them an opportunity to tell us and sum up that I think is the design for the next period of time and with that I left my notes in Menlo Park and the traffic was such that I dare not go back and get them but I have my computer I'd like to introduce oh can I have those yeah I'd like to introduce maybe I'll do it this way I'll just introduce one panelist at a time you won't have to forget kind of who they are when I do that it would be terrific if you could say a little something about your school district set enough context for the good questions that I'm going to ask and so I'd like to start with Dr. Sophia Freary who is the chief of leadership and learning at San Diego Unified School District when I grow up I want to title like that so one of the themes in the study had to do with vision vision for teaching and learning and for centering equity in that vision I am really curious Sophia if you could talk about how that happened in San Diego Unified equity is something that is often in the eyes of the behold means many different things to many different people so it's no simple matter to get people unified around that how that happened in San Diego yeah it's really difficult to talk about in a short response so I'm going to do my best I'll tell you a little bit about our district first San Diego Unified serves a little over 100,000 students from preschool to high school we're actually even doing some efforts to go from crib to college in some of the new structures that we're creating in San Diego Unified our superintendent was appointed in 2013 and she's brought consistency, stability and coherence to a really large district which isn't to do she along with our board are committed to equity we've defined equity as giving every single student exactly what he or she needs when they need it how they need it and in the way that they need it and so we have a clear definition for equity in our district you saw the quote we look at everything we do through a lens of equity it's an important part of our work and we're at the point that we're not apologetic about the fact that we give the kids who need more we give them more and so we also have a very clear vision and a deliberative plan on how we're going to meet the promise of equity for all of our kids and so our vision is centered around quality neighborhoods I'm sorry quality schools in every single neighborhood we also talk about unlocking genius for each and every student our state superintendent talked about that every student has promise and potential we call that genius we believe in unlocking genius of every single student we also talk about maximizing growth and joy in every single interaction we have with kids we believe that outcomes are important but we also believe that students should experience memorable things in school that they'll remember their entire life so that's important for us our equity work is really around two center or core pillars the first pillar is really around access and that our students have access and we focused and we concentrated that work in our secondary schools so we spent a lot of time looking at secondary school master schedules we did an analysis of transcripts like we did a sampling we looked at like over 800 transcripts to see the access and the quality of courses that our students were in and we also spent a lot of time in classrooms so when you walk into advanced placement classroom in a very diverse school and you're only seeing white and Asian students in that classroom there's a problem and so we were got very proximate to the problem and we didn't just look at overarching data we looked at transcripts we looked at students in classrooms and we began to do some really deliberate work on access and so our board approved A through G for All in 2009 and they charged our superintendent who's here Cindy Martin who's led all of this work it was up to her to actualize and make good on this promise of A through G for All and a lot of people thought that our graduation rates were going to decrease because of these new requirements and in fact they increased and so we had increased graduation rates with more rigorous requirements for kids we also launched an effort around advanced placement for more students and underrepresented students and so we did that deliberately as well we partnered with EOS to do that and our current focus is on with our students with disabilities to ensure that they have access to the core and they're being included in general education and for our English language learners as well our second pillar is around success so it's not enough we don't really look at it as achievement gaps we look at it as opportunity gaps and it's not enough to give students access we have to create systems and structures to ensure that they actually have success and earlier you heard about MTSS that's what we're about we're about ensuring that we look at data to predict and anticipate which students may struggle and we put systems in place for both academic supports and social emotional supports and behavioral supports for kids to ensure that kids have the supports they need and they have it before they fail Lastly I wanted to comment that we have some equity levers and so we have five equity levers that were mentioned before strong literacy instruction authentic collaboration meaningful engagement for students assessments and lastly relational leadership those are the five equity levers that drive our equity work Thank you, thank you, thank you. Anything you want to say about the structures or supports that have been created in San Diego to help the adults live into this vision or to pull those levers? We invest a lot in building capacity the capacity of our leaders and our teachers and so we have partners and we do that work in collaboration with them so one of our great partners have been Marzano Research. We do a lot of work on high reliability schools and if you are familiar with that research it basically has five levels we focused on the first three levels of Marzano Research and the first level is faith collaborative and inclusive classroom the second level is high quality instruction in every classroom and the third level is a guaranteed viable curriculum so the past two years that's what we focused on. Earlier you heard about our critical concept and the work we have done in unified is to ensure that we are demystifying the new common core standards they are not really new anymore but what we have done is created critical concepts which is basically a bundling of standards we know teachers don't teach standards in an isolated way so critical concepts have enabled us to do this work another key partner is the national equity project and so they have been with us for a very long time they help us create a common language and a framework for talking about equity in our district so you will hear teachers throughout our district talk about interrupting inequities and doing it with grace and skill and we also talk about interrupting inequities or inequitable practices with skill and grace so those are key partners there's a lot we do in our district in terms of professional development for our principals we have principal institutes that are well planned and we have experts that come out. Pedro Noguera has spoken to our leaders, Yvette Jackson has also spoken to our leaders and then we are recently going to have this year Zoretta Hammond also speak to our leaders so there's a lot that we do to build the capacity the last thing I will say because I got the one minute mark is that we also do student centered coaching cycles we can do an entire session on the success we have had with student centered coaching cycles thank you Sophia so much now yes we have some help but if you see me looking at you in a certain kind of way you can look at me too and that will help us keep time I've watched the country struggle with trying to adopt and implement standards it was interesting how little opportunity teachers actually had to weigh in on how we might think about that that was not true though in Hawthorne and I want to introduce to you Bridget Cruz Brown and I asked her I said well what's your title Bridget she gave me the wrong answer she said I'm just a teacher and I said hey there's no better title could you take a few minutes to kind of talk about the approach in Hawthorne to adopting these common core standards and say something about the ways in which teachers are involved in that project Hawthorne is a really small district we are right by LAX down in Los Angeles we serve about 8,500 kids of which 85% receive free and reduced lunch we have about 20% African American students and roughly 71% Latino students so we are definitely an urban group I've been in Hawthorne school district for almost 20 years now and we are definitely a family we're so small that everyone knows one another so when the new standards came out we as teachers were very anxious we didn't know what to expect and the call came from our assistant superintendent Dr. Brian Markarian and what he did was he sent out an invitation to teacher leaders asking if they wanted to come in and be part of a committee at the district level so he invited us all in and he created a team the team had district level administrators, site level administrators it had literacy coaches on it we brought in a couple consultants from the talking teaching network and then there were these teacher leaders from the site and the purpose of the committee was just to give us time to dive deeply into the new common core standards compare them to the 97 standards we've been working on and see exactly what kind of work was ahead of us once we figured it out as a committee then we were allowed to then go back to our sites and in that safe learning environment because our teachers were our learners at that point we presented new PD to them so we would pilot every activity first at the district office then bring it back to our site and present it to the teachers there hoping that because it was coming from a colleague a friend somebody who was alone it would be better received and really it was it was just a very surrounding environment Doctor Marcarian was very clear that we were asking teachers to do something new and everybody who tried was to be celebrated everything was to be encouraged there were no failure lessons it was more like this was our first attempt now let's learn and move forward so everything that didn't work out was just a learning experience and when we would come back to the district every month they would debrief how did the PD go at your sites and this was the first time we really realized that district level admin was listening because before it was they would tell you what to do we would do it this time we were coming back to them with concerns we needed supports we needed more practice with this and the admin from the district level started to provide and respond to that we would show up we would have this beautiful agenda written and after hearing the debrief we would restructure the entire day so when we came back to the sites we had answers for teachers and I really think that that set kind of a focus an instructional focus for us for example one of the standards that was brand new to everybody was collaboration we'd never taught students how to collaborate before we didn't know how to do it so we piloted some lessons together at the district we brought it back to our sites we let it go the coaches at the site level would come into the classrooms and they would demo those lessons for teachers they would show us how to do it then we would have a unit planning collaboration where we would get to sit with the coach and talk with other same grade level content area teachers and say what was working we needed help we needed more information we dialogued about that new standard then the coach would come in and observe us trying to do a collaboration lesson they'd give us all kinds of feedback try this do that it was fantastic so that by the time our site level administrators came in to do what in our district we call sacred time every Thursday 9 to 11 administrators in classrooms doing their observations we already knew what the administrators were looking for because of this collaborative language they had been there every step of the way so they knew and it was because we felt so safe and supported in that environment I think Hawthorne had a great transition to the common core standards well and I assume that's part of the culture in the district now doesn't just apply to standards adoptions no we have something called the Hawthorne way in Hawthorne and really that is that every person who works in Hawthorne is considered a member of the family and most of us have been working together so long our kids have grown up together and so we really are a true family but we call it the Hawthorne way that's cool you also focused on school climate what led to that and how has that gone so we were like everyone else we realized that we had a problem with suspension we had so many of our minority students getting suspended all the time the district decided to go ahead and adopt the PBIS positive behavior of intervention and supports so they brought in the new procedures had a full district-wide PD day and about a couple months into it we realized that we couldn't just change the procedures that we actually had to look at changing teacher mindset about discipline about behavior in general that's when they brought in UCLA's center X and we worked with Dr. Tanika Orange and Sharaki Holly and they came in and did professional development on using cultural responsive teaching techniques sadly we had just been teaching as if every kid were the same so what we learned is different cultures learn different ways and they literally brought us strategies they wanted us to try one of the things we noticed was the kids needed movement built into lessons I mean subtle things like using the activity four corners where they have to walk across the room or selecting a partner from a different table where they had to just get up and move we also found that children needed to talk before they shared an answer allowed a lot of them just needed the affirmation from a peer to feel more confident about their answers and just by doing little things like that our student engagement actually skyrocketed our superintendent is famous for saying an engaged student is a well behaved student and we really did see that happening so behaviors immediately decreased once we started changing mindset about it however PBIS is not the end all be all and we have some teachers who are still experiencing what I would call a productive struggle with it so our superintendent immediately took notice to that and we convened a committee so now once a trimester we have a PBIS committee from anyone can be on the committee so if you wanted to voice your concerns about PBIS you just go the day of the committee meeting our superintendent was so interested that she actually started attending the meetings herself because she wanted to know what were the problems with instruction what were teachers really facing out there so we feel like we are committed to the PBIS way of doing things it's made our suspensions especially with African American kids go from 12% down to 4% it is it's huge so I think at this point we're committed to staying on that road but you know behavior discipline is always going to be a journey I really think we'll never get to a specific destination there thank you very much I was I was described as a student who loved to talk you would like my class the issues that I would surface my mother was a teacher her sister was a teacher I actually had her in the second grade my uncle was a teacher and the news about things I would do my indiscretion would actually show up at home before I got there Chris let's turn to Gridley where is Gridley right? that's right where is Gridley so we're about 50 to 55 miles north of Sacramento on highway 99 we are between the cities of Chico and Yuba City the Bararual district we've got about 6,000 people in our town we've got 2100 children 2100 children that's why I put you over there our school configurations are quite unique so we have one school for TK, kindergarten and first grade next school is second through fifth and then we have a middle school 6th, 7th, 8th and then a high school but my side alone I will have 8 or 9 teachers for grade wow so while there are processes and structures and visions that you've all created the truth is you also have to intervene when you have very specific challenges to work on could you talk about the recovery work in Gridley first of all tell us what it is we're all clear about that so we implemented recovery in 1999 which is a long time ago there are probably not too many districts that still have recovery unfortunately we have about 57% Latino 77% socially economically disadvantaged and when we started the process with our assessments we noticed that only 13% of our Latino kids were reading at grade level and we knew that we needed a final solution we started working with our county office and at that time they were migrant education was under them and they had an individual that was an instructor of reading recovery so she was like the top teacher in the area for implementing reading recovery so she came to our site, we started talking, we had an influx of funds which is amazing and we decided to jump in with both feet and implement re-recovering so we've trained that first year six teachers and it's a very intense first grade literacy program so what we do is after we assess the students we use some phonics tests and things like that in first grade then we start helping children that need additional help and they will work with the student one on one for 30 to 40 minutes per day every day for 12 to 16 to 18 weeks whatever they need so a lot of people go wow you've got people that can do that one on one, yes we do and our district has believed in it they never when we hit the great recession there was no discussion about cutting that program at all because they've seen the benefit wonderful, I'll just tell you a little bit about it sure and so how our special needs students doing in Brittany and what over and above reading recovery are you working on or considering to kind of help them so our job in first grade and what I worry about in the state is that we start state testing now in third grade so I think a lot of time at the site level principals don't really focus in on what is happening in kindergarten and first grade to get those kids ready when they take the state test in third grade so when back when we have the CSTs we notice that those students again were not performing well after we implemented reading recovery and some other multiple assessments and we really focused on K3 our scores increased tremendously for example our overall school score at the 2 through 5 score at the end of doing the CSTs was at 850 they made rapid progress more students were reading out proficient than they ever had before even at the end of first grade we notice after one year of implementing reading recovery we went from 13% of our Latino kids reading at grade level to 55 so we knew right then wow we had something currently all of our first graders Latinos special ed students we are able to get all those kids reading proficiently at the end of first grade 80 to 90% and what our job is is to keep kids out of special ed that is our job because we know once they start in special ed they are pretty much likeers I have not seen too many kids that we have been able to get out of special ed so our job is to get them early you hear early intervention all the time and if I was in charge of the state of California there would be reading recovery in every single school it makes a huge difference it has not only made a difference for our students but our community our parents I don't know about you guys but at our school or district the Latino parents they will do anything to help their children anything at all even if they can't speak English we expect parents to work with their kids every night even if they can't read English they just need to sit down with their child have their child take out their book which by that time the ones that they are taking home they read them enough they are pretty independent but just to get that nightly practice over and over and over and to still in them that is important there is not a greater gift that we can give to our kids than reading recovery or than reading thank you he didn't put the signs up on you let's see what happens Francisco you know what it means cute view down south you see the beautiful lights of Tijuana five miles away look up north beautiful lights of San Diego east mountains of San Miguel west beautiful ocean you've said a lot of context tell us about the students large military population our students are military high transiency rate because of the military and being so close to the border we average about 17% transiency throughout the year mobility rate for teachers though is excellent about 3% our teachers tend to stay at our district about 70% of our teachers 60 to 70% live in Chula Vista my own kids went to Chula Vista so just great pride in the city of Chula Vista let me ask you a question another word that's in both learning something that means lots of things you all have what you call professional learning cycle did you talk about what you mean by that and how you put them together and what's important technically it follows like many of our districts do you plan for change and then change happens and you look at data and then the data will dictate whether you need to tinker with the change so technically many of our districts in California follow it I want to emphasize the organic aspect of this professional learning cycle because I think that's where the power, the innovation that ability to grow as a profession occurs because Chula Vista is a medium sized district about 30,000 students 46 schools but we break down our district into cohorts so we have cohorts of 6 to 7 schools led by a lead principal so we have a distributed leadership model where our principals act some principals act as a quasi administrator each of my district office cabinet member has a group of 10 schools that they supervise and work with and we are all learners and that learning cycle is distributed from the district office to the classroom level our teachers are part of this instructional learning team and they are leaders in the learning we have actual being a teacher is a very tough task we need to have the opportunity to learn to communicate to share their frustrations and we have by the way time during instructional days where teachers are offered the ability to communicate the ability to reflect on their practice we do not expect during these learning cycles for a lesson to be done in perfection we have safe practice time where teachers have time to work on these lessons we have time where teachers visit each other during the instructional day as well and offer advice to fellow teachers and by the way principals are part of that process as well we have during our professional development time we are weaning out of the consultancy aspect and we are having principals and teachers together and coaches lead the professional development so when you look at this interdependency within our system is very tightly wound where everyone is a learner there is safe practice incorporated and the reflection and feedback is ongoing I myself take time I spend 40% at the school site I visit every school site twice a year and I go to every classroom and I get to learn from them what they are learning what their frustrations are what are those next steps so we have taken it into a very organic humanistic level let me ask you the same question I asked Chris I mean I am curious how this professional development connects to what happens in the classroom but what do you think the dividend has been especially for the students we have struggled to educate the most I believe part of our feedback is we have those student outcomes we don't only look at student at teacher behavior we also see what students are doing and we have a protocol set on what the expectations are with students we have what we call a district instructional focus that focuses on high impact language development strategies so part of one of the things that we do each year we started a couple years ago to test a social emotional index of each child one of the things that we found out is that our kids have a very tough time expressing their emotions so we invested 15 minutes a day utilizing Sanford Harmony to really focus on how to communicate and discuss internally what they are feeling and externally how they are feeling among each other and I think that has been an amazing outcome in helping accelerate learning seeing our English learners really scoring at a very high rate re-designating at a very high rate at one point we were close to 40% English learners now we are in the low 30s so it's been a significant impact on our students and I would like to add one thing I have two minutes in the last couple of years I need to share there's been a real interesting increase of a target group called homelessness I mean just last year our homelessness population went from 80 to 185 and I think that affects on students especially in the area of trauma is very significant and if we don't take key on the social emotional aspect of our students yes academics is important absolutely but how we utilize these important attributes of regulating one's emotions, recognizing and how to articulate your emotions it is so critical and when we do these circles and having kids talk about I had a hard weekend I went with Thea, had a big fight and then I had to move to a friend's house these things happen every day we're just so fortunate to connect with many of our assets such as the food bank where food bank donates every Friday 190 backpacks to our students and inside the backpacks is food enough for the students to survive the weekend and it's done every week so our connection to our community is also that interdependency not only within the district but outside of our district is so critical especially with the trauma that we're facing in our society specifically the area of homelessness you know we're just, we're on the clock we're doing wonderful I'd like to ask Wendy who's the principal of the California Academy of Mathematics and Science you know I used to run the Blue Ribbon program I'm familiar with what you had to do to become recognized is what I would say and I'm just real curious in your case I know that you've done a lot to create opportunity for students to engage them and I wonder if you could describe your approach to deeper learning you know we have a long standing agenda at Hewlett with regard to deeper learning what we learned was the closer we got to students and to teachers the last they actually knew what the term meant right that made us pretty nervous I think in you all's case you sort of got past the term and did things that made it real for folks could you talk about that Sure I'd be happy to thank you all for having me here today so I'm from Long Beach Unified School District I think as a district I'd like to think that we're really a small town with 85 schools and about 72,000 students it really does feel like a small town but it is a big large urban school district the third largest in the state but the way that we approach deeper learning and instruction and supporting our students is really thinking about that we are this small town that supports all of our kids in the city and so we thinking about deeper learning the district really has we as a whole system have a very clear vision into what we want this instructional really have an instructional framework with these four understandings and this started with the transitions of coming forward what that would look like for our students and how our classrooms looked different and it started with four understandings thinking about how will we ensure that every single classroom you walk into not just the AP courses not just the accelerated courses not just the honors courses but every single classroom that you walk into across the district the entire system we see standards aligned instruction we see rigor in those classrooms that was the first understanding the second understanding was is that we see our students grappling with complex tasks and complex tasks but there is rigor every day in your lessons our third understanding is that our students have the ability to talk to someone mentioned earlier that they have the ability to collaborate to work together to learn from each other that it's not just a teacher up on the stage giving that instruction but that they are having the opportunity to process that information and then our fourth understanding was around formative assessment so what type of evidence are our teachers collecting every day in class in real time and thinking about what happens next collecting that data and acting on it and so the student it isn't understanding or that group of students isn't understanding what are we doing to then address those things and so with that big picture of we all came to these understandings thinking this is what we want to see on our classrooms and it was years it actually turned into five understandings which is what's in the report in 2018 we went to six understandings so we'll see we have seven understandings soon but the fifth understanding really was around how our instructional leadership teams work together at the site level and so as a site principal it's all of the department chairs and grade level leads and how we work together to ensure that these are the practices that we see in our classrooms in every department in every grade level and so that deeper learning was really a everyone is a part of this and so our fifth understanding is around collective ethicism and that belief that we can work together and make that change across not just one school in one classroom at a time but across an entire system and so deeper understanding though goes beyond just what you see in the classroom but also a big focus for us is around access and equity in regard in particular to students having access to advanced placement courses having access to dual enrollment both at our community colleges and local community colleges and our universities and so we're lucky to have a really strong partnership with Long Beach City College in our city and with Cal State University Long Beach where our students have the ability to enroll in courses and have a student here with me today and she'll give you a little bit of what that is like for our students but that's a big piece of that collective efficacy and everybody thinking about how we support our students and give them access to a rigorous curriculum to these courses and opportunities where they really are prepared for post-secondary and career options after. Thank you. And what about, you also have Long Beach focused on the pipeline, the teacher pipeline and you've got to grow your own initiative. Could you talk about that? Sure. We call the Long Beach College Promise and really it starts with our students at a very young level and so it's a K-12 system of encouraging our students and providing them the opportunity to really understand what college going really means and being prepared for that and so it starts with our elementary school students visiting our local community college on the field trip at a certain grade level and our middle school students really understanding what it needs to complete an A through G course requirement and so by the time our high school students are getting prepared to apply to school the College Promise is a guarantee that if they meet the minimum requirements that they can be accepted guaranteed admission into Cal State Long Beach and if they go to Long Beach City College they'll have two years of tuition free education and part of that pipeline is really looking at our students as this investment into our city, our community and our schools are part of our resource. We're a link learning district I'm sure most of you are familiar with link learning and so we're a link learning district. Every single one of our high schools has industry aligned pathways for our students and that gives them an opportunity not just to learn about education which we do have many pathways that focus on service careers and including education but really any industry and exposes our students to what that looks like to go to the job force and to pursue a career in post secondary education. So with our partnerships with Long Beach City College and Cal State Long Beach many of the teachers that come and teach in our school system many came up through our program went through the Long Beach College Promise ended up at Long Beach City College and for those that decide to go into teaching go into the credential program where our own district teachers and district leaders our curriculum leaders and district level administrators teach in the credential program and so if you are a student in Long Beach you can go through our system get two years free at your local community college guaranteed admission to Long Beach State go into the teaching credential program be taught by people that work in the district about good teaching practices and then come in and student teach in our district become a teacher and then go into the teacher support pipeline and so and that extends all the way through to our supporting our district leaders so there's a pipeline for identifying teachers who are potential leaders and a lot of professional development that is a part of the program and so if we have a teacher that came through that system has been teaching for a few years is interested in leadership there's an additional pipeline for that so that you are receiving professional development and understanding we also have the Long Beach way and part of that is really thinking about how do we support all students so even though there's 84 schools there's 84 principals out there that are looking at how do we support and develop our teachers to be leaders on our campus and then to potentially fight leaders, district leaders, curriculum leaders so it's really this idea that we're all supporting our students but we're supporting the entire small community. And I'm guessing that's given rise to a lot of commitment and stability throughout the ranks of workforce in Long Beach. Is that true? All right well let's pressure test all of that and talk to first of all I want to say that you could find the time to take off a minute to talk with us and we really appreciate that. We had a meeting in San Diego about a week ago and we had a panel of about seven students talking to a collection of educators and we just learned a bunch. It reminds you just how useful it is to actually listen to the students. Blinding insights. So we know and we have heard it in various ways that since to which we can actually engage to really unlock their inclination to learn. I am just curious Sabrina as you think about your experience if you could just talk about things that schools have done to really motivate you. I understand that there's a lot of project based learning kind of activity in your school. Talk about it. For example for the 9th grade year we had to innovate an idea or a project. Can you not hear well? No. Hold it. So then for the 10th grade year we have to based on what we learned in our classes so for example AP physics and the principles of engineering classes we have to build a roller coaster and then pitch the idea to the and then as an 11th grader we have to then create like a museum as a whole 11th grade class and then present that to parents and teachers and other students and then for the 12th grade year if you're in the engineering pathway or in the biotechnology pathway you have to do a big project so for example for me I'm in the engineering pathway so this year for me I would have I'm in a class where we're working kind of like a corporate and it hasn't been told to us what our project will be this year but we will work together as a whole team like the whole class throughout the whole year and develop this big project that's unknown yet so my favorite project would be the 10th grade year where we had to build a roller coaster with all our knowledge about physics and then principles of engineering where we had to build a mechanism so that the roller coaster would continue on and we also had to create like a pitch like an advertisement and then a video and then a billboard so there we it was different for me because I was always like a shy student and I didn't really work with other students but then these projects have allowed me to really actually have to communicate with these other students and become collaborative which I've learned that it's actually really important this past summer I did an internship with Boeing and I really saw that in the work force yes it's good to have that knowledge up in your head but it's better when you're collaborating with everyone and working with everyone to really create a project When you talk about pathway, I could have asked that question It sounds like you've been given a lot of ways to connect the academic work to the workplace and to thinking about careers So how do you think the experience you've had will impact your kind of goals for beyond high school? What's on your mind? So when I first came to CAMS we either have like the engineering pathway or the biotechnology pathway and all the students are exposed to both well now they're all exposed to both of them for me I took the engineering classes and those engineering classes something that's really cool is that they're dual enrollment with another community college near our school so that's really good like as an incoming freshman you're ready taking these college courses in addition to that we also have I've also taken many math classes which that was because we're on the campus of Cal State Dominguez Hills so we're allowed as 11th graders and 12th graders to go and take college courses at the university which was really different for me because so in high school there's teachers that are telling you okay this is your homework, this is what you have to do, these are the notes that you should take but then in the actual college atmosphere there's no teacher that will tell you oh this is the homework you know you have to do it you should spend this amount of time for the homework don't forget your homework these are the notes you should be taking notes on this you know you really get to learn how the college experience is in high school which I'm really grateful for now I know that I can go to college and I will be able to succeed because I've done these college courses as a high schooler we also have the AP classes so this year I'm taking 5 AP classes it's allowed me to learn the rigor of the courses that there will be in college and also my time management because it's a lot of classes and a lot of work for all of them so I really have to, I really learned how to manage my time, how to study for each courses and then as well as the engineering classes that I've taken there's so many at my school I'm really glad that there are so that I can see how it is in the actual workforce like when I did my internship I was actually glad that because of these classes I actually knew what people were talking about what the engineers were looking at I could read the same thing that they could see it that's great that's why we're here last but not the least is the Ren home all the stuff we've been talking about is arguably harder to do or sustain if our communities and our parents aren't with us, right? So you have these LCAP dinners what my notes say could you talk about those and just more generally speak to what you've done in Clovis to try to engage parents and community members in your work? Absolutely happy to a little bit about Clovis Unified so we're located in the Central Valley and we fall somewhere between Chula Vista and Long Beach we have about 43,000 students that we serve but with that we are set up in a similar format maybe to Chula Vista and that we're broken into five comprehensive areas so we have five comprehensive high schools that have a junior high that feed into them and then a set of elementary schools so it kind of builds a smaller area within a larger district and it allows for maybe better partnerships and communication with our parent communities around because I'm an assistant superintendent so I oversee one of the areas and I'm frequently out at school sites and at the parent events so they get a more familiar regular face than our one superintendent hitting 43,000 students and families so when we had the change that's what we're here for is the changes that have come and how have we managed through those with the LCFF with the funding formula change we also enacted the LCAP plan that every district writes and so our district recognizing that with the supplemental dollars that we were receiving that need to be focused on our low income, foster youth, homeless I'm sorry, an EL student we needed, this was a great opportunity in which to engage a community and at Sabrina alluded you can't really go out in our world anymore and work in isolation and that we really needed to leverage the expertise that was out there from community members, parents and our students so right out the gates we generated this thing called LCAP dinners and so we meet with our community, the broader community twice a year and we revisit our plan so in the very beginning we came together and we didn't really know what that plan was going to look like and we generated some open-ended questions of which we we asked for feedback and it literally was a room probably twice the size, we had about 500 in attendance and that was really a concerted effort to bring first perspective to the table and at the table it's not like parents and administrators so at these tables it is parents, students, group home managers, advocates for foster youth, district administrators and side administrators sitting together discussing the data that's presented how do we make an impact for students and these broader questions and it's a sea of big post-its filled with lots of little post-its of ideas and then we affinity chart those to find general themes to develop what are going to be our actions. Some great benefits about this LCAP dinner has been that some of the most systemic changes have been a result from ideas that came from these tables so one of the ones that Mr. Burns discussed earlier was his transition team so when we looked at our data we found that during those transition years from elementary to intermediate school and then from intermediate school to middle school we tend to lose a good percentage of our at risk students so we generated teams that are representative of the demographics of each area and those teams build relationships with the students that are identified at risk in their fifth and sixth grade year and they follow them to the junior high and then from that eighth grade year they follow them to high school to help bridge. We've seen great success in this process. In one year's data we had our identified transition students grow 8% in their GPA and I think it goes down to relationships which is what our LCAP dinners are about engaging and building relationships with our broader community for the betterment of our students. How are we doing in terms of the hour I said we'd spend on the, when would you say we have six more minutes? Good. So what I want to do we've all heard each other's questions and responses and what I'd like to do right now to see if there are any one or two sort of general observations in as you might have about this work that we're all up to things I wasn't smart enough to ask you during the course of our conversation. Anybody could to jump in. I know if I asked you Chris you'd just say more about reading. I'm going to start over here. Francisco, any the human potential, the relationship is the heart of the matter and a real focused relationship on continual learning and always being vulnerable that you don't know everything but that the solution is out there but you have to create structured ways for collaboration to occur. It has to be purposeful. It has to be focused and I think that by bringing the right people together we can move mountains. We can create opportunities for students to occur, to succeed and flourish and I think we can't lose that focus and I think that it shouldn't be an us versus them but it's all of us together purposefully united in the cause and helping our students. It's us for them. Yeah. I think that's right. For so long we've held lots of things constant and allowed the learning outcomes to vary widely and so thinking now about how to vary what we do so that we get less variation in learning outcomes and everybody's happy with screening and that's what we really want. And to note that you have to be very intentional about your decisions and the way that you look at data and thinking about leading for equity and finding ways to create those opportunities so that all students have those opportunities. So I think about things that, for example that happened at Long Beach, like all of our students have access to take the CSAT and the SAT on our campus which allows us to have the data to look at students that have the potential to succeed in say an AP course but maybe they're students that would choose those classes on their own and so then that onus is on us as the leaders to look at that data to identify students that maybe historically haven't been really represented in those AP courses and those opportunities to do the dual enrollment to go out and do these internship opportunities and to really just be very intentional about looking at where our gaps are and digging into the information that really is available to us to identify status and to encourage them to pursue these opportunities because I think when we look at our data and look at studies really about our historically underrepresented groups being successful that doesn't happen by chance or by accident that's very intentional work that the onus is on us to look at that data to seek out those opportunities and to create those opportunities for our students. I was going to save this question for the end but I'm going to ask it now. I'm curious what state or county supports have been available to any of or that have mattered the most. We've got policy makers in the room. It would be wonderful to hear about which of those have been particularly helpful in supporting or advancing the work that you've done. The restructuring of the LCAP money I think has been fabulous for districts to control what their community wants. It gives us a lot more flexibility than what we had before with the categorical programs and then the last thing I'd like to say is with our teachers they're definitely in the trenches and they need all the support that we can give them as leadership. They have a very, very difficult job and so that has always been my number one criteria is how can I support my teachers and take every how can I support them and make time for them to focusing on the students. I'd like to respond. The state superintendent talked a lot about LCFF and giving control. Our superintendent spends a lot of time at the state level talking about adequate funding and in order to make good on our promise to all of our students particularly our students who are typically or historically underperforming we need to ensure that we have that adequate funding so a lot of her time and energy goes into advocating not just for the students in our district but for advocating for students across the state to ensure that we get adequate funding to make good on our promises for kids. Can I ask you as a core district, when you were about to wrap up, does that have been a huge resource for our district? It's to be a part of the core district here in the state and to have access to other large districts and their data and looking at best practices that are happening at even this looking at these teachers here and having access to the best practices that are out there. Richard any? You know, the LCFF was a game changer for Hawthorne because now teachers were doing all this work for free. We were collaborating after hours and nothing validates a teacher more than saying your time is worthy and with the LCFF funding we could pay them to collaborate after school, we could pay them for the intellectual deep thinking that they must do to collaborate together and I think that we are very grateful to the state because now we have literacy coaches to help us. We have the collaboration time, we have planning time and without the freedom of LCFF we would still be doing all of that for free. We are about done and I need to describe what we are going to do next. However, Sabrina do you have any advice for us? I think it's really great what you guys are doing right now and just really focusing on like the students and how you are seeing us from like our perspective, how we something like us students like we didn't know like you guys recognize that we would work together more like as a team effort and I really think that that's really amazing that more of that is being seen now and we should continue. Thank you, we'll heed that. Alright, first of all my panel has done a lot of work, they have tolerated me for a better part of an hour and I think we ought to give them, we're not done with them yet but we ought to give them a round of applause. Now, I need all these Let's give a hand to the facilitator. I think I know how to talk about what we're getting ready to do. Let me give it a shot but we'll see how this goes. We're going to give our panelists a short break and your facilitator a break but there should be instructions on each of your tables that will help guide the conversations you're about to have but in a nutshell what we want you to do now is take about the next 10, 15 minutes thank you for the extra five minutes, appreciate that to talk at your tables about both what you heard and what you would like to ask the panel when we pulled them back together then we want you to pick someone at your table to put that question the single most important question you have into the online platform I don't know what the online platform is but there is one. Is there one? Is there one? Do you want mine? You take mine You'll have to keep it. Okay, so the most important thing is for you to sit with your colleagues and actually have a discussion about what you think are the most important questions we want to ask the panelists up here then there is this little technical thing that there's a one person at the table will log on to slido.com there's a paper on your table that describes it I've done this before at other meetings as a participant I've never run one slydo.com and there's a code you put it in and you're going to be able to put your number in there. So someone at the table who feels technologically secure should take that one on. Kent if you're at a table don't you be the person. In 20 minutes and we'll actually ask the folks the questions. Okay, so go ahead and get started and maybe we'll circulate around and make sure that people know how to do it. So we're going to go back to work now and I think the process I sure hope I can unlock this phone. I know they're on the screen right but there's more questions on her phone that we get to and I'm going to look at maybe. The panel we have a few really good questions to field. We have I would say what do we have 15 minutes something like that to do this work. So let's get started and the audience can now see these questions but I'll read them for us. The highest vote given was the following describe the development of your culture and the strategy that has allowed for collaboration, cross-site learning and calibration and the scaling of best practice. You guys are second to under that question and I won't volunteer you unless the other thing I learned in that class I taught is that I have poor wait time so I can't handle silence for too long but describe the development of your culture and his strategy that has allowed for the kind of collaboration that you enjoy. Anybody want to jump in on that? I heard it in a couple of different answers actually and it was introduced at the beginning really for our district in our hiring process. So our interviews are extensive a candidate can go from four to seven interviews they work from a site panel on us all the way through our superintendent who hires every teacher and administrator but in that process it's more than just getting to know the candidate it's also our onboarding it's where we start talking about the culture of our school we start really embodying the thing that everybody said about vision with all students one of our strategic is maximize students maximize learning for all students and this is our opportunity as the candidates progress through to really start empowering them what the expectation and the culture of our district is and how we believe in collaboration so that they have a good understanding when they come in and before they sign their contract in that final interview is this a place that really resonates with their core values it's a good fit for them as well as it is for us as a district. Chris you want to add to that at all? Yeah I would say of course trust is key for you to give your educators the freedom to try different experiences in the classroom given that time for them to collaborate and to discuss best practices and to look at student data that's where the rubber really hits the road for us so we will bring their data in and we will look at it and even work samples of students and then especially writing they'll be looking at those and everybody's reading each other and so like we have nine teachers I said at that grade level and then they start asking like well how did you get your kids to perform how did you get them to do that so just building those trust over relationships will take you a long way. You guys are from bigger districts this term scale might mean something how do you get something started and then kind of systematically move it I think it's really important is how you structure the conversation and having even though we're large having small pockets of conversation structured around a focus is very significant and also the type of people that we bring around the table means so critical that we have voices from many different perspectives from the parent perspective, student perspective, the union perspective the leader perspective, the board perspective as well and I think it's really critical that you become an architect on how you collaborate that's very very important. San Diego had similar to Chula Vista the idea of learning cycles and our superintendent when she first started launched four learning cycles and the first two are very aligned to this particular question it was how do we build classroom cultures worthy of our students so we talked about mindset but also physical space and then the second learning cycle was around collaborative conversations and so those two learning cycles and they were a total of four but can you imagine an entire district that serves over 100,000 students all focused in on particular inquiry questions focused on culture for a period of time and then they shift to collaborative conversations you have an entire system where when area superintendents are visiting classrooms and we're looking for opportunities that kids have to talk and then we're also looking at opportunities where teachers have that planning time that you talked about so that's an example of scalability in a really large system. Let me move to the second question with the highest hope. How can a district begin to enhance your preparation, professional development and support? How would you pay for it and scale it? Any ideas in particular for small districts and or districts who aren't proximate to college? First of all they have to listen to the teachers. The PD has to be driven by what teachers mean, what they want and by that I mean what are they missing? What support do they need? Teachers know what's not working but then they need to be able to communicate with their admin, their district leadership to say we need help with this and it needs to be not punitive you're not getting it done but okay how can we help you and that's the way the PD has to start and I think the way you pay for it would be your LCFF budget. You had to have done that with these professional learning cycles because they built them without teacher input. Teacher input is exceedingly important because we not only at a consultation level when our district office personnel meets with the union but also in every single site with the instructional learning teams within every single site that conversation is really important because when you think about our instructional focus which is language development how does that work in a school that's right next to the border? How does that work in a school with 30-40% with military population? Every school has this unique culture within a large culture. We focus what meets the needs of individual schools at the same time as we meet the needs of the district so that two-way collaboration from a district level to a school level centered on teachers needs and the knowledge that they have of the culture of the school and the needs of the students and that's integral. So I'm a recovering dean thanks by four years of recovering from the year 3rd. You mentioned teacher ed in Long Beach as part of the pipeline. Speak to the teacher preparation, teacher education part of this course. Sure. I think similar to what Francisco was just talking about is really kind of tapping into our the answers always in the room when we're together in a PD with teachers with the whole district and our leaders is that the answers are here in the room and so we have a collaborative inquiry visits process in our district where we visit and this was part of the report where you visit, you have like sister schools two to three schools that go and visit each other and look for those for understanding those really best practices and sort of identify great things that teachers are doing because there are a lot of outliers in our schools that are just outperforming the rest of their colleagues and you really want to tap into those resources and so that's really a system that we have built in in Long Beach is identifying a really strong teacher that is doing incredible things and then tapping those teachers to help put on some professional development or be a part of those visits and have other schools come and see some of these best practices and then we'll be, then we're going around to different schools and we're paying for that through LCFF funding through district allocated funding so that we're able to put that knowledge that we have there at the district to good use and to share those best practices around the district so it's not just happening at one school and teachers are teaching other teachers at their schools but it's happening across the district. We also have a platform in our district so we have this way of finding those great teachers that are doing these incredible things around the district and recording them and doing a video and then uploading on our platform so our teachers are able to go and so it's not always possible to take teachers across the district to other schools but it's possible for a teacher during PD time at your school or your allocated meeting times to watch those videos and get some ideas and work with their grade level team and so really kind of just looking at the resources that we already have built into the district rather than I'm going to come back to that resource question in a second and give everybody a chance to speak to it but I can't resist asking what when do you know that your teacher is at the page? I feel when they're teaching like you can feel like their confidence in what they're doing. I don't know how to explain it, you just kind of like for me like there's some teachers where I'm like okay I know what they're doing like I'm totally confident like I don't have anything to worry about. It's the way they show themselves I guess kind of like the way they teach it's not like they're looking at their book or like it's kind of like they're like they magically like remember everything like they just know what they're saying I guess kind of how I know like like they're doing good like that's how they're passionate about it and they have like many activities as well that they do that's how I know like like when they have something planned for us and it's really like hands on and they're they're like helping us kind of I don't know how to explain it but you can see in a teacher way we're nearly out of time I'm gonna go to my version of the third question which would be to say this all of us could use more and I'm sure you'd have a sense of what you do with the next resource you've got I'd like to ask each of you in the name of improving food learning to speak to two things what would you do if you had another dollar and how are you thinking about the reallocation of the resources you have in order to get most out of the improvement strategy that you have to start with right down the line for us it would be definitely to invest in social emotional learning we find that we have a lot of students that have serious emotional needs and you would sometimes you think it's the underperforming kids but we have kids in our system who are high achieving and if you're just looking at their GPA or their grades you don't know the trauma that they're experiencing and so we look at social emotional well-being for all of our kids and for all of our staff actually we've launched a lot of work our superintendent has been truly inspirational on this idea that social emotional well-being is important for an entire system I would provide more hands-on learning opportunities for the kids like when we used to get to do field trips and bring in different assemblies where they crawled in and looked at the stars and we brought in the frontier days for fourth and fifth grade I would bring some of those real experiences back to school I've had an extra dollar obviously mental health services is really critical and not only for the student but really for the adults as well I mean it's very difficult being an educator nowadays and something that Tony talked about also is the affordability aspect with housing I mean if I had some extra revenue or figure out a way for 100% of my teachers to live within my community and make it affordable because I want our teachers if we expect every child as an individual great worth we want to make sure our teachers feel the same way so how do we offer a vibrant workplace for our teachers I mean I get to see how Google takes care of their employees right I mean they offer breakfast stimulating they offer even vacation if you stay there at Google for a year you get to take a one week vacation I mean they do things that are pretty outrageous but people want to go there I want my teachers to want to be in my district right so how do I create that environment I would love to do that and have that extra dollar it would definitely be to continue to invest in our teachers in the professional development that they receive from the onslaught it's very it's common for teachers to get the PD and get into the classroom and then kind of on your own and you get different preps and you get different grade levels and a lot of times teachers are left to figure it out so that continuous PD that I think our district provides I would continue to invest in that I think that is where you know the teachers are going to make the biggest impact on our students and building that collective teacher efficacy you know makes a huge impact on student learning and so I think that's where if I had extra dollars I'd invest it in the teachers and then PD Part from commission to college to bring in that I agree with like helping like teachers because I feel that when a student sees that the teacher isn't like well-prepared or they don't have like they're not putting their all into it that's where students tend to like lose interest as well so I do believe like the strong like the teachers kind of like the root of it off to help us grow I do believe that good like a good teacher with like a good foundation for us to really feed off of that energy and really help us grow as well a lot of what was said I think it's the social emotional support but I think it's preparing our teachers for that they're on the front line and the class is working with our students and equipping them with the resources and the skills that can be the increase we're seeing in the students there we're working with every day good job of being ahead of the clock I have now put us behind it and that means I don't get to give you the last ten minutes speech that I had planned to offer but Karen, Sabrina Wendy, Francisco Regis, Sophia and Chris I have enjoyed myself up here asking you questions and I'm pretty sure the audience has enjoyed your thoughts as well and I want to thank all of you thank you and welcome back I hope you were able to grab your sandwiches and get something to eat feel free obviously to continue eating but in order to stay on time and get you out of here on time we want to make sure that we get moving with the second afternoon panel so now this is the panel where we move from the practitioners to the policy makers and talk about what can be done in Sacramento and elsewhere so this panel is going to be moderated by Vernon Billy and you know Vernon who is the CEO and executive director of the California School Boards Association Vernon the U.S. Air Force, Vernon took on a different kind of service advocating for districts and students and working closely with a variety of leaders to advance education policy. Given his long experience and education we're excited to have him here leading the next conversation where we'll be hearing from leading policy makers to discuss the implications of the work you've heard so far from the practitioners. Please join me in welcoming Vernon and the panelists. Okay I think we got everybody here good afternoon everyone come on you guys got to wake up good come on good afternoon afternoon okay alright that's much better so I'm excited to be here moderating this panel I think with my illustrious colleagues here what I'd like to do first is just go down the line here and have you briefly introduce yourself and tell a little bit about your organization. I'm Matt Marmalino I work for West Ed I was former superintendent Sangria Unified School District where I spent 19 years of my career. Good afternoon I'm Tom Marmalino I'm the executive director for the California Collaborative for Educational Excellence CCE and we advise and assist and work with county offices and other districts and folks to help them on the academic side. Good afternoon everyone I'm Barry Dixie-Sandy I'm the executive director of the Commission on Teacher Peninsula Good afternoon Wes Smith the executive director of the Association of California School Administrators honored to be a part of this great panel. Good afternoon I'm David Goldberg the Vice President of the California Teacher Association and a third generation educator from Los Angeles. Great thank you alright well let's jump right into this and I want to direct the first question to Matt. So the previous panel did a great job of highlighting what has been working in their districts and we all heard about the great work that they're doing. You were the former superintendent at Sanger School District can you tell us a little bit about Sanger and describe what you were able to do to achieve steady improvement for your highest-need students particularly English language learners and students with disabilities. Sure so when I arrived in Sanger it was 1999 and for those of you that don't know the story of Sanger it's a pretty incredible story. We are the gateway to the giant Sequoias and so we were anointed by the U.S. Post Office as the nation's Christmas tree city for those of you that don't know. And in 1999 when you drove into the town of Sanger you saw the welcome to Sanger home of the nation's Christmas tree city and you also saw the sign that said welcome to Sanger home of 100 unhappy teachers and that sign stood for about two years and I was intrigued by two things. One a group of educators that felt that that was the only way to voice their frustration with the system and two a city that tolerated it. A city that whose only identity was being the nation's Christmas tree city and yet that sign stood in partnership with that signal to all visitors who came from that small town. We went through it didn't take me long when I got there to realize that there was a lot of systemic below ground level below sea level frustration in that community and in that district. But about 2007-2004 things started to come together and we really were able to take the fog away from the system in such a way that we focused on three things. The black bone or the umbrella of our MTSS system without us knowing we were building our multi-tiered system of support. We really anchored ourselves to an educational framework that everyone could articulate that was highly focused on the best practices we could use to empower our struggling learners and those students that needed more support. We focused on building a response intervention model that could be translated from school to school and we focused on building a collaborative culture in our system and those three initiatives are the same three initiatives now that were back when we established them in 2004. The same three goals, the same three initiatives and David and Joan Talbert did a study of Sanger they wanted to know if you took the model that Sanger had and translated it to another district would it work they found yes and no context matters for district and for our district we were at a particular time where those three initiatives aligned and allowed us to focus on our most at risk students in such a way that we could pull away some of the frustration and we were able to catalyze the underbelly of our system which is really the identity of the organization, the way information changed and the connections that fed the system that was developing the system strategies, structures and processes and so often times what we were doing is we were focusing above and it was the underbelly that was undercutting everything that we were doing and so once we were able to anchor to the three pieces of work we were able to get some work done Excellent so let's build off of that looking at the state level so we in the last few years we had the local control funding formula was implemented we've had other initiatives like the California MTSS the English learner roadmap just to name a few what are some of the state policy opportunities that could continue building on these types of initiatives so that districts can continue lifting up all students especially the ones that we just referenced earlier Well I think the state is doing some great work right now I think there's some excellent work between CDE and CCE coming out with a 24th century CSLA and the workforce investment grant but I will tell you for us MTSS for many people they don't realize that that initiative for the state of California came out of the special education task force report and published in 2013 and many people question why that came out of the special education task force report but we pushed that initiative because we believe that that initiative if it was translated and transcended across the district that it could be used to support all students mostly with an emphasis on supporting students with disabilities what we didn't do well was preparing we didn't have the preparation to make that work the way that it was envisioned that it would work so I think in terms of policy where we have to put some attention and give some attention is earlier in our teacher prep and our administrative prep program we have to prepare people and educators that are coming into the workforce that understand what MTSS means so that it doesn't get translated like we did initially that MTSS is nothing more than response intervention and we're already doing that there was a vision from that task force that was asking for more more from the system in terms of the way it responded Sanger had backed its way into that not knowing what it was creating and created an infrastructure where the system was aligned from board room to classroom around the same data markers so we didn't have schools analyzing any different data that the board wasn't analyzing we kept the system coherent but what we didn't have as educators came into the system was we had teachers come in ill prepared to support students with disabilities ill prepared to support students that needed language supports and interventions and scaffold we had administrators that we were building our own but we were building our own with our own knowledge base we weren't really expanding their understanding of what it was beyond our wall and so if we can spend some time in policy there I think we can really get in front of some of the issues we're having the other one is the other initiative that hasn't received a lot of attention is UDL universal design for learning was the other initiative that was called out in the special education task force report in 2013 that's gotten little attention yet that is probably the backbone of this whole infrastructure is an instructional framework that all teachers can use to create access for all students and the special education task force report called that out clearly UDL under the umbrella of an MTSS framework will facilitate an educational infrastructure that provides support and resources to students that they need UDL hasn't received a lot of attention it hasn't been called out it's been called locally under local control those districts that feel like they're ready they take it on I will tell you that with UDL what I've experienced in my work no one's ready to take that on it's a much heavier lift than people think but it's necessary. Thank you Matt so I want to shift over to Tom Armolino the executive director of the CCE and so Tom the LCFF and LCAP we heard a little bit about that in the previous panel that was an important change for districts in the state and may have helped set the stage for different types of innovation at the local level as California continues to continue building out its statewide system of support which you're leading over the next several years how can we identify best practices that districts have been developing and then spread them statewide and I just want to add a little something else to this question and we always talk about best practices but what about promising practices and thinking of it in those terms and it's like to see what you think about that. Yeah well thank you for that lens too I appreciate that. You hear me okay? Looks like my mic. There you go. I really want to thank Dr. Dallin Hammond in her team for the work that they've done today in the outlier report as an example I think of I know when I first came under this role when across the state met with a lot of folks and talked to them about what are some things that we can do to make sure that we're supporting the needs of students and folks talked about we need examples. We need examples of folks who are doing the work with kids that look like my kids. I think this is an example of some of the work that's been going on in the state where folks are doing some great work. One thing I think about the LCAP and in the dashboard in particular is it calls out the needs of various student groups that maybe those needs were not called out in the past it's brought attention to those where folks are more focused I think directly on making sure that they're trying to reduce some of those equity gaps and so I think there's really some great work that's out there. We had the experience in our organization we were very fortunate that the state funded us to do some work with what we call our pilot partnership districts it was a group of districts across the state various sizes of the groups both rural and urban and some larger and some small districts and in particular it gave us an opportunity to work with them alongside the superintendent with a leadership team that involves teachers and school administrators and some other stakeholders to really dig in do some work together and what's unique about that work is that it was focused on continuous improvement so we were using all the strategies around continuous improvement and improvement science but it gave them an opportunity to learn from each other as well. So they were able to sit in the room and we were specific about making sure that they had that opportunity and so you saw some partnerships where folks were they were learning but then they were also learning together and that work is actually has really had an impact on our work and some of our work that we've had to do with some of the districts that are in fiscal distress across the state we've used some of what we've learned there as we've gone into those districts to make sure that we can go ahead and kind of hit the ground running and learning from some of that work. In addition to that there I think professional learning networks is a key to our work what's unique about the system of support is that it's a system of support where it's intended for groups of people to work together and I've shared this in the past our systems are really set up pretty independent most of us in our systems where we've worked I know when I was a school teacher I worked independently in my classroom I might have worked a little bit with my colleagues but most of the time it was on my own when I became a school principal very similar it was my school I focused on my school my district I focused on my district system of support says let's open our doors and figure out how we can learn from each other right so both across various agencies so excited about these opportunities that are out there I think the community engagement initiative that we're working on now it identifies some districts that have already been doing some great work around some of these subgroups it's giving them the resources to be able to then look at how we can scale those across the state I think some of the new work around as Matt mentioned too in particular around the Educator Workforce Grant and CSLA those now we're getting at some level one resources that we can really support the system as it moves forward so thank you for that so looking ten years forward into the future how do you envision the statewide system of support both in how it's organized and how it will serve as a resource to districts yeah I can't wait for that you'll still be here right that's right how can you let go of this it's an exciting time in education it really is I know just in my last years of experience I've been blown away with the opportunity that folks have taken to work together that people are really making efforts and it really starts with the leadership of our state board and our governor in particular our state board developed an accountability system that's called the system of support right who does that a lot of folks are watching what we're doing the old systems we're all built on right around this punishment piece this reward at one time built around a single score right now we have multiple assessments we have local assessments we have local opportunities to look at the needs and it gives folks some autonomy and ability to use their resources where they feel like they really need it that's extremely unique agencies like ours was developed right to be a resource and to support other folks too I think the piece that where our current system is you know we're still growing a little bit is it's pretty heavily focused right now around level two or differentiated assistance right it's around when folks you know are first being identified as needing some possible other resources I think where we're going around level one resources in particular around some of the new work as I mentioned was bringing CSLA back bringing the educated workforce investment grant we need more resources at level one level right and so that we're able to kind of across the state make sure that folks can be more proactive right and have the resources that they need especially around professional development I think as I mentioned professional learning networks are key to the work right and actually being able to infuse money and opportunities for folks to learn from each other put them in a room together and talk about ways that they can improve and learn from each other as they're doing that miss some real opportunity the other idea of coaching I think there are lots of opportunities there are reports there are various things out there of what we can do to get better the folks actually need a little bit of help with that right so being able to have some more mentoring and being able to give the ability for folks at the local level to have the resources they need and the coaching they need to actually put those implementation I think will make a big difference right so in the last panel there was a common thread that I think we all picked up on and that related to the importance of teachers and the efforts of districts to not only to attract the teachers but to retain teachers and develop them and provide that professional learning that we all know that teachers need it and want recently the state has made a number of investments to help districts with those efforts but I think we could all probably agree there's more work to be done so I want to turn the next question over to the person who has all the answers on this issue I know she does very from the seat that she sits in at the CTC which is a very important body for the work that all of us are doing so I want to ask you what progress have you seen what are the key barriers to teacher recruitment that your organization sees that exist right now that continue to exist and what do you think can be done to help address them and yes that was more than one question so and I appreciate it I think there are some encouraging signs for one thing we've seen steady though not gigantic but steady increases in teacher enrollment in the 17-18 year we had 25,000 teachers enrolled in teacher preparation that's a good sign and that was up from the prior five years so that's moving in the right direction we've also seen slow but steady increases in the numbers of credentials and issuing so in the 17-18 year when 25,000 teachers were enrolled in teacher ed about 12,000 of them came forward and got credentialed so about 50% of them of that cohort came forward another 4,000 teachers came into California from another state so we had about 16,000 new teachers coming in in the 17-18 year unfortunately that year about 26,000 or the prior year about 26,000 teachers according to data reports on your table left the teaching profession so we're almost but not quite holding steady there which is a bit of a challenge the investment in the last several years in teacher recruitment has been significant and I think it's a very important sign that we are trying to take the problem on head on $200 million has been run through my agency and grants to local education agencies and higher education institutions to address this so one of those is a key infrastructure investment $10 million to build undergraduate pathways for individuals who would like to complete a degree in a credential in four years we funded 41 of those institutions they are together putting about 85 different pathways in place right now and enrolling their first cohorts we are expecting and hoping to see as many as 1,500 teachers come through these new pathways over the next several years so that's a hope for development the Center for Teaching Careers has funded that created the California teach.org virtual job fairs and the web based for an owner that's creating statewide support and access for teachers who would like to be or want to be teachers generally who might want to move into teaching the classified grant program $45 million to attract people who are serving in our schools already and living in our communities already a diverse population of staff who would like to become teachers we expect to see about 2,200 or more classified staff make it into the teaching ranks in the next few years the local solutions grants $50 million set aside for local decisions about how can we best get the special education and STEM teachers to need most of that 71% of the district that got these funds spent it on commission support, service scholarship and things to help allay the costs of getting a credential other things they supported were signing bonuses and training for mentors because mentoring and induction is key to retention and then finally teacher residencies $75 million invested in yet another I think very important part of our infrastructure in California that should create as many as 3,700 seats for residents in special education and STEM over the next few years that's an exciting community that's coming together to think about how we prepare teachers alongside veteran excellent teachers in our schools very exciting moment for us I'm also very encouraged by the 2019 budget that $37 million in workforce investment funds because the veteran workforce could eat some support out there, yes they do funding for the subject matter projects I think some of the best professional development we have out there saw some increases there the restart of the California school leadership academy also leaders are in desperate need of opportunities to work together and that's also an important investment I think most important for the ongoing recruitment issue however is the $90 million set aside for the Golden State teacher grant program focused on service scholarships and that sort of program when I talk to superintendents they tell me the thing that they think would most help is if there was some kind of funding stream to support service scholarships and forgivable loans so we're doing things along those lines the challenge however as I mentioned before 25,000 enrolled in 17, 18, 26,000 left the prior year 8,000 seats were filled by emergency permit holders things that we need to do I think to try to stable this and include not treating these investments as one time investment if we're going to actually make a dent in this situation we need to make a steady focused plan to do so Thank you so the next question you kind of touched on this and I'm let's explore this a little bit more it's been said that just keeping teachers in the profession would go a long way towards eliminating the shortage you just laid out some very startling and important statistics about the teacher shortage what can we do to help districts develop and retain their teachers I think first and foremost nobody wants to go into a job that they're not prepared for or that they're doing for you especially they're not going to stay in a job where they don't feel like they can do it especially a high stakes job like teaching so preparation is absolutely important and we can do some things we're going to have to talk some more after all of this because I'd like to brief you on the things we're doing to get MTSS into the preparation screen for every teacher and every administrator coming into teaching and leading right now new standards, new assessments, a very significant shift in the way we prepare both teachers and leaders new focus on social emotional learning across those populations and students centered teaching and learning new focus on UDL, every single teacher who completes the California teaching performance assessment will have to use UDL to develop a lesson and then a series of lessons they have to be able to use assessment data that they collect from their one-on-one assessments they're checking for understanding their standardized assessments in their classes to determine who's this working for who's it not working for and how do I adapt differently to bring everybody forward brand new and aggressive focus I would say on inclusion that's part of the MTSS effort. I continually meet people talking about MTSS as if it's a special ed program and I want to argue the point it is not a special ed program it is one of the most important ways that we are redesigning the structure of schooling and I totally agree with you UDL is central to that understanding the outcomes and planning forward that's what every educator needs to do that said the 12,000 teachers we prepare in California represent about 1% of the existing workforce and so it's going to take us a little time to get the new population to critical mass in the workforce but we're on it and we're working on it and we really need to work together across our higher education institutions in our schools and county offices of education to see this as a partnership for change that's really quite critical I can't say enough and I can't even begin to say as much as has been said already about the importance of school culture and the focus we have to maintain and aggressively maintain on school leadership. We've overhauled the preparation for school leaders we've built a new performance assessment for them that privileges three things of all the analysis of data, the development of equity gap analysis and the thinking through and the reflection on what are the implications of an equity gap for my practice as a school leader. Secondly organizing communities of practice amongst teachers to work on real problems of practice that are occurring right here in this context and third working on instructional coaching. Those are three very important things that go to the job of principling among many others but we think we're really going to begin to shift the culture of the incoming principle workforce of which there were about 3,000 this year. Well 3,000 people completed preparation this year. Again this is a workforce that needs some stimulation to grow in order to get the leadership that we need in our schools but from the preparation end we've been paying attention to the research and to the direction of all of the reform that's underway in California and I think these are some of the ways in which we're going to create stable schools in which teachers want to work and the leaders want to work and the outliers that we studied today and heard from today have some very important things to show us about how you do this mechanically and culturally and systemically and that's a message for all of us. Thank you alright so I want to at this point shift just a little bit the conversation to the folks up here who represent organization, membership organizations specifically to Wes and to David so the positive outliers report emphasize the importance of establishing a shared district vision that brings stakeholders together around a common set of goals. Many of the positive outlier districts describe a high level of collaboration among teachers, school and district administrators what does this finding mean for your members? Basically what are the conditions that are needed to support this type of activity, this work? Yeah me first Absolutely. Okay I just don't want to get that red sign first thanks to LPI for sending me next to David not because of CTI, I sit by CTA all the time for the last seven years but I haven't felt this short since my senior prom thanks guys Yeah I think first off we have to talk about the narrative we have a narrative that things aren't working and that we can't get along I really in all honesty appreciate the LPI because they're breaking that narrative this report that Tom mentioned and the work that they're doing we're demonstrating that this notion that our system our administrators are teachers and our students are broken it's false and it's malicious it's hyper politicized that reason is no longer here so how do we change that narrative I think examples like that of promising practices at bright spots lifting up where people are working well together and so I think getting to your question about what associations do we can work collaboratively to help people understand how to work together in true collaboration it's something that you can try to test on an exam but I think until you practice it what does true collaboration look like CTA has been talking with ACSA for years there are times that I've chatted about doing workshops with both of our members on true and meaningful collaboration and what does it look like when we disagree it looks like my dinner table almost every night right what does listening really look like what does mutual consideration what does that look like and how can we be intentional about training something we do across the state and then as it relates to governance having governance structures that promote true collaboration so I think associations can do a much better job of being intentional about training our folks to work together to demonstrate that the only way it can work in fact is if we do it together that we're working together towards the best interest of students and then really change the narrative of demonstrating value add right value add for our students seeing them achieve because they will achieve as we communicate better as we work better together and so I think there's a lot of work to be done in that area and look forward to working with CTA and their new leadership to see if we can pull something like that off statewide LPI can study it then they can bring us back and have a stand up on a stage so you can really see the dynamics and share what we're doing David? I think collaboration is absolutely essential I agree with you in fact we have the labor management collaboration which I know some of our locals are involved which I think is critical and I also I do think just reflected on this report as well which I think is very helpful to put stability way at the forefront of our work and our lens by which we look at it because a lot of we have a thousand locals in CTA and a lot of them most of them I would say are not stable places and I think we need to call out that's not by in some ways looking at the outliers is absolutely important I learned a lot just being here and reading the report but I think there's also big systems in a third generation educator my grandmother started teaching L.A. in 1930s and we went in California from first to worst in funding my grandmother was teaching we had free UCs Cal states community colleges our K-12 system was the envy of the world and that changed and that didn't change by accident and I think we need to bring I appreciate the way this report brings up race to this analysis because it became that was very much part of what happened as well right there was a dis investment in public education I think we need to and now we're seeing how schools and communities have been destabilized so I think part of our work is union members first of all you reference me as a membership organization I think we have to redefine what it means to be a member of our organization having these kind of we have 325,000 who pay us dues being a member is having these kind of conversations right and I think what we're seeing is when we do have these kind of conversations we look not just like at the outliers but also the day to day for most people's work lives it allows us for example we've seen exciting changes in the way we work around even our contract demands or our contract demands are no longer in a real exciting way just around salary and healthcare but really about the schools our students deserve right we've seen beautiful strikes across this nation many in California even which again which sees our role not just stabilizing our workforce but also being an important role in stabilizing our communities our school communities but even the broader community so I think we need to keep looking at these outliers and keep also asking great questions about why are they outliers what is the system wide structures that are at play for us we're really we're all on board with the schools and communities the first initiative next year on the ballot which is going to allow us to have these conversations about the disinvestment that's happened over generations and put a racial lens on it and really have a real talk about the soul of our California and how we take care of all kids in all communities because none of our kids even outliers none of our kids are getting the education they deserve and we need to continue to fight for that. So and David thank you for that and you actually have answered partly the next question but feel free to chime in again in fact I'd like to if I can I'm going to break the rules a little bit here I don't want all of you I mean if you feel if there's something you want to say on this last question please chime in so along those same lines what has the state done and what remains to be done to help boost your members capacity to implement the kinds of practices that we've heard about today and you just reference some of that but if there's more chime in Wes and others please and I am going to chime in on this one as well so yeah so for CTA we have a number of initiatives that we're taking on including our instructional leadership core which we're really trying to train our own members because when we talk about collaboration for the most part education as educators it's not always collaborative in general we need you know we're one of the only for example professions that doesn't control our professional development at this point right and that again that's not by accident there's historical reasons for that and I think part of what we're doing is really preparing on members through our instructional leadership core where we've now trained hundreds of people have done thousands of training to be part of that collaboration I think statewide I really appreciate the way that now testing is on the verge of being de-emphasized I got to continue to push around that the way that's taken over a lot of our curriculum I also think we need to continue to figure out ways to make sure that younger students and students of color coming into profession and the state has like getting the RICA getting rid of the RICA a lot of these gatekeeper exams and procedures that have kept a lot of amazing jewels of communities out of education is another huge thing I think the state can be part of and CTA looks forward to helping be part of that as well. On the state we talk about access and opportunity gaps in my opinion we have a huge priority gap our priority ought to be our students and we should prioritize them even more and do so with real money right and you talked about the disparity you hear it all the time it's depressing the important and uplifting message is there are opportunities to make a real difference to do things in our career that are legacy activities that yes there's the schools and community the split role access supports that we're cosponsoring with CSBA about initiative it's about triple the money into the system we ought to all walk the governor's office after this meeting and say we demand you in the legislature do a two third vote bring what's best in schools and community what's best in full and fair funding and invest long term in the twenty billion of dollars in California students so we can end the institutional historic racism that puts our kids where they are before they even come to us and the research is clear on that that's what we have to disrupt if we want to change the system even about the teacher pipeline teacher pipeline excuse me I get pre-service training it's important it's pre-K where the teacher pipeline fails because our students who are misrepresented who look like their friends don't have the vocabulary and access to go to college to go to a pre-service training and to be a teacher who looks like their students so we have to start there funding isn't everything but it's just about everything and then the state ought to put money where their mouth is in prior types of things that are important like collaboration it shouldn't be a hobby we should be doing something about that and governance and you may want to hit on this we ought to be intentional about it in my experience you want to turn around a district to school have great relationships labor management have great governance relationship period everything else will come into play you don't have those I don't care how much you know about curriculum why is it that teachers have to have all this training principles everyone has to have training except for the school board members who set the policies for heaven's sake right everybody ought to be well trained and purposeful and there ought to be some resources to do that alright well you just took everything that I was going to say now I'm going to come up with something else no but let me I said I was going to chime in on this one because and I agree with everything that David and West have said well money may not be everything as you said but in a lot of ways it is to be able to do a lot of the things that we want to do and to expand on some of these promising practices or best practices whatever label you want to you want to put on them and as David alluded to if you look at where California is right now in per pupil funding we are at the very bottom or near the bottom on every major indicator and I think that that's possible and we can do better we have the resources to do better the superintendent of public instruction alluded to this when he came here this morning and spoke this is something that I know that all of us agree that we can and we need we need to do better so that we can provide the professional learning environments for our teachers and for our professional staff related to that I want to talk about something I just want to it connects to the money one of the things that we as an or CSBA does is that we as a organization every single year we are in the unfortunate position of having to oppose bills in the legislature for one particular reason often times and that's because they're unfunded mandates and if you're not familiar with that term I want you to get familiar with it because I will tell you on an annual basis our organization I'm sure West's and CTA's and other districts are able to stop unfunded bills to the tune of at least 600 to a billion 600 million to a billion dollars every single year those are the ones were able to stop the ones were not able to stop from being enacted guess what their thrust on districts and county and offices of education so what that means is now they have to do something they have to pull resources away from the types of things that we're saying are important to fund these other unfunded mandates and when you drop that on or layer that on the fact that we're already at an underfunded system you can see how this cycle that we're all trying to address just continues so my point in saying that is I think there needs to be we can walk over to the legislature to the governor's office and we can talk about money but I also think there needs to be a conversation about alignment with the priorities established in the state budget and the bills that ultimately get signed and what impact they have because right now we have a huge disconnect and everyone wants to talk about over putting we're going to do this for schools we're going to do that for schools and the money doesn't follow and districts continue to struggle we're trying to find resources to do these types of things that we want to do to recruit and retain our teachers provide professional learning environments for our teachers and provides us supports and services to our students so from my perspective I think that's a critical piece the last thing thank you for two minute warning is Wes talked about governance training we represent board members on the county and at the school district level we have been saying that since almost the beginning of time we actually do training for our members but think about this school districts and county offices of education in a lot of communities are the largest employers employ hundreds to thousands of individuals they have budgets anywhere from $1000 to over a billion dollars plus they are elected officials they come in they have to make decisions they have to make policy decisions they have to make budgetary decisions they have to create that they have to work with the superintendent staff to create that vision that we heard about today and that's referenced in the report but at no point do we think that it's important for them to understand and be trained like other officials whether it's on ethics or other things and I think we've reached a place now where from our perspective it's critically important that we need to support board members to be good governance leaders and learn how to do that and it's just not on the job training we as an organization do that and we'll continue to do that and expand our reach but we think it's something that needs to be done and so with that I will I know we have about maybe a minute left I'll open it up to the rest of the panel to comment on anything that you'd like the only thing I'll add is you know we did our best work when there were less resources on the table we learned what it was what it meant to be really collaborative and not co-labor together and originally we were co-laboring and when there's less food on the table less resources we had to come together and that's where Sanger started to do its best work when we realized that the shift in culture and organization was predicated on four simple questions do I know what's expected to be at work do I have the resources to do my job well is there someone at work that actually cares about my personal growth in the last seven days someone told me good job when it came down those four things and three initiatives we started to do the right work and I think as we think about it from the state level we've got to figure out how to translate policy that works can do that work I think the main piece that I want to thank the state for is they've given us some time right so the old accountability system right and we were things that happened to you right they've given us time they've also given us local control right and to me it's this loose tight piece that's pretty loose right I think what we're learning now is that there's some other things we need to tighten right a little bit in regards to that there are as example as you saw these outliers report there are best practices that there's good work happening across the state there always has been right and there's continuing to be there how do we fund more of that type of work and one of the things you'll see I know we've done some work in our models of continuous improvement we've done some of our first work in to the Vista and in particular what you see in those districts that are functioning really well and doing really well with kids is they're working collaboratively across the district with leadership teams of various stakeholders all at the table together in the design of the system right most of where we see where folks are not being as successful is where the stakeholders are not engaged and they're not part of that work right and in particular I would say in our system right now I appreciate the reference to teachers teachers are the ones who are making the difference for children every day in classroom that's where the work happens right to understand that we need to figure out how do we get them more involved in design instead of the responding to what it is that we're designing for them right and I think there's we need to be a little bit more intentional about that put more resources around that and I think if we continue to do that and learn from some of that good work out there so I really appreciate what David said to where it's now no longer an outlier it's the norm we're going to make a difference for kids in this state thank you Tom Mary final word it's a great time to be in education and in education policy I'm echoing somebody or everybody up here we have the elements we need in the state of California to be extremely successful we need time to really develop that capacity develop our capacity to put these systems in play in ways that are working we need to stay committed absolutely to the notion of continuous improvement where we're constantly looking at the results we're achieving and adjusting our course to achieve the goal that we set for ourselves it's a good time to be here right now during this work so please join me in thanking the panel as well as LPI for hosting this event today thank you okay thank you Bernard and panelists for that great discussion my name is Naomi Androsic and I'm a senior researcher and policy advisor with the Learning Policy Institutes before I move on to introduce our final speaker I just wanted to take a quick moment to thank everyone in the audience for your thoughtful engagement during that first panel that part of the event grew out of some survey responses we got at our last event back in February or California Way event where some folks asked us for extra time to engage with each other and with material I hope you feel like you've gotten some of that today and I also hope that you'll take some time to give us some great feedback through the surveys on your tables before you leave today so with that on to the fun part I get to introduce our final speaker Linda Darling Hammond our president and CEO she's well known around these parts so she doesn't need a long introduction suffice it to say that her experience and her insights have made her really valued voice as California has made this journey towards increased equity and deeper learning for all of our students with that please help me welcome Linda well I want to start by thanking Naomi who is largely responsible for all the details of this event so let's thank Naomi and all the other staff at LPI who really contributed to this I want to thank all of you who contribute to the education of our children through teaching and leading through research and policy through cheerleading and advocacy I want to thank the many authors of these studies who were out into these districts for multiple rounds of data collection and then I also want to thank all of you for listening so closely through the jackhammers and the sirens the train whistles the clanging bells we've had quite an accompaniment to this morning kind of like being at school through all the distractions and all the obstacles we carry on it takes a roomful of educators to kind of go with this flow so it's important to understand and the reason that LPI did this study it's really important to understand what works from research and evidence and not just ideologies education in the United States and California has been highly politicized over recent decades and a lot of times proposed reforms have been based on political and theological grounds rather than evidence about what works we've had curriculum wars of all kinds that come and go I remember when I first came to California I was told that the reading wars were going on then if you remember the reading police I was told that phonics was the new F word in California it's a phonics joke if you think about it you'll get it but there are some limits to politics as a way of guiding our work as one person said politics is the gentle art of getting votes from the poor and campaign funds from the rich by promising to protect each from the other and education on the other hand is the art of building collaboration among human beings to help each of them achieve their potential and that definition I think is important you note that I did not say that education is the art of ranking selecting and sorting students to distinguish those who are worthy of excellent opportunities from those who are not yet as you know many of the features of the education system we have inherited are designed to do just that unequal funding across districts and communities is part of that selecting sorting and ranking unequal access to fully qualified teachers is part of that selecting sorting and ranking tracking systems that create unequal access to high quality curriculum norm reference testing systems that are designed to rank so that students against each other rather on rather narrow dimensions rather than to measure the growth of students across multiple dimensions and that's the inheritance that we have in much of our education system and these positive outliers have found ways to push against the grain of the system we have inherited I want to note that we're highlighting these seven districts today but as you noted there are many more that we uncovered in the quantitative analysis in California and many small districts that we didn't even include in that count because we were trying to have statistical stability in the results but lots and lots of people are doing this work in very productive ways our job at the state level is to change the grain rather than people having to work against the grain we need to change the grain and so there are I would really note that one of the things to note about the work of these districts is how they've disproved some of the myths of older reforms for one thing and this has been brought out by a lot of the panelists they've demonstrated the continuity and steady work continuity in the leadership continuity in the teaching force continuity in the nature of the work that continuously improves not disruption and continual change is part of the secret sauce for success it is not the case that these are districts with superintendents every year and a half teachers who come in for a short period of time sinker swim and leave fire bad teachers as a major strategy for getting better there was a theory that was put forward a while ago that if you just fire the bottom 5% of your teachers each year your districts would get better and having studied a lot of countries around the world I used to point out that you cannot fire your way to Finland in fact Finland which ranks highly internationally does that by investing in the quality of teachers and leaders over time almost nobody believes the system because they are both respected and invested in so what we saw in these districts are investments in the pipelines into teaching and leadership and into teaching a second myth that is countered by this evidence is that they really invested in support for social emotional learning and positive behavior not zero tolerance not you know one figure out not punishing and pushing kids out of school we heard a lot about the work that was going on in terms of social emotional learning positive behavior supports and you know we have a lot of evidence that brings greater safety to schools we don't need guns for teachers we need social emotional learning conflict resolution and positive behavior supports through the support those on for community building a third myth that I think is countered by this evidence is no excuses idea of schooling that you know poverty doesn't matter just double down you know look straight ahead follow the line attention to student needs we heard about the sending kids home with backpacks full of food for the weekend as well as being sure that they are well cared for loved and supported with food and counseling and the supports that they need asking what they need rather than punishing them for not having a fourth area that I think we see differences that these districts really focused on unpacking and understanding the new standards rather than shoving them down people's throats or attaching them to sanctions and I don't know if you remember we don't always have a long institutional memory in education but some years ago when common court state standards were going across the country and they ended up being rejected in a number of states one of the states that ended up doing that was New York where I had been prior to California where common court came in with a very short timeframe very little professional development tied to high stakes testing which was used to deny students advancement to the next grade or diplomas to make decisions about teacher tenure and pay to make decisions about what schools would be closed and common core you know a curriculum reform that could bring higher order thinking skills to kids became associated with punishments for schools teachers and children because it was shoved down people's throats rather than an enabling force so I think these districts really showed how that schooling could take place a fifth area was that they really talked about expanding access to curriculum to rigorous curriculum not pulling out students who are behind and restricting the curriculum I don't know if you remember the olden days when we had an approach in California where kids who were scoring poorly would get pulled out of science and social studies music and art get denied recess forget about library time sit for two hours and drill for the test in reading and another two hours and drill for the test in math everything we know from the science of learning and development about what works for brain development and for productive behavior is violated by the way that we treated kids when they had low test scores so these districts really expanded access to rigorous curriculum rather than restricting access a sixth of course is that they we heard a lot about this really great stories of early intervention without labeling rather than testing for labeling and segregation of students but how do we figure out what kids need get it to them right at the moment they needed and then they can go on and be part of the community of learners and finally you know establishing trust and supports rather than shaming and blaming so I think we've seen a real important body of knowledge about how to make the right kinds of changes at the district level now how is California changing the grain so the districts don't have to go against the grain in order to do this well we've also heard that we're making some strides you know LCFF does bring more equitable funding and the possibilities of kids getting access to the resources that they need we're making investments in teacher quality which Mary ticked off every item of the money that's been put into trying to address teacher shortages beginning to invest in professional development we've got an emphasis now on multiple measures of learning and opportunity I think that the measuring of opportunity is as important as measuring the outcomes it's not just about the achievement gap it's about the opportunity gap we're beginning to surface what the aspects of the opportunity gap are in the dashboards and in the work that districts and schools are doing looking at whether kids have in addition to useful outcomes do they have access to rich curriculum to social emotional learning supports to positive school climate etc and we're seeing the results you know it's really interesting California's been really into the LCFF process for about five we're going on six years of really doing this work in 2007 we were 48th in the nation in eighth grade reading 47th in eighth grade math by 2017 we were almost at the national average in eighth grade reading one point below the national average on the national assessments and we had closed the distance the gap in math between us and the national average in half graduation rates went up to the highest we've had even after some readjustments for how we count graduation and exceed those in the nation as a whole San Diego is one of the districts that are measured by the national assessment of educational progress in the TUDA assessments and they had the steepest gains of any district in the country and are now near the top of urban districts in the country so there is progress being made but we have a lot more to do somebody referenced the fact that John Merrow did a film about California which he entitled from first to worst about the deep decline that we experienced when disinvestment was going on I think we are in a position to move now from worst to first and we've got to be really clear headed about what the steps are that are going to help us get there and one of those is that we have to continue the march to adequacy and funding in the state we are now actually because of LCFF and the prop 30 monies we are now 25th in the nation in terms of the amount of money being spent but when you put in our cost of living we're back down to 41st so you know cost of living is an issue here we've got to get to a place where we are as necessary we are the 5th largest economy in the world we have a lot of untapped resources for educational investment we need to educate rather than incarcerating we've been spending $60,000 a year on each young person who's incarcerated when we wouldn't spend $10,000 a year on them to ensure that they were literate and able to graduate from high school that has got to change the other thing that really was pronounced the degree to which these districts and the state as a whole needs to really take into account the wraparound supports that are necessary for kids to be healthy and to develop properly we are in a moment in American history where the nation is involved in aggressive neglect of its children the levels of poverty the increasing the ever increasing levels of homelessness the ever increasing levels of food insecurity and insecurity around healthcare not to mention the deportations and the family breakups that all the rest of the horrific anti-family activity that is going on and we're going to have to as a state really be sure that the wraparound supports are available and that our schools can be a hub of safety and support for children for their the needs that they have as human beings to learn and develop so that we can make progress there have been efforts made in this direction we've got a long way to go to organize those to orchestrate them to make them less than a few competitive grant programs here or there that you have to chase after New York State for example has a community schools formula grant for every high poverty community that allows the building of the wraparound supports for every one of those schools there are other states that are looking at systemic ways to meet the needs of children we have to also evolve our dashboard and our data for districts and schools and support how they can use it well for example in areas like school climate data where we can make a we can make a lot of progress by knowing how children are experiencing school every year not necessarily every other year and teaching people how to use those data to put those supports in place early childhood education of course is a huge investment on the horizon the governor has made that clear in the getting down to fact studies what they found was that kids in California make greater gains than kids in other states of the same income levels between K through 12 they're actually progressing at a steeper rate they come into kindergarten on average further behind so if we want to really make progress we've got to make those investments wisely thoughtfully and in a whole child manner in early childhood and then what we've talked a lot about today and this is going to be a major agenda for us is building that system of support for learning we should have a state in which every educator who wants to learn how to improve their practice around any dimension of the schooling process whether it's math education English language arts English learner development whether it's science and STEM and technology and engineering whether it's social emotional learning reducing suspensions improving school climate that there is readily available high quality sustained available professional learning opportunities that you can access as a whole school as a department as an individual to improve practice and teachers should not have to look under rocks you know for knowledge like is this the place where I'm going to find the answer so that's going to be a goal for us we've got to solve teacher shortages by making the investments you know in countries around the world again we are the fifth largest economy in the world if our teachers were coming up in Finland or Singapore or many other countries they would go through their preparation programs which are uniformly high quality free of charge with a stipend while they train they would go into readily available mentoring programs and then have readily available professional learning it is something that California not only should aspire to and envision but enact over the coming years that we've got you know in the form of the work that's going on at the CDE and CCE and CTC a lot of the elements of that so part of our job is really to do the stitching the investing the orchestrating that's going to be necessary so that we can learn from success and then pointing that professional learning at the things we know that actually are successful rather than random acts of innovation that are like popcorn reform that come and go so we heard about for example reading recovery. Reading recovery is one of the world wide interventions for reading that has hundreds of studies finding that 90 plus percent of the kids who have that experience that we heard about from Gridley learn to read successfully whether they are students who have been identified with special educational needs whether they are English learners or language learners of any kind whether they are just slower to get to the reading process that's one example of many but we do know a lot and we've seen in these districts things that work and we shouldn't pretend that any effort is likely to be as successful as any other effort we should build on the knowledge base build on the research base and use what we know both in California and I know this is heresy even beyond the borders of California to learn how to organize that system of support. So I just want to close by noting that we have been through a lot of reforms of various kinds over many decades but many years ago Horace Mann who was sort of in some ways the founder of public education in the common school made the point that where anything is growing one former is worth a thousand reformers and I think in this room are many of the formers of California's public education system and we need to support each other with knowledge and resources and commitment to take this state from worst to first thank you. I want to share this applause with all of you with my LPI colleagues and I think I am in the position of giving us a benediction and may the force go with you.