 Hello, I'm Ron Ferguson. I'm here at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard and also at the Graduate School of Education. I run the Achievement Gap Initiative here and some of you may know me from the Tripod Project for School Improvement that we started about a decade ago. The reason I'm talking to you now, of course, is to talk about the workshop or the series of sessions on academic equity that we put together. The goal of this series of sessions is to give you the opportunity as a group of leaders in your district to craft a shared vision based upon what research and the literature suggests, but also based upon what you bring to the table. The members of your group each have, every person has their own experience and no one knows what all of us knows and so this is an opportunity to come together and to share your ideas about what you already do, but to do that in a way that's informed by what we can bring from outside of your district from the world of research and analysis. The session that we've designed is divided into five sections, each of which has several, two or three classes, so it's 13 sessions in total. The first basic section of the course or the workshop is focused on big picture issues. It's about how we bring about coherence to the overall agenda and even to the degree that equity is in the title of the session. What do we mean by equity there? We can define equity along several different dimensions. We want to be explicit about what those dimensions are. We want to talk about which ones you might care most about. We want to talk about which ones are currently emphasized most in your district and why. So we want to interrogate the current conversation about equity and come to some shared understandings we hope about the way that you want to think and talk about equity in the district. And then we also want to talk about how we can bring coherence to the overall vision. You've sure been around these conversations for a while and you know that the theme of coherence is one of the main themes that we have these days. Often ranked folks who are not in leadership positions have the feeling that leaders go away to conferences and come back with miscellaneous new ideas that they put on top of the pile. And so the agenda in the district at any particular point in time can seem just like a big bunch of miscellaneous ideas that have no particular coherence. And so we want to talk about the ways or some of the ways that we can make it clear that each piece of the puzzle fits with the other pieces. And so people have a stronger reason to trust that folks in leadership positions know what they're doing and are leading in a direction that's going to actually take the district someplace. The second section of the course is called Building Local Capacity for Excellence and Equity. The first session there is talking about data use for the purpose of defining priorities. And so it's using data to ask what do we want to do and why do we want to do it. The second session is dealing with the question of who's going to do what and how do they know how to do it. So it's about professional development, setting professional development priorities in ways that help students, help teachers and administrators when necessary to build the skills and orientations to address the issues that the analysis of data. Has led you to identify as priorities. And the third session, which is session five overall, but the third session in the second section of the course is called Identifying Problems of Practice and Constructing Theories of Action. And so it's becoming very specific about the particular kinds of instances in classrooms and in the schools to which people would apply the skills that address the priorities that were identified with the data. And trying to have theories of action, not simply descriptions of disjointed actions that help us to understand the chain of events and the chain of experiences that we want the adults to have in order to provide the experiences to the students that we want the students to have. Now the third section of the workshop, which would be session six and seven, instead of dealing with what people do and why they do it, we're talking more about the who and so far as which teachers do we want to attract and retain, which administrators do we want to attract and retain, what are some of the big issues in hiring, issues in tenure provision, just how, what all the matrix of decisions and issues are that we deal with there and the readings and discussions would help to try to bring us again just like on the other things we talk about to some shared understandings of what the main issues are and how those main issues fit together into a coherent way of addressing these issues. So that in this part of the course, we've dealt with hiring retention issues in the previous part, we will have dealt with professional development and identifying priorities and so on. So you kind of see the way that those relate to one another but serve complementary purposes. The fourth section of the course is called engaging all students and families in schools to enhance learning. And here, what we're trying to do is to think about the differentiation that is necessary in the district strategies to achieve both both excellence and equity. We want to be sure that we're attending to the needs of students at all levels of the achievement hierarchy and students who have also may have different emotional needs and different needs based on their family situations. And so the first section there is on differentiated instruction and personalizing the school. The second section, session there, which is session 9 overall, dropout prevention, student engagement and high school completion. Session 10, home school partnerships with less advantaged families. And session 11, helping parents to strengthen home environments for learning and healthy development. And so particularly section 11 here reminds us that it's not only about what happens in classrooms, we're also trying to get to the place where what people do at home, what parents do at home with their students at the evening after the door is closed. Also add up to a set of things that are supportive of the goals that we have during the school day. And so we will want to talk during this session, section of the workshop or the course on how it is that you see the distinctions across different types of students who might have different needs. What you see as the different, the very strategies and resources that are relevant to address those needs as we will throughout the course we'll be talking, we'll be looking at literature, their readings for every session, their discussion questions for every session. But again, it's about drawing from multiple sources, about drawing from the readings from your experience, from whoever is leading in a faculty position in order to make the most of the opportunity to achieve coherence and shared understandings in a way that's distilled enough to be memorable so that we can actually hold these things in working memory and use them in everyday practice back in the district. Now the final section of the course is called assembling resources. Session 12 is called the politics of school finance and 13 is on school community partnerships. And here these titles tell you exactly what we're talking about. There are decisions to be made about school openings and closings and the allocation of teachers to certain schools and other schools. There are just lots of decisions that have interests connected to them. There are stakeholders whose interests will be affected by the majority perhaps of the resource allocation decisions that have to be made. And the question is how do we conduct that process in a way that people perceive the decisions are being made in a way that's fair and that will allow the district also to effectively achieve the goals that it has. So to summarize, the point is not for those of us who might be leading these sessions to come necessarily and give you the right answers. The point is to have a period where you reflect, where you try to reach some shared understandings, where you identify differences in your team on how you're thinking about things, where you reach some agreement perhaps about the division of labor for some of the things that might need to be done, but where you also come out with some parameters on the way that you're going to think as a community of leaders so that you can go back into your school system with a kind of coherence and also a kind of enthusiasm and positive optimism, a sense of optimism and hopefulness about what you can achieve together. And I'm hoping to be a part of this to help make it be successful and I wish you the best. Thank you.