 Well, thank you, and thanks to the consortium for inviting me to be here. I didn't realize I was being introduced as the local expert here in Michigan, which I was a little surprised at since I've actually been here in Michigan for nine months. And I don't know if that says something about the state of expertise in Michigan that having been here for nine months, I'm the local expert, but I actually had an earlier tour of duty here in the state of Michigan where I was a professor at the University of Michigan, and probably one of my singular achievements there was that I was an expert witness on a lawsuit over the use of the MEAPS for awarding of the Michigan Merit Scholarships, where the defendants were Governor Engler and Superintendent Flanagan, one of his predecessors, were the defendants. So I'm not sure that in fact I would have ever been invited back to the state of Michigan, particularly to participate in a conference talking about the Michigan Merit Curriculum, but nevertheless I was invited, so I'll do my best to be the local expert. Barbara started off this morning by talking about this sort of strange arranged marriage that Jack alluded to between the sociologists here at Michigan State, or in some cases Ken Frank is really a quasi sociologist, and the economists at the University of Michigan, and it reminded me a little bit of, to paraphrase that book from a number of years ago, that sociologists are from Venus and economists are from Uranus. But somehow I've been watching this consortium since I have been back here in Michigan for nine months, and it seems to work, and I think actually the two groups of people build on the strengths of each other, and we know that the economists are really the very strong analytics statistical people, and the sociologists presumably know something about people, given that they're sociologists, and they very smartly brought in the data guy here from the state, who had all of the data they needed to be able to answer these questions. So I've been very much looking forward to seeing these first results coming out since I heard that they were going to be released this fall, and I was very excited to be able to have the opportunity to look at some of the results the last few days when they were sent to us. And coincidentally, I just got back late last night from a trip to London where I was there with some people from our college, where we were visiting schools in London that very much mirror the urban school districts that we have here in Michigan, and facing some of the same challenges. And these were schools, state schools, as they call them, and also academies, which are their equivalent of what we call charter schools, that were in relatively poor for the most part parts of London that had been underperforming schools, just as we have many underperforming schools here in the state of Michigan, and managed to turn around those schools into raised academic achievement because the UK has exactly the same goal that we have here in this country that Jack alluded to, which was increasing academic performance, increasing college rates so that they can better perform just as we want to better perform against whom? The Finns and the Singaporeans. That's who everybody points to in academic achievement, and it was very interesting how parallel the conversations were between what we talk about here in trying to raise our academic performance on international benchmarks like TIMMS and Pearls and others against the Finns who seem to be the world leaders in academic achievement, and someday we will actually get there to be as good as Finlan, I'm sure, whether it's under your term as Commissioner Jack or mine as dean here in the College of Education, I'm not sure, but we will get there at some point. So let me just say a few words about the context of college going and what we know about what factors affect whether students actually go on to college or not. Then I'm going to say just a few words about what I took out of the findings that we're discussed here today, and then I will try to get this wrapped up quickly since I'm in the unenviable position of standing between you and our delicious lunch that I think is going to be right next door. I'm a little disappointed I don't actually smell it wafting through to keep us moving through these very quickly. So what do we know about factors that affect college going? What determines whether somebody goes on to college? Well, generally when we look at that research it falls into three domains. The first domain is academic preparation, and we've had a lot of talk about academic preparation today. What kind of courses students take? What's the rigor of those courses beyond just titles that are slapped on them like Algebra II? But how rigorous are those courses? What is the content that is dressed in those courses? What kind of preparation do students have for standardized tests, whether it's things like the MME or the ACT or the SAT test? What kind of access do they have to that kind of preparation? What kind of support do they get in their homes for increasing their academic achievement? The second domain is social preparation. Is there a culture of college going within that family? Have the students' parents gone to college or siblings? Are they in a community where the norm for all students' secondary school is to go on to post-secondary education or not? Are there community organizations that encourage that? Or are they in a place like Kalamazoo that has the Kalamazoo promise that not just provides money but encourages students to go on to college or not? And the third domain, of course, is financial preparation. And that has to do with things like how much income does the student and his or her parents have? What assets do they have? Have they saved for college? What kind of information do they have about financial aid and access to financial aid, whether it's grants or loans or work study? And what kinds of tuition prices do they face in their local institutions because we know, as Sue said, 80% of students go to public institutions and something like 90%, depending upon which survey you look at, 90% of students who go to college do so within 100 miles of their own high school graduation place. So what kind of choices do they face in terms of the price of the institutions? So in trying to understand what impact any particular policy change is going to make in a district or in a state or even nationwide, you have to be able to tease out these different factors. And it is an extremely difficult process. From somebody who spent almost 20 years researching this, I can tell you it's very difficult to do well and to do in a way that allows you to draw conclusions about the impact that any one of these policies may have. And I think that the consortium is on the right track in trying to understand what impact the introduction of the Michigan merit curriculum had on the goals that we have set for this state, which include increasing graduation rates, including, excuse me, increasing academic performance and getting more students into a post-secondary education institution and through to some kind of high-quality credential at the end. So let me say a few words about what I took out of the findings. And I've got a few comments for the researchers here. So this is where you can take out your pad and paper and hopefully use some of the expertise I do have as a researcher to try to think about the next stage of the work that you're going to be doing and how you can try to address some of these questions in the next stage. One of the questions I took out was I'd like to know a little bit more about the quartiles that you constructed. And you alluded to the fact that you included in there not just their performance on the eighth grade test but also something about their socioeconomic background as well as school characteristics. So again, from a research perspective, make sure you share with us how you constructed that because depending upon how you construct those quartiles you may be able to get very different impacts. And since you did find very different effects between top quartile on the one hand and bottom quartile on the other, it's important to understand how those quartiles were actually constructed. And this is particularly important when you're doing pipeline analyses. And Sue started us off by talking about and showing us the pipeline for students in Michigan. And she very accurately pointed out what we know from the rest of the nation also is that we lose students all across and every step of that pipeline. We lose them from ninth grade into tenth grade and even though we have mandatory school enrollment till age 16 we know there are some students that leave school before age 16. We lose them after the mandatory enrollment age. We lose them at the point of graduation and we lose them at entry to college and then through to a credential. And the important thing to know and again as Sue's data showed is that that gap between different groups, whether you measure rich and poor on the one hand or if you're looking at race and ethnicity we usually put together white and Asian American students compared to African American and Latino students that those gaps increase over that pipeline. So what that tells us is that we have work to do at every step of the pipeline. Increasing the rigor and increasing the rigor for the lowest achieving students so they can get to the point of higher achieving students. We have work to do on high school graduation and we have work to do on college entry as well as college completion. The other point that I would make is an important one and in their materials the author said and I think Brian alluded to this briefly the author said that they try to have some conversations with the state to make sure that there weren't other changes going on in state policy simultaneous with the introduction of the Michigan Merit Curriculum so that we could try to isolate that any of these interrupted time series changes we saw like the increase in certain measures or the decrease in others starting with the cohort first impacted by the Michigan Merit Curriculum making sure that that was the real impact and there was a cause and effect there. And I'm sure that they did a very thorough job in doing that and they've talked about the fact that they want to have the same conversations with districts to make sure that there weren't simultaneous changes going on at that same time in districts. But one of the things I do worry about is if you look at that first cohort of students who were subject to the MMC those students during their sophomore year particularly the fall of their sophomore year is when the recession hit this country and hit Michigan. And the question that I had as I thought about this is whether there were any of the economic factors again I think Brian alluded to this a little bit is whether any of the economic factors that occurred during the recession particularly so a ramped up because the recession ramped up so quickly and was so severe so quickly during the sophomore and then into the junior year of these students is whether any of those things could in fact have impacted any of the results that you're seeing here. So for example could the recession have impacted either in migration or out migration rates of students here in Michigan and when those impacts have been different for high achieving students the top quartile versus bottom achieving students. So I suggest you think a little bit about that and in fact whether there would have been any impacts of the recession that would have impacted the results you saw absent the introduction of the MMC and of course we'll never know we can't turn back the clock and conduct an experiment but I nevertheless I think it's something about for example we know that higher unemployment rates lowers the opportunity cost of staying in school. So 16 or 17 year olds who may be thinking of dropping out of school if it's a relatively high employment period and they think they can get jobs out there even though we might not think of those as being very good jobs because what kind of jobs you get if you're a high school dropout but nevertheless if somebody is thinking about that choice of leaving school and getting a job versus staying in school the signals of higher employment rates send to students they may opt to stay in school and with the introduction of the MMC we may say that in fact well the impact of the MMC were that more students were staying in school for perhaps that fourth year or fifth year of high school when in fact the impact you may be seeing may simply be that of the signals of the labor market sector that students are responding to so trying to tease those out I think are very important. I think that what struck me the overall conclusion seems to be that the MMC had a modest impact on the achievement of students who are already fairly high achievers and there's been little impact or in fact a negative impact on students who have been left behind to use the language of no child left behind so the challenge for the state will be to figure out in fact how do we reach and this has always been the challenge when we look at gaps in performance is how do we reach those students now another confounding factor that's going to make your jobs only a little bit harder is that there has been a change in state policy and that's the waiver that the state of Michigan was granted by the U.S. Department of Education so that it no longer has to comply with the no child left behind act and something I'm very familiar with because our college in fact is working in partnership with the department to go out in the next year and presumably in future years hopefully Superintendent Flanagan will work with about 300 focus and priority schools here in Michigan to look and help them address in particular the achievement of their lowest performing students so this is going to be the confounding factor that you guys are going to have to figure out how do you take into account the work that we may be doing and not that we're going to have miraculous results but presumably we're going to have some results in working with these 300 schools because the priority schools are the bottom 5% of the performing schools and the focus schools are those 10% of the schools that have the largest gap between their highest achieving students their lowest achieving students so on the one hand that confounds your work as researchers to try to isolate the impact of the MMC but on the other hand it perhaps provides a national experiment that you can exploit because there are going to be those schools that we're in there working fairly intensively on closing achievement gaps and there are going to be those schools that are just outside the label just miss being labeled with this horrific label of a priority or a focus school who aren't going to be getting that intensive work from us in partnership with the state so maybe there will be an opportunity to see in fact were there any differences between those two groups that you can then exploit in understanding whether the MMC had any impact or not or any further impacts so with that I will stop I think can we take a few minutes for questions before we head next door for lunch so again thank you very much for your attention I for one look very am very excited and look forward to hearing about further results from the consortium and again thank you very much