 Today's conference, as you know, is entitled Disengaged Youth, Understanding Why Adolescents Disengage and Dropout. I mean, we all, for the betterment of the country, we need to understand this issue better and see what's worked and why. The occasion is the 20th anniversary of the National Guard Youth Challenge Program, an extraordinarily successful program that's had 115,000 graduates who are doing better in their lives because of it, and a results-based approach. CSIS is the right venue for this because it was CSIS 21 years ago who did a study at the direction of the Congress. Hugh Price was a member of that study group that looked at the problem of the youth out of school we're facing and came up with this as one approach to that. So CSIS and the National Guard Youth Challenge Program have a shared interest in this issue. We're trying to increase national awareness of it and try and find some ways to help this awful problem for the country. So we thank you for joining us at this important, very important dialogue. In a moment, I'm going to introduce our wonderful keynote speaker, but before I do that, let me just do a couple of, make a couple of points. We're going to have three panels and then a lunch and discussion to try and understand a little bit better the breath and effective ways to address this tragedy that's facing the country. I'm going to ask you all, please, to check yourselves to make sure they're off so we don't get any electronic activity during the course of the event. This is being live webcast, so as we get to the point in each panel, and I think Senator Landrieu, if she has time, may take some questions. If you have questions, please hold up your hand. We have people with microphones who will bring them to you so that those that are watching this in the live webcast can also see who is talking and what's being asked. We'll have lunch at 12.30. You'll just go behind the panels. There'll be a lunch there and bring it back to your table. And then at one, we're going to have a discussion during the lunch period just to kind of talk a little bit about what's been happening. And then we'll have a reception in this room from three to five. We'll just stay around and just talk about what we've all learned and try to make things better. So it is, in fact, a great honor for me to be able to introduce our keynote speaker. She's the co-chair of the Honorary Board of the National Guard Youth Challenge Program, an incredible advocate for it. She has three programs in the state of Louisiana alone. She's been a leader in a number of youth-oriented activities throughout her career, charter schools, and then, of course, her legislative achievements are legendary. I won't even begin to try and address that. But we are extraordinary pleased and honored to have the senior senator from Louisiana, the Honorable Mary Landrieu, as our keynote speaker. Well, good morning and thank you, Kim, so much for that introduction. And Gail Dady, the president of the National Guard Youth Foundation Board, I want to recognize and thank you for the invitation. My name is Carol McKinley, who's our former leader of the National Guard and now part of this particular program that's been so successful, but more than part of a program, a passionate advocate for children that have dropped out and are disengaged and are true assets for our nation. My challenge this morning and today is to think about how to engage them and to make them or to help them become the great assets they could be for our nation and contributing instead of detracting from our overall progress. I also want to thank Paul Pastorek, a good friend that's here, an ally in this battle, a former, well, he's a lawyer, not a former lawyer. But more importantly, it was the former superintendent of education from the state of Louisiana and a real champion for education reform and is known and widely respected in the fields of education as one of the most forward-thinking superintendents in the nation and is now helping also with the National Guard program. But Paul, thank you for all the work you've done for many, many years in education. And I understand that in the audience there are foundations that are interested in the subject. I think Hugh Price is here. Hugh, there you are. I thank you for his leadership on this issue as president of the Urban League 20 years ago. It's my distinct honor to have not only known Hugh, but to know the current president of the Urban League, Mark Muriel. He and I spend a good bit of time together being that we're from the same city. The city of New Orleans is our hometown. Share the common bond that both of our fathers were the mayor of the city. Mark himself served as mayor and now my brother is serving as mayor. So I'd say the Muriels and the Landrys are pretty close and have a lot of common interest. And it's very wonderful even as a senator to get to visit with the leadership of the Urban League on a regular basis as I chair the small business committee. And the Urban League has testified many times before our committee on really a related issue. And that is the wealth gap in this country and the terrible disparity between the Hispanic, African American, Asian and white populations, which is part of the consequence of this root problem of disengagement of certain segments of our population. So I just want to make a few, you know, brief remarks because I know I'm speaking to a room full of experts and just give you some, you know, 100,000 foot level thoughts about this this morning. And then I'd really like to take questions and comments. First, no problem is intractable. No problem is without a solution. But this problem of millions and millions of children, young people disengaging from schools in America today. Elementary schools, middle schools, primarily middle and high schools, not finishing their degrees on time, not succeeding in college. And worse than all of that, even when they graduate from high schools with a diploma, not having the skills that that diploma would otherwise imply they have. So it's a big challenge before our nation to strengthen our elementary secondary school system and to reform that to be able to produce the kinds of graduates that are essential to lift our nation forward. And many of you in this room have been working on that for decades. My involvement was with, you know, Governors Bill Clinton and Governor Dick Riley. Well before President Clinton was President of the United States. Governors like them were working in the 1980s, 1970s when a nation at risk report came out. Which was authored, Hugh, you were probably a part of that, but it was authored by, and a major contributor to that was Norman Francis, who's President of Xavier University. He's been President for 40 years, the longest serving President of any university in the history of our country. 40 years at Xavier University and produced decades ago a nation at risk. And unfortunately, ladies and gentlemen, we still are a nation at risk today. Despite the fact that there have been some real breakthroughs in some parts of the country, in some counties, in some cities and in some states with lifting up the quality of our elementary and secondary education. When you look at the data to see how many children, young people, particularly between the ages of 15 and 22, have just dropped out, disengaged, not attending school, either headed to prison or in prison or, you know, otherwise just not counted. Because if you're not in a school population and you're not in prison, you're not counted. You're either in the juvenile justice system or in the prison system or the education system. And I'm not even sure our country has a real specific handle on those numbers, but they're too big. They're too large. Now, fast forward, just leave that there, and fast forward to the debate the United States Senate is having today. When I leave you all, I'm going to go back to the Senate, and we're going to be debating a bill that helps us do what? It does many things. Secures the border, tries to find a path for citizenship for 12 million people that are undocumented or illegal. They have to speak English, pay their back taxes and get in line before everybody else legal. There are other things, but a big part of that bill is what? To close the skills gap in this country, because America doesn't have the skills necessary for the jobs that are available today. Now, if you think about that and the disconnect here about what I've just said, a school system and an education system that is working in some parts but failing in too many. And now the entire Congress of the United States is getting ready to pass a bill to give visas to people who weren't even born in America to take the jobs that our people are not trained to take. This is truly sad. Now, I'm for immigration reform. I'm going to be supporting it generally, but I'm also supporting very serious and additional investments in STEM education in America for our kids to help them get a visa to the middle class. We're giving a lot of kids and young people visas to stay here after they come from China or Korea or Mexico or Colombia or Venezuela or South Africa. But I'd like to give some of the kids that I represent in communities that have failed themselves, and we have failed them. It's not just a one-way street. Everybody has individual responsibility as well, including parents and children. But we've failed each other to provide an adequate education that actually gives them a diploma, which in our country is a visa to the middle class. And it's not just a diploma from high school. It's a diploma from community college at least two years or college to fill the jobs of the future. We're not building that many more plants in Detroit, that many more assembly lines in Philadelphia, that many more textile mills in North Carolina. We do need a million cyber warriors, and you have to have training in science and technology and engineering to be a cyber warrior. We need a million of them. So this problem is really a big one. Now, from my experience, whenever you have a big problem, I think the military solves those big problems pretty well. And that's why I'm such a strong supporter of a small program, but an effective program that can serve as a model, which is the National Guard Youth Challenge Program. Because 20 years ago, this was a real problem. They said, well, who can tackle such a thing? The education establishment didn't, at that point, want to really recognize some of the failings and kept saying, well, it's not our fault. It's the parent's fault. It's not the parent's fault. It's the kid's fault. We can't really do anything. So the military stepped up, and a small but very effective program was created, the National Guard Youth Challenge Program, which has at least two essential components that I think are necessary to reach this group of kids. Now, some of these kids come from poor and disadvantaged families, dysfunctional families, and families that have disintegrated around them. Some of these kids in the National Guard program actually come from pretty stable families, but the kids themselves are not stable. They have made very bad choices and wrong choices. But the essential components of this program that I see, which is why I say so involved and supportive, is it's got a residential component to it. Kids can get actually out of their environment that's pulling them down or pushing them in a place they don't want to go, or they're with a crowd running with a bad crowd. They're intelligent. They have a good heart. They want to improve, but their situation is not really allowing it. The National Guard Youth Challenge Program is residential for six months. It puts kids voluntarily. There's no bob wire around these sites. There are 40 sites or so in the country. Kids can leave whenever they want, although their instructors spend a lot of time encouraging them to stay. But nonetheless, and it's not a typical boot camp. It's I'd say a very rigorous residential high school program that within six months has the results of basically taking kids up two, three, four grade levels. And the other essential component is every child in this program gets a mentor because mentorship is very important. Now, my parents mentored me. I was very fortunate and still my parents are alive. They mentor me every day. I talk to my parents three times a week and I see them weekly. My father still calls me when I'm late to a vote in the Senate floor and says, where are you? You're going to miss the vote. Now, this is ridiculous. Okay, but this is the kind of parents that I have very attentive and I try to be very attentive to our two children and try to mentor them. But a lot of children, unfortunately, don't get good mentorship from their parents and there's no one in their family to mentor them. And really, no one can be successful in my view without at least one good mentor. I mean, you've got to have somebody that you're connected to that believes in you, that understands your value, that can communicate that value to you and so that you can feel confident going on. So a mentorship component, every one of these children in this program has a mentorship program. And again, it's about character and discipline, but it's intellectual rigor and academic rigor and then the mentorship. After six months residential, it's 12 month mentorship and then we're also designing a community connections piece to make sure that these kids either get on to their real job, either get into college, get into community college, go to be a policeman, a fireman, maybe join the military. Less than 10% of the graduates actually I think General McKinley joined the military. This is not a military recruiting program contrary to popular wisdom, but it is structured, it is residential. Second point with the mentorship component and with a very strong 85 to 95% success rate as by the RAND Corporation. Number two, there's another small model that the Department of Education here in D.C. is running that also has similarly extraordinary results. Some of you might know of it, the seed school. The seed school was the brainchild of some tremendously forward thinking graduates of, is it Tulane or Princeton? I was trying to get Tulane in there. Princeton University that created the seed school sort of for the same reason. It's here in D.C. I visited it several times, but more importantly the President visited it himself. It was the first school he went to as President of the United States, Barack Obama. He went there to say the same thing I'm trying to say today. We have models that work. Why don't we expand upon them? The seed school is almost the same as the National Guard, a little bit different. Well, it is somewhat different, but the same concept. It's a residential program that has a strong mentorship component. Just like the National Guard program, the seed school, which has been now in operation for probably now 10 years, 8 to 10 years, is graduating 100% of a population of kids that otherwise would probably have somewhere around a 50% or 40% graduation rate. It's a residential school, Monday to Friday, kids are free to go home on the weekends. They don't always go because there's not always a home to go to. But at school there's always a meal, there's always a place quietly to study, and there are most importantly mentors around them that can help them. Now yes, the seed school costs $18,000 to $20,000 a year, and I may be a little bit low on that since I've looked at the numbers. Regular schools might cost somewhere between $8,000 and $10,000, but prison costs $40,000 or $50,000. So for these certain group of kids that without the really support of the education community of which the military has stepped up to show what they can do, I'm not sure that regular high schools, even the best high schools, can meet the needs of some percentage of children that are just lost and extremely troubled because it's a combination of strong counseling, strong mental health counseling, strong mentorship and imprinting, new imprinting that they need to get a vision in their head of what success looks like because they're not seeing it in their own families or they're not seeing it with their peers. Now America can continue, this is the last thing I'm going to say, to pass immigration bills that give millions of visas to people that grew up in China to come work here and fill these jobs. It's not easy, but it's a way forward, and it's a way that right now in the short term, we have to do to give people from PhDs from Korea and China to stay here and fill the jobs so we need jobs built in America. But ultimately wouldn't it be wonderful to have a kind of education system and a partnership with our education, our military and our foundations to reach every child that needs and wants a great education and show that in a democracy, the greatest democracy in the world, we actually can live up to our promises and commitments to our people by providing that excellent education. So I hope that today is a great day for food for thought and the panels that can talk about some of the details of the program, but it is a crisis in America, it cost us billions of dollars in our bottom line for our economic security of our nation, and it is also just morally very troubling to basically throw away so many phenomenally talented and able young people because we just won't recognize or can't capture their value. And it's really just a shame to see our prisons overflowing with kids that had they learned to read in third grade and had somebody that told them they were worth something, that instead of spending 30 years in prison, they could have spent 30 years building the next rocket to the moon or some such thing that we need. So I thank you all very much and I'll end there. Thank you. Now I'll take questions or comments, and I'm not going to let you all be shy, and I'm going to most certainly make Paul Pasteurak ask a question or a comment in a minute because he could give this speech about 10 times better than I just did, so I want to hear from him. But any comments or questions? All right, Paul, you're going to have to say something. Go ahead. Well, I do have a... Stand up. Go ahead. I do have a question, and thank you for those comments, Senator. I do have a question. If this is such a good program, why isn't it proliferating across the country? I know it's a good program. We have three programs in Louisiana, wonderful results that were all verified, and it seemed to me to be so logical a step for state chiefs, leaders in education, school districts, parents to take advantage of this and really push for this. But it seems like even though we've penetrated many states, but not all states, and we've got some schools, but not enough schools, there are many kids who are crying out for this kind of support. Not every kid is the same, right? We say this as educators all the time. Every kid is different. Every kid has to be caught at the place they happen to be at that moment in time. So why don't we proliferate these kinds of programs that have proven results? Is it lack of communication, getting the word out? We've got to do it the old-fashioned way. Is it the fault of the children so we can't catch up with them? Well, it's definitely not the fault of the children. The adults here are the ones at fault, and it's a combination of A, people not believing that anything can really work. People in their minds say, you know, there's just nothing can be done with this group of kids, this 20% or 30%. It's just, you know, it's sort of just inevitable it's going to happen. So you've got to change people's attitudes by sharing with them examples that have worked. That's why I love talking about the seed school. And there might be other models. I'm not saying that it's the only one, but it's the one that I'm most familiar with, the seed model and the National Guard Youth Challenge model. Number two, Paul, I think one of the problems is stove typing funding. You know, the Department of Defense has its budget. Now, this program in the National Guard, which has graduated 100,000 kids in the last 20 years, and in our state we graduate 1,200 a year. It's not an insignificant number. Now, it's a small percentage of our total high school graduates, but it's not 10 or 15. It's 1,200 in Louisiana. The wonderful thing about this program is it's funded 75% federal and 25% state. And, you know, local districts could put up the money. I don't think they're prohibited. So let's say the, you know, Los Angeles County or New York County, it's not just the state that locals could put up the money, the federal government will match it. Blanche Lincoln was very instrumental in pulling up that match to 75% with my assistance. So it's not that expensive for states. The budget of the Defense Department has been flat. And with sequester and the strain on the budget, it's hard for the Department of Defense. This is not their central mission. I mean, this program developed because no one was doing this. The Department of Education really wouldn't take any bold steps. So the Department of Defense stepped up. They've shown the model that works, and I think after 20 years now is the time to take that and expand it using education dollars and labor department dollars that are used for this population to labor department dollars that are not being well allocated. So maybe somebody's here from OMB that could take these ideas and look at the $3 billion we're spending in the Job Corps program and what are we getting for the $3 billion investment to minister or to reach this particular group of kids needing job skills? You know, I think we sometimes make a mistake that think it's job skills that this group needs. Yes, that is true, but it's also internal compass that they need. They need a readjustment in their heads about what they're thinking. So if you want to be successful with teenagers, trust me, I'm having trouble with one of my own, you've got to, you know, get their head in a much better place, and they have to do this internally. So why is it that we know as parents what to do? Definitely. But we allow our government to spend money doing things that really aren't going to work. You know, yes, you can teach a child how to hammer a nail, but that's only part of their problem or how to polish a piece of furniture. They have to have the mind and the heart and understand they have to take responsibility for their lives. Now, any good parent will tell you this. So I'm now an appropriator of the federal government, and I'm watching us spend billions of dollars on programs that does total disconnect. And that's why I support independent charter schools. Why I don't, you know, I don't support one-size-fits-all in education. Why we're really pushing out this race to the top, this innovation, because if you want to reach kids, then get about reaching them and not just spending money on programs that don't work. Yes, sir. Good morning, Senator. Peter Boyce, Community Affairs Consultants. Mind you, I'm an immigrant. My wife is also Chinese. We have five sons. Our oldest just came out of Harvard. We have a 21-year-old at Yale. You touched on a point there earlier about environment. You mentioned the residential component of this program. Don't we need to go back and look at the original environment of these youth before they reach this great National Guard program? Absolutely. And again, you know, this problem is so, it's really one of the great challenges before our nation. So it's, I don't know why, and maybe Hugh, you could say something because you've really got a lot of experience here. I mean, I'm 57 and ever since I was in public office, since I was 23, I've been struggling with this. And this was going on way before I got into public office. So I don't quite understand why democracy like ours doesn't understand that one of the most important things we can do is have the absolute, the finest education system in the world and that nothing is more important than educating our children and identifying children at an early age that are in a family that they will not thrive. Children don't just need to survive, they need to thrive. So, you know, I've been also doing a lot of work with juvenile judges and at early stages where kids come into the foster care system or they come to the attention of the authorities. Domestic violence, you know, when mothers are being beaten up and kids observe that, it just tears their insides out. So you've got to reach into the environment and try to get kids either with their extended family that have a responsible adult within the extended family. We're not doing a good job of catching that early so kids are growing up in families that really are, instead of adding to their value, they're just sapping their energy and their creativity and tearing them down by the time these kids are in seventh or eighth grade, they just have no plight of focus. And these are, of course, the kids that are committing the crimes on our streets. So, you know, you say, well, how, Senator, can we fix all that? Well, we can't fix it overnight, but you can take pieces of it. What I'm here to say is the military and the National Guard has certainly met their mark in showing what can be done between the ages of 16 and 18. Now, there's more that has to be done between 18 and 24. There's a lot that has to be done at the early ages, Paul. But, you know, I think getting the stovepipes down between education, health, and the military to combine some of these good practices would be a start. And you've been doing this a long time. Can't you shed some light? Right, this conversation could take a month. Yeah, so many variables. I have been working on this for about a half a century, so I've become convinced that you have to find points of entree and powerful systems to try to affect change and to help young people navigate the world around them. You know, this gets in logic questions about how our economy functions and where people fit in and et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. What's powerful about this is that one of the things we haven't done until fairly recently is to create educational environments that are tailored to the needs of kids rather than the factory model which says, this is it, you come and get it. If you don't get it, that's your little red wagon. So, challenge isn't an attempt to do that many, seed isn't an attempt to do that many other efforts that Belfants and many other people around is an attempt to meet kids where they live psychologically and physically and to help them get on with their lives on creating those kinds of institutions. That's one way to begin to deal with this, the larger social, economic, family questions. I mean, I know, just sorry, Andrea Cain here, she's with the Adolescent Pregnancy Prevention Program trying to slow down the pace of babies having babies and therefore not equipped for parenthood is a major issue and making some headway on that. So, but it would take many months to unpack this and then there's the politics of trying to deal with all of this which you live with. That's another story altogether. Figure out what can be done to scale up what we know works. So the National Guard Youth Program actually works. We have X number of programs. We're meeting the needs of about 10,000 kids a year waiting, you know, why couldn't we work on a plan over the next few years to take that up to 100,000? Then there's some high-performing Paul Charter Schools that are really changing the trajectory of these kids. It's not just taking them from a third-grade reading level to an eighth-grade reading level or eighth grade to twelfth grade and getting them, you know, good marks on test. It's really changing, as you know, because you helped to create many of those high-performing Charter Schools. Sometimes kids can get into college or get into a community college or get into a job where they can start earning their own money and understanding that their future is in their hands, even if they have, as the person in the back said, they don't have the right family background. They can still make it on their own if they can just get to a place where they can think that they can be successful. You know, I've been doing this half a century as well, just about because I really did start when I was a kid. I used to think we had to fix every family in the world before we could do this, and I just sort of gave up on that after 25 years and decided to fix, try to focus on the kid and get, like you said, at the point where that flag goes up, try to do your best to reach them then and help them get forward, because if you're going to wait until every family has the perfect job, every family has the perfect solution, but if you can work on the kids which come into contact more because of schools, think about it. All babies, 99% of babies are born in hospitals. That's a way you can, you know, first identify some kids that are at risk. Then they all show up, most of them at kindergarten. That's another place where you could engage and say, well, some of these kids are in families that don't look like they're going to work. Let's maybe call the family together and see what decisions could be made. I'm not talking about a court or taking kids away from parents. I'm asking the community to work with parents to find a good solution. Then if not, you know, you sort of move it up, but we're not doing any of that at the front end. We're just spending an awful lot of money in prisons and in mental health wards. That's where our money's going. Not very well spent for a nation that needs to be producing more high-skilled workers than us. All right, one or two more questions and then I've got to go. Anyone else? Okay, yes, sir. And please identify yourself. Gerald Chandler. What do you think is the reason for the failure of the Department of Education and University Schools of Education to answer some of the questions you've just been asking? They've been in business 50 to 100 years. Here we are asking what works. Why hasn't the Department of Education with all the millions of dollars we spent on it that had proper studies and validated studies that show that? Why haven't the Departments of Education at the various universities do that? Why are we what I'm going to call these amateurs here coming up with their own answers? Very good question. It's really two questions. First, the Department of Education and then the universities. I've observed over my time in Congress and even before I was here that there have been many Secretaries of Education and Presidents, really starting with President Clinton perhaps, maybe it started even before then because there were studies that were done on trying to get the Department of Education to identify what works. Now remember, up until President Clinton was the President, states ran their own school systems. The federal government had very little to say about school systems. Some states did a good job, some states did a bad job. All the federal government did was give out money regardless. When President Clinton came in, the thinking of the country was to fail your start funding success and start trying to get results. So accountability started coming in and now there's a pretty broad accountability system working better in some states than others. So if schools fail, they're closed, they've got to be reconstituted. That was the no-child left behind and fast forward to Barack Obama. This President and this Department of Education were taking that even a further step by saying not only do you have to have transparency in your schools all across the country and we're going to know who's succeeding and who's failing. We're going to take money away from schools that aren't succeeding. They're also funding for the first time and the first time since the 1960s since the federal education money came into being grant programs that do exactly what you have suggested. Fund what works. That's what the I-3 funding is. So the Department of Education, I have to say, is doing the best it can. Now, let me give you the bad news. I had an amendment last year to take 10 percent, I think, or could it be 10 or 15 percent of Title I money instead of giving it out in grants, give it out in competition to do exactly that, to say, okay, let's not just give the money out equally. Let's get a pot of it. Not new money, but that money and give it out to the programs that work. I couldn't get that past Congress because part of the problem is political that members of Congress want that money going to their districts regardless of whether it works or not. So it's a mindset that Congress has to change. Now, the Department of Education, I mean the Schools of Education, there was a study that just recently came out and Paul, I'd like you to comment on this and then I'm going to sit down is the schools and the Department of Education are finally waking up to realize that the kinds of teachers that we're producing from our universities are not actually the kinds of people we need in front of our kids in the classroom. There's a real disconnect. Schools of Education, some of them are very weak. Now, some of them are very strong, but what blew that up was Teach for America. Teach for America is a very disruptive technology. Teach for America and Wendy Kopp 20 years ago said, you know what, I'm not going to wait for the federal government to fix the schools of education. I personally am going to create a teaching force in this world that will show really how mediocre our other teachers are. Now it's caused a big ruckus and I'm sure that I'll get a lot of bad feedback when people see this video. But what happened is Wendy Kopp, another graduate of Princeton, so I don't know, can we give Princeton a round of applause? Another graduate of Princeton created this disruptive technology. She got the Teach for America, it's harder to get into Teach for America than Harvard Law School right now. It is harder to become a Teach for America teacher than a Harvard Law School. It's because Teach for America takes only the top of the top of the top of graduates. And they put them in schools, these kids are wicked smart. Wicked smart. And they get into a classroom and they, or any Teach for America teachers here? There you go, stand up. Let's give you a round of applause. They're the top graduates in their fields. These kids could go to Wall Street and make literally a half a million dollars, but they don't. They're going to inner city New Orleans to stand in front of a science class and try to figure out what is wrong with this classroom and why aren't these kids learning and they're so smart, they're figuring it out. Then after they Teach for a while then they become principals of the school and after they become principals of the school they become superintendents. This is done by Wendy, literally. So if one person could do all that what could the rest of us do if we got organized? So now the schools of education because Wendy's leading this as well have gotten some of the big presidents together of these schools and saying, okay guys and gals, we are really not doing a good job of creating the kind of teachers we want so let's do a better job. And Paul, why don't you add the final statement to that and just sit down but tell them what's going on with that because I think that's a big breakthrough. It is. Senator, yesterday the National Council on Teacher Quality issued a report which evaluated almost all of the colleges of education preparation programs in the country and basically concluded that the preparation of teachers doesn't match with the requirements that teachers need to have in the classroom. Now the response of the colleges of education was as they said, not to be defensive but you know, you really didn't study us. Well, there was a little problem in the study that National Council on Teacher Quality had. The colleges of education boycotted the study and refused to let the council on teacher quality come in and evaluate it. So they evaluated it based on the data that was produced publicly by the colleges of education. Well, I think whether it's right or wrong whether National Council on Teacher Quality is right and the colleges are wrong or whether it's reversed the point is we've got to be open to examining what the results are that are being generated by our colleges of education just like they have to be they should be hopefully open to this kind of program which works. Are they engaged in this kind of program? No. Should they be engaged? Yes. Do we welcome them? Yes. And I think that's part of this disconnect. We've got to be open to these ideas. States have to be open to this kind of program and listen to the data and the data will answer the question for us but that's a short story on that. Great. Well, let me just end with our adolescents or the future of our nation and it is just so important that we stay focused on a way forward for them and recognize that most parents out there are trying to do their very best. Some parents can't and are just ill-equipped and can't and if the communities could be more flexible, more free and we really be transparent, honest, accountable and get the money to the right place we could do it. Thank you very much. Thank you for setting the stage so well for the discussion. Hugh Price, you've already been called on you are the leader of our first panel so if you and your panel members will please come up we appreciate it. Okay, there we go. Good morning. Thank you for coming out and especially I want to thank Senator Landro who's been an amazing supporter of the Challenge Program. It is a pleasure to be back in this building because this is one of the two birthplaces of the Challenge Program. I've been interested in the whole issue of what we can learn from the military's approach to education and training and how that might help young people who are struggling in school have been interested in that issue since the mid-1970s. In the late 1980s, I was Vice President of the Rockefeller Foundation and we were trolling for, I was trolling for a way in which we might be able to introduce that idea and interest the military in undertaking that challenge and I recall a meeting here at CSIS, an initial meeting with Bill Taylor where we began to discuss the idea of trying to persuade the military to start a quasi-military youth corps for kids who dropped out of school and Bill Taylor got very enthusiastic about it as did CSIS and we at Rockefeller Foundation funded the study group that led to the recommendations. That same spring of 1989 got an introduction to General Herb Temple, the head of the National Guard and raised the question would the military consider creating a quasi-military youth corps for kids who have dropped out of school? I prepared a whole half hour presentation on the idea and 10 minutes into it, General Taylor said, I get it, we'll do it and I almost continued the presentation and I remembered when you've made the sale shut up and moved to implementation and that too was the birthplace, obviously, of the challenge program because in that room with him was a fellow by the name of Dan Donahue and the task of bringing it to fruition. So those conversations which started here and started at the Guard in 1989 led to the creation of the challenge program and it's very exciting to see how it has evolved and flourished. We want to step back from the specific initiative in this first session and ask the question what leads adolescents to disengage and drop out of school? What's the nature and impact of the problem? We have an extraordinary panel with us this morning, several real experts on this subject and I'll introduce them in the order in which they'll offer their remarks. They'll each speak for about 10 minutes. We'll have a little bit of time to see whether there's any interaction between them that we want and then we'll open the floor for questions. Dr. Bob Balfance is co-director of the Everyone Graduate Center and a research scientist at the Center for the Social Organization Schools at Johns Hopkins. He's the co-director of the Talent Development Secondary which currently is working with more than 100 high-poverty secondary schools to develop, implement, and evaluate comprehensive whole school reform. He has published widely on secondary school reform, high school dropouts, early warning systems and instructional interventions in high-poverty schools. And any one of these subjects, if you look up the topic, oftentimes the very first entry under the topic in Google Scholar or on Google is Bob Balfance so we are blessed to have him with us. Our second speaker will be Dr. Jonathan Zaff who is vice president of research and policy development for the America's Promise Alliance which as we know is deeply engaged in driving this issue nationally. Jonathan Zaff is also a research associate professor in child development and a senior fellow at the Jonathan M. Tisch College of Citizenship and Public Service at Tufts University. His research focuses primarily on studying how youth navigate through and are influenced by their communities resulting in academic achievement and civic engagement. Our third speaker is Ryan Rainier who is program director in the Education Division at the National Governors Association Center for Best Practices. Ryan leads the division's work on college and career readiness standards, assessments, accountability and transition into post-secondary education and training. He also leads the NGA Center's work on dropout prevention and recovery. He previously held positions as senior policy analyst and policy analyst at the NGA Center. So without further ado let me ask Dr. Bob Balfance to kick off the discussion. Thank you and good morning. The first question we have to ask ourselves about disengaged youth and dropouts is why should we care? After all probably all of us have some member of our family that didn't graduate from high school and made a life for themselves. My grandfather had an eighth grade education and it was the only member of our family who's ever owned a vacation house. But the truth is the world has changed and there actually is no work in the 21st century for a high school dropout and there is no work to support and sustain a family if you don't have a high school degree and some sort of secondary schooling or training. And so for essentially where we are now still having one in four of our youth not be prepared or able to support and sustain a family it's easy to see how the nation can be lost. And on top of that it's not like there's a few dropouts here a few dropouts there they're concentrated in a subset of communities. And so these communities really are at risk of being cut off from the 21st century. If the majority of young adults in these communities are not prepared to sustain a family so that's why we have to care. Now the good news is we're actually making progress against this as Senator Landrieu was saying this seems untractable but the evidence is we can change it because in fact over the past five years actually the past four years that we have data for the graduation rate has increased five percentage points. It's the first time in the past 40 years the graduation rate is actually moving up. We have a lot of work to do and to put this in understandable numbers next fall there will be about 4 million kids that will start 9th grade in America. If we don't do better 800,000 to a million of them will not graduate. Over four years we've had a lot of work to do and we've had a lot of work to do and we've had a lot of work to do and we've had a lot of work to do over four years that's another 4 million kids without a future so it's a big number still even though we're making progress. Now the other thing we have on our side is we've gained a lot of understanding about why kids drop out and broadly they fall into one of four categories. Some kids it's life events something intervenes you get pregnant you get arrested you have to work to support a family we have to have interventions for that another group of kids they fade out they don't see the reason sorry, it's having a moment can we actually just give this sitting down a little hiccup they don't see the point of graduating they think their life is going to be the same another group of kids are pushed out they feel they get suspended they feel not wanted the system works against them a fourth group of kids just don't succeed in school they're failing to succeed they need extra help they're not getting it so for each of these groups we need individual solutions and to talk about some of those I'm going to turn now to John Zapp Good morning thanks for having us all here this really important topic what I'll talk about is to really build off what Bob has started to talk about the reasons why young people are dropping out I'm going to talk about three different areas just in the next ten minutes one is just to describe some of the research that we're undertaking through America's promise to understand really the lived experience of young people throughout the country and specifically around those who have disengaged I'll talk about some early results we have some of that work and then I also want to talk about I think a narrative that Bob was starting to run Hope in this country is really to say there are really great practices in this country and that we can really build off of those practices to really help resolve this issue but first I want to step back and just give an overview of the framework we use to look at this work there are sort of principles that underlie everything we do but first we believe that all young people have strengths so as Senator Landro mentioned she mentioned intelligence she mentioned thoughtfulness she mentioned agency every young person in this country no matter where they are in life have strength and we come at that, that's our bias and if that's a bad bias I don't know but we like to think of it as a good thing that we believe all young people have strength therefore all young people have potential to succeed that we use to really frame our work is the idea of what we call a youth system a youth system is the idea that all young people need a set of key developmental supports so in America's promise we call those things the five promises a lot of people call them a whole bunch of other things but we know what these things are adults in a young person's life who care and support them great education great healthcare things to do after school and over the summer and that's what the community needs to give back we also know is that these things just don't happen in one place in that place, in this place they happen in all areas of a young person's life so they happen in schools they're a parent in families they're a parent throughout a community so what we know is that if you think about that as a system then is we know that we need to have these key developmental supports that are integrated across these contexts and that are actually aligned to the individual needs of each young person so all too often we know that young people get lost sort of lost in the flow so you might have a YMCA over there or a great school over there but where's the young person in that so we have to put the young person at the center of that planning so that's the framework we use to do our work so specifically on the issues of dropouts and those who have disengaged we're undertaking one major project that we're calling our raise up campaign now the raise up campaign is an applied research project that we're doing in partnership with communities across the country and it's really to raise up the voice of those young people who have disengaged from school and from really other pro-social institutions and we're really the genesis of this project came about because we heard from communities again and again so America's Promise through our networks probably work with I'd say hundreds if not thousands of communities and a common theme we heard was they understood that they were young people they just didn't know how and they just didn't do it and this became exponentially worse when you looked at young people who have dropped out so communities were constantly, consistently creating solutions for young people without actually talking to them so we said let's actually do something unique unfortunately and actually talk to young people themselves so we're in the process we actually started this one of the field it was about two weeks ago there were groups of 8 to 10 young people two groups per community in 20 communities around the country for a total of 40 groups so about 320 young people will be talking to in-depth these are, I shouldn't mention these we're focusing on urban centers in this case we recognize clearly the issues that occur in rural settings and suburban settings indeed in America but in this case it's an urban focus and I should mention these aren't your typical focus groups where you stand behind a mirror and eat M&Ms and watch as these young people go on these are really as you can imagine these are young people who have disengaged and that they're typically a lack of trust for those around them so what we've done we're very fortunate we have some amazing facilitators who work with these young people to really build trust in a very short period of time and so here are young people from different communities from different boundaries within a community that have disengaged boundaries or other boundaries and that they open up in fact we hear stories now of these young people in the first 20 minutes basically in tears talking about the experiences they've had in life and I mention that just because that what we're hearing here are the real authentic lived experiences of these young people where in the near future we'll be complimenting that piece with a poll of around more than 1,000 dropouts from across the country for that depth we're then complimenting that work we've recently done a synthesis of what we actually know about why young people have dropped out and again very much compliments what Bob had mentioned and complimented also what people like Russell Humberger have found over the years but we want to look at it from also this lens of strength so what is that we can do what are those downstream things that we can leverage we can pull that we know will result in good outcomes long term for young people to stay in school and not to drop out with that big build up what are we finding so we're finding is I think very consistent with what Senator Landro talked about and I think it's because sometimes it's intuitive but sometimes intuition isn't so explicit and so we're really compelled by these stories we're starting to hear and I want to emphasize that this is early in the game we've gone through about 4 to 5 different groups so far with young people we've got about 35 to go so we know that more more compelling stories will emerge and these are just a sampling of what we're learning but I wanted to share it today so one is around relationships so we find from these young people they talk about relationships and yes in schools they definitely talk about the lack of positive relationships they're having oftentimes in schools that they didn't have that teacher they didn't have that counselor they didn't have that other staff person the faculty at the school who really took an interest in their lives they didn't come to school one day nobody really cared unfortunately when they went home they also were finding a lack of support now I want to emphasize this doesn't always mean a lack of love that really the story we tend to see through the work we do in this work in other work we've done is that the story tends to be about love that parents in fact do love their children no matter what community they come from but oftentimes it's the ability of that parent one is their own experience have they experienced educational success are they currently employed what is their life experience economically to really serve as a role model for their child and it's also then their ability to help their child navigate and negotiate through their world so if the child doesn't have this person this scaffolding of their parent to really show them the way where does that leave them there's also relationships within their peers and we hear continually from these young people that they get involved with peer networks that don't have the norm of educational success gangs definitely are in the mix there I mean that doesn't come as a surprise but it isn't necessarily about gangs it's just again within a community the social norm isn't about educational success and that isn't to sort of blame the victim in that sense it's just we're just trying to sort of document what's going on in these communities another very important piece here though is around the issue of trauma and I know Senator Landro alluded to this and Bob alluded to this as well you know these life events that happen some of them that are extreme and we hear stories about physical abuse emotional abuse we hear stories about a single parent who has mental mental health issues trying to do the best she can for her child recognizing that their mother can't do it and in fact what happens is that they end up having to spend their time at home supporting their mother in order to survive so as Senator Landro said that's survival isn't thriving so we need to thrive and not survive but in this as well is the idea of agency so these young people that we talk to don't say it was just everything that happened to me I had no skin in the game somebody just pushed me out although clearly happens we hear stories of this this has been documented quantitatively and qualitatively that we do see across the country young people who do get pushed out we've all heard these stories about test time comes up this kid's misbehaving let's call that a much more extreme case of violence and we'll push them out of the school that clearly happens but very often we're hearing from these young people that they are taking personal responsibility for their actions at the same time they recognize that yes at the end of the day they're the ones who didn't walk into the school building but that doesn't mean that they're blaming themselves necessarily in a negative way so it's not like they have necessarily this low amount of self-esteem in fact they're very explicit that they don't want to be considered failures they really want to be seen as these really bastions of potential who if we create the right supports around them they will make that choice to come back and I think this idea of agency is that you have these young people who say yes I made that decision to leave I'm now making a decision to come back and I have that ability too and that's something to leverage it's not something to ignore so the picture that gets painted is really about a broader ecology you know I think very often we focus solely on the school building which clearly is essential but it's clearly not the whole story and we know this intuitively and we hear it from the voices of young people themselves and the data to show this that what happens in the home in the community with peers with families with schools all matter together and so then we look to see well what's happening in the country that actually aligns with that idea that aligns with this idea of a youth system as I mentioned the seed school is a great example actually and the work they're doing is fantastic but we also see places like self enhancement out in Portland Oregon that takes this approach of keeping kids in this isn't about re-engagement but keeping kids in it's a multi-service organization that understands that young people need strong care and relationships this idea of connectedness that we see again and again in the literature as being so important and they partner with schools to embed coordinators there who have a portfolio of youth that they work with and this is that idea of a mentor on steroids and on a whole lot of steroids where these coordinators are in class with the youth they're in the hallways they're at sporting events they're at art events they're helping with the family they're really the every person for these young people and that's aligned then with out-of-school time opportunities that are about enrichment about remediation if needed about empowerment and they stay with them from second grade all the way through age 25 recognizing the long-term investment so again as you can see it recognizes that these young people the strength of these young people but it understands they can't do it alone and that their families often times can't do it alone and that it's going to take a concerted effort to get to where we want to be as a country but it also is the case that young people do disengage as Bob mentioned as recent reports show you have 6.7 million disconnected youth in this country or opportunity youth as they've been defined and what do you do to get them back for me seem to follow into a couple of different buckets so one is this idea this broad-based approach this comprehensive approach that we see in places like the United Teen Equality Center in Lowell, Massachusetts where they basically have street workers who go out and they work and build relationships with young people who are in gangs who are in the JJ system who have disconnected in every way imaginable from pro-social institutions and they bring them back with love, with support and it's unconditional love but it's unconditional love with responsibility with consequences. These young people get put to work so they have a job they get put into a GED or alternative ed program and they're expected to be there and what we see from programs like that is that young people are thriving they're feeling this sense of hope this sense of connectedness and this sense of opportunity this other bucket we see is about re-engagement in a more traditional setting but these traditional settings are starting to realize they have to be a little more alternative and so I look at again going to Massachusetts, the Boston re-engagement work that's being run by the private industry council there and the similar things going on in Houston where they'll actually, they doorknock and they go back door-to-door to find out where these young people are and they bring them back in but they recognize that they just can't bring them back into what they already dropped out of so they're trying to find the right fit for where these young people need to be so Senator Landro mentioned there are going to be percentages of young people who are not appropriately served by the traditional school system and there are schools that are starting to recognize this there are day and evenings Saturday programs whether they're online programs and what we're seeing with American Academy or as an example of that of doing online virtual learning as a way to engage with the Magic Johnson Bridge Scape Academies which is a partnership between Magic Johnson Enterprises and Edison Learning where they bring young people in and do hybrid learning individualized pacing, individualized attention, but the important piece here, it's not just about the education is they recognize that we need strong positive connections with adults in their lives they want to build hope in these young people's lives and they want to empower these young people to take responsibility for their own education so again just to sort of wrap this together then what we see here from the young people themselves from their own voice which corresponds perfectly with what we find on the research side is that young people need strong connections with adults in their lives, positive connections they need to be empowered to have a hopeful, motivated orientation toward the future and they need to be reconnected with these pro-social institutions that really recognize the holistic needs of these young people and when that happens, when that magic seems to happen and I know you'll hear about this on the next panel as well we know that we can turn the tide on this issue for young people dropping out thank you. I'm going to build a little bit on what John started and talk about what states have started to think about from a policy landscape around dropout prevention and recovery given that we know many of the reasons that students are dropping out yet still have thousands of youth that leave school each year. Over the last five to seven years there's been a real concerted effort among state policy leaders to think about these dropout issues largely on the prevention side and I'll talk a little bit about where we're seeing some movement on the recovery side in a second. I think the first real push that we've seen and this continues to be something that states and governors and chiefs are very interested in is making sure that graduation itself is a goal and graduation with the skills that you need to move on to something else. So a number of governors within their state of states and within their own work with their chiefs have set goals like in New Hampshire of zero dropouts. I know Louisiana worked hard in trying to reach some of its goals around graduation rates and I think the point at which policy makers are starting to realize that it's not an intractable problem so while it may seem large when you have 10 or 11,000 students a year that are dropping out when you break that down and look at it by school it's only two, two and a half kids per school. So I think being able to set some goals and have some targets around what you need to do to push forward has really been where a lot of state leaders have started. The second piece is around accountability. What is counted matters and so when states had the opportunity recently to push forward with their ESEA waiver flexibility applications a number of states have really doubled down on graduation as an important component in their accountability systems. We've got I think around 12 now that have put in place some sort of extended year graduation rate as part of their calculation for accountability so that students that may be falling off track do have an extra year to graduate and ultimately schools are being rewarded for sticking with those students. The third piece is really building on Bob's work from Philadelphia and work in Chicago. A lot of investment around early warning data systems and trying to identify youth that are falling off track early. I think the challenge has been that states have put a lot of investments into these systems. The connection between identifying a student that may be falling off track and actually tailoring that intervention has been slow to come about and I think that's really where the next wave of work around drop-up intervention recovery is really pushing forward. You're seeing a lot more investment in wraparound services as John spoke about and trying to make sure that the student beyond the school has the services that they need to come to school ready to learn. You're seeing pushing forward on this notion of collective impact so some of you may have heard or read about this drive partnership in Cincinnati where business education leaders and foundation leaders have come together around some common goals for education and then are beginning to tailor their unique services to help serve those students and so states have begun to think about how you push that from a state level whether there's investment regionally to make sure that each region has some sort of collective impact. Oregon is looking through some of its unique funding structures so that it's funding community based partners that serve students that may be falling off track. You're also getting a lot of interest and support I think and this is more community based than state based. Bob talks a lot about having an extra shift of adults so that you can make those mentor mentee kind of relationships. We need to think through whether there are opportunities at the federal level through programs like City Year or others to get more students connected with their peers and with other adults in the classroom. Although much of the work like I mentioned has been focused on dropout prevention but we're seeing that reengagement is beginning to get back into the conversation. As John mentioned traditional schools often don't serve students that are really struggling well. We see that more than 50% of students say they left school because they're disengaged and that number is about 40-50% of those students that leave school try to come back but ultimately they come back to the same situation as they were in the first time around so we can't expect much different. That's why it's really important that there are options and flexibility around serving these youth. The strategy around tailoring and segmenting populations of students is beginning to gain hold amongst state leaders. There's been work that's done in New York City and Boston and Chicago that's beginning to reach up to the state level at segmenting different populations of students that have fallen off track or that are out of school so those that may be 18 but a few credit shy of graduating need a different solution, different intervention than those that are 14 and very far off track. Another way that states are thinking through this flexibility piece is around pushing forward on competency-based and mastery-based education opportunities so looking for pathways that students can recover skills in a modular way and this has really become I think a really growing force amongst state policymakers as they think through the move to Common Core State Standards if we are to expect what, you know, if the scores around NAPE are any indication of what scores around the Common Core aligned assessments may be we're going to see somewhere on the order of a 30-point score drop in most states in terms of proficiency and so there's going to be a real need to offer intervention and recovery strategies for those students so that they aren't discouraged and decide to leave school if they don't see themselves on a path to post-secondary training or education. And then finally, we are seeing some investment now that states' economies are beginning to bounce back some investment in recovery strategies statewide Texas for a long time had a grant program whereby they gave incentives to students and to partnering organizations that were able to recover students and get them back into school and for each successive outcome that they were able to achieve so if they passed a certain number of courses or if they ultimately graduated they received bonus dollars for that the most recent study of that has showed some really positive benefits within the state Illinois has been investing in a similar program recently and you've got a number of states that are using a number of localities that are using wea dollars and others to build these sort of re-engagement centers to figure out ways to connect students not only with school but also opportunities beyond so training and workforce training so I'll stop there just wanting to give a brief lay of the land of where states have been doing their work and look forward to engaging in a conversation let me start by asking whether any of the panelists has a question or a point in response to remarks by others on the panel I got a question for both Bob and John something that we struggle with and I know that we've had conversations about before but it seems at times that there is a lot of great work happening on the ground in both school districts but also regionally but at times the connect between what's happening on the ground and what's happening at the state level don't always match are there spots areas where you think either programmatically or policy wise that there are successes happening at the ground that really should affect what's happening at a state policy level and talk through kind of an example of a state or two that maybe is working well with its districts or its regionals around prevention or recovery I mean it's interesting that you don't yet see a lot of it's true there's many things people solve things on the ground and there's not a lot of uptake of that to higher levels and spread out I think we're seeing a little bit more of the states getting an idea like early warning systems and trying to push it out I mean they get an idea from somewhere that maybe not necessarily their own state and then are building some systems to push it out I mean partly what this is is that most state departments weren't designed to be sort of proactive prevention based intervention agencies they were basically designed initially to be sort of just monitoring agencies and sort of licensing agencies and it's a whole different skill set to be sort of like we're going to analyze data figure out problems, devise solutions, test them so a significant mind shift has got to go on starting to emerge in some places but yet I think your point is we'll take and we still don't have a good way to say and I think the challenge program is an example of this of wow this is a dynamite program it's getting really strong results high evidence base and there's no way to really uptake that into the state or federal policy structure and say we need to uptake it and push it out Yeah and I would just point to you know it's not good news stories about this happening unfortunately but I think it's also the barriers to this so we do see we're trying to document exemplary programs going on on the local level and trying to uplift them as examples for the country and they're hopefully for states on the uptake and what we find time and again is I think there's a marketing issue to be honest and I think what we hear from communities oftentimes is we're looking for something we just don't know what it is but we know we need something and then when the next shiny object comes by we grab onto it because that seems to be what everybody else is doing and in fact we hear that in meetings well a lot of other people are doing it I guess we should do it too it's not a lot of other people are doing it and getting really great results therefore we should do it too and you know so I think what we're finding is that a lot of people it seems like those who are good at marketing are the ones getting their stuff out there and that it would be great if we could get those who are getting the real great results I'd like to offer a comment and then pose a question my comment is that I'm currently working on a book for Brookings about where I'm a non-resident senior fellow which means I'm an old guy who lives out of town but I'm working on a book on lessons we might be able to extract from challenge that could be helpful in a broader K-12 context and when you think about challenge the fact of the matter is the National Guard is a national defense resource but it's also a state entity so I actually think that there are things governors could do to will some of the lessons into existence at a state level if they were so disposed and in the Guard and particularly the Guard units that have challenge programs there's an amazing resource available to help with some of these interventions now what we wrestle with is the bottoms up let a thousand flowers bloom in a powerful system that's kind of normalized and that's a classic U.S. tension but I'm going to try to develop the argument that there's a lot there and that there's a lot of governors could do if they were so inclined the question I wanted to ask is this with the if it is likely that there will be a sharp downdraft in test scores thanks to the common core will that create so much pressure and hysteria at the school level that they will become utterly obsessed with getting up the scores of kids who are in the schools and they'll pay less attention to the kids who aren't functioning in school to the point of accelerating the alleged phenomenon of pushing those kids out of the building I mean how is that going to play out for the population we're talking about so I've been in a couple conversations about this states are actually really worried about that issue and I think have been smart to say that this is not about just focusing on the 12th grade year that they're really looking for opportunities to identify students at an earlier level using components of an early warning data system to get a better handle more formative sorts of assessments to get a better handle on where students are early on so that they can offer not just 11th grade even talking 6th grade making sure that the students are connected having a clear plan a path, a connection to their future that they want identified but also some hard data around where they're struggling and ways to find like I was mentioning ways to offer more modularized skill gaining opportunities rather than just putting students that may be a credit or too shy behind a computer and hoping that they gain a credit right before they graduate without any real conversation about what the level of quality and skills that they're gaining. But do the accountability measures that are being introduced at the local level and foisted on local districts by states you know teacher tenure teacher compensation whether we're going to open a school or close a school based on test score how does that all play out in an environment where the test scores go down just above their secured well there are conversations happening at the federal level right now so Secretary Duncan put out a letter yesterday that would allow states to delay implementation of consequences for teacher evaluations for a year if they so choose to do that so I think there's a recognition that some of these moving parts need to be sequenced in a way that's smart and doesn't cause too much anxiety amongst those that are in the school otherwise you may end up in situations where there are opportunities to discourage students from remaining in school or from coming back to school because someone is fearful for their own job at the end of the day. I think where there's going to be some tension that can be managed but only if we're really aware of it is especially with the teacher evaluation systems especially when they're based on kids making progress in the class so that's going to put potentially teacher interest in kids interests at a little bit of a logger heads if not managed well because in particular kids that are coming to school infrequently that the teacher can work to get the kid to come more often but the kid might do poorly on the test or the teacher can say I can teach the kids who show up and in their heart of hearts they want to do both but there's cross teachers there and so I think we just got to be as long as we're aware of them I think they're manageable I don't think they could go sub training if we don't pay attention and it could be sort of a yellow flag I would say do schools have the space to deal with the social and emotional issues that are implicit in the whole discussion of disengagement do they have the knowledge do they have the systems do they have the resources so that you can do this work in the schools as well as outside of the schools I'll jump in and I'll let John answer partly this is where I really argued that we need to really build systems to create what I call the second shift of adults which is the way to bring additional adults through nonprofits through retired folks through all sorts of ways into the school during the school day to really help with the things like getting the kids there making sure their work's done and resolve behavioral disputes because the real challenge is that we've concentrated our neediest kids in a subset of schools not designed for that challenge so the great American school system which propelled the nation to its greatness in the 20th century great expansion of secondary schooling was based on the fundamental underlying implicit idea that 15% of kids would need extra help 15% would need acceleration and the great body of 70% of kids if you just have a good teacher and give them a good lesson every day they show up they do the work they're fine that's behind ratios for guidance counselors for assistance principles that was all based on that underlying logic we've done now with a concentration of poverty in a subset of neighborhoods and communities is in these schools there's now 60 70 80% of the kids in the building we need a good lesson every day and something else and the schools not designed there's not the adults not the person power a teacher can grab 10 kids and like pour their hearts out to help them while they teach another 120 they can't grab 60 kids and teach 120 so lots of kids fall through the cracks so that's where people have brought in national service all different ways to bring more adults into the integrate into the school day you know you happy to see you this morning I expect to see you tomorrow and if not I'm gonna come get you and you know I will and did you get your homework done really I saw your head down in math class so let's just double check that and I know you and you and Mr. Mr. Reina a social studies teacher aren't getting along and I know you told me you think he's mean but you know what he thinks you're sarcastic and that's not gonna work it takes 30 seconds but that's gotta be done daily who's gonna do that and so that's where we need to build this second shift of adults because fundamentally when kids are falling off track we either have to change their behavior or solve a problem and that can only be done by having a relationship with a student you can't solve a problem if you don't know what it is you can't change behavior if you don't have a real know the student and so that's that's the key of getting this additional person power involved in sort of getting kids through the school day yeah now just to echo in many ways what Bob has just said you know the short answer is no schools are not can't do that and nor should they be expected and I think that's the other issue you know what slice of that piece of that test score is actually that teacher and so you have an issue of you have a human capital problem you have a time problem so how much time in the day can you actually devote to sniffing issues in a child's life during the school day and then there's the reality that school doors actually close at some point even the greatest community schools still close their door you know I'll give an example of a principal who I've had long discussions with principal now former principal of a middle school in a highly economically disadvantaged historically disenfranchised community doing everything they're supposed to by what you know I think if you if Bob laid out his his aspirations for the school could be and if anybody knows this Bob does of what that aspiration should be she's doing it but what she said is they have those young people who stay in school as long as possible till only the janitors left sweeping the floors and they have to just lock them out because the school's closing and so they do go home they do go back to their communities and so this gets into as Ryan mentioned the term collective impact again you know whatever term you want to use but the idea is that this is these are community problems that need community solutions and that you know as Bob mentions we need to be able to bring in those from nonprofits those from social services those from faith-based organizations who know how to do that work you know how we can't go to a math teacher who's teaching 30 to 35 students and say oh and by the way in between Algebra 2 could you make sure that kid is supported so that he or she doesn't have psychological problems or can you deal with the housing issues that young person had last night it's just unreasonable and it's really impossible so we have to come up with better ways and again communities are doing this again from America's Promise we look at collaboration as one way to look at this problem we see pockets of this happening the paramour kid zone down in Miami you know again historically one of the worst neighborhoods in Miami you would think about where you'd want to raise your child have made phenomenal gains of the leadership out of the mayor's office to bring different players together to do something that seems unique which is the person at the Y if they see something going on with the young person they're working with they'll actually walk down the street to the school and talk to the child's teacher why should that be so unique now clearly again there's a human capital issue here as Bob mentions there's just too many young people stuffed into schools without enough support there and how do we change that dynamic let's open it up for any questions or comments from members of the audience I'm Tophie Owen I'm a member of the National Board for National Guard Youth Foundation and I also chair the scholarship committee for the foundation and when I review the applications that are applying for scholarships that are in the challenge program the number one thing I see across almost every application a large majority is the family issues broken homes and we've talked a little bit about that and you know I'm not sure I know the answer to that part but the thing that I really wanted to address was something that we were touching on at the end there and that is the school situation and I'm going to be a little bit picking on Fairfax County because I live in Fairfax County and I've seen a lot of what happens in the schools and that's the idea of teaching to the lowest common denominator where kids in the sixth grade are not required to know anything except how to spell a word they do not know the meaning of a word they don't know how to use it in the sentence for a book report all they got to do is initial form that says I read a book but not required to write anything about what they read and I've seen that where teachers are even pointing kids out of public school because of policies how much do you think this issue of teaching the lowest common denominator is causing kids to get dis-injuried to be demotivated and saying why should I stay in I'll get at the crux of your question here so part of this what we're seeing I don't want to call them innovations because they've been happening for a long time but if you look at a distribution typical bell curve, normal distribution we do the most innovative things for the tails and we don't do things for the middle things like individualized attention so Montessori the idea of a Montessori school where you really empower young people to be facilitated by a teacher and to explore creativity that's not done for the vast population when you look at re-engagement centers as an example are these Magic Johnson Britscape academies as I mentioned it's all about very intensive individualized attention individualized pacing competency-based learning and close personal connections and so the question that I raised with a lot of people is not clearly there are reasons why there are structural reasons why there are human capital financial capital reasons why but it gets to that point of saying can we push this a little more and think of other models for learning the other side of that is your question about engagement is this what's pushing kids away I think this in my mind it's yes in part but only in part I will say I was in school I brought home my share of D's I stared out the window more than my share of times I now have a PhD I've done pretty well for myself I didn't drop out so it wasn't my lack of interest that led me to I didn't drop out because of my lack of interest there were other things in my life that pushed me there were social norms in my family in my community there were teachers and this is what's going to happen that's not the case for all young people and so for other young people who become disinterested and they don't have those other supports of those norms then I think it's going to be more likely that in fact they will think this isn't worth my time just to add a little bit to that I think it is the combination of not having other external supports that say this one may not be exciting but it's going to lead somewhere so stick with it because in many examples if you live in a high poverty environment for example that sort of effort leads to success what you learn is that life is capricious that's your lived experience the other thing this brings up because you mentioned the sixth grade is that it really is an early middle school that you make an independent decision is schooling for me is it something that's joyful and exciting and I learn from and it's good or is it something I just have to endure and I just endure it for as long as I can and I don't endure it anymore and that's why I think it is important especially in the middle grades that we have both the challenging and interesting curriculum for kids and if you look at the middle grades the most engaged kids I always find are in robotics club chess club drama club these are all things that are cognitively complex and challenging and actually usually have a performance element like if you don't think about it you're going to lose the chess tournament if you don't put effort into your robotics car you're going to get crunched in the first round and after the debate you're going to be embarrassed that's what motivates the kids to actually put the time in it's also with their peers it's usually a group activity which is sort of fist or developmental age and that's where you find engagement yet those are also could be very cognitively challenging things it's not just so we're going to play basketball or something just can I just add one more because that's such an important point I think Bob mentions that I want to just echo which is this idea to really one of the forefathers of the idea of positive youth development uses the term sparks actually it's a book called sparks and it's just that thing with the young people we have to find what is that spark that gets them engaged that gets them excited and that we can't assume the same thing will create that spark for all young people so I think it becomes a really powerful motivator as Bob mentions once again Peter Boyce Community Affairs Consultant look I take off my coat to you gentlemen to deal with this complex issue I might look young but I'm actually 104 or something like that not only with two university kids I also have two in elementary school here in DC the gentleman on the far right and the learner gentleman next to Mr. Hugh Price I think you guys you kind of you get it you get it but my question to you and you feel to go this far what happened to family what became of parents Bill Cosby said something to parents long time ago parent anybody can be a father or a mother that's easy but let's parent and gentlemen we're here let's look at the demographics and let's go from here I can walk the streets of Washington Heights in New York to Capitol Heights to Little Haiti in Miami and I see the same thing they're my Latino amigos and amigas my friends from the Caribbean who are not in school why how do we address this gentleman and please leave nothing on the table let's deal with the demographics and understand where the family issue comes in here and let's move forward thank you gentlemen I think it's important one is not to sugarcoat things to your point because we're not going to solve problems if we sugarcoat but I would also not want the story to come out that says that parents especially parents of dropouts don't care and I'm not saying you're suggesting that in some cases that is going to be the case and there's some very wealthy well educated young people whose parents don't care either is what I would also suggest I think oftentimes what we see I'll take DC as the example the promised neighborhood that is being implemented in DC they did an assessment of the parents there to get their attitudes about education at a percent rate not the most scientific poll but illustrative said they didn't see the benefits of an education that doesn't mean they don't love their children but they don't see the benefits of an education for their child those are two separate issues if you're talking about love and caring of a child that's a lot harder to crack I'm not saying that all parents there's a lot of dysfunction in this world I want to sugarcoat that as Ryan and Bob mentioned let's also recognize that oftentimes we can do attitudinal shifts about the relevance of education and what it can do for a young person is this working? Hi, my name is James Crotty I cover education for Forbes and also have a documentary called Crotty's Kids about the dropout epidemic so I am so happy to be here with you guys you're speaking my language and my questions for Jonathan and Robert but anybody can chime in first of all on Robert's earlier point one of the things I've noticed I worked at the Eagle Academy for young men in the South Bronx you may have heard of it it's an all boys public school and I think they've expanded to other parts of New York and I think even in New Jersey and one of the things that David Banks the founder preached there was put a body on the kid it's an all boys school we need adults just showing up being there talking to the kids I ran a debate and speech program so I'm totally with you there Robert and how academic sports those sparks you talked about Jonathan that turned the game around for a lot of these kids like my kids finished second in state they beat Bronx Science they beat Stuyvesant these kids are capable of winning and the film shows that so the thing is how do you get but my problem was when I'm in a room with 30 to 40 young men and I really want to impart the value of competition and how you're going to get hooked on learning by winning or just competing and 25 to 30 of those guys their job in life is to disrupt me from imparting that and so I had a really hard so what I ended up doing was like winning down until I had six guys who wanted to win who wanted to do the work and of course they became great but then the school said yeah but we're not going to give you the money because you're not reaching these 40 other guys or these 60 other guys so it's kind of like but at least we're getting a single maybe we're getting a double home run so it's kind of my problem I couldn't resolve it on my own so Robert you hit on something how can we create structures because I think I could have solved this problem if I had three or four other adult role models in the room to kind of break up the resistance so that finally the learning could get through structures could it be online where people could like from senior core AmeriCorps and all these other organizations we have who could sign up with schools then those adults could come in at least in an after school setting is that possible how can we get that setup because to me that would be such a big help in reaching these people thank you people are starting to experiment with different models of that so one model is sort of that you actually get right 10 people signed up for one kid but you're only signing up for like you know to be on call for an hour a day and it's using sort of texting all sorts of you know mobile technology that works for some kids the other thing that I think is a lot of promise is national service and different things work for different age groups so there's a group called experience core where they bring in retired folks to teach reading to like kids in third grade that works very well because it's sort of like the grandparent relationship that doesn't work quite as well for ninth graders just for lots of reasons but for ninth graders there's organizations like city year that bring in recent college graduates that are sort of near peers they both look like the kids and don't look like the kids both are important right and they're not they're not purely friends but they're not teachers they're not intermediate space and for that group of kids that works really well so it is getting this idea of a bigger set of toolboxes tools in the toolbox and the ability to customize what we use in different situations so your thing you need three or four different groups going to get those 25 kids because they're just not all into your group at the end of the day and then to do that we're working with is you have to build a structure in the school that sort of lets that be pulled in and that's one thing that schools are doing is with this growth of early warning indicator data there's now these things where a team of teacher that shares a common set of kids plus the other adults that work with them get together on a bi-weekly basis and look at the data who's not coming to school suddenly who knows that kid who could be their champion what should we do who wasn't coming to school is now coming to school maybe we can ease off the supports a little bit let's try because we do have limited supports who have we been trying to help and our strategy is not working and we got to go to plan B and it's that much more real time analysis we would try everything and at the end of the year if test scores went up everybody basked in the glory every single program in the school worked to claim credit if test scores went down nothing worked throw it all out try again new the truth is in case one six things worked and four things didn't and in case other case four things worked and six didn't and until we have a much more rapid cycle of evaluating what's working we can't get that cocktail we need to be able to say these are the supports we need for these kids at this scale and magnitude let me just reiterate a point I made earlier one of the issues in this whole domain is that we have a systemic problem in non-systemic response the response is highly vulcanized across the country it varies by community it varies by the strength of the community based organizations it varies by the different funding sources it varies by the cobble together there are holes in the system kids are not being addressed one has to worry about whether you can have the impact on the problem with the population we're talking about with a policy and practice response that requires that relies so heavily on highly localized responses and that's what's intriguing about thinking about this at a different level which is what we will get to with a discussion of challenge but it also goes to the heart of how this country functions and whether 5, 10, 15 years from now we can look back and say we really move the needle on this population of disengaged kids who from a political point of view are probably the least lovable constituency group in the United States and they need help for their needs to be addressed let's take one more question and then we'll segue to the next two more questions these two let's get microphones in the hands of the two speakers here Hi my name is Devin Coleman I am a teacher at a high poverty high school in southeast DC and I am just so interested in this second shift idea I am a special education teacher I work almost exclusively with kids who have ED emotional disturbance and often times as both a case manager and a teacher I am that main point of contact for the child I talk to their related service providers their parole officer might be the best person to get in touch with them if their cricket phone is off these are the things that we have to deal with on a daily basis as well as meet all these standards of accountability that the federal government requires of us as teachers so as far as the second shift how far down the pipeline from the ivory tower is this I am really interested in how we can assure both accountability of the training of people who are being brought into working these schools often times you see people come in without the required sensitivity training or social emotional learning skills working with our youth and then secondly how can we incentivize people from the community because they actually have a lot of legitimacy with our kids to be in these roles of mentorship well I think that really gets to what you is getting at is that we need to start building systematic responses at least at the district level I mean it ultimately needs to go higher but districts can play a great role in screening folks and helping figure out what schools need what mixes of folks it has been you know a couple of big districts of I would say modest scales done this New York City just launched had a big chronic absenteeism campaign based on success mentors and they use a mix of folks both externals which were often community based organizations that were vetted but they also found ways to reorganize internal staff to give them additional time to work with groups of kids they create a peer based models to get like 12th graders working with 9th graders so that they have a just put in like New York City chronic absenteeism they have a big website that has some I think some good tips even some like how to sheets and how to organize people and there's various other folks that are so I think we're in the experimental phase but I think it's actually hit ground level it's not just an idea I think there's places you can actually go and see it being done but we have to bring it up to the systematic level that a whole district could have a plan on how to do that there are experiences that states pre-recession that invested a lot of money Georgia put in 45-50 million dollars in graduation coaches to have adults there on a daily basis to make sure that students that were clearly had fallen off track were being brought back onto track and now that that the recession is over I think you may have more movement in this area I think I would say is this this notion of collective impact the notion of a community based solution really is about how do you identify what are the what are the skill set of your community and how can they be assist the schools and so it may be that for instance you have a large intel plant in your area and Intel has 100,000 employees that do the tutor math on a weekly basis and so finding potentially your skills or your really the base of your community and trying to figure out how it can be supportive of that and I think that's a good way to move forward in terms of schools partnering and districts partnering with businesses and with foundations in the area and I'll just add on to that and you have groups like mentor with national mentoring partnership so David Shapiro their phenomenal leader I'll put words in his mouth but he you know they're think what they struggle with is that often someone hears the term mentor they think about it just has to be the big brother big sister model and the reality is that's just you can't do that at the scale that we need and so the question is how do you create transformative relationships between an adult and a child and that's what you should be looking for and that's still way up here and what does that look like on the ground but if you look at again there are these places around the country doing this as Bob and Ryan mentioned I'll just throw in again a self enhancement out in Portland just as a great example of this just because I was just so floored when I went and did a site visit with them that you know the idea is that you have to really build the trust of the schools so you put in these relationship coaches for no better term and it's you know and you need teachers who actually get it who actually understand the benefit of this and they don't think that these people are stepping on their toes and that these individuals are being embedded within the schools what's compelling about their model is that they said they couldn't they kept on telling these stories to us about oh yeah I grew up here went to college came back because I care so much about my community and we heard that again and again we said well does anybody here is anybody here not from the community and they had to really think and they said oh there's that one person but one of the things that they saw as magic to this was the fact they were able to get young people I'm sorry those who now graduate from college got advanced degrees have done this work and are passionate about the work to come back and to understand the needs of their young people so I think that becomes really powerful it's not the only answer clearly but it's one of those answers So I just want to add one thing I think this is a good group for this I think connect this section to the next section and also gets to the challenge program is where are we going to get the money for honest about it right and one place we need to look really as citizens because there's a dysfunction in the educational system is at ninth grade retention you can make arguments that retention is a good policy at certain grades but the evidence is overwhelming the kids that are retained in the ninth grade essentially have a one in four chance of graduating so at best that works 25% of the time so what we're saying is like it didn't work the first time try to get under the same circumstances it's like magic going to your boss it didn't work what's your plan right that wouldn't fly but that's what we're doing and we finally got some good figures on how many kids are retained and if you put the average thing of $10,000 per kid per year we're spending $2.4 billion a year on ninth grade retention that's not working in three out of four cases that's real money if we had a challenge program as an example if you had a killer summer program that cost $1,000 a kid and worked 75% of the time people will laugh at you right now and say there's no way we could ever pay for that but we're happy to spend $10,000 for something that doesn't work because schools are funded on per pupil how many kids are in the building that's how your federal money flows your state money flows your local money it's not based on is it working or not and so for schools it's just the monies they are for the retention the money is not there for effective programs but the taxpayer the community is spending $2.4 billion a year for something that's not working and that's to me is where the money is we just got to figure out that dysfunction Hi Larry Hardy American School Board Journal you talked about the the cost and shifting money where it's needed and you also mentioned the impact of high-stakes tests and what that could do I some people worry that the common core is going to bring even more tests and more expenses to school district and also that schools will feel more embattled and teachers will feel more embattled if their test scores are linked to evaluations are linked to their students test scores how does all this affect what you're saying it seems like all the things you're talking about are collaboration, getting the spark having another group of adults how does the high-take testing in common core what it's become how does that affect this whole progress of this well I mean for one thing we've actually had high-stakes testing for quite a while so it's not a new thing and the truth is grad rates have gone up in states that have raised standards so on face value you can't argue that higher standards has led to lower grad rates I think partly if it is a good rich common core curriculum that's actually about thinking that's going to actually help with engagement if people can just rally around it and challenge so I think the biggest risk is not that the common core itself is going to it's just that it takes a lot of energy to do the common core so that to me is that there's only so much energy in the room and that's going to take a lot of energy now long-term that's going to pay off but I think there's going to be some short-term consequences we've got to be aware of and try to try to mediate ditto I think you know it's really I think the hope in states coming together to set high expectations is that there's some opportunities for collective work that allow the reinvestment the rethinking of use of dollars allowing states working across lines to build assessment items that are new and unique and challenging and interesting to students in ways that ultimately could save them money in the long run I think it's a positive and the real issue is you know the conversation the communication is there's going to be more challenging standards the test scores are likely to drop what we really need to push communities to think about and policy makers to really think about is okay and what are we doing for those students that the test scores do drop for but also that may be discouraged and may think that the higher standards are not for them so it's really about this conversation excuse me and trying to identify those students early connect them with additional adults additional supports and help figure out what the specific skills that they need to gain on that path are so that we can tailor interventions that make most sense and just to sort of build off of that point as well which is we can think of this solely as an intervention way to think about things that the use of common core and high stakes testing is to just find out who's not doing well the other side of the coin should be that everything we've talked about here adults and young persons life, high quality education, community supports etc we need the research that shows that that all those things together is what leads to higher scores, higher graduation rates higher college completion rates that it's a much more complicated message to send which is the problem it's so much easier to say high stakes testing leads to X whereas if you say it's all these things together but if we can get that message across then it's not about you know sort of shame on you for not getting the scores up it's that we know that in order to get these scores up we all have to work together which seems it's a different message to send okay with that let me thank our panelists and the audience for the question