 I want to talk to you about America's fifth child, because one in five children is poor and if they're black and Latino, and I'll give you, they're even poorer. And half of those children almost are living in extreme poverty. That's unworthy of us, and it's going to be our undoing. The greatest threat to America's national security, military security, and spiritual security is not coming from any enemy without, it's coming from our failure to invest in each of our children. Just imagine God visiting our very wealthy family, the largest economy in the world. Blessed with five children, four of them have enough to eat and comfortable warm rooms in which to sleep, one doesn't. She's often hungry and cold, and on some nights she has to sleep on the streets or on a shelter, and even taken away from her neglectful family and placed in foster care our group homes with strangers. Imagine this rich family, giving four of its children nourishing meals three times a day, snacks to fuel boundless energy, but sending the fifth child from the table into school hungry. With only one or two meals and never the dessert that other children enjoy. Imagine this very wealthy and powerful family, making sure that four of its children get all of their shots, regular health checkups before they get sick and immediate access to health care when illness strikes, but ignoring the fifth child who is plagued by chronic respiratory infections and painful toothaches, which sometimes abscess and even kill for lack of a doctor or a dentist. Imagine this family sending four of their children to good stimulating schools, preschools and making sure they have music and swimming lessons after school, but sending the fifth child to unsafe child care with untrained caregivers responsible for too many children or leaving that fifth child occasionally with an accommodating relative or neighbor or older sibling or even alone. Imagine four of the children living in homes with books and families able to read to most of their children every night, but leaving the other fifth child unread to untalked and unsung and unhugged or propped before a television screen or a video game that feeds him violence and sex and racially and gender charged messages, intellectual pablum interrupted only by ceaseless ads for material things beyond the child's grasp. Imagine this family sending some of its children to high quality schools and safe neighborhoods with enough books and computers and laboratories and science equipment and well prepared teachers and sending the fifth child to a crumbling school building with peeling ceilings and leaks and lead in the paint and asbestos and old old books and not enough of them. And teachers untrained in the subjects they teach and with low expectations that all children can learn, especially the fifth child. And imagine most of the family's children being excited about learning and looking forward to finishing high school, going to college and getting a job. And the fifth child falling further and further behind grade level, not being able to read, wanting to drop out of school and being suspended and expelled at younger and younger ages. Because no one has taught him to read and compute or diagnose his attention deficit disorder or treated his health and mental health problems and help him keep up with his peers. The challenge for us as educators in this era is a more complex challenge than it has been in the past. Because in addition to all of the issues that are raised by the neglect of children and the growing poverty gap and income gap in this country, we're also being asked to teach young people in ways that were particularly reserved for a few in the past. The new common core state standards, the next generation science standards. Look for deeper learning for children to be able to apply their learning in more critical problem solving oriented ways. The kind of education that used to be reserved for the kids who are allocated to the gifted program or the advanced placement or honors courses is now being asked for and expected for virtually all kids. And so it's a form of deeper learning that we need to be able to cultivate. And I want to start with a hopeful message that our students are capable of deeper learning when they are well taught. And I'll give you an example of how that can unfold. I am a former English teacher myself, so I like to collect examples from the English teachers classrooms of the kind of teaching and learning that many of us worry about. So I'm going to give you some examples of how children can illustrate for us the path to deeper learning in the teaching of the concept of metaphor. And initially, of course, we know when students encounter something for the first time, their attempts are more shallow. They are not necessarily fully understanding deeply what the concept means. And here's an example of the beginning of the process. He was as tall as a six foot three inch tree. Okay, there's the word as in there, but this is not yet an example of deeper learning. But here with a little bit of work, we see a pace forward. John and Mary had never met. They were like two hummingbirds who also had never met. There's a glimmer that the concept is being understood. But with a little more work, a little more teaching, you can see progress being made. She walked into my office like a centipede with 98 missing legs. But don't give up. There is hope. There is the possibility of deeper learning and we can see it here. He fell for her, like his heart was a mob informant and she was the East River. That's a New York kid, gotta be. So deeper learning is possible and we can see how it unfolds. Even in his last years, Grand Papi had a mind like a steel trap. Only one that had been left out so long and had rested shut. And this is one of my personal favorites. He was as lame as a duck, not the metaphorical lame duck either, but a real duck that was actually lame. So you know who this kid is, the one that doesn't want you to write cliche in the margins, right? She grew on him another favorite, like she was a colony of E. Coli and he was room temperature Canadian boots. I think that's an example of deeper learning. That is, the plan was simple like my brother-in-law, Phil. But unlike Phil, this plan just might work. A final example where you add a touch of irony to the concept of metaphor. Her vocabulary was as bad as like whatever. So our kids are capable of deeper learning. We are capable of helping them learn deeply. But there is a lot of work that needs to be done to help us get to the place where that will be routine and where the conditions for that kind of work will be in every school and every classroom. Much of the conversation around education these days is about achievement scores and rankings and among the things that we hear about a lot are the international assessments, the program for international student assessment or PISA. And the OECD countries participate in this survey of student learning. It is a little different than the test that we often give in the United States because two thirds of the items are open-ended requiring students to write a response that applies their knowledge to a new situation rather than bubbles in one answer out of five on a multiple choice test. And what I've highlighted here are the rankings from 2012, the countries that are in purple print are the ones that we're used to seeing at the top of these rankings, Singapore, Japan, Korea, Finland, Canada. The ones in red were surprises in the last round of PISA, Ireland, Poland, Estonia, and Vietnam. Also Germany had been doing much less well and regained prominence in the list. You can see that the US ranks much lower at 21st in reading, 32nd in math, 23rd in science. And often these results are put forward as evidence that the US system is failing, which I think is not the right inference to be drawing from the data. But it's also interesting to see what is happening in the countries that have over 30 years really improve the quality and equity of their outcomes. And I'm gonna talk about both of those things. One of the inferences, however, that I do draw from PISA is that on average, over the 12 years or 15 years almost that we have been implementing No Child Left Behind, we've seen no improvement in our average scores on this international assessment. So the theory of reform behind No Child Left Behind, which is simply to test and apply sanctions to the failure to meet expected targets on the test, has not proved to be enough to make a major difference overall in student achievement. In every one of the areas tested by PISA, math, science, and reading, we're a little further behind in 2012 than we were in the year 2000. However, if you look at how the US does by poverty rates of schools, and this is the point that I'm gonna just jump from, Marianne's talk and piggyback upon, in schools where less than 10% of the kids live in poverty, we ranked number one in the world in reading. In schools where as many as 25% of kids live in poverty, we ranked number three in the world in reading. Even in schools where as many as 50% of kids live in poverty, we are way above the international average. So our teachers are doing some things very, very well because in the high achieving countries, all of the schools have fewer than 10% of kids in poverty because they don't allow children to live in poverty. And so we're being compared in this country against societies that are making the investments in children that are not being made here. I've really enjoyed actually the past two conferences that I've been to, there's been student panels, which as a board member is really important. So pay attention, Superintendent Evans. I wanna, I've actually quote, I've tweeted Austin today, you said something that was really important for me is that students excel when they have choice. And I have a comment and then I do have a question for you all. I know one thing that we're doing and I'm really talking to my superintendent on the side here because I really want a student voice at the board level. I want someone to make sure that we're on point as adults making decisions about your education but you having that voice. And so hearing that for me just continues to reiterate that and I will continue to take that back and say, how dare we make policy and decisions about the future of education without having students at the table? That's my comment. My question is, your junior seniors and sophomore in college, if you could go back to your freshman and junior year, what would you do differently and how would you do it? I will focus less on the social aspect because I thought a lot or paid a lot of attention to what my peers thought about me and didn't really focus on my teachers to the extent that I should have and also on the same lines of Austin, coming from eighth grade. Like I always had a problem back then like asking for help. I was afraid to tell my teachers like, yo, I'm struggling in math, can you help me? So just stepping up, I would have stepped up a little bit more academically and getting, like how we've been talking about getting you guys to know us on a personal level. I also feel like it's important for us to know you guys on a personal level. So you know I may be able to try to do that as well to my freshman year. That's a great point. The importance of teachers being known to their students as well as teachers knowing their students.