 Welcome to the New America Foundation. I'm Lisa Guernsey. I'm the director of the Early Education Initiative here in the Education Policy Program at the New America Foundation and I'm really glad to see everyone here today. It's an unusual day in Washington DC and I know a lot of our colleagues and those who are following these issues in departments of education, health and human services at the federal level may not be able to join us, which is a real shame, but we are hoping that these are messages that will live on and we know they will because we are also doing a live recording, a live streaming of this online. So hello out there to all of our online viewers and we'll have that audio and video recording available as soon as possible in an archive as well. You can follow today's conversation on Twitter. Our Twitter handle for the ED Policy Program is at New America ED, so at New America ED, and you can follow today's conversation using the hashtag ED reform DE. So hopefully we'll get some good conversation going out there. So today our our second day of federal government shutdown and dysfunction at the federal level, we want to shine a light on something positive. What states can do to ensure that more children have more opportunities to learn and that more students are excelling at school? Here at the New America Foundation we see a need for integrating and promoting more seamless connections across the full education spectrum and we want to showcase ways to make that happen. In particular today we will be talking about a stair-step of opportunities that build upon the other from the learning opportunities children have before they arrive in kindergarten and throughout their years in public schooling. So it's a real honor for us here today to have Governor Jack Markell and Delaware education officials to talk about this with us. Thank you for being here. Under the governor's leadership Delaware won grants from the first round of race to the top and the early learning challenge. He's expanded access to high quality early childhood programs for at-risk students, has developed a new early childhood strategic plan, began a world language program, established higher entry standards for new teachers and updated its law governing charter schools. The state is also busy implementing the Common Core State Standards that Governor Markell played a lead role in creating. So these are a lot of big steps. How is the state doing it? Where are the pitfalls? Where are the opportunities? We're gonna hear a lot more about this today and I'm gonna turn it over now to our senior researcher in the Early Ed Initiative Connor Williams who will be guiding our conversation. Thank you all again for being here. I'm Connor Williams. I'm again senior researcher in the Early Education Initiative and thanks again for coming especially on a day when Washington is empty. So I'd just like to take a quick moment. I know we only have an hour so this will be the briefest of introductions. A quick moment to introduce the rest of our panel. You've heard about Governor Markell. To his left we have Ms. Harriet Dichter. She's the executive director of the Delaware Office of Early Learning. She's also had myriad roles in the early childhood world over the years. She was the national policy head of the national national policy team at the ounce of prevention fund. She established the DC office for the first five years fund. She's been she's worked in in Pennsylvania in their office of child development early learning and has a wealth of knowledge on early childhood issues so we're really lucky to have her here. And then to her left we have Dr. Mark Holodick. He's been a student teacher assistant principal and principal in the Brandywine school district but now he is the superintendent so he's also a member of the statewide vision 2015 implementation committee and we're looking to all three of the members of the panel today to talk not just about vision not just to talk about what we'd like to do with education but how we're actually going to take ourselves from point A where we are now to point B implementing that great vision. So thanks very much for coming. It's great to have all of you here. The first thing I just have to get on the table is I'd love Governor Markell if you could tell us. There's so much going on in Delaware right now. We've had two ways to the top victories there in Delaware. We've had increased investment early childhood education. You have a new early childhood strategic plan. You have increased college access plans. There's so many things going tell me about what's happening in Delaware education today. Well there's a lot and first of all I want to thank New America Foundation for hosting us and it's great to be here with Harriet who has a national reputation very much deserved in terms of the early childhood space as well as with Mark Holladick who is just a tremendous superintendent of Brandywine School District. So the way that we think about it is really starting from six weeks thanks to some great work going on really exciting work around early childhood which we'll talk about in a second through K-12. Everything from the implementation of Common Core. You're right I was involved early on with getting states to sign on to Common Core and that's the easy part. You know the easy part is to get states to say okay let's let's do it. The much more difficult and incredibly important part is the implementation and unless you figure out how to infuse these standards into every classroom make sure the teachers get the proper training get the proper materials it doesn't really matter if the state has signed signed on and we're making really good progress I just we just hosted some back-to-school nights in a few districts across the state where we invited community leaders to come in and see what the Common Core implementation is all about. So from the the issue of the higher standards to linking to really focusing on on data driven instruction that that's not rhetoric I mean that's the real thing I think we really know by kid by student by by teacher by by school by by district how we're doing and it's really informing how instruction gets done so we've got we've got that we've got the linkage of student achievement with teacher evaluation very difficult work but we've had 500 teachers across the state working with us to make it happen. So many other things going on in K-12 and then you mentioned briefly at the end the the work we're doing around access and we just announced a very exciting partnership a couple weeks ago with the College Board focusing on high performing low-income kids who could absolutely be we know based on their PSATs and their SATs that they could be successful in college but a lot of them are not applying and we've got a very systematic effort that we've just launched with College Board to identify these kids and to go after these kids and make sure that they know they could be successful and we've got lots of volunteers working with them on college applications working with their families and financial aid forms and the like. So there's a true we can believe me we'll take up the full hour and plenty more but why don't I stop there because you've got some phenomenal other panelists here. Well sure it's a Ms. Dichter and Dr. Hollick would you tell me you're involved in this work you guys have been helping with the rollout of lots of different initiatives. Tell me about your role in what's happening in Delaware now. Okay I'll get us started so I think as the governor said there's a great recognition in Delaware that learning begins very early really from birth on for our kids and so as we've been looking at the early childhood work we've really bucketed into four big areas because the view is comprehensive and so the first of those big areas is really around health and our focus points for that are around developmental screening and also around early childhood mental health those are big very significant areas of improvement and those allow us to cross over from the early learning programs into those really important partnerships with the health care community. Our second big bucket and when we can spend more time on really is the assurance of quality in our early education programs and we're doing that principally through our Delaware Stars effort which is the state's quality rating and improvement system it's open to all the players in the state it's really the framework for defining the standards we talk about the common core it's really our linkage strategy here in terms of being able to have a smooth continuum for our children and for their families in terms of quality early learning. Then our third bucket is pretty critical we are saying that we care a lot about early childhood education but we care deeply about building good strong robust connections between our birth to five programs and what's happening in K-12 particularly in K-3. So we have a focus on what is really brand new work in the state about creating those kinds of partnerships and creating that continuity and then the last area where we've really chosen to focus this work has to do with the concept of being a system that we can sustain over time and so in that we're focusing as the governor talked a little bit around around where are we with our data data-driven practices evidence-based to really inform quality improvement and also very critical work about leadership development community engagement this piece around everyone feeling a part of the picture so they have a high investment in getting the work done right now but also in being able to see that work to be sustained. We're helped in all of this I think as Conor mentioned that we do have a new early childhood strategic plan and we've been able to really take those buckets that we defined as we worked on the framework for the challenge and seed them overall into the state strategic plan for early childhood which brings additional leadership and additional support for this kind of work in this kind of effort. So full disclosure I have a vested interest in pre-K through 12 for numerous reasons one I'm a superintendent of course of a large comprehensive public school district but I also have three daughters who attend that school district one at K the other second grade and one who is a ninth grader. Conor opened with the fact that government is shut down right now and so I have to share a funny but true story regarding my ninth grader. I went to bed last night a little earlier than usual about 10 30 knowing I had to catch a very early train to come up to or come down rather to Washington so I went to bed around 10 30 fell asleep pretty quickly my wife was still up reading. My daughter who's in the IB program international baccalaureate program one of our high schools comes into our room around 11 11 15 which is often when she finishes up her homework in part because she's in a band and just very very busy so fast asleep and she gives me a shake and she says dad I'm sorry to wake you up but I forgot Mr. Bacon Scott Bacon is her excellent social studies teacher wanted us to have a conversation with our parents regarding the shutdown of the government. So I'm grog you know I'm coming at it and of course my wife who's sitting there reading starts to chuckle and I said Taylor you tell Mr. Bacon that I am going to Washington DC tomorrow and I'm gonna have a meeting with John Boehner as well as Mitch McConnell and we're gonna get this problem squared away right and she stands there and looks at me and she says I didn't know that's why you were going to Washington tomorrow. I don't know Governor we might have to spend a little more time here try to get this thing squared away. The Governor made a couple of very important points and covered a number of topics that I think really captures the work we are doing in Delaware which is truly comprehensive in covering all aspects of education from pre-K all the way through 12 into higher ed. We have initiatives that are occurring right now and I wouldn't even say we are waiting to do the work the work is underway. There's some real heavy lifting going on that that does create challenges especially where the rubber meets the road in the classroom. Change is difficult we all know this and we are living in a time right now in this country and especially in Delaware where we are pushing reform through a number of aggressive initiatives so I'm just going to piggyback on some of the things that Harriet covered. We have in Brandywine two pre-K programs one of which serves high needs students educated with typicals we have about 150 children in that program. We also have an early childhood access program run out of one of our urban schools that has grown dramatically over the last 15 years. We have space available to grow that program and with this governor and with Harriet's work that that program has been identified as a four-star program we expect it to become a five-star program and we expect to expand it another classroom next year of about 17 students. We have been successful in writing a number of grants at the state and federal levels to improve the curriculum in that program so that the children that are coming out of RECAP program at P.S. DuPont are better prepared for kindergarten and with the dashboard that we have in place in the state of Delaware we can closely monitor whether students come in academically and how much we grow them in in the early years. So that's just one example of progress that's that we are currently underway with in Brandywine in the state of Delaware so I'm very excited about the work that's being done and look forward to talking more about the work that we're doing K through 12. Sure well so thank you. I think it'd be disingenuous if I didn't ask you Governor Markell just to to it's speculative but to ask you what the shutdown could mean for all of this. All of this great work going on in Delaware do you have any sense for how it might influence how you're serving Delaware kids? Well I mean most of this work a lot of this work gets funded and sort of the prior year budget that being said there's we've got a week's worth of money for things like the Laihe program and you know so this time of year with the weather being what it is what it is that's all right but we've got a week's worth of money for Teneff. We've got a month's worth of money for food stamps through the through the WIC program. We've got a week's worth of money for some child care for some protective services for kids and each of these programs in our state or 900,000 people you're talking between 10 and 20,000 people who are affected and so you know you multiply that across the country. We're slightly bigger than a typical congressional district so there's a there's a very significant impact on the lives of so many of these kids you know at this point a lot of it is not impacting what's going on in the classroom directly but it's affecting their lives outside of the classroom which very much has an impact on what's going on in the classroom. So you know it's a significant concern and we're hopeful that people here in Washington who you know for whom maybe this is more about politics understand that when you're talking about literally millions of people across the country between 10 and 20,000 for each of those programs in Delaware this is impacting people who really don't care a lot about Democrat and Republican they really don't care that much about politics all they want to do is make sure that their kids are fed they have a place to sleep and they can go to school as best they can and learn so it's a significant concern to us for sure but as you can tell we are you know we've got a lot of stuff that we're doing and we're just going to keep driving forward. Well the good news is Dr. Holodeck's going to solve it today. That's right. Let me get right to the meat of some of the things we talk about here often and it's I'm going to ask you a question that just it's unfair in so far as that I'm not sure anyone here knows the answer. In fact I'm quite sure that no one here knows the answer. When it comes to investing in high-quality early childhood programs the research is clear the public is in favor business communities behind it chamber commerce a you had an event recently chamber commerce and Center for American Progress unlikely bedfellows together in favor of more investments in high quality public preschool but political traction is hard to find. How were you convinced first of all and then how do we convince other people? Well so first of all the research is unbelievably clear there's lots of it some of the most compelling research that I've seen was out of the Federal Reserve Bank of in Minneapolis probably not the most likely place that people wouldn't first think of about research about early childhood education but the research shows that the most effective economic development investment that a state can make is an early childhood education so maybe a people don't you know don't think a lot about early childhood but they care a lot about jobs and you say well the most effective thing that any state can do is an early child is invest in early childhood. So that was the why in terms of like you know the logical part and then you know of course there's the emotional piece which is you know if you've ever met a five-year-old kid who's already a year or two behind their peers who already has a deficit in their vocabulary of thousands of words it's a tragedy every single time and so since our focus is to try to do everything we can so that these children when they get to kindergarten are ready to learn we've got to address that so that's sort of that that's the why the how I think Harriet did a great job of laying some of it some of it out but let me if I could just take it one level of detail deeper because I think it's really important and she talked about our foundation in the stars rating system and what this is it's really not that complicated but it's a it's a rubric that early childhood centers can use it has to do with there are a bunch of different criteria that inform how many stars you get your quality of staff the quality of materials the curriculum use a whole bunch of different things it's very clear and so what we've done and this is really the the progress we've made over the last few years is we've changed the way that providers get reimbursed for low-income kids and so specifically we've said if a if a center has three stars they're going to be reimbursed at 80 percent of the market rate if they have four stars are going to get reimbursed at 90 percent five stars are going to get reimbursed at a hundred percent we did also increase the reimbursement across the board because the reimbursement was really quite low but what this does this is so for the first time a high quality center has a financial incentive to accept low-income kids previously they really didn't because the kids were not that whatever the reimbursement was from the state it was not sufficient to reimburse the center for their cost of providing the service so now you've got a situation where the best centers the five-star centers it makes perfectly good sense for them to accept low-income kids and similarly you got a situation where the average centers the mediocre centers have an incentive to invest in quality because they know they're going to get a higher reimbursement rate when they get more stars so you talk about you know the only way that this any of this makes sense is if you build it to be sustainable and the way to think about the way to build something that's sustainable is you've got to look at it from the financial perspective of the folks who are operating these centers and just in three years the net effect of this is if you think about the kids in Delaware who are enrolled in a the low-income kids who are enrolled in early childhood center we've increased from one out of 20 to one out of three those kids who are enrolled in a quality rated center and that's just in three years and so that number is going to continue to increase and the bottom line of what that means is more kids are going to be arriving at you know at the into the K-12 system ready to learn we think that's been a really important area of focus and improvement for us Harriet I wonder if you'd speak to as well what what's your strategy when you're trying to convince someone that it's important to do this it's important to invest in early childhood well I'm with the governor here that the research is pretty clear and the economic impact something we all care about in terms of competitiveness but I do have to say when I sit back you have to contextualize these arguments for your audience different arguments work for different people and I think we have to be aware of that so while we're all pretty dedicated to using the data that we have there are people who are very much convinced by the storytelling aspect you have to kind of pay attention in those different ways to what people have to say what we have been trying to do and I think successfully really under the governor's leadership in Delaware is to grow the number of partners and to take a smart look at the different kinds of constituents to really get them engaged and get them on board and people come at that in different ways the newest partnership actually that we have which I'm very excited about is with the leading business group in the state the business roundtable who was now formed with us a commission on early childhood education in order to continue to generate additional business leaders additional high level support who can really drill down on the understanding that there is such short-term and long-term payoff for children for families for community for employers for the state's economic standing from all the work that we're getting done and Dr. Howard from the K-12 perspective you do a lot of work with that that so what are you seeing after these new investments these these improved investments in early childhood are you seeing effects and how are you convinced about this we are just beginning to see the effects I don't think anyone can argue is the governor and Harriet just detailed a bank for your buck it makes sense to put your dollars into early education politically it's not always popular to do it because you don't see the effects right away so could as the governor for recognizing he may not get credit for this or he may not see the fruits of the labor but it is going to impact public education and in all districts including ours again keeping it simple we have too many programs pre-k programs in our feeder pattern that call themselves pre-k programs educational programs that are really babysitting enterprises good people but don't necessarily have the skill set or the drive to improve their program and those children far too often come in unprepared to learn or at a disadvantage and so the work with those children is incredibly challenging I would encourage anyone who's really interested in understanding how complex the problem is and how difficult it is to move a child in kindergarten in first grade who has a very low reading level go work with some of those children one-on-one we have a large mentoring program in our district I mentor a child my wife mentors a child it's our favorite conversation at the dinner table with our kids to talk about how difficult the work is to catch children up because I think even though our children are on reading level they need to understand that they have an advantage that others do so it is very difficult but if we can improve these pre-k programs get more children into programs such as ecap who are now through the Starsburg program being incentivized to get stronger in terms of their curriculum and where kids are actually ending up before entering kindergarten we are in a much much better place so let me make this even more tangible than president's pre-k plan it's been floating around as something that's going to drop soon for a while now ever since he mentioned it in the state of the Union what I'd love to know is how this changes the game how it could change the game at least for each of you would it change your strategy for how you're doing because in Delaware would it expand what you're doing how would how would it make things different for you well I will let Harriet fill in some of the gaps but I mean I think what we're doing is a total game changer because when you get more of these children young children enrolled in these higher quality centers and what that means for the transition that they make to the K-12 system that in itself is a is a game changer and so I think the president's proposal has incredible potential not just in Delaware but across the country to provide this opportunity to more kids and I mean to me this is really this is pretty basic I'm a big fan of what he's looking to do I'm hoping that when Mark has his meeting more later this morning he can figure this one out too and so I think it's got unbelievable potential one of the things that we've not talked about is the work we're doing in Delaware that Harriet can and Mark both know about with our early learner survey where well why don't I go ahead and let you talk about it because I think it I mean it's and it's basically really trying to facilitate this transition from these early childhood centers to the K-12 system by doing yeah okay so the early learner survey is our kindergarten assessment and it's actually been an incredible bridge builder for us and we talk about partnerships and how do you build political will one of our strongest partners in doing it is actually the teachers union and it has really I think brought them to another place around their commitment to early childhood not only for what's happening in the early grades in K-12 but actually in our birth to five kind of space but it's providing our kindergarten teachers with more information as they're going in and doing our formative assessment they're now saying things to us like I never knew I'd like doing assessment on our children they actually we you know we spent a lot of time with the kindergarten teachers they're building connections to the families because of our family engagement strategy that they have never had before we've had teachers say I've never known so much about the children their family backgrounds I have new relationships with the families as a result of this work and as we get deeper into the work for the Delaware early learner survey it will shed a lot of additional light for us on where we need to deepen our support for good practice which mark was talking about in the infant toddler and preschool classrooms so this has been a really critical part of our effort in terms of building that bridge between birth the five and K-12 on the president's plan were big supporters it would be fantastic to see greater commitment to aid the states in work that states have kind of leaped ahead on doing and specifically how this would probably work out one of the ways it could work out very well for us in Delaware as we've talked about our star system there are a lot of really good points articulated in the president's plan for preschool and they really identified what I think we agree are essential elements that lead to good quality for children and good outcomes and the ways that I've started to think about this is it's likely that we would be able to build another tier into our stars model and that because we have a commitment in the state as is shown in the president's plan to working with our community-based providers really in that market system to our district providers to our charters whoever's out there offering early childhood education we want to engage with them and so we'd have a way with those resources to be able to build on the Star Wars program and to use that as kind of the entry point into being able to go deeper and do more for young children in the system so I think for us it would fit in very well with what we've been creating that is unique to Delaware and I think that that's probably true for most states states would be able to take that framework and sort of look at where they are now and where that would be able to help take them to the next level in terms of improving outcomes for children and really being able to engage all the kinds of leaders and players who need to be at the table for young kids and I do think it's really important that states have some kind of platform or foundation to build on and I think the president to his credit it's been very clear if you think this is just about throwing more money in that's not going to be good enough and so we like the foundation in Delaware we have with our star system it's it's clear it's transparent it's tied to you know if you meet these measurements the likelihood of childhood growth is children are more likely to make make progress so it's a really I think it's very very important that states have that kind of foundation this is something we've been trying to stress here in America that this is not national head start this is not a national program it's a federal state partnership to help states increase their capacity to offer high quality preschool so that's fantastic I wonder if I can ask you guys to speak a bit about challenges involved in implementing the Common Core and how you're trying to make sure that's aligned with your early childhood investments sure so in the state of Delaware the Department of Ed has offered districts the opportunity to work collaboratively with them in the development of Common Core lesson plans and getting teachers trained and Brandywine is part of that initiative and collaborative effort it's going well for us and it is like any other major curriculum adoption challenging challenging to say the least because we have as mentioned earlier in the in the discussion there are a lot of things happening nationally and especially in Delaware and so this is yet another endeavor that the teachers and the leaders of schools are taking on so it's paramount that we communicate clearly and effectively from the top down and ensure that teachers at the classroom level understand exactly the direction we are heading with the adoption of the Common Core how the PD that we are providing them so supports their work directly make sure they understand the timeline of this work and how it ties directly into smarter balance the assessment that we're going to be moving to here next year so it's it's a heavy lift no question and as I said it's it provides its challenges but all in all I think in our district it's going very well there's another piece and I agree with everything that Mark said the other piece is it's not just about making sure that the communication is very very strong with the teachers but it's also with the rest of the community you know because there's just been so much out there about common core and so whether it's the work for example that our PTA has done in Delaware to take the message out to parents I mentioned we've had several back-to-school nights recently community leaders came in and they sat through lesson plans given by real teachers Common Core lesson plans because we wanted to make this real we wanted to take this out of the realm of politics and out of you know all the you know some of the misinformation that's been out there but let's let real people see and listen to teachers walk through real lesson plans that they teach to their elementary middle and high school students and I think when you do that it becomes so much more real we've got a much better chance of having having the public understand what it's all about. Sure, I guess you want me to talk a little bit about the relationship of Common Core to the early ed work. I have to look at my notes because we have a lot going on. So let me start by saying that we're actually now part of a nine-state consortium that we are going to have another opportunity to take a fresh look not only at our early childhood standards and their link up to the Common Core but also our early childhood assessments and our resources again to take one more look to make sure that we have good alignment. So that's pretty important here because we talked about it's the same children. Our philosophy is really let's start as young as parents basically are expressing their desire to have their kids in an early childhood program but let's make sure that that program is going to do well by children from the get-go and do well in terms of the K-12 system as well. Additionally another piece that we're doing that is a compliment to the Common Core is we are going to now be working on building out approaches to learning and social-emotional into our K-12 standards. This is really important as an additional source of support and we think as an additional source of achievement really when we get to what do we mean by the Common Core. So that work is I'm just going to get started this fall and we will have teachers doing that work with us. We'll have principals, superintendents and members from the early childhood community. Very enthusiastic response. All communities when we said let's tackle this because this is part of really making the system coherent for us. In our Delaware STARS program as part of our work to really make this stuff happen in a more concrete level we're taking the kindergarten assessment instrument that we're using and there are infant toddler and preschool measurements associated with it and so we are offering with all resources paid for now to the STARS programs initially in a pilot about doing child assessment with all the right supports that they need and by the beginning of 2014 that will be available to everyone in the state and since we will be paying for it and we've been out there talking to our early childhood leaders. We already know how interested the early childhood leaders are. It really robust appropriate approach to assessment, formative assessment, developmentally appropriate across all the domains in their classrooms and I think this is going to be a great linkage and this piece that the governor talked about about making this very concrete. We're in the process of forming a new partnership to very excited about this to take a fresh look at teacher cert in terms of our preschool through grade two certification. That's an area where I think we need to introduce a little more rigor that will link us back better to the common core as well as make sure that people are well focused on the instruments and the preparation we need for our Delaware teachers, whether they're going to be working in a K-12 setting or whether they're going to be working in a birth to five setting. In addition, let me note that our kindergarten assessment is already fully aligned. We talked a little bit about that and some of the excitement about that and you know that I've said with this link the governor said to our families. Pretty critical. If our families aren't with us, we'll fail. It's our teachers and our families together with the children who are going to be able to pull all of this off. And then I think the last piece I want to mention here is partnerships with our institutions of higher learning because we have formed from an early childhood perspective as part of our plan. It's an advantage of a small state. We can sit at one table with all of the two and four year colleges who work in early childhood and we can sit together with them, whether they are working to educate people on a teacher cert track or whether they are working not in teacher cert. And so we have them all together at present and what we are doing right now is making sure that what they're offering is aligned or not to both Common Core and to the early childhood foundations and we'll have some additional courses that we develop with them and some additional work that we'll be able to do then to fill in the gaps and to be able to make more sense of this because I think from where we sit as we try to think about Common Core and we think about outcomes engaging higher ed so that we are not in the process of retraining the people who are in our higher ed system. And this includes in Delaware our core courses that are the requirement even for those who are teaching in the early childhood programs who are not required to have college degrees, AAs or BAs. So the higher eds are involved in that and we're freshening up their role. So I think that those are you know pretty critical pieces in terms of strategies that will systematically help us be in a better place with that full range of child development with the outcomes that we're looking for. We even have some TFA teachers at our early childhood centers. I can't remember how many. Well we have about a dozen of them and what's novel about our TFA teachers in Delaware is that I think we're the only place in the country that has them in infant toddler classrooms. So we are very excited about that. I met with all of them last week so this is again an advantage of a small place. We sat around the table one evening with some of my staff and the teachers to kind of hear how it was going and to be talking with those infant toddler teachers was great. And you know the commitment really is to grow people who will stay in Delaware and sort of become that next generation of leadership in the early childhood programs. And I do think this idea of people working together maybe it's easier in a small state but Harriet mentioned the partnership with the with the teachers union on the early learner survey which has been really important and really strong. And I think a lot of those teachers as Harriet mentioned have really become pretty enthusiastic about what that tool provides to them in terms of additional information about their students. So that partnership for us has been very important. I'm sure to hear this as a teacher for America alum myself. Though it was many years ago and back then I was a first grade teacher that was about as young as we went. There were some kindergarten teachers as well but nothing infant toddlers. That's wonderful. Yes, you're exciting. And all of those teachers really are out in our community based settings so that they are really working, you know, right where the rubber meets the road. I had a great story from one of the teachers really who met someone she said at the grocery store and said she was a TFA teacher and then announced she was an infant teacher. And they were like what do you mean teaching infants? What's there to teach? And so she told these great stories about how she shared everything you know that was going on in her classrooms to really open up this stranger's eyes to the incredible learning dimensions for the infant. So it's a great thing to have the TFA teachers as part of the partnership but complemented again by the fact that we also at the same time have this super strong partnership with the teachers unions. We have good partnerships with the business community and obviously we're working very hard to make sure that the teachers themselves in the early childhood classrooms feel well supported and understand how much value we put on their leadership role in the work. Connor, one of our teachers, kindergarten teachers Karen Simpson was very much involved in the adoption of this kindergarten assessment. And so she has been incredibly helpful at the local level in terms of supporting other teachers and now that it's rolled out district-wide, taking a real leadership role in helping our administrators get this off the ground. I think it's important to note that the Secretary of Ed recently announced that the kindergarten assessment can be used as a Measure B evaluation tool within D-PASS2R, which is our teacher evaluation system. That is very important because one of the things we continue to hear at all levels is over-evaluation and assessment of kids. So it's important that we be flexible, open-minded, hear the concerns coming out of classrooms, which in this case the Secretary of Ed in Delaware did, made that announcement last week to the superintendents in Delaware. So, you know, when you're able to have some flexibility and work smarter, it saves some classroom instructional time and things really start to fall in place and that's happening with this kindergarten assessment. I'd also note to the governor's point of engaging the community, very, very important in regard to any initiative. So one of the, our Board of Education coming out of their summer retreat had two areas that they really wanted to focus on, parent communication as well as parent engagement. So we have five large seminars this school year, one of which is, so it covers things such as Singapore math and LFS, what it is. One of those upcoming seminars is Common Core. Now, we've already covered it at a board meeting, but being that we're in a room full of people who are involved in education, you know it's not easy to get folks to come out to a boring board meeting, but if you offer a workshop on a particular topic that they're interested in, you get more engagement. So I agree, you've got at every level, including the local level, you have to be transparent, you have to communicate exactly what's happening and why. I'm glad that you guys brought that up. I was planning to ask you about the teacher eval system, but you've covered most of what I was going to ask you. All I'll say is that we published a paper here, my colleague Laura, born friend, published a paper called Ocean Number of Unknowns that took a look at a couple of different states' teacher evaluation systems, including Delaware's. It's a wonderful paper, and you should all find it on our website. One last thing then, and we're going to open the questions up to audience in a minute, is with all this going on, all of the buy-in, all the partnerships, all the initiatives, what's next? I mean, you're not done yet. There's presumably you haven't finished working on education policy. My view, and I mean, there are some other things we're looking at, but let's implement really well what's going on. And I think this is incredibly important and it's something that I certainly hear from teachers and people within the education system. And Mark mentioned, you know, there are lots of things going on. And what you really want to avoid, I think, is talking to a teacher who says, you know, I've seen these fads come and go, this is another fad, and there will be more to come. And I've been very pleased when we've had conversations, for example, one of the things I'm very proud of is the work we're doing around professional learning communities. That sounds, the very name of it almost sounds like it could be a fad, but it's not. And basically what it is, is we've got, every teacher in our state sits down for 90 minutes a week with five of their peers to drill into what the data is telling them about student achievement. And it's an incredible sharing opportunity. And I've sat in on a bunch of them and to see these teachers engaged as they are, student by student, to figure out, you know, what it is that students are getting, what they're not getting, how they can intervene appropriately to change it. The teachers, the overwhelming majority of teachers that I've talked to have felt that this is a great thing. And in fact, one of the teachers said to me, you know, we hope that this is not a fad. We hope this is something that will stay. But when you think about the work, even as we've described it, a significant focus on early childhood, particularly on low income kids and accelerating their growth, the work that we're doing around higher standards, the work that we're doing around making sure that the data is meaningful and is used appropriately, the work that we're doing around the access to college. And if I could just take a minute to talk about that. So these are all really important components. And you know, it's not to say there won't be additional initiatives coming down the path. One that I do feel is important is changing the way we compensate teachers and really to focus on paying for the things that we value. And we've been, you know, we're in discussions now. It's something I introduced in last year's State of the State speech. And I hope we make some real progress there. We've got, I believe, have to increase starting salaries, but also make sure that we're doing a better job of having a financial situation where talented teachers don't feel like they've got to become assistant principals or go into administration in order to make more money. It just that doesn't make any sense since so much important work is happening in the classroom. And we think we've got an opportunity to reward these very talented teachers. Maybe it's because they're going to take on responsibility for, you know, guiding newer teachers and the like. So some of those conversations are continuing. If I could just take one minute on this issue of college access. So we announced two weeks ago a very exciting partnership with the College Board. There's a lot of very interesting research that came out fairly recently from Stanford on the issue of high performing low income students. High performing low income students for the most part are not applying to college. They're not going. It's really not within the, for many of them, it's not within their set of life experiences or in the realm of sort of something that their families talk about. So we in Delaware were fortunate because we've got a very good data system. We have every high school junior take the SAT during the school during a school day. Some of it's we use some of our race to the top money to make this happen. So we know who these kids are by name. So the College Board is basically basically identified if a student gets 1850 or higher on the SAT. There are a lot of very selective schools who are interested in those students, particularly the low the low income students. 1500 or higher maybe the most selective schools are not interested. But that's the cutoff for what the College Board believes is college ready. And so we're going after these high performing low income students in a very systematic way with the support of the College Board. First of all, securing fee application fee waivers so that they can apply to up to eight colleges without having to pay an application fee. These application fee waivers have been available for a long time, but they're pretty complicated to get. And so now this is going to become automatic. But we've got volunteers from local employers and local institutions of higher education who are going to sit down with these students to help them fill out their college applications, work with the families to fill out their financial aid forms. And if we can get a few hundred more, and we're a small state, a few hundred more high performing low income Delaware students who will succeed in college if they go. And if we get a few hundred of them to actually go and we provide the necessary supports, I mean what an unbelievable change in their life and frankly you change a few hundred lives like that, you change a community. And that's really what it's all about. So as long as you're to your questions, so I think in terms of new stuff, I am focused on teacher comp, but I think we've got a lot of the right pieces in place, but we've got to implement well. And that's of course always the hardest part. Well with that in mind, we've got about just sort of ten minutes left for audience questions. So I'm going to open it up in a moment. There's a microphone in the back, so raise your hand if you have a question, but one prelude. I will be urging you, each of you, to keep your comment question time on the mic, 60 seconds or less, preferably 30 seconds or less, and I will start interrupting and be very rude and I will just be pushy and I will do whatever it takes to get a question so we can get feedback, because there's lots of people who want to jump in. Ma'am, here in the front. Thank you. Good morning. My name is Akua Kuyate. I'm Wolf Trap Institute for Early Learning through the Arts, Wolf Trap Foundation for the Performing Arts, recognizing the value of the arts in high-quality learning. Are your efforts in the state of Delaware to include arts organizations at all levels, including the Delaware Star rating system, as well as your enhancing of your early childhood standards and your assessments and your protest learning, as well as your professional development for teachers, particularly since early childhood teachers have to teach across the curriculum and also common core is an integrated form of instruction. Great question and not just because my wife has an op-ed in today's local paper about the value of the arts to society generally. Harry, do you want to take a crack at that? Yeah, and the answer is yes. Okay, because we've said we take a comprehensive point of view around all aspects of our kids development and have a great appreciation for the arts as part of this bundle. We're actually in the middle of now when we talk about going deeper next steps, implementing well, one of the pieces we're redoing is the professional development system for early childhood. It was a little not balanced and maybe not providing enough depth for our teachers, but this is an area as we go through a redo that will be including, but we celebrate, you know, with you and really want to be about all of that and have tried to be inclusive as we've been building out the standards, the participation, professional development, all the different aspects of the work. Yeah, I mentioned earlier than Brandywine, we earned a grant last year going into this school year to adopt what's called the creative curriculum in that early access program and a major component to that curriculum is in fact the arts. So it's, it is happening and I think there is a concentration on the arts and Delaware. During this time of reform it's easy to take your eye off that and so it's incumbent upon us to make sure that doesn't occur. Right there, please. Hi, my name is Evelyn Boyd Simmons and I'm a parent here in Washington DC. I have two kids in the local system and I'm actually trained as a partnership broker. I have spent time in the telecommunications industry, so I recognize a lot of this business strategic, truly strategic approach from beginning to end and I'm really interested in the parent engagement strategy. Who developed it, how was it developed and it sounds as if you front-loaded it in the planning for the comprehensive strategy and I've heard snippets of how it's executed but I'm really curious about how it was integrated into the architecture of what you decided you needed to do in Delaware. The, I'll give a brief comment and maybe Mark can talk about it. The one thing that we do feel strongly about is that programs around family engagement should not be driven by people in our state capital and that you know every community is different. The needs of every community are different and while we did have as a requirement of our race to the top that every district have a family engagement plan, those plans needed to be put together at a local level. So I don't know if you want to talk about how you do that. Sure, so when we developed our race to the top plan in Brandywine we looked at each, each school, it's a comprehensive school district that has both suburban and urban schools and each has their own unique personality and culture. So the principals worked with our race to the top team to develop what those plans that their specific schools look like. Some of our schools actually have family engagement coordinators who work with the principal to plan events and activities that support the school. An example might be at one of our schools, Harlan Elementary, which is an urban school, the principal has meetings, dinner meetings with families and talks, you know, there's actually an agenda of topics all focusing around academic achievement that she talks with families about and of course that's more individualized. We also have large scale programs. We actually started with what is currently happening in the way of parent engagement that's working. How can we keep that going, share best practices in some of our other schools and actually grow it. And then what else can we implement? If there's one thing that race to the top has done and this, and I keep calling it the era of reform that we're living in here over the last let's say four to six years, it has really driven collaboration amongst schools in our own district but also across districts. So one thing I would allude to is this partnership that has been formed amongst four districts in Delaware. We call it the Brink Consortium. It's from the northern end of Delaware where the most northern school district in the state all the way down to the most southern district being Indian River and two other districts Newcastle County Votech and Colonial. Working very hard to get blended learning and personalized learning off the ground in our in our districts. And working pretty closely actually with the Department of Education. So I know I moved away a bit there from parent engagement but I think when you create a climate in both the district and across the state of collaboration we're starting to share best practices at the state level when we meet as superintendents. Sometimes we meet alone, sometimes we bring in part of our team and we actually work around PLCs so that we have the opportunity to see what's working in other districts and make the decision whether or not we can implement some of those initiatives or programs locally. Other questions? Let's do in the back and then in the front right here. I'm sorry, just right here and then there's a question right in front of her as well. Hi, I'm Lori Morris. I run a local foundation focused on early care and education. Two questions. One, in the funding you refer to on reimbursement as people move forward in the STARS system. Is that based only on, is that based on the center at any age or does it follow the age of the child in Virginia? We only fund four-year-olds for example. Second question is in the intro you mentioned the World Languages Program and I wondered if you might take just a second or two to talk what that is. Sure. What about that Harriet? Deal with the first question I'll deal with the second. Sure. It's all ages of children, infants, toddlers, preschoolers and school age as well. We said comprehensive. We meant comprehensive. The data is pretty crystal clear. Children learn from birth. We want the best outcomes. We want really high quality infant toddler programs along with really high quality three and four-year-old programs. On the World Language piece, this is really again about for me sort of economic development. We just got to recognize that the world we live in, the world our kids are going to graduate into is so fundamentally different than anything we ever had before in terms of how we have so many employers in this country now that are based overseas. We have so many opportunities to promote exports. We've got so many people who may want to spend part of their careers overseas. So I think we do our kids an unbelievable disservice when we leave them to believe that they can be successful speaking only English. And so we started last year with three schools. This year we've got 10. We've got a thousand kindergartners and first graders this year who are learning science, social studies and math and either Chinese or Spanish. And we're going to have 10,000 within 10 years. So this year we've got 10 schools. Next year I think 15 the year after that we'll have 20. And by the fourth grade the kids will be proficient. By the ninth grade they'll be taking the AP test. And in terms of something that we believe can set us apart when we're talking to global business interests, we won't be able to say we get it. And you shouldn't have to do business you know in English wherever you go around the world. You should be able to do some business in the language of the people that you're visiting. And there's been plenty of pushback about this. But in terms of I think one of the most important things that for any governor is to have a and really anybody in public office is to have a perspective about how the world around us is changing and what we ought to do in the face of those changes. And to me the fact that we are so globally tied together and this is again real. And people may not want it to be real but it's that real. And so one of the things that we've got to do for our kids I believe is give them more opportunities. And so to see you know I went into the schools at the beginning of last year and then I went into the schools in April or May. And we all fit kindergarteners. I've been speaking Spanish for a long time. I lived in Chile when I was in my early 20s. And I had a little five-year-old kid who his language at home is English. And by April of last year he was rolling his Rs better than I ever will. And his and you know you see that they they've got the accent. They're learning the vocabulary. They're learning the grammar. They're learning the culture. And we've so far recruited our teachers from China and Spain. And we're hopeful that over a period of time we'll be able to you know grow more, grow more of our own. But we think it's a really exciting opportunity to invite people to come see it. Because it's just it's amazing to see it in action. We have very little time left at one last question right here in the front and then we're going to have to break. Hi my name is my name is Carlyce King with the early childhood data collaborative. You had mentioned several times. Thank you all of your speakers. It's great to hear about the wonderful work going on in Delaware about really focusing on data-driven decision making. And I think what we know is a lot of states have struggled, particularly in the early childhood realm, in building data systems that really provide policymakers with the information that they need. I'm just interested to hear more in Delaware how you've been able to tackle this issue. So Carlyce, you know that actually we have done a fantastic job on the K-12 side. We're really at the beginning of the data systems in the early childhood world. We do have the early childhood work spread out over several agencies. They've each built their own data systems. So our effort now, which we're currently in the middle of working on, is we're getting a lot of data out of the systems. It's awkward and it's difficult, but we're using it. We have big dashboard. We really need to drive information back out to people, so we have numerous workarounds to be able to do that. But the next phase in the early childhood piece is really to pull all the data sets together and to go deeper in them so that any one singular effort or initiative has really been linked up to its companion initiatives so that we're able to get the level of data back out to everyone in the field who really needs that. So we have a lot to pull on from what's happened in K-12 in the state on the data systems and we have some additional ways to go in terms of getting to the level that I know people will be able to benefit from. So and I think in this way in the early childhood space we're more like the other states than distinguished from them, but we again are in the middle of really pulling everything we can out of the data systems trying to get as much fed back to people as as possible and then looking deeply to get to the next level so we can build the rest of the warehouses, deal with the rest of the student identification issues and the numerous kind of technical problems that have to be addressed. Harriet may not know this, I don't expect her to know everything that's happening in every early childhood program in the state of Delaware, but we were approached as an administrative team, our executive team last year by PJ Pasciola who oversees, she's the manager of our ECAP program and she requested PLCs in our pre-K program and we feel so strongly that we're having success K through 12 with PLCs that we actually have that now, this school year up and running at that level, you'll have to forgive me, I'm not real familiar with the early assessment that's being used in our pre-K program but it's given three times a year to take a look at growth and progress and so certainly they're beginning to do data digs, it's in the infancy stages, but that works happening and it kind of goes back to what I was talking about earlier, this sharing of best practices and implementing things that work and best yet having someone who is actually in the program coming to the district office staff saying, you know what, I think this could really have a positive impact on staff planning and ultimately student achievement, what those children are learning. Well great, I'm afraid we're out of time but thank you for all the great questions and thanks to our panel and one last thing before I ask you to thank them with me is we're going to be having an event on October 16th that's going to get into more detail on new research on high quality pre-school programs, pre-K programs here in the United States so keep an eye out for announcements on that and now I hope you'll join me in thanking our panel.