 My name is Lisa Guernsey. I'm the director of the Early Education Initiative here at the New America Foundation. We're part of a large and growing education policy program here at the New America Foundation. And we're really pleased to be able to host this conversation today, which we feel can maybe kickstart some new ideas for the second term that can perhaps put a little bit more emphasis on the prevention and not just intervention side of turning around our public schools. I first want to thank Laura Bornfriend, our senior policy analyst in the Early Ed Initiative, for organizing this event today. She's done a fabulous job. And I think as you'll see, as we hear from our panelists, how much of richness and depth there is to be had in this conversation that we feel hasn't really been out there in the area. So thanks so much, Laura. I'm going to just be here today to introduce a couple of people so we can get started into the actual content. I want to acknowledge that we have several members of the administration here with us today to listen and learn, we hope. And Steven Hicks, especially from the Office of Early Learning in the US Department of Education, is with us. Thank you, Steven. As well as Miriam Calderon, who is the senior advisor for early learning at the Department of Health and Human Services. And she's on assignment to the White House Domestic Policy Council. And it brings me pleasure this morning to introduce you to Roberto Rodriguez. We'll give a few remarks, and we'll have some time directly after that for a couple of questions and some answers. And then we'll dive into the panels after that. So Roberto is special assistant to the president for education for the White House Domestic Policy Council. And over the past couple of years, I've had the chance to interact with him to get a sense of where some of the priorities may be in the administration around not just early learning as it's written birth through five, but also understanding what we need to do in those K3 years as well. So thank you very much for your attention to that. And come on up. Good morning. It's wonderful to join you this morning on this foggy winter morning here. I want to really begin by thanking the New America Foundation for hosting this morning's discussion on this important topic, and in particular, to acknowledge Lisa and Laura's leadership and terrific work in this space. I had a chance to be here to talk a bit about our race to the top early learning challenge at some point last year and really want to commend New America's focus on this important part of the education continuum. It really is a transforming moment for early childhood development and early education. We know now more than we ever have before about what our children need to be successful later in school and later in life. We have more evidence than ever before in the past that shows what a difference, a high quality early childhood education can make to the success of our students. And in recent years, we've seen, I think, really encouraging adoptions, validations, developments of new strategies in the early education space that we think really hold great potential for really improving the learning outcomes of our youngest children. So I'd like to take some time this morning really reflecting on what we've accomplished in recent years and highlighting some of the challenges that we see that remain, in particular, as we talk about really scaling up success in the early grades. As you all know, the president very early in his first term committed us to a goal of ensuring that every child has a complete and competitive education from the day they're born all the way through their career. And our early learning agenda really spans an important part of that continuum, the foundational part of birth to five prior to kindergarten, as well as a birth through eight continuum of learning all the way through third grade. And we're committed to an agenda that really has at its center quality, innovation, and access as goals to really support the range of learning for our youngest children, that comprehensive range across social and developmental domains into cognitive development, into physical development. And that's also really driven by an imperative, which is to really achieve results-oriented outcomes that will ultimately help narrow and close that achievement gap that we wrestle so greatly with later in school. So the foundation of that investment, just to remind us as we kind of look backwards over the past four years, that's been shoring up some significant infrastructure in terms of early education. Investments that the president made in the first year of his office to expand Head Start and Early Head Start upwards of 60,000 additional children in those programs to shore up our child care subsidy system where we have over a million of our most vulnerable children who need additional support and assistance to do more to really expand IDEA, the preschool program, as well as the support for our infants and toddlers. And to launch, and this came through the Recovery Act, but also continued with funding through the health care bill to launch a new and ambitious network of evidence-based home visiting for our most at-risk children and families. And to date, we have about $380 million of a $1.5 billion investment that's providing nearly half a million of our youngest children and their families high-quality home visiting services. So we've also ushered in important reforms and changes in the Head Start program, including that a rule for the first time that will require our low-performing programs to compete for funding to ensure that our children and their families in Head Start are supported and served by the highest quality, most capable providers. So they've also enabled us to pursue new directions in Head Start, these reforms. And we're looking right now as an administration at trying to do more to shore up new birth through five innovative models that are place-based in cities around the country. And we'll really look at how we can leverage Head Start resources to meet the needs of children from birth through five in their local communities, also coordinating closely with other resources in those communities, with childcare resources, with resources from the state and local level through the K-12 infrastructure and the existing early-ed infrastructure. So in addition to these important investments, as we've reminded folks prior, we also set out to accomplish a really significant task, which is to address the uneven quality of programs and the lack of access to high-quality programs, in particular for our low-income learners. And as the president has pointed out before, some of our early education programs are excellent, some are mediocre, and some really fail to capture the opportunity and the developmental potential of our children in their most formative years. So we have to do more to really raise the bar, if you will, across these early education settings. And this is really the premise behind the Race to the Top Early Learning Challenge, where we now have over 14 states that are engaged in the ambitious work of really planning goals for rating and improving the quality of their programs, for increasing the share of our neediest children who participate in the highest quality care, for integrating early learning standards into curriculum and assessment and classroom practices in these programs, to implement strategies that are linking to health and family supports for our children, and to enhance the capacity for our early education providers and our early educators to really use data and important and new ways to ramp up quality and really to improve the quality of service for children. So we're pushing ourselves on all of these fronts at the federal level. We have unprecedented collaboration today between our Department of Education and our Department of Health and Human Services and a focal point, if you will, in an interagency council that is working to plan a comprehensive approach to early education across our federal agencies and to make sure we're encouraging that type of collaboration at the state and at the local level. So we feel like there's been a lot that we've invested in, a lot of important steps that have been taken. And yet, despite these strategic investments and these important efforts, we also know that there is a whole lot more that remains to be done. And really, a lot more that we must do, we must lead at the federal level, as well as support our states and local governments in doing, if we are going to really transform this system from a patchwork of programs into a real continuum of quality for our early learners. So let me just remind us again of the imperative there, which is that by age five fewer than half of poor children are ready for school compared to over 75% of their more affluent peers, and that at third grade, a stunning 80% of our low-income children are not proficient in reading. And that a student from a poor family who cannot read at grade level by third grade is 13 times less likely to graduate on time than a child who demonstrates third grade reading proficiency. So that's not as much about, certainly we have to do more from a literacy standpoint, but that is a call to action for us to try to do more to support high-quality early learning experiences leading up to that important benchmark, that important point. And we also have to commit ourselves to saying that the socioeconomic status of a child in his or her earliest years of life, that period that we all know from all the research shows is such an important foundational point for their later learning and success, that no longer should be a determinant for a child's later success in school. And the panoply of reforms that we adopt and move forward really has to tackle that objective, I think, head on. So one of the most important places where we can begin to focus is in looking at the quality of education that our youngest children are afforded in the early grades. And we have to consider here the challenges with our nation's pre-K kindergarten, first, second, third grade experiences. We're just on the heels, as many of you know of the Head Start Impact Study, which I think shows that there's a real important question about, what are we doing to promote a higher quality of learning experience for our children both before they enter kindergarten, but also really importantly after they transition from early learning into these early grades? What are we doing to really make sure that we're mapping a continuum of standards and a continuum of high quality teaching and learning for those children as they access early learning prior to kindergarten and then as they continue forward? We also have to address the fact that we know still far too many of our children are not enrolled in high quality pre-K. And that's the fact that we need to wrestle with. We also need to wrestle with the question of the situation for our kindergartners and look at the fact that only six out of 10 children are enrolled in full-day kindergarten at a time when states are moving forward with the Common Core and a high level of expectation for our kindergartners. Even these states, we have upwards of 45 states now that fortunately are moving forward with the Common Core. Even there, we have children in kindergarten for less than 2 and 1 half hours a day and the charges to make sure that we're providing them a full curriculum that we're making sure we're spending the time they need on task and an important instruction and literacy in math and other subjects, making sure that we have the time that they need for physical activity and play. All of these are imperatives behind which sits the fact that our children aren't afforded even the opportunities that they need to be able to be learning and to be on task in kindergarten. And certainly beyond, we have to also pursue questions around what the implications are for adoption of the Common Core in first, second, and third grade. And to think more about how we can support and reinforce deeper learning for our children at that level. Think about how we can support their critical thinking, their collaboration, their communication skills, their higher order thinking skills as important foundations for their learning moving forward. We know that far too often curricula, assessment practices, classroom practices in these early grades don't emphasize the developmental skills, attachment, executive function, memory. Skills that developmental science tells us are so important for our learners. And for their future success. We have far too many states, in fact only one or two states that actually have adopted holistic standards that reflect social and emotional learning alongside important cognitive skills in these early grades. We have far too many places that fail to use formative tools and other developmental assessments that can provide a roadmap of progress for a particular learner leading up to mastery of the common core standards. And we have far too teacher preparation programs that we need to address and connect the dots here, far too few programs that actually provide a solid foundation in child developmental science that really will help our teachers in these earliest grades provide the type of quality instruction and learning opportunities that our kids need to be able to be successful. So certainly we have some efforts that we've already undertaken to begin to address that our administration has launched a comprehensive blueprint to reauthorize the Elementary and Secondary Education Act, including new focus on health and supportive environments for our children. And we wanna do more to help support states as they move forward there. We've launched important programs like Promise Neighborhoods, where we're beginning to see communities come together and map a high quality continuum of learning experiences for children that really does begin at birth, reaches up through these early grades and all the way through high school graduation and college going. But ultimately, it's gonna require more collaboration at the local level. It's gonna require leadership at the local level and I know you'll hear soon from some partners here who are providing local leadership in terms of thinking about the funding in our education system in new and creative ways to really support the success and the attainment of our youngest children. It's not work that's gonna be done overnight. It's work that I think is gonna require new conversations and a challenging of the status quo in many of our schools and many of our communities and a focus on innovation, on thinking about how we use existing funding in new ways, blend funding, work together all on behalf of our youngest children to provide them the opportunities that they'll need to be able to be successful later in school. So I wanna commend again, New America, for hosting this. We're really looking forward to learning from some of the lessons that will be shared by our panelists that are forthcoming and really looking forward to continuing to foster this conversation moving forward so that we can make sure that we are mapping and living up to the objective here of providing a complete and competitive education that really begins at birth and reaches through a career. So thank you all so much and happy to take any questions or hear any comments or thoughts you might have. Just come to learn together and play with it. We wanna make sure we get to the panelists as well, but we have a microphone here and if there's anyone who has a question, please raise your hand, and if not, I have... I don't see that. Morning, Myrna Mandelowitz with the High Scope Educational Research Foundation. Just curious, Roberto, I know the president's budget has been delayed a little bit, but will be coming out. It's a very tight time, we know fiscally and what guarantees or what words of wisdom can you give us about the investment or continued investment that the administration will make in this very important subject that you've addressed? So that good question, Myrna, and the one on many minds, I know. And while I am not gonna be able to, from the podium today, forecast the budget directions or the directions of a full agenda for the second term, I will say that I think we're gonna continue to prioritize this space. This is important work. I think we've demonstrated over the past four years in our budgets that these investments in early education are really critical to meeting our overall goals here in the education space. So we're gonna continue to support the work that we've laid the groundwork for over the past four years and stay tuned. Great. If I could, can you all hear me? Thank you, Roberto, for laying out such a great vision. I'm wondering if you can tell us a little bit more about, slide what goes to the budget question, but about full day kindergarten and tools that might be available, if you've been thinking through those tools, that might be available to help states move in that direction. And then there are programs in the Department of Ed that while they allow early learning investments and full day kindergarten investments do not necessarily push or incentivize or require those. And this is something we'll get into, I think, in our discussion as well. But if you have a moment to address some of that, I appreciate it. Well, so I think, clearly again, just to remind folks, I think many are familiar with this, but our federal investment and role here in the broader, looking at a broader landscape of funding is quite modest, right? We're less than 10 cents on the dollar at the federal level in terms of the support for education, public education. But we do see, I think, a number of states, if you look back over the past decade and further, we do see a number of states that have taken up preschool and pre-K as an imperative. We also are beginning, I think, to see more states coming to the realization that investing in kindergarten and full day kindergarten is a really important part of their system, right? I think the more recent clip that I've seen on that has been kind of the Indiana movement that's looking at how to support that. So at the same time, I think it's a challenge because states are understandably crunched from a fiscal perspective. And as we've tracked these budget cuts, too often I think we've seen that investments in early childhood education and investments along the earlier part of the public education continuum tend to be those investments that fall quickest. It's easy for states to be able to say, well, if I'm really crunched, I might have to cut my, I might have to scale my kindergarten down, or I might have to lose pre-K classrooms. At a time when we know that the investment there really matters greatly. So I think this is a matter of supporting the work and encouraging states and local school districts to explore ways to use their funding in creative and new ways to really support this early learning continuum. And there are funds, title one funds that can support this work. There are title three funds, there are title two funds, right? We allocate over $2.5 billion across the country for professional development through title two every year. Those funds can support better educating and supporting our early educators. And so it's a matter for us of what can we do as an administration to really help encourage districts to look at this as a strategy for closing the achievement gap later. You know, and this is why I think it's so great to have the panel that will be coming up to really talk about how these strategies can live within existing systems. This should not be a matter of choosing whether we're gonna continue to provide a high quality curriculum across elementary, middle and high school or choosing really basic and fundamental investments in kindergarten and pre-K and shoring up the quality of our early learning in K3. Thank you. All right, thank you. Okay, so we'll get started on our panel here. I wanna bring up Laura, a born friend of our senior policy analyst and she'll speak for a few minutes and then the panelists will come up and give some presentations and then we'll have some time for some real moderated discussion that Laura will be leading and hopefully a lot of time for everyone in the room as well to be able to engage in that discussion. So it's great to have Laura working in this area and one thing about Laura that many of you may not know is that in addition to her incredibly thoughtful and innovative approaches as she's looking at the early learning span and the early childhood span up through the third grade, Laura is a former elementary school teacher and I think that really does bring some perspective to these issues. She understands what it means within a school to have to turn around and think through change and so again, thank you Laura and I'm looking forward to your remarks. Thank you, Lisa. And before we get started, I want to right off the bat thank Quasie Rollins of the Institute for Educational Leadership for his help in putting this event together and on your seats you'll have seen some materials including case studies on linkages which Quasie will give a few remarks about later which is connecting early learning to community school efforts. So thank you to Quasie. And in 2009, the school improvement grant, the school improvement grant program CIG received a makeover and a one time $3 billion funding boost from the 2009 American Recovery and Reinvestment Act. The department identified four models of improvement for schools to use, turn around, closure, restart or transformational. Now we know that high quality early learning programs provide deep lasting learning opportunities that foster social emotional development and help set children on the path toward academic success including reading proficiency by the end of third grade. But there are few mentions of early learning when it comes to discussions of turning around struggling schools. While CIG guidance from the Department of Education does say that under the transformational model, the most flexible of the four models, districts may also implement full day kindergarten or pre-K programs in addition to required activities such as replacing the principal and using student growth data in evaluating teachers. But that's as far as the guidance goes when it comes to early learning. And we don't know whether schools or school districts are implementing those activities or other early learning activities as part of their turnaround efforts. The first look at the school performance data from hundreds of schools receiving CIG funds didn't provide much insight into those things either. And those were released in November. These data raised many questions. For example, the department noted that a large proportion of elementary schools saw student achievement gains in the first year of the CIG program when compared to middle and high schools. But we don't know how significant those gains really were and more importantly, we know little about what was done differently in those schools. Did access to early learning programs, full day kindergarten, pre-K third initiatives, early literacy programs or initiatives that focus on building executive function or social emotional skills affect student outcomes? Or an even simpler question, again, were early learning programs offered at all? More recently than with the no child left behind waivers, there's been a focus on improving the bottom 5% of schools. But again, the guidance on how to improve has really included the same types of models as a means for turning around schools. The early education initiative, we've suggested before that the department do more to encourage or require schools to direct school improvement and other federal dollars to support early learning. But it's unclear, as of yet, what barriers have kept the department from acting on those recommendations. Meanwhile, groups like the Coalition for Community Schools at the Institute for Educational Leadership have been working on how to build better linkages between community schools and early learning programs and we'll hear a little bit more about that later. Now, consider this scenario. If the federal government provided incentives or even required districts with persistently low performing elementary schools to improve early learning, superintendents would need to really start by identifying the numbers and the needs of preschoolers in their district, reaching out to community pre-K providers, collaborating with them on professional development, data collection, standards, and curriculum alignment, excuse me. Using a variety of funding sources, such as the ones we heard Roberta Rodriguez mentioned earlier, money from the school improvement grants, Title I funds, state pre-K dollars, childcare reimbursements, a lot other resources. School districts and community agencies could hire more qualified early childhood teachers and create seamless programs so that children receive solid funding, excuse me, solid learning experiences that build upon each other throughout the early grades. Think about how differently schools and districts would operate and look if efforts to improve struggling schools started here. Children and their parents would experience a smooth transition from pre-K into kindergarten and into each grade thereafter. A well rounded curriculum would be clearly sequenced making sense for children as they move from grade to grade. Principles potentially lead the school in a way that recognizes the importance of pre-K in the early grade, supporting joint professional development, pre-K third. Right from the beginning, kindergarten teachers might have more access to information about the kinds of pre-K experiences their students had and that would guide their planning and instruction. Teachers pre-K third might use information to find out where children are and collaborate on how to better meet their diverse needs of struggling and excelling children. And teachers instruction would reflect again where children are developmentally and teachers would be able to differentiate that to meet again students' individual needs. Building strong early learning and elementary school programs are an important first step in helping children to succeed throughout their schooling as they enter middle and high school. Today we are joined by representatives from three initiatives that are thinking about school improvement a little bit with this lens, focusing on early years and grades to improve elementary schools. We have four panelists with us today. One will be with us via Skype and I will introduce them in the order that they are speaking and they are seated in the front row. They'll come up and give their presentation and return and then we'll invite them all back up for question and answer to the table here. First up is Sam Ertwig, the director of school implementation at First School, a pre-K third school improvement initiative focused on improving the school experience of African-American Latino and low-income children. Sam will highlight First School's work in Lansing, Michigan. Next will be Lydia Carlos, Carlos Chief of Research and Innovation for Appletree Institute a network of early learning public charter schools in DC and she will talk about Appletree's partnership with the New School Venture Fund to implement its comprehensive instructional model every child ready in three under performing DC public charter schools. Lydia will be followed by Darlene Kamine, executive director of the Community Learning Center Institute in Cincinnati, Ohio. This is a nonprofit agency which is dedicated to the development of all schools as community learning schools in the city and she'll discuss Cincinnati's Community School Initiative and how sites are incorporating early learning programs. And finally, Craig Hockenberry, principal at Euler School will join us via Skype. Euler is a pre-K 12 school in Cincinnati and he'll discuss how the school's birth to pre-K early learning center is linked to the early grades. You can find each of their brief bios in the event handouts. If you're interested in learning more about our esteemed speakers and now let's get started with Sam Ertwig. Thank you. I'd like to thank Lisa and Laura and New America for inviting us here today to share with you some exciting things that are going on in the world of pre-K at the school implementation level. As Laura mentioned, we are a pre-K three school initiative. We started about three years ago. We began working with some partner schools in North Carolina and then we expanded a year later into working with some partner schools in Michigan. We use research to really guide our instruction and data as a springboard for a collaborative inquiry that we do with the teachers. We have our own data that we bring to the schools but we merge that certainly with the data that schools have. At the moment schools seem to be essentially overwhelmed with data and so we help them to kind of pinpoint what can be considered relevant data, what is really going to help them as they zero in to give their earliest learners the best start possible. We know and we fully recognize that the kind of change that we're hoping and expecting to see is deep and it doesn't happen rapidly. It's not about bringing a new program in a box in. This is about changing the conversations that teachers have. It's about having them really look at themselves and their students in a very different kind of way. And it needs to be sustained over time. So we stick with our schools. We basically work with them for a minimum of three years. We love teachers. Teachers are doing an amazing job despite some very overwhelming circumstances and under a lot of criticism and public pressures. But we find in every single school that we go into and we only work with the most challenging of schools. We only work with schools that have high minority, high poverty and low student success. So we're going into the most difficult challenging of schools and we see every day amazing, dedicated professionals who really are doing the very best that they know how to do. The problem is they're often lacking information about what early learners really need. And a lot of what they face in schools is very contradictory to what they learned in their teacher education program. So we try to bring some sanity and some guidance to all of that that's happening. And we really view leadership as broad base. We look at every teacher as a leader. We work with vertical teams of teachers in the schools from pre-K through third grade. And in many cases, in fact in most cases, I'm sad to say that it's the first time that the pre-K teachers and the kindergarten teachers have actually sat down and talked with one another about children despite the fact that they're in the very same buildings. So with all of that, what we do is we're very focused on research-based instructional practices and we have 10 instructional practices that we really help our teachers to understand in a deep way. Nothing up here is going to seem revolutionary or something that's new and different than what. I'm sure all of you who are educators know works for all students. However, the research is very clear that if any of these instructional strategies is missing for our most vulnerable children, it increases their chances of failure. It increases the chances that they're not going to get off to a great start. So we really begin working with our teachers around the three cultures, the culture of caring, the culture of competence, and the culture of excellence. And culture of caring, we know that a relationship with your teacher, with the adults that are with you through the learning process is critically important and without it, no learning is going to go on. We all know that the brain research shows very clearly that stress and anxiety block learning. So children have to feel comfortable. They have to feel that they can take a risk, that they can make a mistake, that all of these things are supported as part of the learning process. But just liking your kids and being nice isn't at all enough. Children really have to understand that they are valued for the individuals that they are, that when they come in and they have interests and they have questions and they have curiosities and that they're not just perfect little regimented soldiers, that's wonderful and that that's valued. So we really help teachers to delve much more deeply into what caring is all about. We also focus on the culture of competence, which as Roberto talked about this morning, this is where we really bring in a lot of the developmental science pieces. Children need to really have rich interactions with one another. They often learn more from one another than they will from us adults and have opportunities to learn how to self-regulate themselves. I know that one of the things that I saw recently was a study that showed that most adult problems are problems of self-regulation. So where is this learning happening? My best friend is a middle school teacher and she often gets great insights from conversations I have about young children's self-regulation as children are passing from into the high school years. So again, we have a strong emphasis on that. But minimum standards is not nearly enough for a child. We want every child to have the opportunity to fully excel, to fully reach their greatest potential. And the only way that that's going to happen is in a classroom that is really also focused on the culture of excellence. And the Common Core is very hopeful to us because we know that it supports these kind of things. The higher order thinking skills, children's rich conversation and questioning and being able to analyze. And all of this isn't just happening at the high school level. This needs to happen right from the moment a child comes into school. If they have to be in a quiet, just listening place for the first six years of their education, they're never going to be able to talk about their learning at later point in time. So we also bring to the table two different research instruments that we use to collect data. And one of them is called the class, which is the classroom assessment scoring system. And what it does is there are three different domains and 10 dimensions that measure classroom quality. It's a pre-K through third grade measure. It measures what is the emotional support in the classroom? What does the classroom organization look like? And what does the instructional support look like? And here is a sample data that is gotten from this instrument. And you can see that the first four are the ones that fall into the domain of emotional support. The red ones fall under classroom organization and the last three under instructional support. A one or a two is considered low quality. A three, four or five is considered to be average quality. And then six and seven is high quality. I have brought a very typical example of the data and you see that in no area is there high quality. And this data has been collected across the nation in thousands of classrooms. And this is a very typical situation of what we see. We see fairly decent positive climate. Negative climate is what you want to be low. So that's the only one on here that you want to be down low. But when it comes to teacher sensitivity and that regard for student perspective, that's where we really see a drop off in terms of the support for the students. The middle, the red ones, they tend to be the highest because teachers do seem to have a firm grasp on sort of that classroom organization aspect of things. However, they get these scores more because of themselves being organized, but to get really into the high scores is when you're putting that in the hands of the children as well. And then where we see absolutely across the board, the lowest is in terms of instructional support, which I don't know if all of you can read this, but concept development, quality of feedback and language modeling, three things that we know are so important in learning development that usually are, again, pretty much in the basement as far as what's happening in the classroom. The other instrument that we bring is our own instrument. It's called the First School Snapshot, and it's been around for about 15 years now. It's been used in multi-state studies. The latest iteration just came out and we have added a few codes. What this does is it records the minute-to-minute experience of the students in the classroom, and we have 41 different codes. I won't be able to get into all of them today because of time, but I did bring a couple of graphs that I'll show you. The teachers have really been very excited, enthusiastic, and receptive to the data that we bring as well as the research base, because, again, oftentimes this is not what they learned in their teacher education programs, particularly the developmental science pieces and the development of the social and emotional natures of children. And so we also bring very different data because the data that we bring is really from the student perspective of what's happening in the classroom, whereas mostly what they have been receiving is data on their personal experience. So here is just one thing with activity settings, and what you want is to see kind of a balance of activity settings, and again, I don't have the time to go into this, but you see a lot of whole group, which is pretty much the culture across education these days, very little small group, which is an instructional strategy that is the most effective, and you see a lot of time spent in basics, which is transition time, how much time children are changing subjects or going to and from specials, the cafeteria, waiting in line for food, all of those kind of things. So this is a pretty typical graph of what we see when we go into a school, and then when we have worked with teachers on intentional change, you see that it's dramatically different. There still is probably, and this teacher said, oh, I'm still having too much whole group time, but you see that there's a much better balance, and she reduced her basics from 23% down to 10%. So a lot more instructional time is captured in the day. Now you might not think that that's very significant, but one of the things that we found is when you lessen things that you don't want to see a lot of and you increase the things that you do want to see, the instructional time throughout the course of the year grows dramatically, and just a 3% change actually will translate to two more weeks of instructional time, because one of the things that happens is a school day is about six and a half hours long, but if you minus out about an hour for lunch and recess and you minus out an hour for transitions, which is a reasonable amount of time, 45 minutes for specials, you have about three and three quarter hours, in other words, 225 minutes of your day is all that's left for instructional time, so it translates to a lot. And then if you change something by 10%, that actually can give eight more weeks of instructional time, so that's nearly another quarter in a child's school experience. Another piece of our data is the teaching approaches. We see an overwhelming amount of didactic teaching, teachers talking, talking, trying to pour knowledge into students, but very, very little time for them to be engaged in the feedback loops, for them to be engaged in higher order, answering higher order questions, and no time on reflection. However, when we've worked with teachers, we see a dramatic shift, and this is just with them making intentional changes. This isn't with bringing in any kind of new packaged materials or anything else, this is just when they really see what it is that is honestly happening in their classroom and they start paying attention to it, you see dramatic changes. So, we started working with the Lansing School District. We had one partner school in Lansing, and we also had an individual working with us with our partner schools in Michigan, and she actually was named as the superintendent to the Lansing School District. Now, some people may say we were lucky, but we consider ourselves to be fortunate that a superintendent who had a vision about early Ed became the superintendent of this district. We also now have three other districts that we're working with, and none of those superintendents had anything to do with us originally. So, there's a lot of reasons why Lansing needed to restructure, and they're all pretty typical things that people see, and what happened was we worked with the superintendent to really lay a clear vision that was research-based, that had a long-term instructional vision and we've been contracted to work with them for three years. They restructured all of their schools, and they also looked at, they worked very hard with buy-in. So, they got their executive team on board, they had their board members were filled in on it. We did a lot of presentations to all the different aspects of the community, the newspaper, everyone across the board in Lansing got very excited because this was a very unique and different approach to problems that had been systemic for quite a long time, and so their new configuration is that they had to close a number of buildings, and so what they did is they turned 11 of them into pre-K through three schools, and then in kind of the outer lying areas, they still have a few that go beyond that, and then they have five schools that are grades four through six. We're using the snapshot with all of the pre-K through three classes, and we're using the class with the fourth, fifth, and sixth grade classes. We've just, we collected all the data with them, and we had a feedback session, and actually today is the first meeting after the teachers have had some time to sit with this data that they will be coming back together to decide what professional development they want to engage in. A lot of times we find that teachers already know the information collectively within themselves, they don't really need us to bring anything new to the table, they just need the permission to focus on it, but other times teachers recognize that they do need some new learning, or they need some reminder learning as is often the case, and so that's what we also bring to the table. So thank you so much for your time. Good morning, my name is Lydia Carlos, Chief of Research for Appletree Institute. I'll be sharing our efforts to erase the achievement gap before children enter kindergarten to drive elementary school improvement. We hear a lot about the achievement gap. It begins early and it's prevalent because many children today become from so-called disadvantaged households where, because of a variety of factors, they are not exposed to sufficient early language and literacy and vocabulary experiences to prepare them to enter preschool or kindergarten on par with their more advantaged peers. Without an effective early intervention, these children tend to fall behind early and experience difficulty in learning to read, which is a gateway skill. This early gap leads to remediation, higher rates of special education, greater attention, and later rates of dropping out, even incarceration. However, research shows that effective early childhood education can close the achievement gap for children and increase academic achievement, economic prosperity, and opportunities for success. Secretary Duncan argues that the K-12 system needs to get out of the catching up business and concentrate on educating students to high levels to ensure that American education is preparing a workforce that can compete in our global economy. The administration has provided a number of incentives for states and LEAs to improve early education and to better align early education with elementary school improvements through the Race to the Top Early Learning Challenge, Investing in Innovation, and the Current Head Start Recompetition. The District of Columbia provides an eye to the future, if you will, since it is one of the few state education agencies that provides robust levels of funding for three and four-year-olds through its uniform per student funding formula, the vehicle through which all public education is funded. The advantages are that early education providers receive a predictable public stream of funding of just under $15,000 per year per child that enables schools to implement high-quality, well-resourced early education programs. Washington, D.C. also has a strong charter schools program which combined with the funding and policy landscape that encourages innovation in early education created a wonderful testing ground and policy ecosystem for creating something different and more impactful for children in terms of early education. Appletree Institute won a Federal Investing in Education Investing in Innovation grant for every child ready in 2010 to document, codify, and catalog the curriculum, tools, training, and assessments we began developing with funding from two prior Early Reading First grants. We understood one of the real challenges to improving quality is the lack of curriculum or instructional programs for early education, especially for three-year-old children. What we began developing, evaluating, and improving in public charter, traditional public, and Head Start classrooms through that previous Early Reading First funding has been codified, implemented, and evaluated in 31 classrooms enrolling 640 students, many of whom are Washington, D.C.'s most vulnerable children. Since we knew from our own experience the value of having an instructional program that provided teachers with the supports they needed to be effective in providing engaging, high quality instruction in a warm and nurturing environment, we developed every child ready with the goal of creating fully exportable and adaptable curriculum, tools, training, and supports to help teachers beyond our own program educate young children more effectively. There's no silver bullet. People often look at improving education and think there's one human capital model, assessment system, or curriculum that will improve teaching and learning. With ECR, we looked at all the things our prior implementation and evaluation demonstrated, teachers needed to achieve great outcomes for children and have worked to create a coherent, connected system of resources. One of the key features of ECR is its online platform. We intentionally developed an online rather than paper based curriculum and resources so we could respond quickly to the needs and realities of teachers in the field and to allow for continuous improvement based on ongoing data analysis and program evaluation. Appletree's greatest advantage in working here in Washington DC, excuse me, is our research to practice model, which puts us in a unique position here at the intersection of research, policy, and practice. Appletree's instructional quality team, which I'm privileged to lead, concentrates on research, innovation, technical support, and program evaluation. Our partnership with Appletree Early Learning Public Charter Schools, which is akin to a lab school relationship, provides us ongoing collaborative experiences to implement programs, improve practice, collect feedback, and continuously improve our instructional model. Our evaluations to date show a strong positive effect from every child ready on children's school readiness. As an i3 development program, we are now planning ways to bring every child ready to scale so more children will benefit. Because we are located in DC, we also have the opportunity to highlight and amplify our accomplishments, outcomes, and lessons learned to audiences like you, which hopefully increases our likelihood of sharing our stories successfully and increasing the impact of our education innovation. This chart shows the impact that our instructional model, every child ready, is having on the children in Appletree's 31 Washington DC classrooms. Unfortunately, the yellow bell curve on the left is typical performance for a highly disadvantaged population, even at three years old. But look at the blue curve, which represents how our students achieve after two years in an evidence-based instructional program. The majority of children who are predominantly African American and or English language learners qualifying for free or reduced school lunch have higher vocabularies than the average American child of the same age, as measured by the test of preschool early literacy, a standardized norm-referenced assessment. Recently, Appletree contracted with the local research firm to collect and analyze available data on our alumni. We were excited to learn that Appletree graduates outperformed their peers in every year on every Dible's measure. Of note, by second grade, Appletree alumni scored nearly 70% higher than their peers in oral reading fluency. Equally as thrilling, none of Appletree's graduates had been retained in grade or identified for special education upon leaving our program. Through our current investing and innovation funding, we continue to implement longitudinal evaluation to analyze short and longer-term impacts for our students. Now I'd like to talk with you about an important way Appletree's evidence-based innovation is being leveraged for greater impact. New School's Venture Fund, a social impact investor, created an initiative called Accelerate DC in which charter schools that wanted to improve agreed to a series of interventions designed to help them become higher-performing. In spring 2012, Appletree was selected as a partner because of the strong outcomes we were achieving in our classrooms and our commitment to developing an exportable instructional model every child ready. In order to participate, the entire school had to buy in, including their boards, administrators, and instructional staff. Potential schools visited our classrooms, talked with Appletree staff, and observed some of our workshop opportunities to determine alignment with our model. Together, we developed a framework to support participating programs and implementing every child ready with a high degree of fidelity. I say together, because New School's program leaders have been integral to development, implementation, analysis, and refinement of the program since inception, and principal coach and teacher feedback at the school level continues to inform the work of our Accelerate DC project staff to improve our implementation in real time. Our goal is to provide an intensive professional development experience for leadership and staff so that participating schools can own ECR as quickly as possible. Appletree coaches work directly alongside campus-based coaches in a train-to-trainer framework to support better teaching and curriculum implementation in a gradual release model. Our vertical alignment work begins in February to ensure kindergarten teachers are equipped to receive students who have benefited from this model and to highlight ways preschool and pre-K teachers might tailor ECR to better support a coherent and comprehensive education program throughout the early years. Vertical alignment work will include standards review, cross-grade level observations, and developing criteria and processes for a student portfolio system to help children transition most effectively into kindergarten classrooms where teachers understand their students' performance on key readiness indicators even before children begin their first day of kindergarten. Every child-ready teachers are trained to understand and interpret all of our teacher quality tools and to reliably administer our student achievement measures while coaches and principals are trained to reliability on all of our project tools. Teachers participate in monthly observation, feedback, and modeling cycles with coaches on our attributes of effective teaching and targeted domains of the quality indicators. Three times per year classrooms are observed formally by external observers using the full quality indicators, LCO, and class observational tools and student achievement is formally assessed five times per year, baseline and outcome along with three progress monitoring waves. We use both process and outcome data to increase program effectiveness. Our professional development scope and sequence is updated twice per year. Using data from the previous year, a PD scope and sequence is developed to support teachers from August through January. Beginning in December and culminating in January after the second wave of student progress monitoring, project and school staff collaborate to develop and document PD plans for February through June using student and teacher quality data from the first half of each school year. Student data from across the 52 classrooms implementing ECR is also used to enhance and improve our online curriculum in areas where trends demonstrate children are making less than desired growth. An effect size of 0.2 is considered small but significant with an effect size of one being likened to a full school year of expected growth. We use three subtests of the phonological awareness literacy screening, letter ID, name writing, and letter sounds. On assessments such as the PALS, which have a low ceiling, the possible effect size growth is constrained by the points possible on the assessment and students baseline performance. Across campuses, children enter performing better on the letter ID subtest than on the name writing or letter sound subtest. So the smaller but still significant growth on letter ID in comparison to the other subtest is expected. ECR language and literacy and ECR math are project created tools validated against nationally normed measures of similar constructs and approved by the public charter school board for use in their new early childhood performance management framework. These standard spaced assessments provide teachers with data to immediately inform instruction and also give teachers an understanding of how their children are likely to perform on the standardized assessments used to validate the tools. All campuses demonstrated significant effect size growth after only seven to eight weeks between baseline in the first progress monitoring period. Across partner sites, classrooms have either maintained or increased quality as demonstrated by our quality indicators observational tool. Teachers and coaches used baseline observation data to develop action plans for areas of concern and participated in a targeted observation of an apple tree classroom whose teaching team demonstrated strong quality in that same area. Data from class and ELCO observations demonstrate similar trends. Moving forward, we hope to partner with additional early education providers in a variety of ways. We are encouraged because our professional development and training program was recently certified by the Office of the State Superintendent for Education to provide seed hours for participants. And as mentioned previously, our progress monitoring tools have been accepted by the PCSB for use in its early childhood framework, management framework. As we continuously improve our tools and resources, we continue to seek ways to increase our impact on research, policy, practice, and ultimately student achievement. Thank you to New School's Venture Fund and our partner schools for their investment of time and funding into Every Child Ready. And thank you to New America Foundation for the opportunity to highlight some of our early progress. Finally, thank you for your time this morning, which demonstrates your shared interest and improved opportunities for young children. We're excited to continue this work with you. Good morning. I'm Darling K. Mein. I am from Cincinnati, Ohio, the executive director of the Community Learning Center Institute and working in close association with the Coalition for Community Schools here in Washington, D.C. Some of you have, I have had the pleasure of meeting in Cincinnati and hope to see more of you there because to see what we're doing, I think does so much a better job than what Craig and I are going to be talking about this morning, but we're going to try to paint a picture for you. Basically what we're going to talk about is how you create a system that provides the conditions for learning that are necessary to get to the comprehensive development that Mr. Rodriguez was talking about earlier. We know that children can't learn if they are hungry, if they are without stable housing and so forth and so what we're really talking about is what is the whole package that allows us to move forward. I want to provide the context for the work that we did in Cincinnati so that you understand how it is that we are actually implementing our approach to the integration of early childhood with the community school model. We started as Sam talked about the situation in Lansing and I know many of you are very familiar. The starting point in Cincinnati in the late 90s was declining enrollment, white flight, the flight of the middle class. We in fact, at the time that we started working in about 1998, 1999, our situation in terms of racial segregation was worse than it had been on the day of Brown versus Board of Education. So we had gone from 1970, we had 90,000 students in Cincinnati Public and by 1999 we had 45,000 students. In 1970, which happens to be when I graduated from high school, I didn't really pay attention to this data at the time but it's meaningful to me as I place myself in history. And in 1970, we had 70% of the students in Cincinnati Public were middle class and above and white. In 1999, we had the mirror image, 70% were below the poverty level and minority students. So we had a significant, significant crisis and in addition to that, and as many of you know the expression from crisis comes opportunity or as one of our board members says, we hate to see a good crisis go to waste and so we really did take advantage of that situation and had a Supreme Court decision came down from the Supreme Court of Ohio which found that in addition to all the other factors that I just described, the condition of our physical facilities were so bad as to be unconstitutional that they deprived students of the constitutional guarantee for an adequate public education. So the Supreme Court ordered the building of new school buildings throughout the state of Ohio. There would be a match from the state that had to come from the match came from local bond levies. So this is very confusing. Craig's picture is right in front of me. Is that supposed to be there? He's on standby, okay. He can chime in whenever he hears the. So we had this opportunity then to build new buildings in Cincinnati but we had to go to the taxpayers and convince them to put in about 75% of a billion dollars of new school facility funding. Against the backdrop of what I just described to you in terms of the condition of schools in Cincinnati, you can imagine we hadn't passed a levy in long, long time. People just had lost their trust in the Cincinnati public schools. With all that having been said then, with this opportunity to build new buildings, our superintendent at the time, Stephen Adamaskey, who some of you may know because he's been in districts across the country, Jack Gilligan, who had been the former governor of Ohio and then in his retirement came on to the school board, came up with the idea, basically the starting point was we cannot go to the taxpayers and simply ask them to build new buildings, wrapping a new skin around the same product that we've had. So with that, they started to look at what would be transformational for the school system and for the city. There were three initiatives that really provided the incentive for us and gave us the launch into the work that we did. First of all, we were inspired because we were looking at buildings, we were inspired by Secretary Richard Riley, the Secretary of Education, as you all know, under President Clinton, to look at buildings as joint use facilities. So if we were going to build a school building, we were not going to build buildings in the same way that we had been using them, where they close at two o'clock, 1.45, in fact in Cincinnati, because we were so at that point in time without anything beyond the school day. There was no after-school programs, there were no services or supports or anything in the schools, basically teachers and books. And so kids were literally pushed off the playground to get onto the bus, chain goes up, school is over, and you have a giant taxpayer-funded building that really just irritated people, being most of the time unused and dark. And so the idea was, how are we going to use those buildings that we are now going to ask the taxpayers to pay for in a way that would really provide not only enrichment and additional support to the students in the school, but would also be an asset to the community. So whether that would be recreation, social, civic, cultural, art, whatever, that was what Secretary Riley inspired us to think about. The second part was a work by David Matthews at the Kettering Foundation, called Putting the Public Back in Public Education. So the concept really was, we knew that we had lost the trust of the community, we had lost the trust of the taxpayers, parents weren't sending their children to Cincinnati Public Schools in the way that they were, and the idea was, and as our superintendent at the time articulated, we were the ones that broke it, basically, Cincinnati Public Schools was perceived as the one that messed it all up. So even if we came up with a great idea, why would the public trust us? Why would they believe that we now had suddenly figured out how to make things work? And interestingly, we had gone through a period of about a decade where we tried one curriculum after another, one new approach to teaching after another, and they came with all kinds of promise, and they might have been perfectly fine educational approaches, but they missed all of the other pieces, starting with why would people trust enough to send their children back to Cincinnati Public, and where were all the supports that were gonna be necessary to make that curriculum really maximized. The third element, and certainly I think the most important for us was when Marty Blank came to Cincinnati at the beginning of the Coalition for Community Schools, and really talked about how these various ideas could come together, that through a process of working with the community, engaging the community in what their vision was for how to create the conditions for learning, how to create vitality in the neighborhood, using the building essentially as a hub for partnerships or as a joint use facility, and providing all the conditions for learning that would ensure that we had at least a better chance of being able to make success. So with that backdrop, that is how we began. In 2000, the commitment from Cincinnati Public Schools was to create, not in one school, not in a set of pilot schools, but completely district-wide, city-wide, when we went out to ask the taxpayers to provide the funding to rebuild these buildings, these were to be built as community learning centers, or as you know across the country, the term community school. We call them community learning centers in Cincinnati because in Ohio, community school means charter school. So community learning centers, if I slip into that language, that's the same thing as you know to be community school. But the idea basically was our promise to the community that every single school would be used in this way as a hub of partnerships that would create the conditions for learning, that would put all the same kinds of enrichments and supports that you had when you were children, that you would expect your children to have, everything from healthcare, to enrichment, to dancing and ballet, and after-school opportunities and adult education and a gathering place for the community and whatever it is that the community envisioned. That was the commitment right from the start from Cincinnati Public. It was not to be a poor school, a low-performing school. This was across the board, and we had some and continue to have schools that are doing very, very well. We have a high school that is always ranked in one of the top 50 in the United States, and it is for every school. So that we were not putting a big scarlet A and marking a school, meaning a community school, meaning it was somehow failing or low income. The other element of the starting point for Cincinnati Public was that it would be neighborhood by neighborhood community engagement, a facilitated process that involved the city, or the, excuse me, the people living in the neighborhood, as well as the school, to be able to plan for what their vision was for their particular school and what partnerships they wanted in that particular school. And there would be not only planning at the site level, but governance at the site level. What partnerships did they want, who they wanted to provide that. And finally, and I think the piece that's most significant from that starting point of Cincinnati Public was there would be no money from the CPS budget for that to occur. That right from the start, while the building was available for this joint use, all partnerships would be self-sustaining so that we wouldn't repeat what had happened that brought us to that crisis that we were in, that we wouldn't suddenly find ourselves in a situation where we got all this wonderful stuff going on and gave everybody excitement and promise, and then the grant runs out and that's the end of it. So the idea really was this was gonna be a hub of partnerships that had the opportunity to come in with free space, access to the students in the school, access to people in the neighborhood, location, very convenient, transportation is in a barrier, service providers and programs that came in, had a good captive audience of customers, and but there had to be sustainability by that partnership. So that's the launch and that's the context. Right out of the box in planning for these partnerships, we went neighborhood by neighborhood, worked for sometimes years at a time, and we heard some very unique things, but some we heard very, very commonly, the same kinds of things that people wanted, every neighborhood wanted mental health services, they wanted primary health services, after school programs, and so one of our board members said to us early in this process, how are you going to be sure that you have enough capacity? How are you going to be able to be sure that school number one and school number 60 are going to have the same access to quality care? How are you going to prevent what she called partner envy? And so we started another piece of the infrastructure that is what we call partnership networks to be able in the same way that we engaged communities to be able to plan and govern their schools as community learning centers. We went to all the providers in a particular area, all the mental health providers, all the primary providers, et cetera, and said look we have this opportunity, you can be co-located in a building, you don't have any overhead, you'll never have any overhead, all your dollars can be spent on program, you have 600 captive customers all the time and all the families around, does this appeal to you? But the catch is you have to be self-sustaining and there have to be shared outcomes, you have to live in this building as seamlessly as if you were in the part of the staff. What this then led to ultimately and most recently was the connection between early childhood and the rest of the curriculum and frankly the rest of everything else that we were trying to accomplish. We heard from several neighborhoods in the beginning we really, really need to be able to address our zero to five population. And that was kind of frankly lower on the list, we needed to get to things like health and mental health and those seemed to be easier to get to frankly. But it then became quite urgent that we really figure out what is this same approach to creating this partnership network that would align with what this infrastructure of community schools was all about. And we went to the providers in the community, we went to early childhood providers, daycare centers that were large, individual home providers and just started to try to figure out if you had the opportunity to live in the building with us. If you had the opportunity to be seamlessly integrated into the rest of what's going on in school, would that appeal to you? If we took care of all of your overhead and you never had to pay a cent in heat or anything else, would that appeal to you? And so what you're gonna hear here in a moment from Craig Hockenberry, the principal of Euler School is how that happened first in Euler, the creation of a zero to five program. At the same time, we know that that's not always what is needed in every single neighborhood and that the full zero to five enrollment is a very expensive approach. And again, not necessarily what each neighborhood would like to have. And so in other neighborhoods, we're actually working on creating, and this is gonna be basically over the entire district, every school in Cincinnati Public will be a hub for early childhood, zero to five, aligned with the whole rest of the curriculum and everything else that we're trying to accomplish to improve the quality of life in community. So that hub might be all the providers in a neighborhood coming together for parenting classes, the home providing that was talked about before. This school is now the home in many of the neighborhoods where these early home providers are coming, the home instruction. We have the healthcare is there, the mental health is there, the supports for parents, social services to help them get housing, et cetera. It's all there, the lending libraries, the toy libraries, the mommy and me classes, you name it. It's the place even if you're taking care of your child at home by yourself, you're a small home provider taking care of a few kids, you're a for-profit place. You can all come together for every school as a hub for zero to five programming to align and prepare students to enter kindergarten and be successful. And I wanna turn this over now to Craig Hockenberry who is the principal of Euler School. Many of you may have heard about him. He's in the press quite a bit. He is featured on a year-long series on National Public Radio Marketplace because of the extraordinary work that is going on in this really gold standard model for a community school. And he is available on Skype and I guess he's ready to go. Alrighty, thank you. This is my first Skype and I actually wasn't sure what it was until just the other day. So welcome, I'd like to thank everybody for giving me an opportunity to say a few words. Certainly not the expert, but I certainly have a lot of hours and passion and dedication into the school and into the whole community learning center concept, but it wasn't without the work of a ton of great, great, great, incredible people that have helped pull this whole idea together to make it something really special and it's got the eye of a lot of folks. So thanks again. Before I begin, I wanted just to, you know, again, just thank everybody and talk briefly about Euler. And I started at Euler 14 years ago as the assistant principal at Euler school. And when I arrived on campus, we were a kindergarten through the sixth grade school. And as I walked through the hall as my first day as assistant principal with my brand new shiny radio and office, and I walked into the side of every classroom and checked out all the teachers and was having such a great day. I was totally shocked at the amount of, or the lack of services for kids that needed so much. Nothing to deal with probably any of the services that our kids needed. And I watched the faces of our teachers who are supposed to be working on academics, instruction and raising students and accelerating student achievement and moving kids to an academic level that's acceptable to our society. I watched them totally pretty much leave here every day and sweat and tears and absolutely no issues, no answers at all. Euler is a pre-K to 12 school now, located in Lower Price Hill in Cincinnati. We're most famous for a wonderful novel that was written by our New York Times bestselling book by Jonathan Kozol entitled Savage and Equal. Jonathan Kozol was in order in the early 1990s about Euler, he had went all around the nation and talked about some of the most challenging neighborhoods in the United States and spent about 11 months researching Euler. He stayed here a very long time because he had never seen poverty like this. Euler, his historically poor white Appalachian community were a lot of families that migrated from parts of West Virginia, Kentucky, Pennsylvania when the coal mines closed in the urban areas of Cincinnati and they held root here. Many of the students that attend our school, grandparents, great-grandparents and great-great-grandparents all have gone to school here. So it's got a lot of history and a lot of culture and it's a very exciting and very unique place. We have about 802 kids preschool to the eighth grade and that's not including our infants, our toddlers. We have a preschool, which I'll talk about in a second that is not the same as any of our schools. We also have a GED program meeting that serves the adults. Over 30% of our school are students with disabilities, which I'm sure is the same with a lot of other city schools in the neighborhood. About 19.5% of our school population is homeless. Homeless meaning they have nowhere to sleep at night or they are doubled up with friends, families and relatives. And more than 90% of our kids qualify for free, we're doing a lot of things. The number yesterday was 91.5. The other 80 or so percent are families that have not filled out the form. So I will. I have one question for Craig, if you can hear me. John, I think we need to end the Skype. We try these experiments and we were so happy to have Craig here, but I know it's difficult for our audience here to listen as well as our audience online. So if I could ask Darlene to just come up and if you could just talk quickly about the Early Childhood Center. And again, thank you Craig for taking time from your morning to join us. Okay, well, as Craig said, the starting point for the Euler School, it's located in a very unusual demographic and urban appellation population which has significant poverty and that does not make it unusual necessarily, but because of the culture of this community, they don't leave the neighborhood. And the tradition really was to drop out after sixth grade, eighth grade, ultimately when the school went to eighth grade and then the kids were done, they graduated, they put a corsage, they marched down the aisle and they're finished. And then some come back at GED, but that was all in the neighborhood. And so the adult illiteracy rate when we started work in this community in 2002 of people over the age of 25 was the highest in the United States. The mobility is very high, people moving back and forth between Lower Price Hill and Kentucky and so all of the conditions that would create readiness for kindergarten were just not there. And we found when we were working with this school population, children who came to school didn't know their name, didn't ever held a pencil in their hands, no books, had no books in the home, had no idea how to hold a book. And so we were making great progress in this school, in the development of a school as a community school. We had worked very hard as part of the community engagement process that I was talking about to add a high school at that school. And so we were able to keep people in the neighborhood, add the high school, see kids graduating from high school, had all kinds of conditions for learning. From a clinic to enrichment and hundreds of tutors and wonderful, wonderful things. But it became very, very clear that we were working against all odds, that as Craig would have said, the high school teachers were blaming the middle school teachers who were blaming the elementary school teachers who said, well, wait a minute, it's because the kids are not ready for kindergarten. And so for those of you who are familiar with the kindergarten readiness crawl scores, as we call them, literacy was the lowest by far across the district. And it became very clear in the engagement process that is ongoing between the school and the community that we absolutely had to have an early childhood program. And that it couldn't start at three or four. One sort of side note is there is a Head Start program in that school, just as Craig said, there is a Head Start classroom. But the urban appellation population in that community, and again, because of literacy issues, wasn't coming to Cincinnati Public to sign up early enough to get their kids in the Head Start seats that were in that school. So kids were coming from other neighborhoods to the Head Start program, then going back out to their neighborhoods. So that wasn't really helpful to the overall model of creating a community school and engaging the families and so forth. So we really just were determined as we are with the development of all these partnerships to give kids a real start. So that we weren't working always behind the eight ball. And Craig has hosts quite a few tours and one day happened to have a tour with a man who happens to be on my board and is the family principal in a small family foundation that is very well resourced. Craig didn't have an idea as to who this guy was other than he was a member of my board. He's a wonderful, wonderful man who happens to be a professor of English. And he asked Craig, is there something that you really think would make the difference? And immediately Craig said yes, we have been dreaming about having an early childhood program. And so we received from that foundation, unsolicited basically, enough funding to be able to allow us to take what was an unused space in the existing school and create in a partnership with a 501C3, a non-profit early childhood agency in Cincinnati. A zero to five program, 42 students are enrolled in this program. We have infants, toddlers and preschoolers, just as Craig said, they are students who are from, the children who are from the community. And I think what's most significant about this, just to add a word that I think Craig would have addressed, we worked with a team of about 25 people for one year to be able to figure out what would make us successful on day one. How would we really open the doors and make sure that this was a self-sustaining program? How would we make sure that we had all those voucher issues taken care of? How would we be sure that all of the other partners that were in the building, the school-based health centers that typically were starting at five, mental health that was typically starting at five, that all of those other kinds, the parents were engaged, that parents were the ones who were out there in the community saying, this is coming, not just, oh, all of a sudden there's this program, but this is coming, we're excited, we're part of the planning for it, they speak our language, they're sensitive to who we are and what our culture is. And so we worked for an entire year to make sure that everything really aligned, not only with the curriculum, but with what it is that the parents and the community really wanted. We opened those doors full and have stayed full with the same constant population. In addition, parents are very, very, there's a living room atmosphere there, parents are encouraged and engaged in the program. And again, as I said a few moments ago, this is also a hub for all zero to five, whether you're in a program, in-home provider, or you're home with grandma, this is a place that you can literally come every day if you like and have all kinds of other supports, even if your children are not enrolled. It is completely aligned with curriculum and the whole rest of the transition into kindergarten. And so that's the story of the Oiler Early Childhood Program. Thank you. Thank you, Darlene. And now I'd like to invite all of our panelists up to the table and Claire will let you know where you're gonna be sitting. And as is often the case with these events, there's never enough time for questions. We have these great presentations and I myself have several questions, but I'm just gonna curb those to one. And then we can turn it over to get some of your great questions answered. And just so you know, we do have Craig on the phone, so if you have a question that he can answer as well, hopefully he'll be able to do that. So I just like to ask each of you, we've talked about school turnaround and school improvement, and specifically the Federal Government School Improvement Grant Program. And so thinking about what your work and thinking about that program, how could it be changed to encourage school districts? Do you think to explore more specifically pre-K third strategies like yours and others? If you just each could go and keep your, I know this is gonna be difficult, but try to keep your answer to just a sentence or two, one word would be great as well. Okay, well I guess I'll start. I'll just say one thing is that what I'd really like to see is funding across the divide. I have numerous examples of how that is not currently happening. And so I think that if we really believe that the pre-K three continuum is important, we have got to really merge those at the funding level. Darlene? I agree. I think making it not only just for low income kids as well, but making sure that we have early childhood and full day kindergarten is just a natural progression of what school is all about and incentivize that from the federal level on down. Lydia? So with only one sentence, I will say that SIG currently allows for extended learning and turnaround, but does not allow for early childhood education. So I would suggest that SIG be updated to include early childhood education as one of the priorities. And Craig, if you're online, do you have anything to add? I guess, can you hear me? Yep. Kind of. Kind of. I apologize about that, but if we had funding, it would be to create early-internet programs across the nation and get through our preschool programs that still struggle badly when they get to kindergarten, but at the end of the year, and others, not just at older and in poverty neighborhoods, but across the nation, should be mandatory for kids to complete these types of programs before they come in. Then we're not playing catch-up for three years when they take the big test at third grade and everybody's pointing their fingers about what's wrong and what we did wrong. Thanks, Craig. Okay. Now, Claire is going to get our microphone ready and she'll be coming around, but first, before we take full audience questions, I'd like to just really briefly, in a minute or two, Kwayce, could you talk a little bit about the Linkages Program? We think about what Darlene just shared in terms of the Community Learning Center's initiative taking advantage of really best practice in early childhood education and transition and alignment kinds of activities. Cincinnati represents one of about 65 comprehensive systemic initiatives around the country that are really trying to do community schools, not necessarily in the same way that Cincinnati is, but in what they represent is a collaborative table, a deep commitment to shared governance, partnership, multiple partners, and et cetera. And so what we've tried to do through Linkages, essentially, is crack this difficult nut around how you actually take some of the best thinking as expressed by First School, for example, in Appletree this morning and create a context where people actually use that information to actually operationalize it locally. And so what Cincinnati has been able to do in our other Linkages places, which represent really kind of mature community schools initiatives, is really take advantage of what we understand as best practice in research and et cetera, and because they already have a collaborative context because they already have a kind of a commitment across sector to really address all of the conditions for learning when they were ready to really be intentional about early childhood. They had an easier context to kind of take advantage of that. And I would ask Darlene to talk a little bit about that because we talked about the specific Euler example, but I know there are how many 33 community schools, I don't know how many of which are elementary schools in Cincinnati, but the context, and now that you've kind of gotten your feet wet, the plan going forward for that collaborative team to really expand throughout all of Cincinnati's elementary schools. Yeah, well, the idea of this, as I was mentioning before, this partnership network where we have all of the early childhood providers, whether they're home providers or centers, but the idea is that curriculum is really looked at relative to what would be the expectation for child entering kindergarten ready. We have what's now called a summer bridge program for kindergartners that happens in the school that's based on the curriculum that they'll be prepared for and children from the neighborhood are able to attend that program in the summer time before entering kindergarten and we've seen tremendous turnaround, but I think one of the things that Quasie and the Coalition for Community Schools has really highlighted for us is that we have the infrastructure. You know, those schools and those programs in the curriculum are great, but you need somebody to be able to go out into the neighborhood and begin to develop, again, a trust with people who haven't yet been in school. They may not even think that they need or know what it is that we're talking about in terms of early childhood education if these are parents or grandparents who are taking care of their kids. You also have all of the other kinds of issues that Craig was talking about before. What about the healthcare of the children? What about the healthcare of the moms? What about children whose behavior is so difficult that they're headed for an IEP, they're headed for a lifetime of special ed, but in that zero to five conditions for learning that we talk about in community schools and linkages, we have mental health people that are part of those community schools that can work with families and work with kids to be able to manage some behaviors that over and over again result in the child being able to enter kindergarten without all of that. And then all of those other kinds of things, you know, if we really expect a desegregation socioeconomically, another thing that happens in those linkages is the opportunity some kids take Suzuki violin at three. All kids should have the opportunity to take Suzuki violin at three. And so all of those things that happen in that connection between the school and the community, and now we're talking about the zero to five community, really, really doesn't, the key element that I didn't mention, and many of you know if you know community school work, there's an infrastructure. There's somebody called a resource coordinator or a hub director or whatever it is that you call it in your community. We really look to them as chief operating officers who are constantly, constantly out there trying to bridge the divide between schools and the zero to five population. So all of those linkages are really, really critical in the work that the coalition is doing across the country and that we have followed in their example in applying in Cincinnati. Thanks, Darlene. Okay, questions from the audience? No questions? Oh, way in the back. And if you could just introduce yourself in your organization. Sure, Lori Connors, Tadros, new project director for the Center on Enhancing Early Learning Outcomes that is recently funded by the Department of Education and we're charged with building SEA capacity to support birth through third grade programs and services leading to improved children's outcomes. So my question is for the folks in the local district, Cincinnati, is what would be helpful from the SEA so that your efforts at the district level and in the community of Cincinnati would be either, would be both supported and perhaps sustained and scaled up to other districts? Craig, did you hear that question? Yeah, I did. Can you hear me? So far. Okay, so far. Luckily, seeing me, that's good. The way I could best answer the question, probably a million different ways, but we need to take a multifaceted approach to educating our students' grades pre-school all the way to the third grade. We have to deal with all the high level of abuse that's going on, neglect and the violence that is in the community. We need to address the extreme high mobility, not Cincinnati, but I'm certain it's around 50% of our kids are in, out, in, out, in, out of our school all the time. And we're accountable for all of those students, no matter if they've been raped, no matter if they've been abused sexually. Craig, I'm gonna, we're losing you. Darling, if you could just finish his thought, that would be, I know you know what he's thinking. Where he's going? Well, I think the short answer really is just to help make the opportunity for pre-school accessible across the board. We still have to do a lot of gymnastics, if you will, to be able to make sure that people are eligible through the voucher system. And that is still, it is gymnastics. So I think we just wanna make sure that we have access and all of the kinds of things that would bridge if it's in the short term existing systems so that, you know, everything works together to be sure that we've got access for everybody. That's the most important thing. Thank you. Other questions? Up here in the middle in the blue shirt. Hi, I'm Marcia Semmel from the Institute of Museum and Library Services, which is a small federal agency where we're now tackling our early learning in our various institutions. And actually, I lived in Cincinnati from 1970 to 1979. So it's sad for me to hear about what has happened, but it makes me happy now. But it's all cool now, which is great. That air-trimmer here, that's pretty good. And we've done the riverfront too, it's wonderful, come visit. I know, I know. Actually, I worked at the Taft Museum. Oh, great. But my question really has to do with those institutions that might have other physical structures who are in your institution. Of course, we know about the ubiquity really of libraries and things like that. So you alluded to it a little bit, Darlene, in your remarks, but I wonder if you could expand on that. Yes. Actually, I have something very specific to respond to you about. Again, when I talked about each school comes up with its own vision, looking at existing resources, reallocating resources so that we are looking at self-sustaining. We are working with a community that has a PIDEA program. And PIDEA is a very, very good approach. It's a very well-researched and best practices and all that kind of stuff. But it wasn't drawing customers, basically. And so in the planning process, as we looked at all the various other options, the community, the school and community said, no, you know what, this is pretty good. But in order to really have experiential learning, we need to be able to take our kids to museums and those kinds of institutions and really use hands-on. The classroom doesn't always have to be a table in a building, it can be at the museum. And lo and behold, we now have a museum school with 14 museums that are partnered. The resource coordinator, remember I mentioned before the sort of chief operating officer of a community school is from the Art Museum, the Cincinnati Art Museum. And the idea is to thread all of the museum world into the curriculum. When you come to a certain place in the curriculum, there is the museum. And that is intended to go all the way down, again, zero to five and all the way up on the other end, all the way into adults and so forth and so on because museums are saying, we need to connect the school and the community. Now we're not asking the Art Museum to close its shop and move into the school. But there are certain things that they can do in terms of programming, bringing people down to the museum, making it a much more organic part of the way that you are educating kids and families and community. And so eventually you are driving more customers to the institution while you're also coming out of your walls. You know, we kept finding that museums do these programs in a box or there's one Saturday and that's not organic enough to be able to create the culture that you're just going to naturally go down to the museum because it's part of what you do. So I hope that answers, is that what? Okay, another reason for you to come to Cincinnati. Are there questions? Way in the back? There's two in the back, there's one on that end and one on that end, so maybe they don't. Hi, Sun Sia Coleman with Senator Harkin on the help committee. And I heard one response about what we can do at the federal level around SIG, but were there any other specific things that we could do to make your job easier? Great question. Well, I think that, you know, for me, that I feel like we, that the federal government could in any way, shape or form be much more explicit about brain research and developmental science for children, that we really need to get that word out in a big and major way about the impact that it has upon teaching and learning. And, you know, right now, whether that's included at the teacher education programs or teacher certification programs for leaders as well. You know, most principals receive a, basically a K-12, you know, certification. They often don't have any kind of foundation in the early learning trajectory. So anyway, that, again, the brain research and developmental science can really, the word be spread and gotten out there and valued, that the importance of that is really being hit home. I think that would do a lot. I agree with Sam and would also say that it's important that we focus on outcomes and incentivizing schools and districts to really focus on partnering with early childhood programs that are producing strong outcomes for children so that children are ready to really receive and maximize the learning that's happening in K and up. And I'll add something that's a little specific, again, looking at conditions for learning. One of the things that we know, because we're looking at every aspect of the child that is a bit overlooked, I think, is the oral health care. So the wisdom of the last generation of dentists was that you bring your child to the dentist when they're eight, and then it became three. And it's really, according to the American Pediatric Association, it's one. And we know that 40% of children are entering kindergarten with decay. And it's severe. And so, again, how do you get to learning if you're in pain? How do you get to accomplish any of the great things that the curriculum offer if you have, just imagine what that feels like. We had a child because we have the first vision center in the United States at Euler School who were able to really not just do a screening, but a comprehensive exam. And we found a second grader who was blind in one eye. And that blindness was from the dental decay that had started to impact the eye tissue. There isn't access to oral health care in the way that you do with your own children. Clinics usually have a very long waiting list. And again, pediatric dentistry is not something that's high in the list. So the federal government and state governments have done great job in saying, you've got to be screened for this, this, and this by the time you enter kindergarten. Oral health care isn't necessarily one of those. So not just screening, but really being able to push treatment, prevention, all of those kinds of things in the 0 to 5 population. So that we are creating another really important condition for learning. I know there was another question in the back there. Claire, did you see who had their hand? Thank you. Louise Wiener, Learning and Leadership in Families. If there's a single theme today, it seems to me it's a combination of intentionality about what people are doing. I said single, and I'm already going to the three. But intentionality, it's creative use of research, and it's creative use of resources. One of the pieces of research that I haven't heard anything about is that there's a lot of focus on chronic absence now and the importance of good attendance habits from the outside of school. And I wonder the extent to which any of the programs are focused on an intentional approach to improving attendance. Sure. At first school, that's one of the pieces of data that we ask the schools to bring to the table because we have very good statistics on how very important children being in school is. So that is something that we do focus on. And at Appletree and with our partner schools, we ask for those data throughout the year so that we can run analyses and give parents back information on how attendance is impacting their children's performance, but also starting with historical knowledge that we have within our own program, how students who attend more achieve more. And again, the community school model gives us an opportunity to look at the data, track what's going on, but then pull together the partners to really figure out child by child, why is this child not coming? We will go to the house. We will figure out is it health care? Is there something going on with the parents? Is it transportation? So that resource coordinator, again, and the infrastructure allows us to pull the partners that we have to deploy against whatever the particulars are. And I think that that is where we'll wrap up today. Thank you so much for coming in and hearing about three initiatives that are all working to turn around schools. Thank you. Have a great rest of your day.