 Good morning, everyone. Thank you for joining us. My name is Jessica Cartichon. I'm the Director of Federal Policy in the Washington, D.C. Office of the Learning Policy Institute, where we conduct and communicate independent high quality research to improve education policy and practices in ways that support equitable and empowering learning for each and every child. Thank you very much for your time in attending the briefing on performance assessments and opportunity to advance educational equity and transform teaching and learning. We'd like to thank Senator Hasen and her wonderful staff, including Brittany Weaver, for sponsoring this event. The senator will be joining us later on, so we will make sure that we will stop and do a formal introduction and welcome her and she'll provide some remarks as well. Also, we have a PowerPoint presentation that will be posted on our website, so as we go through it, no need to take notes, we'll make sure that it's available and sent to everyone who's attended afterwards. So we're going to get started and move right into this, so I'd like to introduce Linda Darling Hammond, our CEO and President of the Learning Policy Institute, to present and then we'll move into a moderated discussion and then take questions from you all. I can't tell that Jessica grew up and taught in New York City. She's got the pace. We are delighted to be here. There's a long line of security, so I know that people will continue to join us as we get started this morning. And this is a conversation that comes around and goes around and has come back again, this conversation about performance assessments and why they are essential for 21st century learning. There's actually been some federal policy advance on this question, a lot of work going on in the states right now and in higher education as well. And we're here to bring you up to speed on all of that. I'm going to go very quickly through a few points and again, as Jessica said, you can get the PowerPoint on the web, so don't worry about keeping track of all the details, but I just want to give an overview quickly of why we continue to return to this question of what the nature of assessment is and why it's so important to evolve assessments to measure 21st century learning. Many of you know that over really a couple of decades, the demand for complex communications and expert thinking skills has been increasing, the demand for routine cognitive and manual skills has been decreasing. We saw a lot of the political effects of that in the last election where there was a lot of talk about workers who have felt left behind by the economy as things are being digitized. And as this notes, the dilemma of schools is that the skills that are easiest to teach are those that are also the easiest to outsource, digitize and automate. And we're seeing the effects of that. I live in Silicon Valley where driverless cars are driving around in my neighborhood. We will see a huge shift in the nature of jobs available. The ones that are available and pay good wages require complex thinking. Right up the street from me at Google, it used to be the fact that when you applied for a job you would provide your transcript and they'd look at your grades and they'd look at your test scores and they actually were very diligent about monitoring all of the data they were collecting. And they found at a moment in time that none of those things, test scores that people were bringing in with them and GPAs predicted success at Google. So they don't use those data anymore when they're hiring. If you've ever seen the movie The Internship, I don't know if it's a couple of years old now, where they put people in these tasks that they need to do with others. In fact, the way that you get hired at Google is that they try to understand your learning ability. Can you take a problem, find resources, weigh in balance those resources, work with a team, come up with a solution, test your solution and figure out whether in fact it's going to work. That's a very different thing than what we've been focusing on for much of the 20th century in terms of transmitting information that people will then just apply and regurgitate on a test. In fact, there's been a huge growth in knowledge. Technology knowledge is doubling every 11 months so that our young people will have to work in jobs that use knowledge that hasn't been invented yet with technologies that haven't been designed yet, solving big problems that we have not managed to solve. If we were going to teach for learning ability, we would be teaching kids to transfer and apply their knowledge, analyze and evaluate, weigh in balance, take initiative, find and use resources, self-manage and learn to learn on their own. So what kind of assessment does that call for? We're familiar with the sort of leaning over the scantron, you know, pick one answer out of five. But if you went to Google and they asked you a question, you said, what are my five choices? That would be the end of your interview. In fact, picking one answer out of five is not what anybody actually does, particularly in the world of work today. Or we have assessments, as we do in some states and some countries, many countries, where kids are actually performing investigations and inquiries and writing up their findings and having those evaluated and scored as part of the way that they both learn and are evaluated. Clearly in the century that we're now in and in the economy we're in, higher order skills are needed. Educators in the audience will recognize Bloom's taxonomy of skills. At the bottom is just recalling and recognizing knowledge. At the top are skills like evaluating and synthesizing and analyzing. But most U.S. tests have focused on lower level skills, especially since 2000. Once NCLB was passed, state tests actually became mostly multiple choice. A lot of states had had performance assessments in the 1990s. States phased them out both due to cost and to the way the law was regulated by the administration at that time, which did not approve most of the performance assessment programs that states had in place. In fact, some states actually sued the federal government to try to maintain their performance assessments in science and other subjects. Connecticut was one of those. Kentucky fought that battle for a long time. What they were giving up was what other countries have been doing and moving forward to advance their capacity to teach higher order thinking skills. Rand looked at state tests in 2014. Only 2% of the math items and 20% of the ELA items assessed higher order skills. So we were really driving a recognition and transmission curriculum. Here's an old California test item. The CSTs were the California Standards Tests. You might think that it would be unfair for me to give you this question without giving you the passage that it refers to. It says which of the following statements from the passage supports the author's conclusion that carrier pigeons sometimes had a dangerous job. But if you had learned to take tests as many students did, you could simply find out that in answer C, it tells you that the pigeon was wounded. So that must have been what made it a dangerous job. You don't really have to read the passage to get the right answer. You just have to find the right answer out of the ones provided. During that era, many teachers were saying that testing was undermining good teaching and 45% said that testing made them consider leaving the profession. This is towards the end of the NCLB era. One Texas teacher said on a survey, I've seen more students who can pass the test but cannot apply the skills to anything if it's not in the test format. As for higher quality teaching, I'm not sure I would call it that. So a lot of concern about the nature of organizing instruction around the format of the tests that were predominantly in use at that time. When ESSA was passed, states were invited to rethink assessment. It calls for the assessment of higher order skills, invites the use of projects performance assessments and portfolios. Learning Policy Institute did a publication with the chief state school officers on how states could design models for assessment systems that really upgrade the capacity to evaluate higher order skills. We do see performance assessments in many other areas of life. You'll recognize the driving test. We don't want people on the road just having taken the written test for driving, right? We want them to do that thing where they get in the car with the driver and go around and turn left and so on. Now the standards are higher on the east coast than on the west coast because on the east coast you have to parallel park. We don't have to do that on the west coast. There's a lot more land and we can just drive into a parking place. So there are different standards but it does give you an authentic representation of whether people can drive. Same thing is true when you take an eye exam. It's true in medical licensing where doctors have to demonstrate that they can diagnose a patient and figure out what to do. In engineering exams they have to demonstrate that they can design a building that is safe and so on. So performance assessments are not unusual in society as a whole. And in other countries, as I've noted, they're very widespread. If you want to Singapore, Hong Kong, Australia, the UK, the science assessment would have students involved in identifying a problem, designing an experiment, conducting it, collecting data, evaluating it and writing it up like a small science journal article. And so that's what kids in many parts of the world are doing that is helping them become the scientists and the technologists of the future. While in our country many kids have been memorizing facts and bubbling them in and then forgetting those facts and not knowing how to do science. So things are changing. Fifteen states are using the smarter balanced assessments that were designed in the last few years. And to contrast it to the task I showed earlier, here's a research task, a performance task on that assessment, which asks kids to pretend they are the chief of staff for a US congresswoman. Nuclear power plant is being proposed for the state. You have to go online, figure out the pros and cons of nuclear power and write a memo for the congresswoman. And the next part of the prompt, the congresswoman says, well, I don't really have time to read all that. Please just write me a speech that I can take a stand on what my position is and contend with the other point of view. That's a much more authentic kind of task that involves students in thinking and performing a critical analysis of an issue. And one that responds to what professors like myself across the country have been worried about, which is that kids often come unprepared to write and think deeply and analyze because they have been just choosing one answer out of five. We do have other performance assessments. The AP now has a new capstone portfolio course and assessment, IB exams, state assessments in the 1990s. But there are still some states today that have our rebooting performance assessments along with the Smarter Balanced Test. There are local graduation portfolios and many school networks and districts across the country and some states as well. And then there are teacher portfolios that are being used now for licensure in 17 states across the country as well as in the national board. So we know a lot about how to do this. We're just not doing it very widely. But there are some new opportunities. 26 states are now meeting in a state performance assessment learning community to develop performance assessments in science and other subjects. New Hampshire and Louisiana have both stepped up to launch new approaches under the ESSA new pilot authority. We have an expert from New Hampshire here to tell us more about that. States can continue to apply for the pilot in future rounds. In the New Hampshire plan, there is a mix of local performance assessments and common tasks as well as occasional uses of the Smarter Balanced Standardized Test that together paint a picture of what students know and can do. And that's part of what makes it able to address the issues of reliability, validity, and efficiency. And I'm not going to give you a psychometric lecture. You'll be pleased to know. But I will point out that we do know a lot about how to create comparable and valid assessments by carefully designing the tasks. How to have reliable scoring systems that are based on common rubrics and training for teachers who are scoring in moderation and auditing of those scores. We have examples of places where we can get more than 90% reliability in the scoring of performance tasks. We do have methods for ensuring fairness using universal design and developing tasks and careful reviewing and piloting of the tasks. And we do all that in some places because we've found that performance assessments do develop critical thinking and performance abilities. Students who take these assessments do as well on traditional tests and better on assessments of higher order thinking skills. They provide information to inform teaching. They improve the quality and the equity of instruction. And this is key because if kids across an entire district or state are all engaged in those science inquiries, for example, that are part of the assessment system, it means that we're not restricting that kind of instruction only to a few kids who got lucky and leaving everyone else to answer the chapters at the end of the book. We're actually infusing that instruction across all classrooms. And that's an important equity move because we know there's great curriculum inequality in this country in what kids get access to. And we need all kids to have a thinking curriculum if they're going to be part of a thinking economy. It helps students and teachers internalize standards as they are involved in the work and in the scoring and the feedback. And that means that carries forward as to how they judge and improve their own work later. And then, of course, it prepares students for the demands of college and work. We've found that not only do we develop a lot of cognitive, higher order skills through these kinds of assessments, but also social and emotional skills. Things like the ability to self-manage and be resilient and have a growth mindset when you revise your work. And those carry you into life. In fact, they have more predictive power for how you do later in life than the score that you might get on a single test. So we're now thinking about how to use this work in higher education admissions. There's a project called Reimagining College Access that David Hawkins, who we'll hear more from in a few minutes, is part of, along with quite a number of school leaders from many of these states, like New Hampshire and others, as well as admissions officers, registrars, faculty and presidents organizations to create digital portfolios that can go with kids to school, take their work to college with them, and portfolio recognition systems. Because colleges are looking for ways to know more about what kids can do that's really college ready. 900 colleges plus have made traditional tests optional for college admissions, and they're looking for ways that they think will be more valid to help them understand what kids can do to diversify admissions to college and to allow placement and advisement to be based on what students' accomplishments are. You can imagine a digital portfolio where an admissions counselor can look for 10 minutes at the summary statement with the usual GPA and college and career ready test score information and so on, but also has a little video clip of the student presenting their portfolio, perhaps a short essay, on a table of contents that when they want to and need to, they can dive into to see the student's work. So we're going to talk this morning about what we can do to continue the path to 21st century learning. We sort of got off that path for a period of time and the country is trying to get back on it, and we have a wonderful group of panelists who are going to help us explore this from many different dimensions. Thank you. I'm going to shift over here and introduce our panel. We have first Ellen Hume Howard is the Executive Director of the New Hampshire Learning Initiative. You can wave Ellen, which assists New Hampshire schools in deepening their innovative practices and improving learning. She's also worked as the Director of Curriculum for the Sanborn Regional School District, guiding the nation's research design and implementation of their K-12 competency based learning system. She'll be followed in our conversation by David Hawkins, who is the Executive Director for Educational Content and Policy for the National Association for College Admissions Counseling, which represents more than 15,000 high school counselors and college admissions officers throughout the U.S. and the world. And NACAC, as it's fondly known, is devoted to making the transition between high school and post-secondary education equitable, transparent, and fair. We'll then hear from Nicole Dooley, who serves as the Policy Counsel with the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund. Before joining LDF, Nicole was an attorney in the D.C. Metro Regional Office of the Department of Education Office for Civil Rights, filing and investigating systemic complaints concerning students pushed out of school rather than being provided with educational services. And then Lindsay Jones is the Vice President, Chief Policy and I Advocacy Officer for the National Center for Learning Disabilities, and they work to advance government policies that support the success of individuals with learning and attention issues in school at work and in life. She also works closely with their grassroots network of committed parents. So welcome to this wonderful panel, and I want to kick off right away with Ellen, who comes to us from New Hampshire. New Hampshire has been at the forefront of performance assessments. So tell us a little bit, Ellen, about what New Hampshire is doing and why this has been a priority for the state. New Hampshire actually got off the ground with working with performance assessment first by thinking about competency education. We were very lucky to have leaders at our DOE who were strategic and very careful about bringing in competency education through policy at the state level and also through the levels of support that they created at the state level. Once we had our competency education work in place, it became very clear that performance assessment was going to play a key role in how students would be assessed back in their districts. Performance assessment asks students to apply and analyze and do all the things that demonstrate competency. At the same time, we were talking about what would it look like, how could it be different for us as far as accountability in our state and the two ideas sort of merged together. New Hampshire designed an accountability system, as Linda pointed out, that's a blend of best practice and best thinking around what would be the best assessment to inform teachers about their students and their learning. So at every step of the design of our PACE project performance assessment for competency education and accountability, teachers had a role in talking about when would be the best time to take a standardized test, third grade maybe, for reading, or fourth grade for math, or eighth grade for both. So teachers informed the common sense approach to when these assessments would take place. And they also, as districts became involved, and there are currently 23 districts in the state of New Hampshire, we only have 87 SAUs, I know, we're tiny. 23 districts are involved, 364 teachers are involved in task development, 13,000 students are impacted in our fourth year of our pilot. Districts who joined made a commitment to have reciprocal accountability to take ownership for not only participating in the task development at a high level, but also to take that learning back to their districts and to create those assessments back in their local districts and in their classrooms of the same high quality. One of the components of PACE that's somewhat misunderstood is it's not just the task that's scored. For these districts who took on this work, it's the body of work that a student does all year that becomes the indicator of their competency and their accountability. This is a huge commitment on behalf of the student and also the teacher to put this package together, but it's been so well received by our districts. We have 15 districts wanting to come into PACE in the next year. It's a nice balance to being able to educate students in a sensible way without having testing take up a great deal of their time, instructional time. Thank you so much. I'll come back around to this question of how the assessments inform teaching and learning. First I want to ask David Hawkins to give us a higher education perspective. David, you've been working on this question of how to bring performance assessments into the admissions placement advising process. How do you think that can work? Well, thank you, Linda. This is something that admission officers have been talking about, even if not specific to performance assessments for decades. Because as we know, the system for conducting admissions at colleges and universities across the country has been relatively static. And it consists of students' grades along with the strength of their curriculum, followed by the standardized admission tests, and then a host of other factors like the essay and the teacher recommendations and whatnot. But the fact of the matter is that there are two pretty big challenges that relate to the performance assessments. I mean, sorry, to college admission in the current context. Number one is that the factors that we currently use that have been in place for a very long time don't say a whole lot about why students succeed in post-secondary education. You'd be surprised at how little, in fact, they predict these factors predict about even a student's first year, much less the second through fourth. So there's been a need, a desire for more information about why students succeed. You hear conversations about determination and grit all throughout the admissions community. And the way I think that performance assessments helps address that challenge is that it does provide you that additional context, and it does provide you more about what might make a student likely to succeed in a more multi-dimensional way than just really the two dimensions that we currently use. The second challenge, which becomes a reason why I think performance assessments end up helping the process, is that the current system that we have in place has really been ineffective at addressing the inequities that we have in our country related to college access. Those two major factors I talked about, grades and admission tests, tend to be mostly reflective of the student's background rather than what the student's actually done or what the student's potential is. So absent a catalyst, which I think performance assessments and the admission community can see performance assessments heading in this direction, those inequities are still going to persist. And so the way in which performance assessments work into the admission process particularly is that it starts to provide more context, more multi-dimensional views of what makes students successful. So there's a couple other points I think with regard to the larger transition to higher education, but perhaps I'll leave it at the admission process at this point. Okay, we'll come back around and talk about the way in which it can actually help students as they go through college as well. But you already made the point about kind of more equity and access to the learning opportunities that you want kids to have to be successful in college. So I want to turn to Nicole and ask about what we know about the type of access historically underserved students have had to a rigorous and engaging curriculum and how this kind of work might change that balance. Thank you. And I'm going to concentrate on students of color, but a lot of this could also apply to other historically underserved students like students with disabilities. So we have a history and current system of largely segregated education where even after a Brown v. Board is decided in 1954, students most often attend schools with other students who are of their same race or ethnicity and especially for black and Hispanic students. These schools that they attend are largely high-poverty schools where most students are on free or reduced priced lunch. These schools are often under-resourced or almost always under-resourced and under-performing. They have fewer materials, fewer credentials and experienced teachers, fewer advanced course offerings, especially offerings that focus on critical thinking skills and advanced learning. Even within a school, students of color are often segregated into classrooms that don't concentrate on these advanced thinking skills. This happens in a few ways. One is curriculum equity where simply students are not directed into gifted classes, AP classes, IB classes. A second way is exclusionary discipline. Black students are 3.8 times as likely to receive an out-of-school suspension. If you're not in school, you're not learning in school. And often these suspensions are for minor misbehaviors which can often result from students not being engaged in their learning. If they're in a class where they're just doing rote memorization and they're not really engaged, they're going to engage in misbehaviors and then are at a much higher risk of being suspended. And then a third way, the students of color are often disengaged from school and not engage in higher critical thinking skills and engaged learning is through disproportionate identification for special education services. This could be over-identification and under-identification, but in both ways the students are not being provided with educational services designed to meet their individual needs. And students of color are disproportionately placed in segregated special education settings, which too often also are not the educational services provided in those classrooms or not at the same academic level as in regular education classrooms. I want to take this opportunity before I turn the question to Lindsay about students with disabilities to give a little video clip from Oakland Unified School District, which illustrates how their effort to do this for all the kids in the district in senior year is addressing some of the points that Nicole just made. Just a little bit of bringing the kids into the room. Essentially my talk is about racial biases and how that can unconsciously undermine a black patient's care. My issue for my senior topic is sexism in video games. My topic is about the lack of access that women, specifically women of color, have to reproductive health care services. So the capstone project is the culmination of a full year of students identifying a research question on something that they're deeply passionate about, doing research on those topics and then writing a research paper and doing a presentation in front of an authentic audience. The graduate capstone is really trying to find a way to engage kids in deeper levels of learning and give an authentic assessment of how they're going to engage in real world problems as they transition out of high school. But I really wanted to focus on black patients because they have dealt with so much. It was something different and it was something that I really wanted to do, not just the teacher was like, this is what we're going to do and you better just do it. I was like, no, I love this topic, might as well, I'm going to put in all my effort. Well I gave her a four for a clear and original argument and clear reasoning that was convincing, but I gave her a two for partially addressing alternatives, opposing alternatives and perspectives. So I averaged four and two and got three. What we were really trying to do with the capstone project was ensure a level of equity across the system by agreeing on a set of common rubrics. Let's try to create a common understanding of what high quality instruction looks like so that the instruction and the learning experiences that students have leading up to that point prepare them in order to be successful at that level. So the point that Oakland, we could look at more of this on the Learning Policy Institute website if you want to see the whole video, but the fact that they began to do this work district-wide, which is happening as well in places like Pasadena, Los Angeles, about a quarter of its high schools are doing these kinds of graduation portfolios, is a curriculum equity strategy to enable kids to get access to the kind of thinking curriculum that would otherwise be restricted to kids who are selected into certain honors courses or advanced placement courses. And we're seeing the results of that in terms of kids both being more able to access college and in studies that have been done completing college and being successful in college at rates much higher than the national average, and they'll often talk about these experiences as the things that enable them to be successful. So, Ninsie, I want to turn to you now and ask about how we think about the use of these kinds of assessments in terms of meeting the needs of students with disabilities. Yeah, thank you so much for having us. We are excited about performance assessments and the work being done in this area. It's interesting. I agree with a lot of what Nicole just said. And in 1997, Newsweek ran an article called Why Johnny Stayed Home? And it was profiling a study done by the National Center for Education Outcomes that found in most schools and districts that were just then piloting standardized tests. So this is pre-no child left behind. That they were routinely sending children with disabilities on test days on field trips or telling parents keep them homesick because they had made a decision that there's no way those children would ever pass those tests. So we shouldn't even put them in there because they'll drop our scores. It won't be really reflective of the school. And so what that became was just de facto segregation and discrimination against kids and using tests as a tool against children. It also resulted exactly in what you're saying of curriculum inequity. So all of these issues, there are decisions sometimes made by adults that children just can't learn. That's why we say they have a disability. They can't learn. But the evidence more and more but always has shown us that that's not the case. And so we're excited about performance assessments in particular because of the way and we've looked most closely at New Hampshire in our work at the National Center for Learning Disabilities. And what's so important about the PACE assessment in our opinion is how involved teachers are and the impact it has on their ability to instruct. They are very much intensively working on these assessments. And as you may know or may not know, in the last 10 years, most children with disabilities spend almost all day in general education classrooms. And general education teachers don't have a lot of information about how to teach to children who think differently. So the combination of those two things, which is a deeper understanding that individuals with disabilities have a lot of strengths. They have some weaknesses, but don't have to be relegated to a very rote curriculum, a very rote set of activities and denied other complex thinking tasks. In addition, with assessments that much more involve honor and respect the teacher and their ability to instruct, we think is a very important thing to look at as we go forward. And so we're very excited about that. I just one last thing I'd say is we live with the history of the discrimination knowing that that was there, and so we're looking very cautiously at these. As you mentioned in your opening remarks about how are they validated? How do we ensure that whoever is grading them is using a rubric that is comparable to, it provides validity, reliability, comparability. That's an essential question, but we're excited that we're finally looking at ways to honor teachers in a better way and children and individuals who don't think in little boxes and little squares. A good lead into the kind of work that's going on in New Hampshire. How do you see this use of performance assessments and forming teaching and learning? I mean, performance assessments really reshape the way teachers think about their classroom instruction. I mean, we've all had that moment where we've been impacted by a performance assessment. It's when you became most engaged. It's when you wanted to learn something because it would move you forward. Putting performance assessments at the forefront in K-12 education rather than waiting for the campaign you do in college or where most of us found our passion, I think. Performance assessments ask teachers to look at how do they invite students into learning? How do they engage them? How do they allow different pathways for students to come in? The performance assessments really communicate to kids that what they're doing is important, that it's valued. And for teachers, it shapes the way they assess and everything else in their classroom. They start to think about assessing for learning. They think about looking at students as learners at different points in the learning process and giving them productive and feedback along the way. For most teachers who go down this road for performance assessment, if they were here in the room, they would tell you they started to get rid of a lot of their multiple-choice tests because they just didn't get the job done. And they weren't at a high enough level of intellectual stimulation or curiosity for kids. They saw that right away. One of the things about performance assessment is it's not just about students who struggle, who find a pathway in. Allowing advanced-level thinkers, strong students to just do multiple-choice is short-changing them. They don't engage, they don't move forward. They don't see the continuum. Performance assessment opens teachers thinking about all students' pathways for learning. Are you seeing ways that teachers are using the results of the assessments? Yes, one of the big pieces for PACE particularly is we have protocols in PACE where we train teachers to look at students' evidence of their work and for students to look at their own evidence and shift their thinking about instruction based on what they're seeing students do but communicating together. No more teacher isolated in the classroom by themselves making those decisions. It's collaborative now. You're sharing the expertise of other people in the room whether you're a small school up in SAU 35 where there's only one teacher for three grades you share with other teachers or if you're in Manchester where you have multiple teachers teaching you're starting to collaborate because that shared intelligence around education for students is better for kids. I may take that to the higher ed level and ask David you mentioned that the assessments can be used beyond admissions to inform aspects of the curriculum and planning and programming for students beyond that. So could you say a word about that piece of the use of assessments? Sure. The transition from secondary to post-secondary education is like a very narrow bridge. There's a lot of stuff going on in K-12. Students sort of traipse across this bridge and then there's a lot of stuff going on in higher ed and right now the idea and very little information makes it across that bridge with the student. So the idea that both higher ed and K-12 are looking at performance assessments very seriously right now means that we got to figure out a way where that bridge gets wider and the idea that a student could come to post-secondary education with a much more robust indication of what he or she is capable of doing creates not only a more nuanced understanding of the student from the admission perspective but it also sets up the handoff between the K-12 institution and the higher ed institution in a much different way. Right now for instance a student might come in and if the institution says, you know, we might need to assess this student for placement in their math or science or English study. There's an assessment that has to be administered after the student arrives. The faculty and staff have to spend time sort of analyzing that and then making determinations about where that student goes. If you had a lot more of that information as you come into the process you might minimize the need for all of that extra work and you might also as you sort of get students into the appropriate level of coursework you might set them up for longer term success because not only are you looking at a larger constellation of what constitutes success but you're also smoothing that transition. So students aren't hitting a wall when they get to higher ed or they're not taking classes that are largely redundant of what they did in high school. So there's a lot of potential here and I think what I really appreciate about this effort is it is involving a lot of stakeholders from a lot of different areas and that I think will help smooth the way. That actually makes me think about students with disabilities in particular because there's so much work that goes on on transitions both getting kids through and letting them get access to the kind of learning they need and then how do you get them to the next thing and then how do you inform the next higher ed institution about it. What do you think about this piece of the puzzle that has to do with the continuity of information? Yeah, I think it's really important as you point out, one of the biggest issues is transitions for all children with disabilities. And we're so excited to hear that 900 plus universities are looking at a broader view of who an individual is. I would say that we work with young adults quite a bit and one of their biggest concerns is they, we've historically had a much more difficult time transitioning to college for our young adults because the tests themselves are so inflexible. They oftentimes use accommodations on these exams. Those are widely thought of, there's been a very onerous process to go through to try to justify them and make sure that we get something that actually authentically shows what individuals know and that is coming at this time that you just described, a very challenging transition anyway. So frankly the only children who are going to succeed in that have incredible family and community support around them. And that is not equitable in a sense. So we can do a lot more in some ways to ease this. So the openness and what David has described is something we're extremely interested in especially because 40 years ago we passed IDEA, three or four generations of children who have some different expectations for where they will go, they will go to college, they will achieve these things as we move forward. Terrific. We're just being joined by Senator Hassan. So I'm delighted it's a perfect moment. We'll come back to you Nicole for one last question. And then after the senator presents some remarks we will have some time for audience Q&A. Come on up Jessica. Great, thank you. I'm going to start with Senator Maggie Hassan represents the great state of New Hampshire and is the second woman in American history to be elected both governor and U.S. senator. The senator serves as a member of the Senate Health Education Labor and Pensions Committee where she's committed to making college affordable for students and families finding ways to meet the needs of students with disabilities so we're particularly happy to have our panelists here today to speak to that and ensuring that all students need to be successful in college career and in a democracy. The senator's work is focused on supporting strong K-12 public schools and empowering students in developing the skills and innovative thinking necessary to compete for the jobs in the 21st century economies. We're especially appreciative and excited to have you here today. Thank you. Yeah, that's helpful. Thanks so much. Well Jessica, thank you for the introduction and you should all know that the other woman in American history to be elected governor and senator is my senior senator from New Hampshire so we are very proud of our tradition of women representing New Hampshire and we are always for any women out there who haven't thought about running for office yet, you should. And to Linda Darling-Hammond and LPI, thank you for facilitating this discussion to Ellen Hume-Hower down at the other end of the table who is our executive director of the New Hampshire Learning Initiative. It's really great to see a familiar New Hampshire face here this morning and thanks to all of you for being here and for all your work in this really important area. You have focused and are focusing on bringing stakeholders together in a bipartisan manner to improve our education system deeply, deeply grateful for that because your work empowers students and it empowers educators and coming together there are some really exciting possibilities as we do more and more work to help us understand how to create student-centered learning environments and really help our students maximize their potential and become confident and competent and ready to lead. We share the goal of ensuring that all students have access to a quality public education and so it's incredibly important that we continue to work together to make sure that students will be competitive in the 21st century economy and that our public school system is able to evolve and change with them and with that economy. As governor I worked with leaders, teachers, students and parents to strengthen our education system. New Hampshire as I think many of you know leads in focusing on how student progress should actually be measured. Our performance assessment for competency education or PACE program is a first in the nation accountability strategy allowing districts to reduce the level of standardized testing in favor of more locally managed assessments. Since starting out as a pilot with just four schools in New Hampshire it's now reaching about 30% of New Hampshire students. I have witnessed the power of this firsthand at schools across New Hampshire. I visited Sao Higan High School most recently. Sao Higan has been a real leader in competency based education and it was really fun to see students mastering material that will stick with them, doing hands-on lessons in subjects like science and literature and it was also really important to me to see students adjusting their own focus, not just about the topics they wanted to study, the material they wanted to master, but becoming sophisticated learners in their own awareness of what works best for them. So I had one student say, well you know I tried learning it this way, it didn't really work so now I'm doing it this way and I'm finding it better to learn. So it's clear that focusing this way on project based learning and project based assessment really has great potential and I know you've also heard today about some of Sanborn regional school districts work as well and they've been great leaders and it's been really fun to see the communities of Sanborn embrace this notion of project based and competency based learning too. So it's clear we have some really good pilots efforts. What I'm trying to do in this Senate is continue the work, continue to increase the scale so that we are meeting the needs of today's students, not just in some communities in New Hampshire and pockets elsewhere, but across our country. We have to continue to address unique challenges that all of our students face and we have to continue to work to identify our students' skills and really focus our teaching and our assessment on those skills. So on the help committee I'm trying to make sure I support those efforts. I'm working on legislation that would support teacher preparation and performance assessment as well as support for higher education institutions to better utilize those assessments. We know that when we meet students where they are they unleash extraordinary or we unleash their extraordinary and great potential. I have been working with members of both parties on this I am committed to working with members of both parties on this education really should be and in many ways in the Senate continues to be an area of bipartisan focus. We also know that in addition to focusing on project based learning it's important to provide stronger pathways into higher education and career education for our students so that they know that they have options that again will work for them where they are in their lives, where they are in their finances to make sure that they know that they can chart their own course and start working if they want to earn stackable credentials maybe decide to go to higher education after they've put some money away for instance I talked to a 19 year old last week in New Hampshire and he was doing an acturing training he's working weekends at BAE Systems so he can use their tuition reimbursement credit during the week and he looked at me and said Senator I'm 19 and I have retirement savings which was pretty cool and he has a whole pathway charted right you know he's going to figure out how he's going to get his degree but he's doing it in a way where he doesn't have to take out student debt which is exactly the kind of choices we want to be offering people lastly I just want to take a moment I know that today's focus is on the different learning styles that our children have the different paths they will take in their lives and focusing on how we can make sure that as educators everybody has the tools to support our students in following these paths and these learning options in a way that makes sense for them because obviously that's the way they're going to really strengthen them and help them learn and lead and grow I also do want to tell you how committed I am to making sure that the work we do to prepare this the ongoing work to prepare every next generation how important it is that we do that in a robust public education system and so right now while there is good focus on some of the things we're talking about today some of the specifics I do continue to be concerned about efforts to undermine the public school system in our country I am very grateful to all of you for the work you do I come from a family of educators there's nothing more important to our democracy than what educators do when you think about the vision that founded our country this notion that we could over time include more and more people we could do better and better living up to the idea that every single person counts and has something to offer educators are at the very core of that vision and so I am so grateful to you all for doing it but I also am very concerned that if we don't do it together if we don't do it with public funds if we don't have a public commitment to making sure that our education system evolves and meets the needs of our workforce and the needs of our democracy we will slide backward and we will begin marginalizing people at a rate we haven't seen in a long time so know that I am committed to working on the overall goal of making sure we have a strong and robust public education system know as well how excited I am at what you all are doing in making sure that that system evolves with our economy meets children where they are meets families where they are and really empowers people in an entirely new way to become such incredible vibrant and contributing members of our society, our economy and our democracy. Thank you so much for having me. So I wanted to give Nicole one more opportunity to speak to the issue that we had just taken up about access for young people through the continuum into and beyond higher ed and then I want to just flag for you that we'll take questions and answers from the audience. Thank you. So I agree with what all of my panelists have said and I think it's even more important for students of color. I think all students start with the same potential and then black and brown students enter this system that shuttles them into disengagement and kind of removes it squanders that potential and performance assessments are a way that they can become re-engaged in the system, they can become re-engaged in their own education and help close those gaps that are between students of color and white students and other students in high school graduation and in college attendance and college graduation and even after college and employment and other issues where there are these huge gaps that we've been working so hard to close but I think just with the current system in which students are not engaged in school if that non-engagement continues then the gaps will continue. Thank you so much. Let me turn it over to you.