 I'm pleased to welcome you to today's event on the future of education in Detroit. Our goal today is to begin what I hope will be a series of conversations about the recent successes as well as the continuing challenges in preparing the young people of Detroit for the 21st century. Today's panel represents one aspect, one perspective on this conversation. In particular, each of our panelists today work outside what some might consider the traditional public school structure in Detroit and in different ways have been pressing for substantial changes in the approach to schooling in the city. So we plan to hold additional events on this topic in the coming months which highlight other perspectives on the future of education in Detroit. And for today we welcome questions that challenge the perspectives offered by our panelists here. And so then going right to introducing those panelists. We have three distinguished speakers today. To my right, immediate right is Dan Varner, CEO of Excellent Schools Detroit, followed by Tom Willis, CEO of Cornerstone Charter Schools, and Veronica Conformay, Interim Chancellor of the Education and Achievement Authority. I'm going to just do a brief introduction of each of them. And then when they speak, they'll each be speaking for 15 minutes and then we'll open it up to a more general Q&A. But before I forget, I want to make sure I thank some of the great staff who have helped put this together, Mahima Mahadevan and Julie Montero de Castro as well as the other folks working at EPI and the folks at the School of Education as well. Also I'd like to recognize Charles and Susan Gessner for their generous support of this event. And for the audience here, the way we're going to do Q&A is you can write questions on note cards, then kind of get the attention of one of the staff here. They'll collect them and then I'm going to kind of go through them, collate questions on similar topics and kind of read them to the appropriate panelists. For anyone following via the web, you can also send questions via email or Twitter. So email is edpolicyfordatumich.edu and this is our hashtag for tweeting us questions. So I think that's it for the logistics. I'm going to introduce our speakers and we'll be on our way. So Dan Varner is the CEO of Excellent Schools Detroit, a coalition of philanthropy educators, civic organizations and community-based organizations working to ensure that every Detroit student cradle to career receives an excellent education by 2020. He is also the co-founder and former CEO of a nationally recognized award-winning youth development organization called Think Detroit. Tom Willis, to his right, is CEO of Cornerstone Charter Schools, which currently directs four charter schools, one of which Madison Carver Academy was recently named as one of 31 top schools in Detroit by Excellent Schools Detroit. He's a Michigan native and a U of M alumni. Prior to joining Cornerstone, he worked for Intel and Price Waterhouse Coopers. And then last but not least, Veronica Conformay, who is still the interim superintendent of Education and Achievement Authority here despite a meeting this afternoon that didn't have a quorum. The Education and Achievement Authority of Michigan was created to turn around the academic performance of students in the state's lowest-achieving schools. The EAA is in its second year of operating 15 schools in Detroit. Veronica was previously the vice president of the College Board's Access to Opportunity Campaign and served as the chief operating officer of the New York City Department of Education. So without further ado then, I'm going to turn it over to Dan Varner, who will begin the presentations. All right. Thanks, Brian. And special thanks to our host here at the university. Brian didn't mention that I'm a two-time graduate of the University of Michigan undergrad and law school, so go blue. I know we've got some green and white in the audience, but I'm going to stay true to my colors. Right. That's right. It's great to be here with you, Dan. I've only got 15 minutes, so I'm going to jump right into it. I'm just going to grab my bottle, my water, so that I can have it. All right. So let's jump into it. So this is actually titled Detroit's Public Education System for a reason. DPS used to be Detroit's public education system. The education, you could actually call it Detroit's education systems. There are many of them. I'll get into that momentarily. So, and can I take this full screen? Let me see if I can do that better, yeah. So this was Detroit's public education system circa 1990, right? Lots of Detroit public schools and lots of private schools that Detroit kids went to. This population decreased and state law changed. That landscape started changing dramatically. So here's what it looked like in 2000 with the advent of charter schools. And here's what it looks like today. Part of the point of this slide is to understand that Detroit does not have one system anymore. It has 12. And we're talking about the systems that are run by Detroit public schools, by the Education Achievement Authority, and by all of the active charter school authorizers, 10 public universities that are active in Detroit as well as DPS and the EAA. And let me be clear about one thing. I'm actually going to talk about governance of schools, largely. Governance and public policy surrounding schools largely. I am not going to get into curriculum. Like, so I'm not a teacher, never have been. And although I am the child of a teacher, certainly not qualified to talk about what makes for effective teaching or curriculum or what have you. So I'm really interested in what makes for effective governance. Really quickly, one other caveat about that, and that is that effective governance doesn't equal good teaching, obviously. I would argue though that any good curriculum teaching whatever doesn't have a chance of succeeding if you've got bad governance in place and bad policy in place. And that's because schools won't ever have enough money with which to operate. Schools, the system that they're operating in will be so unstable that talented folks won't choose to stay in it and on and on and on. So I want to lay the groundwork for what is wrong with public education governance in Detroit and offer a proposed solution for that. All right, so 12, does that get rid of that? If I click that, anyone now? Good enough. All right, so 12 public, 12 school systems in Detroit. Each one of them operates by their own rules around deciding when to open a school, when to close a school, where to open a school, where to close a school. What level of family support to provide? Some provide transportation and busing. Some don't provide transportation and busing. So they're all wildly independent, although they are regulated at the state level. So here's the metaphor. It's like they're 12 drivers on a road. And let's say that they're driving school buses to make the metaphor really clear and all of those school buses have kids on them, right? Every one of those bus drivers decides where to park on their own, which side of the road to drive on on their own, what speed to go on their own, right, and there's no organizing mechanism for them. And as you can imagine, kids and schools get hurt in that process, right? Some park in the middle of the street and somebody's speeding down the middle of the street, which is why we land with that metaphor. All right, so what does that look like in practice? In practice, we've got way too many schools. So you'll notice if we go back to these slides, right, that this is something like 370 schools, and I don't have the math in front of me, but this is 230 schools. Detroit's population fell way like much more than the corresponding reduction in schools. Nobody actually knows what the real capacity of every school building is. I mean, the only way to do it is to actually find out from the fire marshal what the fire marshal coded capacity in all of those school buildings are. If you think about it from a practical perspective, schools can add teachers or reduce their teaching staff based on enrollment changes as long as they have capacity in the building. So the actual capacity of the building is the max capacity for any school, individual school, and add that all up for the districts. The point is that given today's population, we've got way too many schools, way too many schools. The consequence of that is that most schools are under enrolled. Most are, it's driven in part by state policy around financing. But in addition, because of enrollment, most schools are under enrolled. And as a result, because money follows kids, don't have enough money to actually do anything well. One, two, DPS has been in financial distress for the better part of two decades, like real significant financial distress for the better part of two decades. And 50,000 kids go to school in Detroit public schools. It's not good for anybody. Three, because nobody's in charge of all the charter school actors, bad actors in that system behave poorly. So quick example, in the last year, I think we've had five charter schools in Detroit that have changed authorizers, right? Five that have changed authorizers. Now there are a number of authorizers that are opposed to this. But all you need is one authorizer. Let me explain this. So a good authorizer puts pressure on a charter school to improve its performance. That charter school has a bunch of options we can get better. Or under current state law, we can switch authorizers and go to somebody who's not gonna hold us accountable for performance, right? Five schools did that. In the last year, I think three of them specifically because they were getting pressure from their authorizer to perform at a higher level chose to go to a different authorizer. Fourth, the EAA, so lots of state money now being put into this entity and 70 million in philanthropy being put into this entity. Struggling to survive, why? Because you were running two different plays. So on the one hand, the governor says, let's put a lot of money into an entity designed to turn around the most troubled, most difficult schools that we have in the state and start in Detroit. And on the other hand, the legislature uncaps charter schools, unleashing a marketplace designed to close the very same schools that the governor's saying, let's put a lot of money into, right? Doesn't make sense. Fifth, as a result of that, school quality is bad across the landscape. So let's explore that a little bit. Red is bad, green is good, meaning performing a below and above the 50 percentile mark on Meep for the state or on the whatever the test is as we go through these slides. So these are Meep reading scores for Detroit. By the way, the blank squares and circles tend to mean that the school doesn't actually take the Meep, maybe because it's a high school. And of course, high schools in the state take ACT and not Meep or a private and independent school. Of course, such a small school that its results aren't counted. So these are all the schools, all the red schools in the city that are performing below 50 percent on Meep. And the green are the ones performing above that mark. Here's math. No better. Here's the top to bottom ranking. So the state organizes every school, right, and ranks them top to bottom by performance across the state. So green, top 50 percentile, red, bottom 50 percentile. Once again, way more red than green. And we're not getting any better. So if we quickly look at the trend line, sorry that the type face here is small, but students aren't making measurable progress. And if you look at the larger data around students in the city, the trend lines around math reading and ACT performance aren't getting any better. And if you look at it by governance type, it doesn't really matter by governance type either. Charters, DPS, EAA, schools are all performing pretty mediocrely. The only thing you can pull out of this slide is that some of the independent schools are more stars toward the top than the bottom, right? So some of the independent and private schools are doing well, which you would expect because those families have the means to send their kids to private school, right, and so on and so forth. Okay. So last slide on this. Boy, I hope this is the right deck. Yep, it is. Okay. So who's in charge? Really quickly. This starts to tee up what I would propose as a solution. So the mayor in Detroit controls nothing. The Detroit Public Schools Board of Education controls nothing. The state legislature controls state policy and finance, right? The Michigan Department of Education enforces, and by virtue of the state board of education, of which I'm a member, by the way, and I should, so I should disclaim, I should be clear. I'm talking here in my capacity as CEO of Excellent Schools Detroit, I'm not, while I might feel personally, strongly about what I'm about to suggest, it's not written, it isn't to the level of a conversation at the state. I really am talking about Detroit in this particular instance. So the state board of education hires a state superintendent who runs the Michigan Department of Education. That entity or those folks are responsible for regulatory enforcement of the policy that the state legislature develops and for compliance with federal requirements, which is attached typically to money that the feds provide for education that passes through the Michigan Department of Education. Lastly, interestingly, the governor controls quite a bit. He appoints the DPS emergency manager, appoints the board of the Education Achievement Authority, and appoints, thank you, the boards for all of the charter school authorizers. So here's my proposal, a possible future for governance of public education in Detroit. There is going to be a reset, I firmly believe. Now, I don't have inside information on this, but when you look at the kind of aligning of all the stars, I think there is just going to be a reset. And here I think are the priorities that need to govern that reset. First, you've got to have equitable and accessible schools, right? So I believe in school choice, I want to be clear about that. And I believe in it because I think that as a nation and a community, we're not serious about desegregating housing patterns based on race and income. And so we're basically forcing poor kids to go to a school where there are just a bunch of other poor kids there. Like, can we concentrate poverty any more than we currently do? I suspect not. Given that fact, I think we've, and knowing that education and jobs are the pathways out of poverty, really the only two, I submit that kids and families, low income families, have to be able to send their kids to schools elsewhere. They have to be able to have a choice around sending their kids to school just like anyone else. But that choice isn't real right now, right? So you and I get to decide we're to send our kids to school and we have the means to get our children there. You've got to have, you've got to make it equitable so that if a family without the means wants to send their child to a high-performance school on the other side of town, they need the means to be able to do so. That needs to be publicly funded. Second, coordinated efficient management of the entirety of that public education system. You can't have 12 bus drivers driving by different rules, right? Traffic works when you make everybody drive on the right side and park in certain places and go a certain speed. Third, stable sustainable system that supports talent. So once again, teachers, administrators, and so on don't stay in a system that is unstable. Let's create one that's stable enough so that talented people want to work in it and stay in it. And lastly, it needs to be publicly accountable. I really do believe that one of the greatest challenges that Detroit faces right now is the fact that education in Detroit largely is not publicly accountable. There's just no way for Detroiters to hold schools accountable for performance. Now, I have strong opinions about the best mechanisms by which to hold leadership accountable. That's a whole other conversation. I'm not going to get into it today. But know that, and let me just bite my tongue and stop there. I don't want to get down that path. All right, so here's what it would look like. A portfolio manager for the entire city of Detroit. And I don't see any way that we are going to govern public education in Detroit effectively unless and until we move in this direction. Multiple people driving the bus by different rules makes no sense under any circumstance. It doesn't make any sense to me. Thank you. So a portfolio manager who would do two things. One is around this accountability function, manage all school opening and closure decisions, as well as school operator assignments. That means one charter school authorizer in the city of Detroit, the mayor. That's my proposal. Let me not say that. So it could be lots of people. I think the mayor should be it. But it could be others. I completely get that it could be others. Let's just have the conversation about who is the right person for it. One authorizer, move all buildings, DPS, and charter school buildings to a portfolio. Why do we ask educators to be experts on real estate? It doesn't make any sense. And lastly, assessments and accountability managed locally in partnership with the Michigan Department of Education. Around school choice, a second function for this office, and that is to make choice actual and equitable for all families. So a scorecard that makes clear the performance of schools, a common enrollment system so that there's a single window for enrolling in schools. I can game the system, because I know folks, right? That shouldn't be allowed. School enrollment should be transparent to everybody, and it should be done the way that we do other things with a simple algorithm to make sure that we're matching folks blindly and transparently. And lastly, a common transportation system so that low-income family can get their child across town or that high-performing school. And here are the benefits of said portfolio management or air traffic controller or rules for the road or whatever you wanna call it. You've got a responsive system for students and families. Teachers and school leaders have a stable and adequately funded system that supports them. Community partners have a predictable system with whom to partner. Detroiters have an educational system that's actually accountable to us. And student outcomes, I would argue, over time improve as we move bad schools and bad operators out of the system and more quickly replicate good ones. My time is up. Thank you. Well, good afternoon to everyone. Good evening, I guess, almost. Woo, I told Dan he was gonna bring the room down a little bit with the facts and the details. And I can only say it because Dan and I have been friends. He's much older than I am. We went to the same high school, but he's much, much older than I am. I like Dan, I'm not a career educator in the introduction. I was a U of M engineer, actually, of all things. Very good at two things, picking a wife and picking good people to work with. And so, part of what we're most excited about in the cornerstone is building the team that can really take on and try some new things. So part of what I'm gonna talk about right now is not so much Detroit and its landscape, more about Detroit and what I think it is becoming and can become. A lot of what Dan laid out there, I think we're signing up for as well. And I say that as an operator that has one school that is very low performing and that we're in a turnaround model for. So very willing to raise our own hand and be held accountable for that as well. So Detroit, how many of you been to Midtown Detroit lately? Not downtown, not a Tigers game that doesn't count. Midtown Detroit. So the Shinolas, the Willys, all the stuff going on there, the high occupancy, we're seeing the rebirth of a great American icon. This brand that is gold right now in this country is Detroit and it's awesome to see. I've been back in Detroit for about 12 years now and I can say that having grown up here, there's no time now to see the future. But I think what's being left out of the conversation for good, bad, otherwise reasons is what really matters, which is education. And I'm so excited that Dan and the work that they're doing with excellent schools in Detroit is trying to bring a light to this that is so, so critical. When you've got 80 plus percent of kids in failing schools in a city that is just frankly unacceptable. And so really excited about the rebirth of the city. I think it's one of those carp before the horse types of pieces, but we will not keep people, good people in the city unless we've got good schools. And so that's what we're trying to be about. I know that's what Veronica's trying to be about is helping to turn that city around. We don't propose to have the solution, we just wanna be a part of it. And so I'm gonna spend a little bit of time talking about some of the things that we're doing. Before I do that, just a quick snapshot. So we opened a new high school two years ago. We're in our third year now. We tested all the incoming ninth graders or as we call them, beginners. There was about 70 of them. They came from 35 different middle schools. 70 kids from 35 different middle schools. So talk about a little bit of the chaos that Dan's talking about. How do you create a culture when you've got that many different middle schools coming to you? We tested them using the map, NWA's map. And here's just a quick pictorial of where they fell out, both in math and ELA. And as you can see, ELA, they're about a sixth grade average and math competency was about fourth grade. These are ninth grade students, just unbelievable. We knew it was gonna be tough, we knew it was gonna be bad, but until you see it in black and white, it's hard to really stomach. So that's just the reality of the world that we're in. So I wanna talk about three things kind of quickly titled here yesterday. Burden and a blessing, collaboration and innovation. And you notice what's not up there is really the core of what matters, the basic blocking and tackling. As my counterpart at the Cornerstone Private School says, you've gotta do all the basic blocking and tackling. You've gotta hire good people, you've gotta reward them, you've gotta create a culture where people like each other and they're like working together. And you've gotta have amazing curriculum that gets better every year. So I'm not talking about any of that. That's intentional. I'm trying to just talk about some of the other things that are going on that may be of interest. So the first is a little more burden with a tremendous blessing. The reality is, and especially in urban schools across the country, I think, I'm blessed to be able to be a part of some groups. One of them was funded by the Gates Foundation. And it's the same story. I got into education, I was actually visiting a friend over in Tanzania, Africa and I was there for a little bit teaching. And it hit me one day that kids are kids, no matter where they are in the world. And the reality is the challenges are the same in most cities. Detroit's unique in maybe the scope and the absolute challenges that we're facing as far as dropping students and population. But at the core, it's still an urban city that has similar urban challenges. So the burden is increasing. I think we're putting more and more as a society on schools. The weight of pressure on teachers. How many teachers are in this room? God bless you. This is a very, very tough time to go into this profession. It's long hours, the pay is not so good. And the public pressure right now is just through the roof. And it's just a tough, tough time. And I think the burdens that are being placed, especially again in an urban environment on schools, to do everything now is through the roof. But with that becomes, in our opinion, a great blessing. Where it's not just about the mind, it's about, in our case, the mind, body, and spirit. So we've got a great responsibility to, how do we raise students that have great morals, great ethics, in our case, we call them the 10 character words. And these are not easy things to do. But we love that task and we love that challenge. Collaboration. So we've got a partner program that actually stands way back to 20 some years ago when Cornerstone started. And it was really kind of a brilliant idea that was very counter-intuitive. And in fact, one of the original founders said, that idea is never gonna happen. You're not gonna get people to come into a city that they are afraid of to spend time, maybe with students they don't know, that with time that they don't have and in this case, pay for the privilege. In the charge school world, we don't charge for the privilege anymore, but we still keep the core of the program. So how do you connect the real world? How do you connect mentors and adults into the students' lives to give them a vision beyond the small world and sometimes a very dark world that they live in? And I can tell you, this is what turned my life around when I went to one of these. I partnered up with little Wesley Striggles. He was in kindergarten, he's now a freshman in college. And just that simple relationship that we had over those years, I think certainly I thought I was gonna change his life and what ended up happening is really he changed mine. And it's just a simple but very powerful relationship. And so if nothing else today, if you are looking for something to do that will truly change your life, we'd love to have you as a part of our partner program. Another kind of actually partnership, collaboration slash innovation is that we're working on is trying to connect students to the real world. The number one reason that students drop out is they don't see the purpose of school. It's when their lives are so challenging at home, why am I bothering with algebra? Help me understand that. And so we've got to make that connection. And it could be a very simple thing. We took some students last a couple years, the name of our high school is the health and technology high school. So we took some of our students to Beaumont. They came back all fired up because they learned that pharmacists make six figures. And you never know that simple light bulb that may have gone off and even if it's just one student's head could have changed their trajectory, it could have changed their path. And so part of what our goal is is to create those exposures ultimately that may lead to internships but really even at the basic level of exposure. So we're working with one of Dan Gilbert's companies called the Grand Circus. They do a lot of tech training and we're launching a pilot this spring that's all around sort of coding, getting kids into that world, creating partners with the penskies of the world, the plant brands, the ZF systems, trying to create that relationship so that students can see, okay, now I understand why I'm taking this class. Blended learning, how many of you are familiar or have heard that term? Okay, so it's a big topic, it's called many different things, personalized learning, blended learning. The EAA is doing a lot of great work in this space as well. The quick summary is really how do you maximize the student's potential, especially in our case where they're coming to you at all different levels? How do you meet them where they are? In this case, leveraging technology. I think the technology is finally to the point, it's not very good, but it's finally to the point where it can be leveraged to try to meet students where they are. So you can have, let me jump ahead here real quick. So in a classroom like this, which is one of our K-AIDS, you have what we call three station rotation. These little dots represent students. So you could have 30 students in kind of three different stations. The small group work where they're collaborating together, direct instruction with the teacher, which is kind of the holy grail for teachers to be able to work in these small groups. And then maybe 10 students working on computers and all 10 of those kids could be working on a different math lesson. I could be learning how to add, Dan could be learning how to subtract, et cetera. So be able to meet them where they are. And then they rotate every maybe 30 or so minutes. So it's about doing that. It's about mastery in our high school. We're trying to build the program so that kids can advance based on mastering, not a time bound system. So if they're able to fly through algebra one in two and a half months because they've got the passion, the grit, then great. We don't need to hold them back. So trying to advance them based on that, that is very, very messy and very, very hard. So I will not tell you that we have all the answers. And then individualized learning plans. So again, how do we meet students where they are? Not just in math and English, but across all the subject areas. This is a rendering of our new high school that we just opened. We moved them to a permanent location. It's very close to what it actually does look like. And you'll notice the intention here was creating more of a college sort of feel. And all this is around trying to give students that vision for the future and some ownership. It's very, again, very challenging. When we first started, we had this kind of choose-your-own-adventure approach that we thought 9th graders could just kind of jump in and say, oh, I'll just work on math for a half hour and maybe I'll try history for the next half hour. That didn't quite work. So we've had to tighten it up a little bit, especially at the early levels, but it's amazing those kids that are in the third and fourth year as we call them beginner, intermediate, advanced and professional levels, it's amazing to see them finally taking ownership of this whole thing. So to me, that's the power of blended learning. I use myself as an example. I was halfway through my MBA at a university that will not be named in this room. It's not in Ohio. And it occurred to me that, oh my gosh, I'm supposed to be learning things, not just getting good grades. I was really good at getting A's, but I wasn't really focusing on learning things. So that light bulb finally went off for me and that's part of what this is about is trying to get students at a much younger age to say the purpose of school is to learn and to be lifelong learners. So I just wanted to wrap up with a couple of things here. My new favorite image is here. So if you can't see this, it says the horse is here to stay, but the automobile is only a novelty, a fad. And this was from the president of the Michigan State Bank advising Henry Ford's lawyer not to invest in Ford Motor Company in 1903. Here's another one with some computers. I think there is a world market for maybe five computers. Thomas Watson, chairman of IBM 1943. And so I think this challenges us. We had a retreat a couple of weeks ago with our team, about 170 employees, and I went through these plus about 10 others. And I said, what are they gonna be saying about education in 10, 50 years from now that we think might be true, but we're not really willing to take that risk. And it was amazing to hear what some of our teachers said and we're trying to push the envelope when it comes to blended learning and these sorts of things. But I remember one of the teachers saying that there won't be any more school buildings. Kids will just kind of learn anywhere, everywhere. And even for me, that was a little bit hard to hear. And I don't see that future, but who knows, it could be. So I think it's exciting. There's no doubt that there's good people that are working hard to try to make this happen and to ultimately be a part of rebuilding this great American city that is Detroit. So good evening. My name is Veronica Conformay. It's an honor to be here today at the University of Michigan's Ford School of Public Policy to discuss the future of education for Detroit. What an important topic. Let me start by saying that as someone who just moved to Detroit, my interest and passion is about making education successful for our children, transforming lives and transforming the schools that are in our charge in the Education and Achievement Authority. I spent over a decade at New York City public schools. My culminating position was as Chief Operating Officer. And it's so fascinating to me to have my two fellow panelists talk about things that are very familiar to me. And so although my experience and context is from New York City, we ran a portfolio district. We ran what was a portfolio model. The school district did transportation, did school safety, did all of those things for charters and for traditional public schools in New York City. So it's a very familiar conversation to me and I'm excited that Dan and others are launching into that conversation to see where we go from that. And as Tom said, we are equally eager to be accountable for student outcomes and for the mission and purpose of transforming education. So a couple of things. I think for background purposes, the EAA was formed through an interlocal agreement between Detroit Public Schools and Eastern Michigan. We run 15 schools all in Detroit. They were historically the struggling schools. The charge is to transform them, turn them around, improve achievement and ultimately not stay in those schools forever. There's still a lot of questions about what the future becomes. I'm sort of excited that we have those questions because it should not be baked. It should be very much an engaging conversation with others about how we do this very, very hard work of transforming schools. We have 7,700 students from pre-K to 12. And we run a model that is extended school year and extended school day. Meaning that our Michigan's school days are roughly 175. We run 205 days currently this year. Okay, so areas of concern. Many of them coincide with what Dan said. And so what are we talking about? So what I have found in the four months as interim chancellor for the EAA is we have lots of empty seats. We have an over supply of seats in schools and an under demand of students. We have, Detroit in the 1990s had 200,000 students. It currently educates 100,000 students and over half of those are educated in charter schools currently. We don't have a coherent framework for accountability. I would agree, I would say that Dan in excellent schools, Detroit has done a great job at starting that conversation at creating school progress reports so that parents can actually understand more about quality and choice because it's not choice for choice sake. It is choice to improve options, real options for families. I'm a big believer in choice. I attended one of these struggling schools as when I grew up in the South Bronx and that ultimately in that same environment where my junior high school was today are three thriving schools. Two of them are traditional public schools and one of them is a charter and are creating much better options for families in that particular community. On accountability, I think the things that we should be thinking about is how it has to be accountability for all traditional and charter schools. It needs to be slightly focused on how students are performing and student outcomes and it needs to be a good solid framework that not only provides parents and the public with information about the school but that indicates to the educators in all of the buildings what are the right next steps to start to solve some of those problems. To start to intervene and to be able to measure whether those interventions are working in the long run. And finally, it has to be about student interest. We must prioritize student interest above all. We talk a lot about governance in Detroit in my short time there. We talk a lot about all of the adult actors but we need to move away from that and really, really focus on what are the priorities for students and how do we serve them best. I also would wanna see much more conversation. Tom, I had the pleasure of meeting just a few months ago but much more collaboration and cross conversation among charters, EAA, DPS, et cetera. So just as a reference point, Dan pointed to a lot of data associated with MAPE scores. I've taken a look at the national data for Detroit and this is our NAPE scores in Detroit, fourth grade math and what you see is that although Detroit is improving, it's the last line on the bottom, it is slow in improving and other cities are improving faster like Chicago, D.C., and L.A. And these are representative, as we all know, fourth grade scores are the types of things that economists look at when they predict prison pipelines and other things. And so this is not only a statistic of where we are in terms of achievement but the type of crisis that we are up against in this great city. Okay, so but there are some positive things and I think like Tom, I wanna talk about some of the positive things. How are we moving in the right direction and what are some of those things that are happening? I think that parents are certainly more involved and starting to be more informed and how do I see that? From the partnership that we have with Detroit Parent Network, I just attended an event this Saturday. There were over 100 parents in attendance on a Saturday afternoon to talk about how important it is for parents to be involved in their children's education and celebrating their involvement through a superhero theme. And I see those types of events happening all around and I see parents wanting to participate more in the conversation and in specifically addressing some of the concerns that schools may have. Parents are also, I spoke at this event and I said parents are students first teachers. And so how do we continue to empower them? In our schools, we have a parent center in every one of the schools. They are equipped with computer and resources to support parents around job searches, resume building, et cetera, et cetera, other social service contacts. We feel that as an organization that is working with the most struggling schools, it is critical that we are supporting parents in this way. The conversation's starting to change from quantity to quality. And I think some of Dan's remarks are really about that. Lots of quantity, lots of seats, lots of schools, lots of options, different authorizers, lots of folks in the mix. But how do we focus on quality? How do we ensure that we are recruiting and retaining top talent in our organization but in all schools across the city? Accountability, advocacy is growing. To Dan's point, he's talking about this today. He and others continue to push this conversation in Detroit and I'm happy to be a part of that conversation as well. And I think one of the other priorities that is for us, we are expanding our early childhood program at the EAA. It is expanding across the city. We see that as a top priority, we know that it's worked in many other places where they have focused on pre-K and early childhood programs. We're also opening this year in November a birth to four years old program for our students who are teen parents to be able to bring their children to school. EAA, some of the other academic things that are going on specifically at the EAA. In terms of academics, I mentioned year round programs we have reinvigorated our team to focus on all students, including our special education students and our English language learners. Putting more resources, we doubled the number of special education teachers this year at the EAA. We continue to plan to expand our pre-K offerings. In terms of data and accountability, three of the 15 schools are no longer on the priority list. That's the priority list that's set by the state. So there is some progress. It is not fast enough and in no way are where we need to be, but it continues to move every day. Safety and security. We do lots of parent surveys and student surveys and what we have found is that one of the key indicators is that safety and the culture in schools has improved over the past two years as we've implemented some of the programs and started with new leadership in many of the schools. Building relationships and talent. Let me focus on talent for a second. We can't do this work if we cannot retain and support and provide the right professional development to teachers and principals. And one of the things we are looking at is doing a full on engagement this year with all of our teachers in every single school to devise a talent retention support strategy. And to ensure that we are able to keep our best performing teachers in the EAA. There is a lot of work to be done. I wanna also invite any of you to visit our schools at any time. We have an open door policy. We do get lots of visitors. Some of it comes from the blended learning approach of other people wanting to see that work. But we certainly have our doors open for anybody to come visit. Thank you. Okay, well thanks to all of our panelists. And so we're not gonna start the Q and A. Please, if you have questions, write them down in the note card. And Mahima, are you and okay, the people in the back who are raising their hands or wants to collect the note cards. While we're waiting for some of the note cards coming in, I wanna start off with the first question. I'm gonna take the moderator's prerogative. And I'd like to ask all of the panelists about this portfolio management system. I think on one hand, kind of my personality makes me naturally attracted to kind of order and linearity and all those wonderful things that apparently doesn't exist in Detroit now. But when I hear you talking about a coordinated system of opening schools, closing schools, intervening in schools, providing school accountability, providing transportation, structure and enrollment, that sounds a lot like a public school district, right? And that sounds like, so what is, what different is that? How is that different than the old DPS where they were doing that, maybe not as well as they could be? What is the key to portfolio management and making that different than the traditional urban school district and making it effective? So I'll jump on that one. And I should, I actually failed to do this at the top of my remarks and meant to, I said to Professor Arson from Michigan State before we got started that it was really odd to me that I was up here and he was in the audience. I felt like that should have been reversed. And looking out, I now see tons of other folks who should be up here while I listened to them. So Chris Waijin from Wayne Reesa and Kerry Moss at the ACLU and RJ Weber at Novi Public Schools and professors from Wayne State and on and on and on. So my apologies for not acknowledging all of you at the very top. Oh, and I should say as well, colleague from the State Board of Education, Michelle Fecto. So two things, two big buckets. One is I just, so a lot of people hear that question and think, well, why can't we just go back to DPS? And I would just argue that the cat's out of the bed, like the genie's out of the bottle, right? The notion of going back to DPS is so, I don't even know how you would do that at this point in a city where 50% of kids go to charter schools. Those parents are like you're asking, you're effectively taking that choice away from those parents and so on and so forth. I just think that politically and practically that doesn't make any sense. So really I hear that question as, okay, well, how really is portfolio management different from having a central district? And the truth is it doesn't have to be. Now it's very different from what it was in Detroit two decades ago, right? You didn't have school choice in Detroit two decades ago. And so it's not the same system as it would have been in Detroit two decades ago, but in many respects it does mimic some of the same economies of scale that you get with a district, right? Providing transportation for all schools is very similar that is what you would do with a district. A singular control over opening, closing and citing decisions makes a lot of sense. Some of the additional benefits I would argue are that you actually have more actors involved in innovation. I think that having a single district puts a lot less pressure on that entity or there's a lot less interest among actors at that entity to actually try different things with education and having many actors helps to spur innovation as long as it's coordinated. So that's probably not a comprehensive answer, but it's a couple of examples of how it's similar, both similar and different. Any other panelists like to respond? That's his idea. No, I think you could probably look at New Orleans as probably an example where they have both. They have the choice in different options, but there is a chief at the top of the food chain. And so I think ultimately that's what Dan's talking about. If you distill the idea down to that simple concept, right now it is like the Wild West. There is no one person who's ultimately accountable. You know, just to be clear, just because I don't want Tom putting words in my mouth. So I wouldn't hold up New Orleans as the perfect example of it, just to be clear. There are elements of what happens in New Orleans that make sense, some. I'd add a couple of things. I'd say that clear lines of accountability are not always the norm in traditional school districts. I would also say that there is a great need for coordination of services, specifically those things like transportation and safety. But what is critical is the autonomy that schools have. And I think, Dan, you in some ways refer to it as innovation. Autonomy to decide on their own curriculum to say we're going to go for a longer period of time to attract talent and entrepreneurial spirit to schools to be able to create the type of successful cultures that we know allow for great education to happen in schools. So autonomy being the linchpin. OK, great. And so there's a few questions here from the audience that all involve student responding to student discipline concerns in constructive ways. And so I'll read off a few of them. What is the EAA doing to ensure that all students have access to education and in-class learning? We know that students with learning differences, low income and minority students are suspended and expelled at disproportionate rates. What is EAA and charters? What are they doing to ensure that these students have equal access to education? There was a related question that was referencing some MDE, Michigan Department of Education policy, pushes to have less punitive disciplinary measures. How is that playing out in charters and EAA? We see a lot of that. We see a lot of students that come in and end up at our doors who have been suspended or expelled from different schools in Detroit. And we take all of those students in. The goal is to ensure that there is safety in a school but that we are doing it through restorative practices. So one of the things that we have done that we just did with the new teachers that were hired this year was do an intensive training on restorative circles and how to de-escalate situations of conflict in school without resorting to violence. So lots of those things are in place in EAA schools. But as I said, we certainly see a lot of suspended and expelled students and accept them into the EAA and find other wraparound services in counseling, et cetera, that need to be in place for those students to be successful. And a lot of it is just figuring out how to design those services for them individually. Yeah, a couple of things. We have a wonderful special ed director, Tina Saunders, who's been in the city working for a long time is doing an amazing work. And the state average is in the 10 to 11% special ed population as a percent of your overall body. And we're right at that level. In fact, our high school is over 20%. So we very much put a lot of effort and energy and the resources around that to support those students. And we also spent a lot of time, especially at the beginning of the year, with our high school students, trying to create that right culture and just to try to set the right expectations. In fact, the first two weeks of school, they didn't touch a computer. They really didn't, because we have an extended school year as well, 200 days, we didn't get a whole lot of the curriculum. It was really around getting to know each other, building relationships, creating the right foundational that you need for the rest of the school year. And even with that, we had a student just a couple of weeks ago bring a gun to school. And some things are not up for debate. The law is very clear that we only have certain choices to deal with those sorts of situations. So really quickly, two things in response to this. One is I'm going to take panelists prerogative and actually ask my colleague from the State Board of Education to raise her hand, Michelle. Throw it up there. Michelle has been sitting on a task force on this very issue dealing with state discipline policy and kind of model policies around suspensions and expulsions and so on. And if you're interested in more information about state policy and potential direction in that regard, I would really encourage you to talk with Michelle. And I hope that's OK that I'm volunteering you that way. And if it's not, I'm going to run out of here really fast. Second thing I would say, just from a personal perspective, frequently in this space, we talk about academic outcomes for kids and so on and so forth. Suspensions and expulsions, I mean, this is a critically important issue. So what actually drew me into this work at the end of my legal career was doing criminal defense work. I was at the Federal Defender Office, which is the public defender for folks accused of committing federal crimes. And sat in my office, literally, kind of witnessed to a parade of largely African American and Latino men coming to my office accused of committing crimes that most of them had in fact committed. This was in the mid-90s, who had been failed by our education system or other systems. It wasn't just education. And we're facing 10, 15, 20-year prison terms that would, in many ways, put their children on the exact same trajectory that they had been on. Like, this is a vicious, horrible cycle that is morally and ethically inappropriate, as well as financially burdensome for the entire state. It just has to get fixed. So sorry for breaching, but no. I'm not sorry for breaching this. That was... Okay. Thank you. To me, maybe kind of, you know, related somewhat to that kind of the last stream of thoughts from the panelists, there are several questions involved, kind of, parents and the larger community. So I want to kind of read off a few of these questions and have the panelists address them. One, I feel like we're hearing about Detroit education in a vacuum. How can we ignore the profound poverty some of the students live in or the cultural violence they are immersed in? Are great people and organized bus routes enough in such a setting? And then another related question. My question for Dan and the rest of the panelists is the, is that the fear of school choice, placing more of the responsibility of child outcomes on parents, picking and navigating, finding the schools. Okay, so I think that's what I can get. And then another related question is, to Dan and Tom, how are you, I would say Veronica could speak this well, how are you engaging parents and families either in your individual schools or for Dan and kind of the process that you're envisioning moving forward? So sociological context of poverty and education and then engagement of specific families in particular. Yeah, I'll jump in on these two. So I strongly believe that the conditions around the school matter greatly. This is, I don't mean to have this conversation on a vacuum in my apologies for kind of not highlighting that at the outset. I think this is a community challenge that has to be addressed community-wide. That having been said, schools are one of the few places where we are willing, that we believe so strongly and that we're willing to tax ourselves and publicly fund in order to try and resolve the challenge, right? So I think the schools have a unique, a unique role and unique possibilities around helping to remediate some of those other challenges, some of those socioeconomic and societal and community-wide challenges. And so we've got to get schools performing at as high a level as possible. Now frequently that conversation kind of sounds stark and really confrontational and oppositional for teachers. I want to be clear, part of what I am proposing is a system, a governance system that would allow, right, for greater supports for teachers, more money in the classroom, more money in districts, more stable infrastructure, so on and so forth. So all that other context does matter to be clear. Two, around choice and kind of markets treating families, particularly low income families, unfairly, hear that loud and clear, like I'm a dem at the root of it all, right? And an unregulated marketplace does create that possibility for sure. Like that's what's happening in Detroit right now. If you're a connected family, you can game the system and you can get entry to the school of your choice. If you're not a connected family, you can't. Creating real transparency and regulation around choice, right, would resolve that problem. And if we're not gonna fix housing patterns, I would submit that school choice is the next best mechanism that we have for helping kids growing up and low income families and communities escape the cycle of poverty that we all know exists. Lastly, so regulated choice, I think, can make choice fair to parents and low income families. Lastly, engaging parents and families. So we do quite a bit, probably the, and I'll just talk really quickly about engaging teachers as well. Our scorecard on school performance actually includes the five essential survey out of the University of Chicago, so we pay for the surveying of every teacher and every student fourth grade and higher in Detroit as part of the generation of the scorecard. We'd love to do that for parents as well, but getting parent response rates to that tool high enough to actually make it a useful tool is a nearly impossible task, at least to date. I actually don't believe many things are impossible. We just haven't figured out the right way to do it yet. We also do unannounced site visits to schools in order to help parents, one, get visibility to lots of schools, right? The notion of choice is much more effective when you can actually compare A and B. It also changes the relationship that the school has with the community, right? So, like, folks should be able to come and check me out and check out the school, so on and so forth. So parents and community members develop their own rubric around what's important in schools, safety, cleanliness, student work displayed on the walls, working toilets, whatever it is. And those items they assess for is they go to school buildings unannounced throughout Detroit, all schools, EAA, Charter and DPS. So that's part of what we do around engagement. I'll start on the poverty question and yes, I completely agree, it's a real issue. And I'll go a little broader than Detroit and go from my experience in New York City for over a decade being there. So what happens in our schools, in our poorest neighborhoods? Our schools in our poorest neighborhoods have less money, generally, have the least experienced teachers and least effective teachers, generally have unstable leadership. We see high turnover rates of principals in our most struggling schools. And we don't have high expectations for students. And I would submit that that is probably the case in some of the challenges that we see in Detroit. So how do we go about fixing those major challenges? I think they are deeply, deeply tied with poverty, but we see examples all over the country of innovative strong cultures, doing incredible, schools doing incredible things with students, despite all of that, because they're addressing some of these issues, having the right level of resources, having experienced effective teachers in all classrooms, doing the type of work to support and improve teachers over time, creating strong cultures and setting high expectations for students. And I think that we see that happening in a number of different places, and we see that happening in a couple of places in Detroit as well. We need more of it. I don't know that I have a whole lot to add. I think we're in this every day, so we know that the poverty is very real and very challenging in our schools. It's 80 plus percent free and reduced lunch, meaning the high poverty levels. And it's a reality, but it can't become an excuse. It's kind of our motto, so you just have to acknowledge it and keep the focus on high expectations and ultimately do all the basic blocking and tackling really well, which is very hard to do. Okay, now a few questions I've been reminded. A number of these questions I've asked before have come in on Twitter. I'm supposed to say that. I'm not sure why actually, but. So some of them are coming on Twitter. One in this group has, one of the group that I'm gonna read now is a Twitter question. Okay, so these next set of questions really, I think challenge like the paradigm that all three of you kind of have embraced to one extent or another of a choice at heart-based system that really this is the right structure. So in 1990, I'm just gonna read a few of the questions off, in 1990 there were 100 Michigan districts scoring below DPS and Meep scores. Since reforms such as the growth of charters, EAA, takeovers, et cetera, scores have plummeted. The city also went from a healthy surplus to deep in debt. How can we say that charters, EAA, and all these kind of choice-based reforms have not completely failed? How about tax, another question. How about taxpayer choice? Don't Michigan citizens have choice not to profitize Michigan education? I think that's a reference to for-profit charter operators. School choice often looks like business interests being prioritized over student interests. What measures do you suggest to maintain an environment where families have options, yet children don't take second place to what works well for the service providers? So what evidence is that this whole paradigm actually is worth trying to pursue? Sorry. So I actually hear that question as being a little different. There's a remarkable supply of evidence that the paradigm as pursued in Michigan and Detroit does not work, I would argue, right? I don't think that's an indictment of other paradigms that are similarly different from the traditional, but- Just to clear, you're saying there's evidence that the old kind of DPS-centric paradigm wasn't working, or the current charters, EAA, both, okay. Both. There's an ample supply of evidence that neither worked well, that the old paradigm didn't work well and was increasingly not working well as Detroit got poorer and blacker, quite honestly, and that the new paradigm does not work well in Detroit either. I think there's an ample supply of both. That having been said, so I always enter this conversation from so what can we do to make it work today? So given the conditions that exist today, like what conditions have to be changed today to make it work, right? Kind of politics aside, what conditions could be changed to make it work today? And I believe that there are a set of them that could be changed that would actually give it a much, much better chance of working, many of which I outlined for you in my 15 minutes. A common enrollment and transportation system actually does make choice equitable for families in a way that it's not when you don't have common choice and common enrollment, a common enrollment window, transportation systems, and the so on. So there's a second strain to this question having to do with the privatization of education, kind of the for-profit enterprise, playing a role in all of this, so on and so forth. I'm not a fan of that, just to be clear. That actually shows up, I think, in the real estate portion of this game. I mean, if you actually look at how that works, it's the real estate portion. It's not the teaching and learning that is making national heritage a lot of money. It's the real estate game, right? Where you buy the facility and you lease it to the school and you're able to pay it off in 10 years and then the rest of it is gravy. So let's be clear. So their schools happen to be among the higher performing in Detroit, ironically, right? And we don't wanna take that away from those kids and so on and so forth. But why are we, somebody explained to me again why we have educators involved in real estate? Like what, somebody, somebody, anybody, explained to me why it makes sense to have professional educators charged with dealing with real estate. Anybody. It's not a rhetorical question. Like, so I think we mix burdens when we talk about the privatization of education and the for-profit motive and so on. Take the profit elements out of the game is my solution to that at the base level, right? And then, if politically speaking, we believe that we should not have for-profit schools and great, like I believe in democracy, like let's actually put that up for, like let's talk about that publicly and have a vote about that. If that's an issue that needs to be wrestled with. But in the meantime, let's get real estate and all of that, get that, that mess, it doesn't have anything to do with it. Get it out of education. It doesn't make any sense. Other thoughts on that point? I don't feel strongly about any of this. No, I don't. That's why we like you. We got to stop letting him go first. So first of all, we are a nonprofit management company that runs our schools. Maybe that's why I was invited today. I don't actually don't have too much of an issue with the for-profit world. I think most folks are pretty entrenched on this topic. And they seek out opinions and articles and data that supports what they already believe. And so it's unfortunate because it creates not a whole lot of productive conversations that ultimately our kids are watching and saying is this how we're supposed to act when we grow up? We think that the topic is just so complex. When I worked at Intel making the most advanced computer chips in the world, that was easy because we had a system, a process, an equation, a formula behind every single one of those chips. Every day in the space of this world called education is different and the politics is raging out of control. So it's just an infinitely complex and it's so easy to print broad strokes over the topic to say that charter schools are bad or et cetera, et cetera. And I just don't think it's very productive. There are a lot of good for-profit major companies that are getting good results and I think if we stay focused on what's working for students, those parents are choosing that school and they're happy with it and so we need to, I think we need to in many ways move beyond that. So I'll stop there but I think it's a very interesting time. I think Dan's right that a lot of this stuff is gonna shake out in one way or another because there's so much attention on it right now. So it'll be interesting to see how it does and hopefully it's in productive ways. My perspective is the EAA are not, it's not a private entity, it is a governmental entity so let me say that to start with. And the second is with a robust accountability system you could really focus on closing down or moving out bad actors and without it you can't. And so for me, that is where we can make the most difference by really truly evaluating what is going on and moving firmly ahead to move out any bad actors that exist. Privatization has been going on in traditional public schools for a long time. I've managed multi-million dollar contracts in New York City public schools with textbook providers and all sorts of other entities that were private and so this concept of privatization is an interesting topic but I think looked at from one lens and not sort of the broader lens. We've been using private entities to service and support our schools for a long time. A few questions now kind of we're gonna ask the panelists to focus specifically on DPS so and of course one of them is from Twitter. How does DPS fit into the conversation? Is the goal true then another one is the goal to replace the Detroit public school system or restore the system? So where does DPS fall in all of these conversations? Veronica, why don't we start with you. Well I think for the EAA DPS is a critical partner. They are part of the entity that created the EAA. I think as I said I've come from a school district where we had a traditional public school system running and a robust charter sector running and those two things when running in tandem tend to elevate each other's performance so that's the system that I'm familiar with. I don't have any particular perspective on that but I do believe that having the opportunity to have multiple parties and multiple entities in this work just improves our work all together. Yeah I would ditto that I think in fact Dan and I before Veronica moved to town we worked on initiative with several charters with Exon Schools Detroit, the EAA and DPS and it was all around this notion of rising tide, this all bodes so how do we focus on Detroit as a city and not on our own turf within that and in a grant that we were going out after collectively on the national level so I think there's a lot of work to be done there but I hope that DPS is a player for a long time to come. And so I would agree I think Detroit Public Schools has to be a part of the future public education system in Detroit or one of the public education systems in Detroit, I think that it like that bus like all the buses on the road needs to be accountable to a larger coherence strategy so the goal isn't to replace DPS at all. And I would say too so I didn't say this I shortened my debt quite a bit for today that part of what has to happen going forward in Detroit and I probably just needed to stay in is that the debt that DPS is carrying has to be resolved. You just you can't, we are ultimately so that debt is being paid, right? It's being paid by kids who aren't able to get the same level of resources that they would be able to get if DPS was not carrying that debt. It's ultimately an obligation of the state. I mean the state constitution requires that the state provide education to every child in the state, a free access of whatever the language is, public education. The state's got to figure it out. Like Jack Martin, personally he's a nice guy and I think it's pretty clear after six years frankly that the emergency manager system is not resolving the deficit situation in Detroit. I just think it's clear we can refinance to long-term debt and kick the can down the road but it's not ultimately fixing the problem. That debt has to be resolved if we are serious about educating the 47, 50,000 kids, whatever it is that attend Detroit public schools. And so I know we actually have a few of the panelists have to leave right away so I see it's 5.30 now. So I want to stop here on that optimistic note of Detroit's debt and thank all three panelists for joining us today and for some interesting and stimulating remarks. I hope to see all of you at other EPI events and other events specifically on education in Detroit. Thank you very much. Thank you.