 Today, the majority of our public school children live in poverty. Students of color in the largest 100 American cities are more likely to attend schools where most of their peers are in poverty. And last school year, for the first time in U.S. history, children of color made up the majority of students attending America's public schools. I want you to think for a minute about what these new data mean for public education in America. We live in a new public education reality. And a strong federal role in public education is more important now than ever before. We cannot abandon our children. On behalf of MassSync, I want to thank Clark University and the Mazukowski Institute for their partnership in organizing today's symposium, but also their support all along the way in our Gateway Cities initiative from the very beginning. Three years ago, we actually came together here at Clark with Gateway City education leaders to begin a year-long process of crafting together a collaborative vision for community-wide learning systems in our state's Gateway Cities. This vision called for increasing access to early learning, expanding the school day, providing social-emotional supports that are critical to lifelong well-being, doing better to nurture newcomers and ensuring that all of our students are on paths to college and career success. Those are the tangible elements of our strategy, but we also spent a lot of time as leaders thinking about the why, trying to craft a narrative. The narrative began with what our Gateway Cities are going to be to our commonwealth in the 21st century. And the clear answer is there are going to be places that produce human talent. They're home to one-quarter of our commonwealth's youth. If our economy is going to stay competitive, it's critical that all these young people realize their full potential. We read recently on the front page of the globe that economic inequality is leading to increasingly economically segregated communities in our commonwealth, that youth who hope to gain the skills in our economy are increasingly isolated from opportunity in the learning experiences that they're going to need to reach their full potential. The globe explicitly named our Gateway Cities as the places where these opportunities were lacking, where economic inequality is rooting itself and perpetuating this cycle. The words they used to describe our commonwealth's Gateway Cities bore no resemblance at all to what we outlined together in our Gateway City vision for dynamic, community-wide learning systems. So the question for us all is how? How can we change this dynamic, enable all of our youth to receive the opportunities they'll need to have that opportunity? For two decades, we've been working on that problem at MassSync. Our founding mission was to support the growth and vitality of our middle class. And frankly, it's been a bit disheartening to see the trajectory of our commonwealth since our founding. And it's hard to believe that one little think tank could make a difference in such a major problem. But what gives us tremendous hope as we do this work is Senator Warren. She was but one faculty member who with carefully crafted research in strong, powerful presentation has changed the national dialogue and she's bending the arc of policy. In our time, this is especially rare and I know that it inspires me and it inspires all of you at Clark who aren't content with the status quo. When we're dealing with such enormous, lead complicated issues, it's hard to stand out alone even when your intentions are pure and yet Senator Warren has done that repeatedly in Washington and her stance has haven't halted progress. They've made for better policy. And I think the issue that we're talking about today, the law, is another example of where she's done that. She was one of just three members of her party to vote no in the legislation that passed the Senate last July and her dissent attracted a lot of attention and resulted in a better bill from the perspective of providing more accountability for federal funds that are directed at our most vulnerable students. So for us, in terms of achieving our gateway city's vision, broadly speaking, the how is emulating Senator Warren as we speak out and empower our gateway city students to speak out on behalf of the educational experiences they need for equitable opportunity in our Commonwealth. But even more specifically the how before us today is how we implement this new policy, the average child succeeds act to build a stronger community wide learning systems for our gateway city students. And to begin this dialogue, please offer a very warm welcome to our senior United States Senator Elizabeth Warmer. Thank you. Good morning. Thank you, Ben, for the very generous introduction. It is great to be here at Clark University for the sixth annual Ligarelle lecture. I just want to start by saying how pleased I am that Dr. Ligarelle is able to be here with us today. He is a wonderful man, and for decades he has been a real champion of public education. And it is a great honor for me to stand here and deliver a lecture in his name. Dr. Ligarelle. Thank you. I also want to say a very special thank you to Clark University, to President David Angel, to Provost Foreman, to Institute Director Jim Gomes, and all you Clarkies out there today who come in on a Monday morning to talk about an issue that is critically important to all of us, public education in America. You know, speaking before you at this symposium about public education reminds me of my own journey into public service. I was not a little girl who had firmly fixed my sights on being a United States Senator. That wasn't quite within the range of what I was thinking. But I did have ambitions, ambitions to be a school teacher. And for me, that was the tops, and in some ways, it still is. Teaching is not a job. Teaching is a calling. I know where it started for me. I loved my second grade teacher, Ms. Lee. She was truly wonderful. And when she told me one day, you know, Betsy, someday you could grow up to be a teacher. It changed my understanding of the world. I stood a little taller. I spoke a little clearer. And I organized my dollies into let's play school. We were heavy on reading and snack time. Actually, it was tough being one of my dollies, I mean day after day. My first job out of college was to be a teacher. I taught little ones, children with special needs in a public elementary school. And after I went to law school, had two children, I managed to find my way back into the classroom teaching in law school much taller students. So I've taught the range is how I look at it. Being a United States Senator gives me a somewhat different perspective than I had from my elementary school classroom. But I have never lost my appreciation for the importance of strong public education and the vital role that the federal government plays in making sure that every kid has a real opportunity and a fighting chance to succeed. Sixty-two years ago, the United States Supreme Court issued Brown versus the Board of Education declaring school segregation unconstitutional. In May, 1954, before I had ever started school, Chief Justice Warren, no relation, although in law school, I had a constitutional law professor who thought it was very funny to call on me for every Warren opinion. Chief Justice Warren in Brown versus Board of Education delivered his opinion to the country. And I want to read you the words from it. I brought them with me. Today, education is perhaps the most important function of state and local governments. In these days, it is doubtful that any child may reasonably be expected to succeed in life if he or she is denied the opportunity of an education. Such an opportunity where the state has undertaken to provide it is a right which must be made available to all on equal terms. Can I have an on-man on that? Be a bet. Available to all on equal terms. Those are powerful words, but they ran into a hard reality. The next year, the Supreme Court ruled that schools were required to use, quote, all deliberate speed to integrate classrooms. But let's face it, a lot of people didn't want to change. Nearly 20 years later, I was a young law student who was asked to write on a case in which Virginia continued to resist desegregating its schools. Across America, racism ran deep and its hold was strong. Now, one of America's most iconic paintings is Norman Rockwell's The Problem We All Live With. I hope many of you in this room know it. If you don't, you've got your iPhones, you can look it up real fast. The problem we all live with is the title of it. It's from the 1960s, and it features Ruby Bridges. She's a six-year-old black child, scrubbed and shining for the first day of school. She's wearing new shoes and a white dress, and she's accompanied by four U.S. marshals. On the wall behind her is an ugly racial epithet and a smashed tomato, but Ruby is marching straight ahead with a kind of dignity and determination that should put every adult to shame. Her message is clear. I belong here, and I will take my rightful place here. Ruby is the star of this painting, but the federal officials with their heads just cropped out of the frame are flanking young Ruby to protect her right to a decent education. And they are a reminder that we move forward together. When state and local governments blocked Ruby, the federal government was there for her. By the time President Johnson was in the White House, Brown was nearly a decade old, and its promise of all deliberate speed seemed at that point just to be an invitation to delay. Lyndon Johnson knew that one critical way to force states that were reluctant to go along, to get them to comply with school integration and to expand educational opportunities was to put some money on the table. So in 1965, he did that with the first Elementary and Secondary Education Act. It was part of our civil rights laws. A key purpose of this landmark civil rights law was to drive desegregation in the South in the 1960s by withholding this new federal funding from school districts that failed to integrate. It was federal accountability for how those federal funds were to be used. ESEA was meant to counteract the crippling effects of poverty in America's schools, more federal resources to support the schools that needed it most. I want to do another quote here because I think it's every bit as important as what was said in Brown versus the Board of Education. When President Johnson signed ESEA, he said, quote, I know that education is the only valid passport from poverty, the only valid passport. I believe deeply no law I have signed or will ever sign means more to the future of America. In 2016, as in 1965, more federal resources coupled with strong federal accountability for serving historically marginalized groups of kids is still at the heart of this education law. Today, the majority of our public school children live in poverty. Students of color in the largest 100 American cities are more likely to attend schools where most of their peers are in poverty. And last school year, for the first time in U.S. history, children of color made up the majority of students attending America's public schools. Want you to think for a minute about what these new data mean for public education in America. We live in a new public education reality. And a strong federal role in public education is more important now than ever before. We cannot abandon our children. So I want to talk a little bit more about our new laws on this. Ben mentioned that I've been very heavily involved in this. At the tail end of last year, Congress passed a reauthorization of ESEA. And at the White House ceremony for the signing of the bill, I heard President Obama call it a Christmas miracle. We managed to get it through. Now the bill was an unexpected achievement because it was truly bipartisan. It was supported by Republicans and Democrats in its final form. Governors and principals, parent groups, and superintendents. It was the first bill in 20 years endorsed by organizations that represent all 50 state governors. Of course, part of that collective enthusiasm came from the fact that no child left behind was so unpopular that passing anything that got rid of no child left behind was woohoo for a lot of people. You know how broken that law was and how much it needed to be fixed, but as problematic as no child left behind was, and as anxious as everyone was to replace it, and as much momentum as there was for replacing it, it was very important to me, very important for the Obama administration, and very important for some of my Democratic colleagues in Congress to ensure that we replace it with a bill that is true to its roots and that serves the kids who need it most. When ESEA was passed 50 years ago, it was a landmark civil rights achievement. The federal government committed itself to improving educational opportunity for children who had been underserved, who had been mistreated, or who had been outright ignored by our public schools. But the early drafts of the legislation to reauthorize ESEA for this go round, to replace no child left behind, lacked even the minimum safeguards to ensure that the states would use federal funds in the right places. The original Republican version of this bill was effectively like a block grant, just give the money to the states and let them spend it any way they want. To me, this was just a non-starter. I voted against the first version of the bill and I fought alongside the president to ensure that federal education dollars came with commitments about how the states would use that money. I thought that was absolutely critical. And let me just underscore, one of those expectations is for states to actually target their efforts toward kids who need the help most. Hard fought, but we got it. And I just got to say, the final bill is a whole, whole, whole lot better than the bill that they started out with. For example, I want to give you two examples of what changed in the bill. The new law includes an amendment that Senator Cory Booker and I put together to help ensure that the 1,200 high schools in the United States where fewer than two-thirds of students graduate each year get some extra help. I want you to think about that. We have 1,200 high schools across this country where fewer than two-thirds of the students graduate each year. And so we managed to put more resources into those schools. This means that states can't turn a blind eye to struggling kids in under-resourced schools. And it ensures that the schools that clearly need the help are the schools that will get the help. We thought that that was absolutely essential. There's another bill I co-sponsored with another Cory. This time with Republican Senator Cory Gardner, we got in an amendment that requires the states to report better data. So for all of you who like to study education, you know how important it is to have the numbers. And so what we insisted on in this bill that had never been there before was not just that the states have to report the data, but they have to do what is termed in the bill, cross-tabulated data reporting, which means now that parents, that teachers, that researchers across the country will be able to look at the outcomes of different groups of students. For example, young Latinas, teen-aged African American boys, or low-income children with special needs. By being able to look at subgroups and do that systematically over time, it helps us better understand how our schools are serving or not serving students and to identify student groups that need more help and to identify programs that are actually working. You can tell that your senior senator from here in Massachusetts is at heart a datanerd. I think this one is going to help us make a real difference going forward. So I mentioned two of these as important accountability provisions. They speak to why we have a federal education law in the first place. To make sure that all our children, regardless of race or income or zip code or state, have the same opportunity to get a great education. And ESEA is now a step in the right direction, but I want to be clear. It is only one step. The federal role in protecting educational opportunities for people of color does not stop at high school. We know that to get a college degree, more black and low-income students borrow money and they borrow more money than their white counterparts. For example, while less than two-thirds of white college students graduate from public colleges with debt, which is still way too much, four out of five black students graduate from the same schools with student debt. We also know that many for-profit colleges, particularly the shadiest outfits, prey on people of color, on low-income people, on first-generation college students, and on people who have already suffered at the hands of American educational inequality. Black and Latino students make up less than one-third of all college students, but nearly half of all for-profit college students. Not only do for-profit students graduate at much lower rates than they do at not-for-profit schools, they also are almost certain to leave with massive amounts of unsustainable debt. I want to give you three numbers just to lock in your mind because it's easy to forget that there's another whole world out there on higher education. 10, 20, 40. These are roughly the numbers of 10 percent. One in every 10 college students is in a for-profit college. Those colleges are sucking down 20 percent of all federal aid and loan dollars. And those colleges, graduates or dropouts, are responsible for more than 40 percent of all the defaults in the federal system. This is not working. The federal government has an important role to play on the side of our students. Instead of funneling money into these schools on a no-questions-ask basis and signing students up literally for billions of dollars of student loans collectively that they cannot possibly repay, the federal government should crack down on predatory for-profit colleges and make sure that federal dollars are going to the places that are trying to educate our students. You bet. So I've talked about two key areas where I think the federal government has a very important role to play in public education, but I want to mention a few more. Things the federal government can do and should do. The federal government can ensure that a debt-free college option is available for all students, particularly for students who are most likely to graduate with debt. The federal government can do this. The federal government can fight back against resource inequality in our schools, and that means inner-city public schools get the same music and art classes, the same school nurses, the same advanced placement courses, and the same high-quality teachers as white suburban schools. That's what we believe in. The federal government can ensure that young dreamers are able to access the same great education as their peers, no punishment just because they were brought to the United States as children. The federal government can ensure that black and Latino students aren't disproportionately suspended from school and sent tumbling down the school-to-prison pipeline. We can do that. The federal government can ensure that black and Latino students aren't disproportionately pushed into special education classes, also very important. Yes. Let's throw in one more. The federal government can ensure that every young girl has equal access to sports, science, math, whatever it is she wants to study. For me, all of this is personal. It is because of public education that the daughter of a janitor ended up as the senior senator from the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. If it hadn't been for public schools, first grade through 12th grade, I never made it to kindergarten, and if it hadn't been for a public college that gave me a chance to get a diploma and then opened a million doors for me, I wouldn't be standing on this stage today. I never forget where I came from and what an educational opportunity means for a kid who's just willing to try hard. The federal government has a critical role to play in standing up to protect the educational opportunities of low-income children and children of color, but we have a lot of work to do before every kid in this country gets a great education. We can do it if we remember that these aren't other people's children. These are our children, every single one of them, and we want every one of our children regardless of race or income or zip code to get a world-class education. We want not just some of our children, but all of our children, to have a fighting chance to build a future, and that starts with public education. Thank you for being here. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thanks very much. Thank you. Thank you. So, it's going to be here at Clark University to be able to talk about the importance of public education. This is about opportunity, not just for some of our kids, but opportunity for all of our kids. Anybody have any questions? Senator, I wanted to get your thoughts. You've had some, obviously, more remarks in the presidential race of late. Do you feel responsibility to get more involved? I mean, you said there was extremists running on the GOP side. Do you feel like your voice is now needed in this race? You bet. I guess in what way? I mean, hang on. I'm getting more involved, and I will get more involved as we get closer and closer to November. You know, I watch what's happening right now on the Republican side, and there reaches a point where silence is not a virtue. There is a form of ugliness and extremism that is erupting on the right, and it not only threatens the Republicans, it threatens the entire country. And which way would you, if you just see yourself getting involved? Would you just support the extremists? Is that what you're asking me? No, more in general. How do you feel lending your voice and so forth? How do you get involved? I'll find a way. I usually have a fairly loud voice. I think he's asking if it's time for a two-woman ticket to the presidential race. What do you think, Senator Warren? Right now, I think we need to concentrate on getting our presidential candidates. Do you feel it's still competitive at this point? It seems like Bernie Sanders has a long road to climb if he wants to get the delegates. Democrats are doing what they should be doing. They're out talking about the issues that matter most to the American people. And they're drawing a contrast with what's happened over on the Republican side. Democrats are talking about the importance of radio in Wall Street, about making college affordable for all of our kids, about trade deals that don't leave workers in the dirt. That's the kind of conversation we're having on the Democratic side. I've not got to say. It makes me really proud to be a Democrat. On the Republican side, they're just trying to out ugly for each other. And so far, pretty successful. But that's the big difference. And that's what folks can now see. They can see what Democrats are talking about. Look at our debates versus what goes on in their debates. We had comments where we can seemingly leave open at the door that you'd be open to the vice presidential candidacy. I guess how open are you to that? Look, I love my job. That should be pretty clear. I love this job. I am up early every morning and stay up late every night doing the work that I promised the people of Massachusetts that I would go to Washington to do. I'm out there fighting on behalf of working families. This is a great job. I'm not thinking about another job. Do you have questions? Can you send it around to the Education Law? Oh yeah, Education! There was a whole coalition of civil rights groups that at the time of the passage put out statements saying they still had a lot of misgivings and concerns about whether the reauthorization was going to protect vulnerable populations, whether states could kind of backslide on accountability. They gave it kind of a tepid golf course of flaws, you might say. And your remarks on the Senate floor, you also at the end sort of said that you'd be watching closely that sort of suggests that you also have some concerns about it going forward. I do have concerns. We passed a bill that was very much improved from the original version. There is now some accountability in it and there will be a robust data gathering that helps expose inequality in the educational system. Both of those are critical. But it's going to take real energy to make sure that the promise of this bill is fulfilled for our most vulnerable children. Just so you understand, my message when I go around and speak to state legislators hearing Massachusetts is to say, watch out, this new bill is coming. It's going to have different set of rules than the old bill. And you've got to be in there watching it every step of the way to make sure that the money goes to the kids who need it most. Now you're concerned that nationally even a lot of your democratic, more liberal colleagues were ones that pushed back on a lot of the accountability provisions. Does it, do you feel like people lost sight of sort of the roots of this whole thing that you talked about today, the civil rights, you know, legacy? I've pushed really hard on that because I think it's absolutely critical. No child left behind was so widely disliked that it created this kind of momentum. There's a chance to move a bill. We can repeal no child left behind. Yay! And everyone, you know, jump on the bus and is heading off. And there were times when I felt like the skunk at the picnic saying, hold on, we've got to look at what we're replacing it with. The problems of no child left behind. But that does not mean that the federal government can simply write a check to each state and say, spend it however you think best. We just can't do that. That denies what federal aid to education was all about. And that's why I wanted to put the talk today at Clark University. When I was invited here, I thought, perfect timing, I want to talk about this. The reason we have federal aid to education is to try to improve the quality of opportunity for our children who most need those opportunities. All right, guys, you guys have one more? That's it. Senator, you included today in your children who are vulnerable, the ones brought here by their parents against their will or without their knowledge of their status. Can you talk more about other ways that you're looking to support the Dreamers and the efforts that they're making for more opportunity? We start with the Dreamers who want a chance to go to school, a chance for the Dreamers who are trying to build a life here. These are young people who did nothing wrong. They were brought here by their parents as children. And this is the only home they have known as a people and as a country. We should welcome their contributions and we should encourage them to become as well educated as possible so they can make even more contributions and so they can build some security for themselves. You know, look, ultimately, we need comprehensive immigration reform in this country. That's what we need to do. That is the answer. But certainly, as a people, we can agree to this slice of it in the meantime and that is an opportunity for Dreamers to get into education, surely. Senator, how important do you think it is to just go back to the political question? I know you've been knowing an endorsement doing that within the primary while it's still competitive. I mean, how important do you think it is for you to make that decision? Right now, I think we're in a good place. Democrats are talking about issues, Republicans... What are they doing? I have to pause here. Republicans are talking about ways to divide this country and ways to place blank. And I think that this part of the primary really helps people all across this country see the difference. Ultimately, I think this election will be about who you stand for, who you think government should work for. And the Republicans make it pretty clear. They want it to work for the rich and the powerful. They want to cut taxes once again for the richest and most powerful among us. And that means less money available for education, for roads and bridges and medical research. Democrats are saying we need to come together to build a future, to build opportunities, not just for some of our children, but for all of our children. I think right now in the process, those are the differences we're seeing, and I think that's good. I think it's good for democracy. But look, it's good to be talking about these issues. These are the issues I ran for the United States Senate on. This is why I came here. I came to the Senate because I wanted America to talk about these issues. I want us to make the changes we should make. What do you make your decision, I guess, in terms of who you feel best if it does all that? I don't feel tied to a timeline. I know where we are today, and I think we're in a good place today. Thank you. The two that I'll talk about first, one of them is that really excites me in the new law is the opportunity to get away from strict use of standardized assessment measures to rate schools and students and to move on to opportunities to have performance-based assessments, which I feel will more accurately capture what students know and are able to do in a variety of different settings for a variety of different students. We've all known for a long time that there are some people who, quote-unquote, don't test well. And that's not been addressed in how we look at student performance or school performance. And so I'm excited for the opportunity to think innovatively about how else we can help students demonstrate their learning. The second thing that I think about when I think about the law, especially reflecting on the senator's comments this morning about how the law seeks to channel funding to those students who need it the most and who have the largest educational gaps to close. In Revere, where we have a high immigrant population and we are a majority-minority school district, we face a lot of challenges with students who come from sociologically disadvantaged homes. And we understand what it takes to educate those kids, but recently, the governor's budget, where he infused, and is proud to say that he infused, $72 million of additional FY17 chapter 70 bunnies. When we really look at where that $72 million went, it did not go to Gateway cities. And so it's a concern for me when I think about the federal legislation and how that's really being implemented in the state of Massachusetts. And specifically speaking about the budget, where we changed from a metric of low income to identify students living in poverty to a new metric called economically disadvantaged. And when we do that, we see urban districts like Revere with multi-million-dollar budget cuts that are going to just completely impede our ability to help these students who need the extra support get what they need. And that is a concern to me. The governor's budget funnels 10 percent. Budget increases from last year to this year to 11 districts, none of which are urban and none of which are Gateway cities. Of the 25 districts that are getting between five and 10 percent increases, only two are Gateway cities. The vast majority, in fact, over two-thirds of the Gateway cities in the state of Massachusetts will see a less than 1 percent increase in their budget from last year to this year if what the governor proposes goes through. So it's concerning that as we're talking about moving money to those students who really need it, we don't see that happening at the state level. Great. I'll try to be additive here. I think on the positive side, I think the advancing policies to really promote a more innovative approach so that it's a seven-state pilot in the law that allows some states who are ready to move forward to really try to expand the nature of assessment toward more performance-oriented events that are complex, that are challenging, that have differential outcomes. And the great piece there, from our perspective in L.A. May, is not just the advancing of innovation. It's that they're staging the advancement. So I think it's instructive for state law that if you want to adopt simple practices that really don't demand much in terms of system change, you can ask everybody to do something all at once, but if you really want to move things creatively forward, you better work with a smaller group of people to pave the way. And I think the law models that, and I think that's good. I'm excited about the shift down to the local sites. There's a lot expected of districts. Their expectations are on stakeholder engagement. I mean, these are systems of public education. So it's exciting that there are provisions where actually the public needs to be engaged at the state and local level. The big issue on the flip side, of course, is that these are great ideas, but when you release someone from prison or been locked down, they don't immediately exercise themselves as free citizens. There's a curve there. You need to sort of, you know, reawaken, remember what it's like. And flexibility is good, but do our districts really have the capacity to really step forward for the opportunity? And the last thing I think that is hugely important is that the law is a great compromise, and it's an important step forward from the no child left behind version. I had the privilege of implementing that law when it first came out in New Hampshire as the state chief. It was very challenging. So I'm very grateful that it's moved forward, but it's a compromise, and there are conflicts in it. And I think they've yet to show themselves. One that I'll name, for example, is that there's a differential bar for the use of research. So the way we read the law, if you're working targeted populations of kids who really need and deserve help, there's really a very high threshold for the kinds of research to be used to advance and promote new practices. But more generally speaking, there's more room available for more general approaches in districts. Now you've got these competing thresholds of what's allowed, and the great irony would be that young poor people, poor people of color, will certainly have the safeguards of the science behind research and learning, but will they be limited in terms of the exposure to creative new practices that have not yet met the threshold? So I think that compromise piece is bothering me. I met with some of the staff in Washington from some of the leads on the bill, and I asked them what they had not been able to accomplish. And there was one Democrat and one Republican, and I said, you know, the more partisan positions that they couldn't each get against the other. I didn't hear the idea they shared that they just wish they could move forward in unison, because that's not the nature of the deliberation. So all four of you have talked about the issue of increased opportunity, but a worry about capacity. So I was wondering if you could say a bit more about directions for states and districts to take to build such capacity, and either directions that are really needed to elaborate that a little bit, or particular strategies that you think would be powerful to create that capacity. At the state level, we've developed institutions that are going to need to reflect very deeply about their role, their function, although there have been some real progress made over the last few years in trying to shift the complementary role that districts would have with the state. A lot of the states still don't have the skill set inside the agency to be true partners with districts. So there is a real issue about both capacity of states, and these times when since 2008 we've used the state department staff and they have generally in state legislatures begun to look at them as the first point of resource reduction before they go to the school. So there is reduced capacity there. It's not just reduced numbers, it is a shifting in the role that they must play. In order to carry out the kind of area issues that are mentioned in the Elementary and Secondary Education Act, there is a deep expertise in teaching and learning. So SEA capacity is an issue. At the local level, there is business as usual and how does one interrupt that in a way to bring about these deep conversations that are going to be necessary about the future, how they can redesign learning programs and opportunities for students and how they can bring resources into that district in a way that results in strong planning and implementation of the kinds of shifts that are taking place. The other part of this is I think this law is calling for a different kind of relationship between states and districts. We've operated so long with a sort of you come up with a state solution it's passed down to the local districts it's implemented at that level. This law hints at a much more collaborative process and I think the best models coming forward would be context for states to form strong relationships with districts particularly districts who are in a leading position have will and capacity to use those as laboratories for learning and then to reflect policy on that sort of turning things upside down in how we do business rather than coming up with a solution and passing it down let's use these laboratories of innovation reflect on what implications there are for scalability and for systems designed at a state level. Others? I think the first step may be to more effectively use the capacity that we already have. There's some districts that have more than others do. There is private sector consulting capacity. You can imagine having districts share certain types of expertise. You may have a region where you have a few people who are really good analysts of particular kinds of patterns in the student results or who know really well how to put together high school schedules or whatever to try to take stock of what we have and have almost consortia that share expertise in particular regions. The you can also imagine institutes that convene people in job-alike roles to share the state of the art and to be what's essentially what folks are now calling a networked learning community. So you have people who are all trying to solve the same problem and they come together two or three times a year to talk about the state of the art where they are with their learning and they learn together not claiming that anybody's got the exact right answer. That's another thought. And with regard to school leadership I've always, for the last time, wanting to do some work where we harvest the folk knowledge from the most effective school leaders. Every year we go around and Massachusetts has data online where you can see the growth percentile the average growth percentile each school which is the closest we come to measuring how much kids are actually learning from year to year at each grade and you can rank order the schools in the state and it turns out that at the top of that ranking there are a lot of public schools the charter schools get more attention because they have the advocacy engine going but you can also find public schools there and we can go inside those public schools and ask those leaders how do you do it and we've done some of that and when you do it they give you sort of the kind of informal insight that you won't find in the leadership articles and textbooks it's really subtle things that they're doing and you can imagine going in harvesting that folk knowledge and having institutes where school leaders attend these things two or three times a year to learn the tricks of the trade from their colleagues at the most effective places so basically talking about in various ways setting in place systems where we learn from the best of what's already happening and support that learning in a way that it takes root. So I guess for me one of the major things that we need to do across the country but also in the state of Massachusetts is really change the dialogue around public education away from this place where we're using data to almost vilify teachers in schools when really that's a misuse data is really important I'll tell you I should stop by saying that when education reform occurred in 1993 and we first started our MCAS testing Revere High School ranked seventh from the bottom of all high schools in the state and we're proud for the last two years to be able to say that we are last year the only level two urban district in the state this year we are pleasantly joined by Everett Public Schools and Cambridge Public Schools I will put the caveat that Cambridge spends twice as much money you know schools are doing great and the reason our schools are doing great is we use data appropriately we like having data to reflect on but we use it to drive our instruction and when we talk to teachers about data we almost have to decouple ourselves from the state conversation about data which is all about passing and failing and all of that kind of thing I'm glad to have the data to say that we're doing well but really we need to use the data to say here's where a lot of our kids have gaps how are we going to tackle it what are we going to do how are we going to make sure we close those gaps and that goes right back to what Ron just said it's really about re-professionalizing education and giving time for teachers to work together and collaborate and learn from the experts among them and among us and that changes how we do school districts there has to be common planning for teachers every day that costs money because now we need more teachers to be with the kids while the other teachers are in common planning so it all comes right back to budgeting how successful do we really want to be and let's put the money out as an indicator of how successful we want to be the foundation review board spent the last 18 months reviewing how we should change funding formulas in the state of Massachusetts their report came out and was largely ignored if that continues to happen then we're not going to see huge increases or the ability for districts to be really innovative and engage teachers in the kind of dialogue and professional work that's going to help move students performance up a notch great I would add sort of a complimentary response which is when I think about capacity I think about people and I think about volume and I think about just who are there the most of and I think about students I think about parents and I think about teachers and I think the challenge is before us and there's a lot of assumptions behind what I'm going to say and I work at a foundation we get to test things and try out new ideas we have an assumption that we really need to dramatically dramatically change how we understand student engagement we're living today with a 19th century model rooted in 17th century ideals and it's working perfectly to continue to stratify and to select and to perpetuate structures in our system that really limit our progress ironically so if you really want to get out of the box we're in then we believe you really need to move to a much more customized much more real world much more competency based approach to learning that actually very simply put on the shortest elevator ride when people ask me what we do I say you know we're trying to make education align with what's known about learning and that's a big step so if you want to do that that's called system change you want to change systems you got to deal with purpose and really culture and values and beliefs so if you want to do that in a public setting you better reach the people who are authorizers the folks who developed no child behind forgot about the public and it took a couple of years but finally people stood up and said you know this testing regime is just it's just onerous it's not good for learning we're not experts but it's got to change so my hope around capacity is that somehow in this state that the leadership probably at the grass tops starts to revoke a conversation where we get at least 1 in 30 Massachusetts residents publicly together about public education I live in a small town south shore we get a lot of people together for town meeting we vote on warrants why aren't we having an open conversation about the future of public education to move our communities forward one of the reasons is educational leaders myself included really don't trust the public it used to be that way I was commissioner I'd release test scores on a Friday I'd say they're getting better we got a whole lot of work to do and I would just pray that nobody really noticed so I didn't trust the public and that's crazy because the public knows what they're talking about we've done a lot of research Americans are interested in progress they're interested in moving forward they want to advance and I just don't understand why we're not inciting a conversation publicly among the parents and community leaders why we're not just positioning students to be more outraged than they are today about what they're getting which isn't enough and in particular that we remember that things don't move forward without your professional workforce so it not only made we're really interested in trying to unleash the power of educators to connect together not to follow some preconceived professional development regimen but to put their minds together and to advance change in their communities based on their leadership because the most trusted person in a local community about education are teachers so we dug ourselves into a big hole with union politics but I just think the pluralism that describes our democracy has not been tapped fully when it comes to thinking about the future of public education is the home of the revolution right so maybe we can be the home of future revolution to rethink what schooling means and batch processing in schools and head toward universal attainment of deeper learning outcomes so our society can move forward that's what I hope the law provides Kate there's a there are real implications for higher education in this shift and I can just mention two or three one we still need jurid research not having a direct impact on the teaching and learning process to the degree it should in this country so I think universities beginning to think about how they can get inside schools on a regular basis be a part of that planning process the just in time or the action research is necessary which allows the schools to learn from those experiences make adjustments be guided and directed and supported by higher education and then the reports coming out of that to a scalability a second one is the systems alignment issue the most powerful voices to high school students are those folks that they're going to be aspiring to reach to and higher ed folks have much more influence than high school teachers when you get to those junior and senior years developing a very thoughtful and connected relationships between high school kids and middle school and high school kids and higher ed institutions setting up direct relationships between professors and students putting them with some sort of technology based planning process that allows them to make judgments supporting their thought process and giving them ambitions to move forward and dreams for the future higher ed can play a major role in that alignment and then finally I think on this issue higher ed is the time of transition and I think the preparation programs need to have a really thoughtful analysis of where they are what they're teaching, what courses students are engaged in, are they aligned with the kinds of themes that are coming out these days and what kind of changes are necessary and how do you begin to have a much more lasting impact on those students once they leave your programs and move into teaching situations we have a curve here of teacher growth in those early years as they launch but it seems to wane as they go through their experience they don't have that kind of rich resource base coming from higher education to keep them engaged and moving forward so I think for higher education there are tremendous opportunities in this kind of environment nice chime in too for the last 20 or so years I've gone in and out of working with schools some years much more than other years and the one of the biggest problems I see is the incoherence of the professional learning system from the perspective of teachers okay you got all kinds of ideas coming at you from all kinds of directions from all kinds of people with leaders not giving you clear direction about which ones you're supposed to pay the most attention to with nobody doing the crosswalk between the different frameworks that are coming at you I can remember being in one meeting with some teachers and we were talking about some issues and they said oh yeah that's already in the frameworks that we're using and I said well what else is in the frameworks that you're using and what are the key themes and they start digging through their papers so there were things that should have been front of mind that were not things they should have memorized that they hadn't but the reason they hadn't because that was just one list I got another list and another list okay and so when we started talking about going into schools and doing it in more modern ways it's going to hit the teachers it's just one more list of things to do it's a bunch of how we all get on the same page and it's very difficult I'm just, as a consultant I just got one more list from the perspective I do a lot of surveying in schools we put survey reports back into teachers to use to inform their professional learning feedback from their students but again it's just one more source of information there's often not a coherent conversation around the feedback that the teachers get and so the challenge is to figure out how to make the job doable for a teacher I think a lot of this I'm not as big a fan as a lot of other people are about coming up with a lot of new ideas about if we just use the old ideas well we might be in much better shape and the new ideas on top of the old ones before we've actually even perfected the delivery system for the old ones just makes it more complicated and so the question is how do we sort all this out when each of us comes and thinks we have the answer okay and you've got ten of us coming to the same school all of us think we have the answer it's a and I don't have the answer to that it's just Diane do you have a sense of I think Ron hit the nail right on the head which is teachers feel inundated especially in the last six or seven years I'd say teachers really feel overwhelmed by the volume of new initiatives that are coming at them from every direction from the new frameworks in the state of Massachusetts the educator evaluation system district determined measures you could go on and on and on it's exhausting and the reason why it's so difficult is because we've nurtured an environment of innovation so we've been talking to teachers about having been a teacher myself you always just wanted to have a normal day you wanted to come in and have everything go as it should and no kids got wildly upset and nobody was sent to the office and there was no big drama coming from the school you just wanted to have a normal day and that's just no longer something that happens we have to look at every day as a day of change and a day of innovation but we also have to give the teachers the support they need to try different things and we have to give them the freedom to understand it's alright if it's not perfect because as we learn to improve our practice we have to make mistakes along the way it's the same message that we give to our students but for some reason we as a society think that everything is supposed to be perfect in the public schools every single step of the way and so that limits people's comfort with trying to innovate or try different kinds of approaches and different strategies even if the change and the innovation isn't perfect it can be better than what was in place before so we have to take the time and have faith in each other and be able to let teachers and groups of teachers in schools try innovative new ways of instructing students and assessing students and doing all of that work that's going to make the work more personal and more connected for the kids so that they're able to go on and be successful beyond high school but also beyond school period in life you just said let the teachers yes what about induce the teachers allowing them to do it doesn't help if they aren't inclined to jump out and do it because there's kind of an inertia so as a school leader I can induce that because I hold them through the process and let them know that I'm going to make them feel comfortable if they try new things and there aren't going to be repercussions but they still feel that tension from the state and from the public from parents from other people and that's the comment I made earlier about we have to change the dialogue around what's happening in public schools people have no idea of the wonderful creative innovative hard working teachers that populate these public schools across the Commonwealth can I ask a question in your district to the degree that there are wonderful teachers who have great ideas are there ways for other teachers to have access to that to learn about one another's great ideas is there any structure to the way that happens there are so for the last four years we started actually we do have one innovation school every year and our innovation school started experimenting with professional learning communities and then through the Nellie Mae Foundation we had a grant that allowed us to restructure our high school where we were able to work in professional learning communities there as well in the alternative school in the sorry in the innovation school the teachers meet once a week for their professional learning communities at the high school it's twice a week we also have three expanded learning time schools where those teachers meet daily and so we have our professional learning groups where we have trained teacher leaders in each school we have about 65 of them across the district who facilitate the professional learning communities and in that way we're able to honor teachers as leaders of each other and they can have those leadership experiences and there's more of a sense of professionalism while they're still in the classroom there are not a lot of opportunities like that traditionally in public school systems because either teachers are teachers or they're administrators so one way that we can help professionalize the community of teachers is by creating more teacher leadership opportunities and that's just one of the ways that we've done it in Riviera we do I mean with our educator when we had the educator evaluation protocol change in the state of Massachusetts we actually call us an educator growth model because we don't believe in educator evaluation we believe in educated growth although admittedly we do sometimes have to evaluate a few people but because we have a culture around educated growth we're more focused on how we can all learn more from each other and so when we implemented the new system we had a team of 30 teachers trained to lead the new process and they're the ones who trained the administrators on how to do observations in classrooms how to document those observations how to give feedback to teachers etc so we work very hard to establish a culture in Riviera where it is about teacher leadership the teachers are the ones who are going to bring the kids to new levels those kinds of relationships that the teachers have with each other transcend into how the kids have relationships both with teachers and with each others and that's how we're able to have some of these positive results in Riviera so I hear each of the speakers use the word innovation quite a bit and and part of the title of today's talk is next generation learning so I would love if you could talk a little bit about how in a system as Diane said that has been working from being vilified through the high stakes testing through the sense of not performing well teaching to the test and schools that really don't look much changed from last century or the century before how do we move into the 21st century it's already 2016 and our schools look the same we're just starting to move out of this this yoke of the high stakes exams with this new law so how do we really create innovation in the schools what does that look like and what does that look like for schools is that the point I mean we want schools that work for kids okay and the why do you think innovation is the answer I just keep using it other people are saying and I'm sort of pushing back a little bit I'll give it a try the point I mean in the work that we do we want two kinds of things we want kids to have basic skills we want them to develop the mindsets and dispositions and so on when we look across lots of schools we survey millions of kids a year and if you want the basic skills it's how effectively teachers challenge kids to think rigorously and to persist in the face of difficulty and to stay on task if you want them to have ambitious goals and to be inspired to do more things to predict that are how interesting the teacher makes the lessons and how personally she connects with the kids so if you care a lot and you captivate them they want to be like the teacher they want to learn from the teacher they want to be like the teacher they want to be like the teacher they want to be like the teacher they want to be like the teacher they want to learn more there are ways to do that that people already know but what we don't have is learning systems in schools and supports that get people to sink their teeth into these things people are so stuck in the status quo that they think this is how it's going to be I just need to get through the day like you said they want to have a normal day and so you could say there's some innovation to be had to turn the ship get the boat to move and to do more of what we kind of already know needs to be done so I'm not sure where the line is between innovation and existing knowledge but it seems like it's a lot about implementation it's about putting in place the systems it allows you to use what we already know more effectively so I guess I would just say that in a lot of ways what you're talking about is innovation those are the things that are going to help kids do better we don't have the on demand in the moment supports for students because of the way that our schools are structured we're still structured with all kids come in at this time and all kids go home at that time and a period is this long and lunch is this long and everybody must take this many math classes and this many English language arts classes in order to graduate we haven't stepped outside of that box even though we understand better how kids need support like you were talking about in Revere we talk about our four Rs rigor, relevance, relationships and resiliency and that's what we talk about in all of our professional development is how to help kids grow in those areas but we really need to look at ways for some kids that can happen very quickly there should be some kids in the state of Massachusetts who can graduate high school in three years and get on to college it might take five years or five and a half or six years but it shouldn't necessarily mean that a school is bad or the kid is bad because that's how long it took it might just mean that he or she grew up elsewhere and needed to have some time adjusting to being in a new country and learning a new language before he or she was going to be proficient at what we expect for all kids to be able to do in order to earn a high school diploma but so we have to decouple those things where we say if you don't graduate in four years then there's something wrong either something's wrong with the kid or there's something wrong with the school and we have to so that's what I think of when I think of innovation is just changing out of that traditional everybody's here for the same amount of time for the same number of days for the same length of year etc etc I think the conversation the conversation sounds like it's just about doing new things for new things' sake and I think that's a big mistake in education and Ron I couldn't agree more I think the things you've noted about highly skilled teachers are transferable to new settings so it's critical that we not pretend like this is a new problem but Diane said it and I think more generally schools are still built on a model where kids basically go through the same thing at the same pace and if you fall behind and move ahead you're the aberration it's not just an innovation in practice I think it's more a really an innovation of purpose and it brings me back to these ideas about public authorization and endorsement you know if you want a system that is good at culling and sorting a select few for an opportunity to take an next step in education do what we are doing if you want to advance more people to a promising future do what we're doing better if you want to advance a large majority of people forward then you're going to do things like meeting students where they really are not where we wish they were because of their birthday we're going to be passing people forward when we're sure they know things not just because June rolls around I have some friends of mine you know I hang out like my neighborhood they still have no idea exactly what I do you know I'm a foundation CEO they're just you know do I pour foundations do I you're not sure and I sit there with the guys I know and I go you know we're really about competency based education at Nellie Mae we want to think about competency based education and they're like great what's that about it must be good and I go well it's when we advance kids when they really know things they've mastered things before they go on to learn the next thing and I get to stare and they're like what have we been doing all these years and I go we move kids forward with you know 75 and that means they got about three quarters of it they pile those deficits up and then we wonder why they drop out of math in college so we're not we're not setting them toward mastery so I and I'm very anxious of people in today's world who talk about different pacing for different kids and I will be the first to say you know that is a formula for expanding the achievement gap because you'll just reinforce social inequity and you'll see it translated into educational outcomes so in our day and age equal equitable is not equal it doesn't mean everybody gets the same treatment it's where you put you know resources where they're needed and you meet kids where they are and I think so that is rooted in innovation of purpose and that means that people in this country need to think for themselves look ahead and consider what kind of education system do we need to succeed as a community in a society and I have confidence in the people in this country we've seen we're experimenting with this now and it is just eerie the way put in a particular way we've read some preconceived answer that regular folks come to the conclusion that we just need to do things somewhat differently so Ron I agree with you don't let's not throw the baby out of the bathwater and I think there are edges places like Revere working on State of New Hampshire, Connecticut I mean it's wildfire around this country the ideas people are having about just shifting the box a little bit and maintaining the best of our instructional practices but really moving to a modern age if you could just list it off you could paraphrase this effective differentiation absolutely right and when we start talking about effective differentiation they're going to be race and social class differences in how kids get sorted to differentiate and there's a question who do we trust to make those calls and so there's going to be resistance to effective differentiation because some people are going to be afraid to take the most vulnerable kids and say well they don't quite know it yet so we can't cast them on yet and there's also some misunderstandings even there were a couple of misunderstandings even in what Senator Warren said okay there's a common understanding assumption that students of color are sorted into special education disproportionately the research on that topic is almost never has the right control variables to ask what were the skills that they had when they were sorted and are we saying that kids with exactly the same skills are sorted differently by race the best study I know of shows that the racial differences in special education placements as of fifth grade are completely predictable by kindergarten entry level skills and the fact is that these kids of color are under enrolled in special education because they tend to be at the schools that have a heavy need for it and the kids who are whites tend to be at schools that have enough capacity to serve everybody who needs it so the fact is the opposite of conventional wisdom on that one and so if we take that the first the incorrect notion as the premise and run off trying to do all the right interventions we're way off base I agree on that one I've heard the same sort of information I guess one way of pushing on this question and I agree with Ron I think there are dangers with any big change and there are massive risks and I'm anxious about it I think the new law represents them very well you know it's got a real split personality you know use that term lightly and I'm very anxious about the ways that different states will be able to act and who will suffer at the hands of the inequity that will reemerge I think they are huge social issues for us to consider in a country about how we think about moving our society forward but so one thing we've done is we calculate we really care about readiness one of our little bees in our bonnet is that people have been very focused on graduation rate which is important you got to get out of high school to move on but we think that particularly in the region of New England is true from Massachusetts that while we're graduating nearly 80% of our young people and I think Worcester has an 80% graduation rate that in places like this town probably 20% of them are really ready so that we calculate that simply by meaning if you get into some form of post-secondary and you need some remediation in a course that does not bear credit because it's something you should have learned that you're not ready and there are other factors to not being ready and you know the good news is the readiness rate in this country is going up the bad news is it's going up at 0.3% a year and in New England in Massachusetts it could be the year 2300 on the current pace before everybody's ready so you can make numbers say anything you want but that's supposed to make a point that if we keep doing what we're doing and even increase and double the rate of return on the way we're educating now that it will be the middle of the next century before everybody's ready so we just think it's time to give some places that demonstrate responsibility and I know that's hard to monitor but I think we're very interested in what New Hampshire's done and what the pilot provides where in the district you don't get to jump in with everybody else at the same time to do something poorly you need to demonstrate that you have invested in capacity of people who are going to lead the change so I think there are ways of staging innovation that can be productive but I agree it's a very treacherous time for us where the opportunities to create and innovate could be hijacked and you know the jury is out about what this country will do will we move ourselves forward by focusing on universal attainment it's too soon to tell but I think we need to take some risks in the process so I'd like to end on a very important issue that has been raised here of equity and ask if each of you could lead the audience with thoughts on what do you see as ways for states and districts to as Elizabeth Warren has called for to stand up for their most vulnerable kids there's a tremendous benefit going on in society do we really have a commitment to these young people or they really are children so I think at a state level there is still the jury still out on whether we're going to respond to this resource issue both in terms of adequacy and distribution of resources equity is not equal resource distribution and in a society we're going to be asking folks disproportionately resource highest need areas if we're serious about the challenge that's a tough assignment for a lot of folks in America do am I willing to give up more for the most needy kids in the country and what we're asking states to do now is to step up and address that with a theory of action different than the way we made those changes in this country we made those changes historically through the court system we've been forced to do so sometimes with great resistance to make these kinds of changes but you cannot continue to under resource the highest need kids and expect positive results secondly I think it is this investment in teachers along the lines of what was just described is a tremendous change in the country making the teachers putting the teachers in a position of being the producers of knowledge of innovation of movement forward rather than consumers of other folks ideas and building around those teachers an infrastructure that allows them to learn grow expand and developing systems around those folks that are not counter to what was described earlier positive learning environment most of our state systems are historic have been piled on over years many of them don't make sense today so a really thorough rethinking of what a professional experience ought to be and how we design systems around it is important I think we've got to figure out what to do about concentrated poverty and the impacts of concentrated poverty on educational opportunity when you have concentrated poverty the schools tend to be overwhelmed by the needs of the children you've got heavy turnover of the families things are so hard you can get turnover of the administrators and the teachers you get instability of various types and you get frankly a lot of behavior problems that are occurring partly because of instability I'm actually finishing a paper right now where I'm finding that the greatest inequality in access to educational opportunity is in access to an orderly classroom we ask kids questions like kids in my class behave so badly that it interferes with our learning you get way too much agreement with that in classrooms where you have concentrated disadvantage time on task is one of the strongest predictors of learning and disorderly classrooms don't have the time on task and coherent time on task the way they want to so either equipping teachers so they're so good at teaching in these environments or dispersing these environments one way or another you've got to deal with that second issue that I think you just get in the picture here is we want ultimately all kids to thrive in life which means that we care about not just whether the money is equitably distributed but whether the life experiences are equitably distributed and we need to have more discourse about what are the life experiences we want our kids to have that really matter and a lot of it is happening even before school achievement gaps by race, socioeconomic status and gender are clearly apparent in the traditional data by the age of two and has a lot to do with early childhood life experiences working now to try to saturate Boston with five propositions for early childhood life experience of maximize love minimize stress, talk, sing and point count group and compare explore through movement and play and read and discuss stories we want parents to understand that the baby is learning language from the moment they're born actually from prenatal care six months into the womb they're in it listening for three months before they even come out and so their basic ideas about parenting that kids with less advantaged backgrounds don't benefit from as much that ought to be part of the equity agenda because the gaps are there by age two and they're for sure there at age five when the kids start school they're already playing catch up from the very beginning and if we stay focused only on the money piece of this we'll have equal money we'll have equal life chances because the life experiences will have been so different even outside of school so I think you both had perfect comments there and I would agree with everything that you just said but because of the situation we're in this year with the budget and the governor's budget I'll take this opportunity to reiterate that I think that we as a state need to decide whether or not we're going to invest in helping our poor students get the education they need funding those districts that have high concentrations of poverty at levels that will enable us to close gaps or are we going to still just talk about these things and not really do them because that's a game changer for Revere if something doesn't happen with the house, between the house and the senate budgets then Revere will be looking at drastic layoffs and that means our class size will increase social workers will disappear some of the administrators who prevent the problems you were talking about in terms of classroom disruptions will be gone and so will our performance level so I'll leave it at that thank you great and I would just add it sounds like a big I don't know if it's going to sound unpointed to people but I think continuing to advance conversations about racism and white privilege in our communities I think it is the glue that holds inequity together with the great malady of our country and our time and in particular I think because power and privilege really are continuing to be drawn along racial lines that white people in our country to step up and stand forward and start to really understand white privilege more is a way forward I'm beginning to look at this myself it's scary to me I feel like I'm going to be bad or blamed or all the things that white people feel about race issues and I also understand that there are concepts like being spared injustice which is a piece of white privilege the fact that when I send my children off to school I don't wonder if they're going to come back home for in terms of their safety my daughter keeps saying she wants to move out but you know that's a one can only wish but I think people really just putting their attention on the things that's a very difficult conversation to have there aren't many people or communities that are poised or it takes help but I think that unless as a country that we put our attention on this white people in particular get up get behind people of color in advancing conversations around racial justice and injustice and the related issues of economic justice and I think to do that that many of us really need to examine you know what it is that is holding us back and what do we need to experience to move our society forward we really need to make a change and that means advancing the futures of folks who don't always look like us or who we might not know that well Thank you I heard a lot of talk today about difficult dialogue reflection really thinking about doing things in new and different ways and I'd like to thank you for hopefully starting that discourse with the audience here I was listening to my own tone and some of our conversation I think the things we've been talking about and the puzzle we're in we are completely capable of finding our way forward this is going to get better it's going to be advanced it can feel daunting and heavy but I just think we're a good people and we have figured out how to do a lot of things and I think we're going to move forward it's going to be bright our children basically expect that we can just spend too much time on this panel sound like there's a lot of heavy lifting oh my god I got to unpack white privilege today or whatever but we are able to do this and I think it's the decision we get to make about whether if we're going to do it education is going to modernize it's going to be available to people with means and wealth it's going to continue to be a great place for education and we have cracked this and it is doable and that just means that we got to keep our spirits up and keep going forward put that little code on our conversation I think we agree no better words to end on please join me in thanking the panel for example the democrats for education reform is a political action committee supported largely by head fund managers their board is littered with hedge fund folks they favor charter schools high stakes testing school choice including vouchers and tuition tax credits which I call Munderlauntering voucher scheme