 I have been in the field of education for almost 30 years now. I was drawn into the field because I thought it was a place where I could make a difference. And I have worked in education as a researcher at NYU and other universities. I have been a teacher, a classroom teacher in Providence, Rhode Island, and Oakland, California. I have been a school board member in Berkeley, California. I often call it my sentence on the school board in Berkeley, where I learned about making policy at the local level. And I am a parent of five children, which I regard as the most challenging job of all. But in all of my experience, I keep coming back to the question, why is it that educating children in America has become so hard? And the longer I think about and the longer I work at it, the more I realize we have made this much more difficult than it should be. And much of the problem lies not in the children, because we have lots of evidence that we know how to educate all types of children, children with disabilities, children with all kinds of challenges. The problem is the way we treat the children. The problem is the kinds of schools we've created, and more importantly the kinds of policies we've relied upon to drive education in this country. And we have lots and lots of evidence that what we've been doing as a nation isn't working. We have the international comparisons that shall we keep falling further and further behind. Last time we checked we were behind Slovenia, which really got the congress mad because most of them didn't know Slovenia was a country. We have dropout rates of 50% and higher in almost every major city, with a policy called no-challot behind, clearly leaving many, many children behind. And so as I think about it, what's wrong is that we have relied on the wrong kinds of questions to drive our policy. We've been asking how to raise achievement when what we should be asking is how to get kids excited about learning. We've been asking how do we hold teachers accountable when what we should be asking is how do we hold everyone accountable? Parents, students, politicians, everyone accountable for educating our children. And we've been focused on closing the achievement gap and asking what it'll take to close the gap. And what we should be asking is how do we create schools where a child's race or class does not predict how well they will do? If you ask different questions you come out with different answers. But the wrong questions have been driving our policy. And I would add that we've been using fear and using testing as a weapon against children and against schools. We've operated on the assumption that you can pressure schools into improving and use humiliation as a strategy to get schools to get better, and we have no evidence whatsoever that this works. The truth is that it's not as hard as it seems. And I can cite several schools throughout the country, schools in affluent communities, in poor communities, schools that serve recent immigrants, schools that serve homeless children that succeed. Succeed not only in educating them, but getting them excited to learn and addressing their whole needs, including their emotional and social and psychological needs. At the core of what makes some schools succeed when so many others don't, and let's be clear in many schools, the number one complaint our kids have about school is that it's boring. What separates the others from those is the relationships. The strong relationships between the educators and the children that make learning possible that result in students who are engaged and motivated to learn and make it appear easy. To illustrate that point, I want to describe a school I worked with in Oakland, California. This is a school, troubled history, continues to be a troubled school. And so it had relied on Teach for America recruits to come and stay after school. And one of those teachers came to me one day and said, Pedro, I need some help. I'm having trouble with classroom management. And she fit the typical profile of a Teach for America teacher. She was young, she was bright, she was extremely committed, and she was overwhelmed. Overwhelmed because they had assigned her to teach a very, very difficult class. So I go to sit in a class and it's chaos. Kids are screaming, she's screaming. It's painful to sit through the class. At the end of the period, I say, well, this is hard, this is terrible. She says, no, I can't take it. I have a migraine. I'm about to leave. I'm about to quit. I can't take this anymore. I say, don't quit. Let's go see the principal. Let's talk to the principal about what's happening in your class. And together we go see the principal and he listens as he describes what's happening in your classroom. And he says, you're a professional, deal with it. And then I speak up. I say, listen, if you don't help her, she's going to quit. And she quits, you'll have to get a substitute for the rest of the year. He says, okay, I don't want that. He says, I have an idea. We have a veteran teacher who's just retired. She's very good with kids. I'm going to ask her to take over your classroom for two days. I can only afford two days, but I want you to watch her and see if you can learn some things. So both the new teacher and I say, well, let's see what the veteran teacher can show us. And the next day the veteran shows up and there's something about her walk, something about the look she gives, but the kids can tell almost right away that the real thing is here. And so the classroom they have her out of control is suddenly on task. It's a math class. She's teaching. Kids are working. No disturbances. Both the new teacher and I are kind of shocked. We can't believe it's been that dramatic. But at one point during the lesson, she hears two girls talking. So she stops what she's doing. She says, young lady, when I'm speaking, I want you to be quiet. She turns to go right on the board and under her breath the girl says, bitch. But it wasn't a direct bitch. It was an indirect. It was way down here. Bitched. You could have thought it was a fart or a sneeze or something else. You could let it slide, but this is a veteran teacher. She's not going to let it slide. She says, young lady, do I look like your mother? And the whole class says, whoa. And the girl immediately says, no, you don't look like my mother. She says, well, whenever you speak to me, I want you to think of your mother. And with that, she goes back to the lesson. The girl goes back to work. Class does not miss a beat. New teacher turns to me and says, how did she know that that would work? So I said, well, let's talk to her afterwards. And the first thing she said, well, first of all, I could not let this slide because this is a test. If I let this slide, bitches are coming out all over now. Because the kids know that I'm not really in control of this classroom. So the second thing I know is I can't escalate the situation. I can't say, your mama's a bitch. Because if I go there, now the girl's got to respond. So I also can't ask for help. If I get on the phone and say, call a dean, they're cursing at me in the classroom, they're going to say one little bitch ran her off. I said, no, what does this veteran teacher do? She calls her attention to a higher authority. She says, you're going to speak to me the way you would your mother. And then what she understands is ultimately the key to keeping this classroom in order is to actually teach them, to keep them focused on the math. Because when students are intellectually engaged, they're much less likely to disrupt. Now I can describe classrooms like that throughout the country. And sometimes even in the most dysfunctional schools such classrooms exist. My question to policymakers right now is why aren't we learning from these kinds of educators? We live in a country where those who know the most about education have the least said and those who know the least have the most said. What qualifies you to make policy is the fact that you once went to school and we suffer the consequences. The future of this country will be determined to a large degree by what happens in our schools. We have a lot at stake. And whether or not you have children in schools now or plan to have them in the future and whether or not you will rely on your own public schools, all of us have a vested stake in what happens there. Thank you.