 On behalf of the Board of Schools Public Policy and the Association for Public Policy about Learning and Education, Apple, I would like to welcome Dr. Ken Burnley, the CEO of Detroit Public Schools. As many of you know, Dr. Burnley is a distinguished educator, administrator, and public manager. Before coming to Detroit, he was a teacher, principal, university instructor, and school superintendent. In 1993, he was selected as national superintendent of the year. It's clear that there's a great deal that we can learn from Dr. Burnley today in terms of leadership skills, management challenges in the public sector, and the difficulties of affecting change in schools. I would be remiss if I did not also mention just one more of Dr. Burnley's many accomplishments. He's a three-time University of Michigan alum and former Wolverine track coach. So please join me in welcoming Dr. Ken Burnley back to U of M. Thank you. Thank you very much. Well, good morning. Good morning. Good morning. Good morning. Now, you notice I have no PowerPoint presentation because I know we have to turn the lights down. You probably see them all the time, right? And you go back to sleep on me. We used to, by the way, I lived right behind a West Quad, and we used to have, in fact, the place looks better, it seems, than when I was here. It looks pretty good. We used to have eight o'clock classes that started at eight o'clock, and so I was asking them, well, they don't have eight o'clock classes anymore. They said, oh, that's too early. It's a pleasure to be with you, actually, to be back. I lived in Ann Arbor for 20 years. My children were raised here in Ann Arbor. My wife and I, we've been together ourselves for, in fact, this week, Thursday is our anniversary, 38 years, 38 years. And we've raised two sets of children, and we've raised a fifth young man, it wasn't ours. So we've given our whole lives to public policy and public initiatives, as well as our personal lives to children, because they really matter. It is the future. And so today I want to have a stimulating and provocative discussion with you. How's that? Is that right? All right? I mean, here's my thing. I hate to have anyone talk to me and bore me to sleep. So I just don't like that. So I want to talk to you about a couple of things, and to set the stage, I want to ask you some questions. I want you to be thinking about them. I want to pick somebody in the audience who will gong me at the point in time when I stop being a talking head, and in fact, you can stop me from being a talking head anytime you want to ask a question. How's that? But at one point, I'm going to stop all together, and I want to have some dialogue with you. I want you to ask me whatever's on your mind, and I'll come as fully clean as I can. First I need to know, is there any media in the audience? Would you please stand and acknowledge yourself? Anybody write for one of the local papers? Anybody follow me here from Detroit? Because that happened. Anybody write for the Michigan Daily? Anybody snickle? I heard that. All right, well, what this all means, this is good, because even on being videotape, it portends that we can have a very frank conversation, unless we get him to turn off the video. I really want to have that kind of a dialogue with you, and I want to ask you some questions in preparation. First of all, you're studying the issue of policy and management. So I ask you this question, number one. How do we make public policy at the local, state, national level? How do we do it? How do we do it? That's one question. And another question. How do we have a sense at the local, state, and national level that our policy decisions are really meant? That we really mean what we say in a way of policy decisions? That's the second question. And I'll throw out a couple examples. No Child Left Behind, Proposition A on the state level, which is how you finance public schools. No Child Left Behind being a national law that talks about public education. And then I'll throw one in that some of you might remember. How many remember that we were going to be number one in the world in math and science as a nation by the year 2000? Raise your hand if you remember that. National discussion, that policy decision. We thought we'd made a policy decision. Be number one in the world in math and science by the year 2000. Well, goes back to those two questions. How do we get to that decision as a country? Number one. Number two, will be really serious about it. And I'll give you some perspectives when we start to have some dialogues. When I traveled representing the United States as National Superintendent of the Year, I got stopped on the way back into the country in Germany. And they asked us if they could have a discussion with there were ten of us. National Superintendent of the Year. This is a person that's decided once each year in a partnership with the American Association of School Administrators and the Service Master Organization, Public and Private Initiative. He's the number one superintendent in the nation. And, you know, we all are preoccupied with being number one. We very seldom remember who's number two. And I'm not sure if it really matters, but that's just how our country operates. Who's number one and whatever it is you're doing. But it does give you a national and an international stage to represent your profession. As long as you keep your head down here knowing full well that you're just a representative of your peers and you get to speak and people listen to what you have to say on a national and international level. So I want to tell you about that conversation after we have a dialogue and tell you how they look at us in Germany. And they can actually tell when we're serious about something when we're not. First of all, I am the CEO of the Detroit Public Schools. Now, you've heard schools, normally the person that's in charge is called a what? Superintendent, right? Have you ever heard of the CEO of a school system? How many have actually heard somebody being called a CEO? Other than me. Okay, in Chicago. So you have a couple of models like this around the country, but not very many. Normally they're called superintendents. So I guess I have to ask you, well, what's the difference? Why is that? That's another question. Okay, first I'd like to select somebody to gong me. Let's do the talking head game. This class is over by 10, is that correct? All right, so the halfway through the time we have is when? Somebody tell me. 9.25. All right, who said that? That's right, what's your name? Okay, would you gong me at 9.25? No further talking head and we'll just engage in conversation. Okay, the Detroit Public Schools was founded in the 1800s and it was once the fifth largest city and fifth largest school district in America. I was born and raised in Detroit. I got a fantastic education there, second to none. In fact, we were even the number one merit scholarship winning high school in America in my senior year a couple of years ago. 1960. So that tells you when I moved in West Quad, the fall of 1960. And the city was almost 2 million people at that time. And now we're under approaching 900,000. Like many urban areas in the country, our population has declined. Okay, so what's happened to the school system? Well, we used to be over 300,000 students plus and now we're down around 150,000 students. So almost the exact thing has happened to the school system. And it's happened not just in Detroit but in other urban areas across the country. As communities have moved out of core cities into suburban areas and even beyond into the rural areas. One of the things we're finding is there's a tremendous amount of similarity between problems and issues in urban school districts and even those now in rural districts. We used to think they were just totally different. Well, they're not necessarily. Because people are finding their way out further and further out. The question becomes what happens to our great cities unlike other parts of the world in Europe. How many are from other parts of the world? Raise your hands. Hi. Proud. Good to see you. This is somewhat of a different attitude about cities. They don't run freeways through cities in many cases as we have chopped up the city of Detroit. We have a wholly different philosophy about that. Nor do they necessarily tear things down. I mean, to it, look at West Quad. I mean, it looks great. I thought it was old when I came here in 1960. It looked old, walking up State Street. Everything down there looked old. Today it looks as good or better than it looked when I was here. Because our whole attitude, it's here to last. It's here to be here. This building will be here long after you and I are gone. There's nothing to 400-year-old building in Europe. I took the United States Olympic team to Moscow as chef de mission, which means you're here at the U.S. delegation. I've done a lot with the Olympics. And they were celebrating, I think it was their 850th anniversary. And it was at the Ball Shoy and a totally different attitude. We go to watch Monday Night Football. They go to the museums. The kids know all the museums. Many of them have skills that they can do. Poets, dancers, pianists, singers. You can see the difference in culture. We sometimes impose, want to impose our culture. We're a relatively young culture. So it's no secret what's happened to the Detroit public schools. And as a result, the reputation of the district has gone down. Really, many of the innovations in public education began in Detroit public schools. Many of them. Not one or two or three, but many of them. It was once not only intense and large, but kids considered one of the best public school systems in the world, in Detroit. And many of you today would look at Detroit and say, well, that's not what I thought. Well, that is true. What I've said is a fact. So what becomes an issue today that I think is intriguing for you are some things, policy issues around no child left behind, which is the federal law that literally says no child shall be left behind. We want to talk about that. How did that come about? Why did it come about? And is it really working? I mean, I saw the N. Albert paper just yesterday. There's a big discussion about Proposition A, which is the way that Detroit, rather the state of Michigan, funds at schools, which is almost unlike any state in the nation. It's funded on the basis of sales tax. So what does that mean for public education? Most public schools are funded on property tax, which is a stable income. Sales tax, as we know, can go up in great times and can go down in bad times. They attempted to insulate the public school fund from that somewhat, but as you can see, Michigan's going through some tough times. Michigan is a manufacturing state in predominance, and so we're recovering much slower than others have recovered. I think those are big policy discussions. Public Law 10, third major policy discussion. No child left behind of federal law, and we can talk about all the issues surrounding that, Proposition A, which is how the state of Michigan funds public education, and then Public Law 10, that in fact created this job called the CEO of Detroit Public Schools. The legislature, in fact, most legislative bodies, most constitutions in most states remain education to the state as a responsibility, not a federal responsibility, it's a state responsibility. And as such, the legislature, if it thinks the school district is not doing particularly well for a long period of time, has probable cause, a state can take over a school system, which is what happened in this case. Policy implementation, they took over the Detroit Public Schools. They basically said the board that was voted in by the public was out, and of course in a city, predominance of African Americans, how do you think that played on Broadway when you lose your right to vote? Big issue. Big policy discussion. So we can have some fun on some very juicy topics. Because I've been in the middle of the CEO, and let me tell you back home, there are a lot of people that just don't like the fact, somebody took my right to vote away. And then the mayor was allowed to appoint six board members, he used to be a seven member board, and one of the members came from the state or the superintendent of public instruction. That's the board that hired me in year 2000 when I came to take over to try to rebuild the public school system. That's essentially been my challenge. And it's been a rather incredible ride. We accomplished a lot in a very, very short period of time. Last year our student scores started really moving up in fourth grade reading and literacy, because we focused heavily on reading and literacy. We traveled the country, we studied urban school districts, we belong to a group called the Council of Great City Schools. Council of Great City Schools represents the 62 or so largest school districts in the country, or the largest urban district in the state that doesn't have a large urban district. And they were looking at closing the gap in student achievement between minorities and the majority population and trying to discern which of the big urban districts were doing the best job of that. We're getting systemic growth in student achievement. Systemic means all the kids' cores were rising on some systematic basis. They found four or five of them. One of them was Houston, Charlotte Mecklenburg. So we basically traveled to find out if what they were saying in the research was true. Were they really doing these things? And we found they were. So then we basically took our teacher's union and board members and some of the administrative team and traveled and looked at them, then came home and put together our own teacher's committee to take a look at scientifically research-based textbooks that would deliver reading and literacy in a way that said, if you do this, you'll get that, provided you put all the staff development that needs to go into it. You put a heavy emphasis on quality control by having people who are teachers going around making sure the teachers are getting it right. If they need help, they get additional help. And by providing all the materials and supplies, books, equipment that you need to do the work and doing that all in a timely fashion. As a result of that, our fourth grade scores went up last year. 22 points are 67% in one year, which is really rather startling. But that's because of the great job teachers did with principals. We put a huge amount of money in staff development, a principal's academy, heavy training of our teachers. We delivered 110 tractor-semi-truckloads of books, take-homes, decodables, those terms you may not know about, so that all the materials were in place and we put the program in K through 6, and then for kids who had gotten beyond the third grade, our objective is by third grade all of our students should be reading on grade level, at least by then. Our emphasis really is earlier because we put a lot of money in early childhood education, preschool ed, almost all, but two of our kindergarten classes are full day, even though kindergarten isn't even mandated at the state level, and we reduce class sizes K through 3 to 25 or less. So we basically put $128 million more per year in these terrible, tough economic times into our mission, which is instruction, which is children. We put a lot of money there. And that's as it needed to be, because we had to go try to correct some deficiencies. So we're on the right track, and in the Council of Great City Schools, in their research, and I provided your professor with a copy of this document, which you can get online, and I think in your information, I just gave you the website closing the gap, the Council of Great City Schools. This report is titled, Better Schools for a Stronger Detroit that basically says, we're definitely on the right track now. However, we need to stay the course. And of course, in public law 10, it was done for five years. How many of you have been studying organizational development? And you kind of understand, do you think in five years that you could correct the issues and so forth we had in difficult economic times, institutionalize it and change the culture. Can you do that in five years? Organization development says, how much do you need? How much time? Generally. If you really are all out, how much time does organization development suggest that what I just described takes? Fix something, institutionalize it and change the culture. Somebody. Eight to ten years. And interestingly enough, in their research, looking at the top four or five urban districts that were getting systemic growth, this report says we need to stay the course eight to ten years. Totally independent maybe, unless these people really sharpen organization development, which they I'm sure they are. So yeah, it takes about eight to ten years, but the law was for five years. So we went through all of this difficulty looking back. All this major public policy upheaval in proposition in public law ten for five years. So if you would think looking back, if we're going to do this, you need to put it in place for a decade to give it a chance to really be completed and outlive any individual including myself. But we didn't do that. But that was a major public policy discussion that ravaged this part of the state, particularly in Detroit, in debate and anger. Anybody follow that? Yes, anybody? Remember hearing about it. If you didn't follow it, sure. So just imagine all of we went through and we did it for five years. In retrospect, it should have been ten. So now all of that is up for discussion in our legislature as we speak. So you're in the midst of talking to somebody in the midst of exactly what you're studying. There's no unbelievable public policy. There are master's thesis in this. There are PhDs in this. Maybe at some time people want me to write a book. I don't have time always to find where the bathrooms are let alone sit down and write a book. So I try to collect things because I've been involved with some interesting things in my career. There's a lot of fertile territory for a lot of research on this whole topic of public law ten. Not to mention Proposition A, which is how we fund the public schools. Tremendous fertile ground for conversation there. Let's talk a little bit about how is it that Detroit got into this kind of maybe you call it a funk to where the legislature would take over the school district? Well, you've heard of some of the things that have occurred. You remember what happened in 1967? Anybody followed that? Happened in Detroit? Let's see some of the students. What happened? The riots. Exactly. But you know those go back even further than that. How many of you remember? I think it was 1943. There were riots on the Belisle Bridge. At least that's where they started. So you ask yourself, well, why? I mean, not all the other urban cities in the country have gone through this. Well, why would Detroit? When you do research, you really begin to understand the automobile industry. Where did the workers come from? How many? Where? The south. Yeah, and where they were both black and white, mixed with northerners. They didn't necessarily get along in the south and suddenly we bring them up into a whole new environment. So this has been going on for decades. This is new. And unlike other parts of the country that had that same kind of mix, but not to the extent that Detroit and the automobile industry put the world on wheels. Remember that? Put the world on wheels. Helped, you know, a major success in World War II. It's all in Detroit. Rich history. Tremendous success in a wonderful city with a lot of wonderful people. But there's another whole issue that involved somebody made some policy decisions somewhere that created major direction for the city of Detroit. So you think about all that in this really unique and wonderful opportunity. I'm living it to really engage in major policy debate, discussions, research, PhDs, books, master's thesis. It's just fertile territory. I don't think you could have a better stimulating, provocative discussion than the one that we're engaging in right now. This really is something. Also remember that in addition to the riots, really much of that began earlier as some of the factories began looking for cheaper labor. Some began moving their factories into the south. Moving them further out in the suburbs. Some of that is believed began even in the late 40s, in the 40s. And then there was a residency rule which a lot of people even today miss. There was a rule that said if you work in public sector in the city of Detroit you had to live in Detroit. Well that was taken to court and that battle was lost. And so a lot of people who worked in the city of Detroit no longer had to live in Detroit, many of them have left. Now Detroit is also doing some rather incredible things. It's on its way back. I mean if you want to look at some of the housing being developed. The stadium both Tiger Stadium and Ford Field. We built 16 brand new schools in three years since I've been here. And we have five big high school projects on the way. We will have a fine performing arts high school that will be second to none in the world. In other words, fine performing arts and communication arts high school all in one behind the symphony which has a brand new building also, the max. And students who go there will have an incredible experience with all the musicians and the symphony. Every role every performance streaming video and a host of other things in the performing arts side and mentorships but on the communication arts side everything digital that you can imagine that will exist anywhere in any production studio will be in this high school. There is nothing like it in the world. We have Davis Aerospace school. We have students in high school flying planes. We have four area skill centers that students run businesses in that are second to none. We have the best urban high school in America or they're on test scores or college completion called Renaissance high school. Absolutely one of the best in and also good in sports, good in everything. It's an outstanding school. We have country schools that outstrip the state national averages or any test you want to give them. We have you can go into most of our schools and contrary to what you may think you can literally sit down and have a meal on the floor. Is that clean? Is that much productivity going on? Teachers have pacing guides. If you walk in a classroom it's standardized now. Everybody's working out the same materials particularly in reading and literacy and everybody's almost on the same spot and students need more effort today on reading then they'll get it later this afternoon at the expense of some other things because we're trying to make sure that they get their skills in place by third grade and if they've gotten beyond third grade without those skills we're going back and catching them up. The whole program is called the open court reading program it's tied to phonics, phonemic awareness, fluency, vocabulary and comprehension and it's dynamite. The kids are fired up, the teachers are fired up now we're tackling mathematics and algebraic thinking in the sixth, seventh and eighth grade because our objectives in every child will take algebra in the eighth grade that's where we really want to go. So those are some of the real successes we're having at the same time on our bond program at a $1.5 billion bond program we built 16 schools we have five new big high schools on the way we're renovating two or three and it's just an exciting time in Detroit. Not only that we've also put a tremendous amount of money into security to prepare an involvement. You often if you're in Detroit will hear me say the main thing is to get the main thing to be the main thing but it's hard to get the main thing to be the main thing if you're not sure what the main thing is what is the main thing? Our mission is student achievement and performance what is it? Student achievement and performance that is our main thing that's our mission we want people to choose us come back to us or stay with us that's our vision our mission is we want to turn our students who can be productive members of society one goal, student performance and achievement, student achievement and performance and then three goals that support that one is parent community involvement another is safe clean schools and then finally running an efficient, effective organization so that's real simple vision, mission and goal with supporting goals that come under so we know what we're doing we're excited about it but our time may be up because our legislature pay attention to this before your class is over my guess is that you will hear something come out of the legislature that will say in November of this year the public will vote to either go back to the way it used to be stay the way it is now or go with an alternative where the mayor might appoint the CEO this is a major, this is a wonderful time for policy debate and discussion and things that you can follow if you just want to do research write some really provocative papers draw some null hypothesis and prove them right or wrong it's a wonderful opportunity you're in the middle of a lot of major policy decisions in this country very major policy discussions and decisions happening in your time that you can help shape and you certainly can write and follow here's another one how do you feel about the public school system versus charter schools versus vouchers now when I came through the school system we were pretty much all public some might even say we had a monopoly but at the time my parents said well the only way you're going to go anywhere is by having an outstanding education that's the only way and so they invested heavily in our education and the street that I grew up in we totaled them up there were 218 students in the three block area that were all in school when I was in high school at high school 218 of us now look at the stark difference and you're growing up in this ear on that same three block area of my city where my brother still lives in my parents home I'm not sure if he or I could tell you which children or which homes had kids in them let alone of school age we might know one or two but we knew everybody then so this is a very different time the family is in very different shape it used to be when I took a role in the class I'd say Jimmy Smith how's your mother Mrs. Smith now you don't ever do that you know the mother and the father and the kid they have totally last names structured the way they structured very differently than when I grew up and how about this factor the 22% factor when I was in school almost everybody had children in school or of school age almost everybody it was a major initiative and people focused on the schools tremendously the public schools today on average across the country only 22% of adults have children of school age do you hear what I said in America almost in any community on average back in Detroit 22% of adults have children of school age now I'll tell you another funny story this is really a kicker I went to one of our high schools when I was in Colorado Springs I used to be a superintendent in Fairbanks, Alaska actually went that far away from here I have a superintendent of schools in Colorado Springs Fairbanks for six years Colorado Springs for 13 years and the average 10 year of superintendents is four or five so both cases now in Detroit used to be the urban district superintendents for the last two and a half years very very difficult jobs extremely difficult jobs at any rate I've been here now this is before years in June so I want to talk to a group of kids and talk about school finance which is one of the most complicated topics you ever find most people have no clue and even in legislature there are few people who understand school finance and the other legislators have to follow their lead because it's just complicated very complicated at any rate we finished talking about school finance and they said well, Dr. Burnley, I was leaving we just have one more question now these kids, this was about now eight years ago these kids I actually tracked five of them they were going to Harvard, Yale, MIT Dartmouth I can't remember where the fifth one was going but they were the leaders of that school so they're obviously out of school they may be through graduate school and you can count on the fact that they'll do great things and it was a mixed group there was one or two Hispanics there was a black young man at any rate they said Dr. Burnley we want to know one thing I said what's that we want to know why adults don't like us I said what I knew exactly what they meant but I acted like I didn't because I wanted to hear from them I said what do you mean by that I like you, oh we're not talking about you Dr. Burnley you're alright but adults by and large don't like us school aged kids and I said well why is that they said well Dr. Burnley we've done all kinds of research even during this election that just passed we had to teach our parents what the issues were we had to argue pro and con and help them decide how they wanted to vote so these kids were sharp they said well let's see you can go to Arizona there are signs that say no one under 18 is welcome here oh absolutely right now today you can go to Arizona if you're under 18 you're not welcome here and if you come to visit you can't stay more than two months you have to leave there are curfews on us were there curfews when you grew up Dr. Burnley and I had to think a minute no there weren't any curfews they said well we have curfews today and we also know that school millages are constantly failing did school millages fail when you were growing up Dr. Burnley I really thought because I used to do my current events in high school I said no there were always big issues but the parents back there and most of us were in school it was after World War II by God these kids are going to get an education we'll do whatever it takes and they didn't have a lot of money but they took care of the schools said well why aren't they taking care of us today Dr. Burnley are you aware that it won't be long before we will be the productive members of society you'll be retired on your pension check we may not want to take care of you I said wait wait wait not me I'm one of the good guys they said oh well not you per se but the adults I said Dr. Burnley are you aware of AARP and that really stopped me because I just got my AARP card I said well everybody here know what AARP is huh anybody does know alright AARP is for old folks it's a national organization and basically when I got my card they said my dues were $8 and that there were 9 million at that time this was years ago now there's much many more than that well Dr. Burnley you and all your AARP people will be retired but you won't be bringing in a dime you won't be producing anything and over here will be our generation and we'll be the producers and you're going to be voting deciding on what you want for yourself but we're going to be producers you're going to be deciding you want this and we are needing this do you see the war that's going to shape up between the generations and I said well yeah I hope not but so then I finally said okay I do understand I speak about these things nationally there's actually a book out big thick book I don't know if it's in paper back yet it's called Generations I think from 1560 to 2062 and in that very book it predicts a war between the generations in this country this large block of retired folks on pensions and social security and young people like yourselves that are going to be making things work because you'll be the producers and by the way there used to be 17 to 1 retired and now it's going to be more like 3 to 1 people actually working for every one of us retired used to be 17 to 1 now technology and a host of other savvy kinds of things can make this group far more productive but imagine if they don't get there imagine if Detroit public school children do not get to that level of sophistication to be able to use the technology are highly educated they're not going to be able to produce and the country then has problems competing internationally that's why a lot of these debates and conversations about public school children are going on that helps you a little bit with this whole policy piece that's why and we debate and I won't talk about that I'm going to come back and have you explain that to me and this group over here was starting a national organization and you had to be under 30 to belong they had 250,000 members 8 years ago I haven't checked back 250,000 members to 9 million members producers retirees smaller number bigger number one issue and one perspective on what needs to happen totally different set of perspectives on what happens in this group is that intriguing very intriguing how many in here are 30 or under how many in here are 30 or under I'm not, I'm putting my hand down do it again, how many in this classroom right now raise your hands high are 30 or under almost everybody you can declare yourself alright there you have it folks there you have it isn't that intriguing and those are big issues for our country and those are the sorts of things that I wanted to frame for you today let me see if there's anything else where am I at 9 for 25 8 minutes, alright let me see what else I've neglected to share with you that I want you to know before we have this stimulating and provocative question I'm not looking for softball pitches I want some tough questions and I'm going to ask some tough ones back so be prepared if you come hard I'm coming back hard some of the lessons learned I think we've covered over some of those no I think we've covered it all I think that's rather exciting so let me come back to I have a pin on here that says I am DPS and when you're in urban areas or you tend to some of you may work for non-profits I understand some of you are going to work in one third or one fourth of you will work in government another third or fourth will probably do non-profit some of you go into the private sector some of you go back home if you're from a foreign country and provide leadership there but wherever you go this group will provide leadership and so these topics that we've just discussed are very provocative no child left behind the federal national law that some states are opting out of Detroit public schools gets approaching $400 million in federal money should I opt out tomorrow because I don't like it if I opt out and many of our urban children 33% of whom are kind of struggling how does that come across in the media when I say I don't need the money that doesn't quite make sense I try to make this happen so as a whole council of great city schools trying to make this work I've spent time with the president and the first lady spent a lot of time with the secretary of education so I've been in the White House with this administration I've been there with several administrations but I've also spent a lot of time with the secretary trying to implement no child left behind at home so we could make it work and then of course with the war a number of resources were pulled away from no child left behind but people think it's a federal mandate then you have Proposition A how we funded Detroit public schools and all the schools in the state of Michigan from sales tax versus property tax everybody wants relief from property tax well what's the alternative and that was a pretty provocative topic in the state of Michigan in the early 90s and now the anniversary in fact is coming up if it's today or tomorrow and so there's a lot about it the next day or so if you pick up the newspaper then there's public law 10 in terms of how the Detroit public schools are structured with the CEL I have all the powers of the former board and the superintendent and so we've been able to move at great next speed accomplishing the things that I mentioned to you one of the editorial boards asked me about Dr. Bernie how much of this would you have gotten done under the former structure and I said well I'm not going to criticize but I can take the best boards I've ever served and if there had been major public debate and conversation over these kinds of things at a board table maybe one 40th of it at best at best and yet our needs were accomplished 100% of this as fast as you can because you're looking at 3 and 4 decades of deferred maintenance and other kinds of slippage in Detroit public schools once the best and the mightiest to now many people just think well not a really good school system but we really have a lot of outstanding students who go to Harvard and Yale Michigan MIT Stanford do very very well out of Detroit public schools right now today anybody here from Detroit public schools sitting here okay we do have a lot of students and I'll give an example in all my time since 2000 back here I went to the state meeting of superintendents and they looked at me and said aren't you the new guy in Detroit and I said well yeah well why are you here I said what do you mean why am I here I'm a superintendent I belong in a state group well Detroit superintendents don't come to these meetings I said you're kidding me they said no so you have a tendency to be big and bad and you do your own thing but you get isolated so I said well I'm going to participate to the extent I can to hold the state meeting in Detroit they said we've never been in Detroit in the history of the entire organization for the state of Michigan and so we started some planning found a number of people were afraid to come to Detroit they admitted it they wouldn't bring their family or spouse to Detroit bad things can happen to you down there so we got them to do a conference planning committee we took them to a tiger ball game they walked around went to greek town spent money we tried to get them to spend as many dollars as possible and they did they had a good time and they decided to come to Detroit and bring the conference and they did two years ago and they were back this year and I think the plans are to do it every other year because they had a great time in Detroit so we dispelled some myths a lot of wonderful things are going on particularly in downtown Detroit so there you have it and now you throw into this mix of the three provocative topics charter schools or public schools versus vouchers and charters why do we have public schools as a policy issue in this country to begin with and they educated most of us at least of my generation did a fantastic job now all of a sudden why are they so defunct that we have to throw the public schools out and then you begin to say well yeah but there was a time when we really believed in public schools where everybody pushed all the resources their support their scrutiny behind the public school system now only 22% of the people had children of school age so you begin to think about some of the wise and where for in terms of these policy discussions and you begin to get a wholly different perspective so time alright see that I keep clocks in my head I give 5 minute speeches, 15 minute speeches 10 minute speeches so if you tell me about when I pretty well get close to knowing when I have to stop remember the main thing in my business is to get the main thing to be the main thing it's hard to get the main thing to be the main thing if you're not sure what the main thing is once you get the main thing to be the main thing then you have to keep the main thing the main thing what is the main thing? student achievement and performance help me out what is the main thing? student achievement and performance what is your main thing? there you go you better get some grades, right? All right, well listen, the floor is open. I'd like to, I'd like you to ask me some questions. I'm gonna ask you some questions. Don't be bashful. The answers and policy discussions are not always clear and not always are necessarily agreed upon. So don't be bashful. Yes ma'am. Well good. One of my questions is you talked a lot about like increasing reading and helping kids in the very beginning. Right. And also certainly there are stellar students that come out and go to the amazing universities and are very successful. But I also know that there's an amazing fall off sort of drop off, drop out literally rate and students who maybe don't technically drop out but just sort of never get out. So how, I mean obviously increasing them on their skills at the front end is gonna help with that. Right. But is there something more and something that needs to be done with those who are already past, you know the third grade level now? Well I see that's pretty stimulating. I'm gonna make sure I repeat the questions that everyone hears. She's from Detroit. She said, I heard all the things she said about particularly your outstanding children but we have a number of students in Detroit public schools either dropping out or just not getting out. And so the question is what are we doing for them? Very good question. One, we have to get their requested skills up. If we send them out or they drop out and their skill level is so short, in this kind of an environment, unskilled folks don't have much of a chance. If you can imagine that they're gonna live for another 20, 30, 40, 50, 50, 60 years and they don't have any skills today, what do you think will happen to them in the future? As opposed to you and I or at least I have to constantly maintain my credentials and constantly taking classes. Oh by the way, you'll be taking classes for the rest of your life. You got that? You'll be engaged in stat development forever. So if you think when this is all over, you're done, you're not. And then when you get that PhD, you're still not done. And so that's the way we're trying to treat them. We have alternative schools for them. We have dropout prevention programs. We work with agencies in the community. We track our dropout rate. We try to make decisions on the basis of data. So we have lots of data. We roster data on students sitting in front of teachers. We assess their skill sets if in fact they don't have the requisite reading and literacy skills, then nothing else they can do will be successful either. So we're trying to get them. The governor has put together an alternative education program approach where kids can maybe, we're hoping can take their GED during the summer, rather during the school day. Right now they can't do that. So for many of these kids who get behind two and three and four credits, they just give up, figure there's no way I ever graduate. So if we could get them through into a GED program and then plug them into the community college during and shortly after, we have a chance for a lot of these young people to catch up. And by the way, we have a lot of them that are in fact doing it, and some of them going to be more successful than the rest of us. But the majority of them, about in our community, probably 33% are constantly struggling and are way behind. That's a lot of young people. Yes? One is, I'm curious as to whether back in 2001 when the lead in our child behind after being formulated in Congress, there was another act called the Leave No Child Behind Act that was being supported by all these child welfare groups and education focus groups. And I'm curious as to whether you know it all, the difference between the two acts and which one, the education community largely seems behind the Leave No Child Behind Act versus the No Child Behind Act. It's the motto of a child welfare group that the administration had. Well what actually prevailed is the one we know about, the No Child Left Behind. And yes, I was aware of the other conversation too, but the No Child Left Behind, which is the law of the land, received bipartisan support from both houses as well as the president. And so that's how it became the law of the land. And once you have a law, it is the law and you have to comply or receive no dollars as some states are indicating that they may want to do. I happen to think it's a good conceptual law. I mean, for instance, if you are in one school district and your school district is considered a top performing school district, but in that school district, you've got a group of Hispanics or blacks that aren't doing well academically. No Child Left Behind says, well, neither is your school. In other words, all your subgroups have 90% of, 5% of them have to take the test, 85% of them have to have that level of attendance. And so if your subgroups aren't doing well, neither is your school. You cannot ignore, I thought that was very good and that's one that's conceptually why the law was so uniformly accepted. But at the same time, that says to people, wait a minute, I'm out here in Bloomfield Hills and Gross Point and Farmington because the schools are good and I'm willing to pay extra for them. But now you tell me my school has got an A on the report card, but they're on the AYP list. It's a lot very difficult for people to understand or getting angry about it. And that's what we see shaping up. Yes, uh-huh. I noticed that in your mission statement, in your mission, you talk about data driven and the moment ago you mentioned it too. I'm curious how you're simply using data down to the teacher level and if you're familiar with the ComStat system in New York, there's discussion about taking ComStat in public schools, how do you feel about that? Well, I was just with the governor last week Thursday in one of our schools and they had gotten, listen to this, in one year, gotten its reading scores up at 33 points and at the 56.6 percentile. Got its math scores up, I think it was 86 percentile. That's pretty good. And the governor came out to ask the teachers and the parents in the round table discussion, how did you do that? And I sat there with my chief academic officer, Dr. Chambers, and we just sat in a gymnasium in the back just to listen and it was really wonderful to hear our teachers talk about just that, the use of data in fact, how they had done this as a school. One of the things, we've created a data warehouse. The guy knows what that is, a big barrel, all the data in the school district is in the barrel. Depending on your codes and your access, you can query the data to interrelate any of that information to get questions out about the cost effectiveness of English at the high school level, ninth grade versus sixth grade and so forth and so on, as well as tracking student scores. In there we have a school improvement planning process that's online that schools have to submit how they will improve their school district from a planning context. In there we have what's called learning synergy and that's a program that provides re-roster data to the teachers on every child that's sitting in front of them. So, supposing your class starts second semester. Well, we'll re-roster the data. Here are all the students in your class. Here's the history of the students. Here's your test scores on the national norm reference test, on the state criterion reference test, on the district's local instruments. We give instrumentation tests every quarter tying the achievement criterion reference and our own internal testing together to make predictions about what students need more help during the summer, what students need after school support in classes. So we're using data heavily and to hear those teachers talk about now we're getting the data. Now we have to know how to use the data, how to interpret the data to make educational decisions and they even went a step further and they said, you know, we now understand that the failures that a lot of these children have been having or not meeting certain strands is not them, it's us. We're not teaching it well enough, we're not taking to make sure they've gotten it and so we own this. So if they came to the school district in kindergarten behind two to 4,000 vocabulary words, it's our job to close the gap no matter what their issues are. So yes, we're using data heavily. Yes. Student achievement and performance is your main thing and I agree, I agree it's the main thing. However, a lot of that depends on not only on what happens in the classroom but also what happens at home. How do you address or how do you help those students who might be failing that because of the school but because of what's happening at home? That's an excellent question. Everybody hear the question? A lot of, the first parent, the first teacher is the parent, that's what she said and it's a partnership between the teacher, the principal of the school and the parent for high achieving kids. That's an additional secret and really if you wanna really take a look at the difference between kids in higher performing school districts or higher performing schools, it's that relationship. Usually where the kids are doing well, the parents are intimately involved, whatever. Where there's a charter schools because the parents walk the kids there. Make that choice and by God, I'm gonna be here to make sure that they get it. Oh, by the way, the public schools are outperforming the charter schools. I don't know if you knew that. We're outperforming them. So why create a second system and strip money away from one system when it's not doing any better? So we agree wholeheartedly and we're doing our best to try to enhance this parent component. That's one of the supporting goals of parent and community involvement because we know without it, we just won't get there as fast or we'll have to overcome more barriers. It is a problem in many of our homes. Let me give you a personal story. We adopted our grandchildren and we had them tested in Urban League Daycare Center in kindergarten program that we ran in Colorado Springs. We were about six months old and three years old and this was like starting all over for my wife and I. So we kind of had lots of conversations about that. My idea, so we had even more conversations about it because once a woman makes up her mind that these children are mine and then everything else becomes secondary to those children and that's exactly what's happened. The three-year-old was thought to maybe be special education and two things had not occurred. The two prerequisites to reading readiness at kindergarten. One, somebody's read to you all the time from the time you were born and two, people are talking to you all the time and requiring you to talk back using full sentences in proper verb context. Oh mom, nope, say it again honey. That's not, say it again and the child shall repeat it. Those two things happened. Children will come to the kindergarten prepared to read and the vocabularies won't be behind by two to four thousand vocabulary words. They'll be right on par. That didn't happen for that young man and so they thought he was not smart and he was also due to go to a low performing elementary school that was performing around a 33rd percentile. Long story short, he's 14 now. He's a straight A student, he's a good pianist, he's a great athlete and his little brother's even smarter. There wasn't a thing wrong. My wife and I simply got involved in their lives did just what you said. We had no television during the week, homework every night, you know, high expectations for behavior and everything else that good parenting requires and the kids did fine. And that is all that's wrong with kids in Detroit that are not at the, you know, that are dropping out. They simply are going to situations that just don't support them. So we're doing what we can through parent involvement, parent liaisons, parent training, parent seminars. We just had one last year with about last week for 300 parents. We do them every week and we get lots of parents in, we're training them. We have what's called our parent university where we teach parents about preschooling give them calendars about activities to do every single day, simple activities. Stick them on a magnet on your refrigerator, do this today, do that tomorrow, simple things. But all add up to reading readiness, period. Great, great question. Yes. Michigan has had an accountability system for quite a while compared to most other states. Yes it has, good for you. How'd you know that? Just been working in education for a while. Okay, good question. Let's see where that goes. We gotta take that. I think as a result, Detroit is gonna have several schools which have gone into their final phase of school improvement. And I was wondering what your, as a district, your plans for a reconstruction will be. Oh, he's going in the case. He understands the five stages of No Child Left Behind leading up to when you have to make a major change to school and she's talking about the schools that are in the fifth year. We have 53 of them, yeah. And the other piece that I think is important for you all to hear is on a policy basis the state of Michigan engaged in average or adequate yearly progress two to three years before the rest of the nation. So we were already two to three years in it. So if you remember when you looked at how many schools in Michigan were failing, we had 1500 and some states had zero. Well some states have never done anything with this concept. We had been working with it for two or three years so instead of allowing, being allowed to start at the beginning with everybody else, we were saying, oh no, what you've been doing for two or three years has to be carried on. I think that's a bad policy decision, that was not right. So Detroit's Michigan schools have suffered as a result and it's just not right. So as a result, instead of being at maybe year two since it's been implemented, we were at year five because we were engaged in this for three years previous. So that's where we are. We got those 53 schools identified during winter break the end of last week of February. We have 30 days to submit a plan for each of those 53 schools to the state about what we'll do differently. One of them is reconstitution. By reconstitution you can change the principles of almost all of our teachers. I'm not sure that's always the best thing to do, that's a lot of upheaval, but there are a series of other things you can do. So we do know of our 53 schools, some, a few, we might do some reconstitution to a point. Mainly allowing the people to come back and say we wanna commit to this, this and this. That's really the main thing. They understand what it is we're asking them to do. The others there will be some other offshoot of things, we're doing a profile for every school so we know what every school's profile is. Some schools need different things in other schools. Very good question. She knows her stuff. Yes, sir. There are a number of bills in the house right now we want to give the power back to the voters for creating their ISDs. For ISDs? Yeah. You support that? Intermediate school districts. Intermediate school districts, we call ours Wayne Reeson. So what was the question? Do you support that? Do you feel that the voters of Detroit are ready to, if you talk about the voting that the people of Detroit want to have back in their possession, you feel that they're ready for it. Okay, well I think you're mixing a couple things. The ISDs are the intermediate school district. The Detroit Public Schools is a separate school district in the state of Michigan. Your intermediate districts are generally developed to help smaller districts that don't have enough resources or for special education dollars and federal dollars to flow through. So right now the intermediates are going through an issue as a result of Oakland County and accountability and so folks are, some cases attacking intermediate districts as to whether they should even exist or their fund balances ought to be drawn down. Now coming back to us, only Detroit Public Schools, several bills going through the legislature as to whether we ought to go back and give the vote back, like it used to be, leave it the way it is now or some offshoot of that. So your question to me is how do I feel about Detroit? Not the ISDs. Okay, let me tell you that my comment on a public context has always been, I'm interested in the main thing, which is student performance and achievement. And I prefer not to weigh in on what I think is the best thing to do or not to do. I'll provide people behind the scenes. I'll provide data, research data, empirical data in terms of what seems to make sense. And here it would suggest you need another five years of this. That's what this suggests. And so that's research driven. As far as my personal opinion, I stay out of it. Why? Because I have to stay focused on the main thing. And if I get in a political discussion, you know, I've got a legislative delegation, we've got the mayor, we've got all kinds of politicians. That's their job. And for the public to weigh in in terms of what they want. I will not mire the school district down on that because we'll very easily get knocked off course. People might get mad at me because while he said this and he should have said that. And I want to stay focused on student achievement. So that's my public posture position. It's been from the outset and I'll keep that. But I think you can see what some of the research suggests needs to happen. I provide those documentations. Yes. Some people would say that not everybody in schooling who are important forces in schooling agree that the main thing is student achievement and performance. And some people might point to teachers unions as not thinking that the main thing is achievement and performance. When you came into the, I'm interested in this both from an education policy point of view, but also from a management point of view. When you came in as the CEO, how did you approach working with the huge Detroit teachers union to say this is the main thing and that has to be your priority too? Well, interestingly enough, I engaged them at conversation and they felt just as I felt we've got to do a better job of getting our students to achieve better. I had a father call me up. I said, Dr. Burnley, my son and I were going to school A and we had to move, which by the way happens a lot in urban areas. And we ended up in school F or E and they're using different materials or a different place in the materials. My son's lost and so am I. So today that same parent called back and said my son and I moved from one school to the other. They were not only in the same materials. The teachers are not only trained in the same way. The principal's providing instructional leadership and by God they had pacing guides were about the same spot. And so this was done with the teachers union. They went across the country with me, with us and came back and we put together a series of invitations for textbook companies to ones that thought they could do the best jobs to make recommendations and make their presentations. I asked simply that the group make three recommendations me and they did and I picked open court. I found it was having the greatest success in some of the other urban areas. So they've actually been right there with me and so there's not been a tug of war at all. But they are union and unions are there to represent the members period. But they've been side by side on this. We'll see as we move forward. I don't know if you've been following our financial fortunes. We have to reduce $78 million out of our budget between now and the end of June. And then I've got to remove another 90 to 100 million by July one. Tough times and we've been going through this for three or four years. So this investment we've made by shifting 128 million to instruction has occurred in this very difficult financial area or time. And the reason is I brought tremendous talent from all over the country to help me in this. I mean, we're really having a lot of fun and a tremendous amount of challenge. But I've got people who are business experts in insurance, in risk management, in chief financial services and legal services that the district didn't always have to the degree that it needed to sharpen your pencil because you're really competing in the private sector. And if you have a principal who's been put into the insurance area, you're in trouble because you need an insurance executive who's going to then talk to people in the insurance business as consultants to make sure that we price point ourselves properly and get the very best deal we can and therefore drive our costs down so we can shift some of that money over. That's how we've done it. Yes. I grew up in Detroit and one of the things I know about the Detroit public school is that there's always been a perception that for parents, for a lot of parents that you could do better by putting your child elsewhere. And as you come into making these drastic changes in the school system, the things that are happening are now being marketed. There's commercials and I am DPS and there's a huge public alertness to the fact that there are dramatic changes going on. How important do you feel that that marketing is going to be to the continuation of the current system or just to the continuation of the greater public respect for DPS? Well, it's a great question. And by the way, as you know, always a lot of great things were happening in Detroit but they were never publicized. Such a big city has all these challenges and the news kind of like, well, it bleeds, it bleeds, it bleeds. Well, that's unfortunate because then the good things never are told. One of the issues that people would constantly say, Dr. Bernie, all these wonderful things you're doing not enough people know about them. And we're not marketing experts, we're educators. And so just as we talked about having business acumen, we said we needed a marketing acumen. We need people who know how to deliver messages in 30 or 60 second sound bites or on video or audio that people grab hold of in here and that resonate. So we've actually paid for those services. Now the issue will become with all these declining revenue problems we're having, do we keep up the marketing? So I need to ask you, we're a huge organization, 1.5 billion dollar operating budget, 1.5 billion dollar capital budget, somewhere around 24, 25,000 employees, 167, 300 sites in total, 157 schools. Do you think that's big business? Yeah, do you know any big business that does not have a marketing arm? Does anybody? No, but yet public schools, maybe because of monopoly we used to have, we're never expected to spend money on that because I remember talking about that 20, 30 years ago. We have to, otherwise our story's never told. It's not the free presses or the newses or channel 247's job to tell our story. They're there to report the news. So if we don't tell our story, it isn't gonna get told. So I intend to continue to tell our story and it's being well received everywhere we go. Thank you, Dr. Berry, we're glad to hear some of the good things. And again, you have to be telling the truth and we are, great question. All right, now no one has asked me anything about, well yeah, no child left behind has come up, Proposition A hasn't come up. Public Law 10, we have talked about some of that. But do you understand how provocative these topics are? Yes, sir? Proposition A, wasn't the, one of the possible intents of that was to reduce the despairing school funding across school districts? Right on. And I'm getting the sense that it's not, you know, people aren't really happy with that proposition but isn't it better than the old one? I guess one question. The second is, there seems to be this antagonistic relationship between school administrators and accountability-based initiatives that no child left behind. But from what I'm hearing, a lot of good has come from the fact that we've taken that new approach and introduced competition and accountability. So I guess my question is, wasn't it fine? All right, great question, it is provocative. Let's deal with the first one again, frame the first one. Okay. It was designed to provide, at least I was not here, I was in Colorado, equity. What I think ultimately it did is there were school districts that really had, they were way below, there was no floor. It was been very successful in creating a floor. So they're all school districts are gonna get a minimum level of funding. That really was accomplished. The other thing that it did in order to make it saleable from what I understand is that if you had, say, if you were Detroit and you raised this much money for your own children and we had the floor, you got to keep the money you raised. So then the disparity becomes if you're a district, the outside Detroit that had $12,000 behind the children, the floor, plus all this other, they were able to keep that too. And that's what's at issue, you're absolutely correct. That's a big issue, how that will come about. Here's what I'm recommending. I'm recommending the state doing adequacy and an equity study. There are about nine or 10 states that are getting ready to do it now. I've been a part of several states who've done it already. And an adequacy and equity study says what does it really take to deliver public education in this state? And how can we be sure that we're being equitable in our approach to this? And then what do we need to change in the way of our structure to make it happen? And how can we gradually get there? I think that's a responsible piece and maybe a new look at where to go next. In terms of accountability and essentially public schools versus charter versus vouchers, we simply say there needs to be a level playing field. And so whatever the rules are, everybody played by the same rules. So if you're in charter school and a public school, then you have to address the same mandates, the same data comparisons, the same representation of where your children live and where they go to school. All the things we're asked to do as public educators, we say anybody operating a charter or voucher should have to do also. And if they wanna take their money and go to that voucher, they generally don't want that. Oh, no, no, no, no. We don't want all those rules. So wait a minute. How can you compare this to that if you're not gonna play by the same rules? It's kinda like you have two different games going on. That's the issue. The other issue that worries a lot of us is what's the public schools help make this country great? And therefore everybody. Our taxes are given, paid and as a result we buy public education for everyone. It doesn't say some students might not be smarter and so forth than others. And so what happens for democracy when you create charters where only a select group of people go or vouchers where only a select group of people go? What's that gonna do for this country? You know, I continue to raise that question. It's a real serious question. We should be educating all of our children, give them the same opportunities as you just asked in your first question as opposed to having a couple of different systems and maybe only those who know how to work the system or know somebody get in here versus the other. Plus the research indicates the charters are doing as well as we're doing in public schools. The best performing charters in the Detroit area are our own charters. We have seven of our own. So we do charting ourselves. Yes, sir. You got your hand up? Okay. How are we doing this? We get it close? Henry, okay. Hey. I was wondering about the sexualized students according to performance, so for example, if you're trying to, when you're talking about increasing test scores, for example, how much of that is due to students who are pretty much at the margin already or close to doing well, as opposed to students that are way at the bottom? Because my fear is that sometimes when you, when people talk about test scores, improving test scores, that it's easier for political reasons to say the test scores are improving and you focus on students that are at the margin, but at the same time, there's a whole bunch of students way at the bottom who will not be represented in those test scores. Well, we're after improving all the students' performance and achievement. There's what's called regression analysis, where you're able to show if a student was way down here and they came way up here, how's that compared to a student who's way up here that really only goes maybe one step? This student may have actually done a better job, even though they had a bigger gap to close, you know, regression analysis you show on a comparative basis, this kid's doing better than that kid or that kid's doing better than this kid. Also, a no child left behind, it's kind of a stair step up. We're taking the very lowest and the very highest and saying each of them have to make steady progress over time, out to the year 2013. So we're not leaving anybody behind per se. Some kids have a further distance to go than others and there are certain steps that you're asked to hit along the way to show you're making steady progress. In that way, you go after everybody. Keep the ones that way up here way up and make them go even a little higher and the ones that way down here, get them up to some basic standard. Yes? The system of accountability has been sort of implemented. What's happened to dropout rates in the city of Detroit in particular? Dropout rates when I arrived were purported to be anywhere from 57% to 37%. So we bought a third party in from Wayne State University work between ourselves and the State Department and they found our graduation dropout rate, dropout graduation rate on a four year cohort was about 60%. Since we've been there, it's now to about 67%. So we're moving it up gradually. If you throw in GED preparation, then it goes well over 70%. But that's true for the country. The national dropout graduation rate is somewhere around 75, 76%. By the time you throw in GED, it gets to 84, 85%. Does that answer your question? Yeah. Yes. From 60 to 70%. The dropout rate has gone down slightly. Yes. So we're graduation rate is up, dropout rate is down, nowhere near what we wanted to get. But we literally have metrics. My evaluation is a metrics evaluation. So if we're talking about test scores, my evaluation from the district says, the kids were there last year on reading, next year they have to be here. So then I disaggregate that and say, for your school, you were here, you have to be there. So that everybody's being held accountable. We have test scores plastered all over our walls, but then I have metrics and everything else, an amount of parent involvement. You're here last year, you need to be here this year. So basically the same thing you find in the automobile industry is the way we use data and the way that I'm evaluated, not just on soft stuff. We think you did a nice job. We like your tie. Do you like my tie? Anybody notice my tie since I've been here? I love ties. Yeah, we like your tie. And so we give you a nice gray. Well, no. You get along with us, no. I mean, it's much harder than that in our business now. It's data driven. And then there are others, the softer side too is another section of the evaluation. And then there's a third section that talks about the environment that we're operating in and how we've done in this environment, economics and otherwise. Yes. I want to talk to you up here to see what you think about it. I've taught Detroit public schools for three years before I came back, so. Where were you? I was at Crackett. Yeah, of course. One of your employees. I feel like Detroit already has kind of this educational free outhouse. We had a testing school, system high school, Casper on Science King. We had schools of choice where you basically have to sign up to go. You have to provide your own transportation there. Sometimes. But you can pretty much go there and those are, in general, what I've seen is the more motivated students. That's the type of school I taught at. Then you have neighborhood schools where the parents can't get the students to the schools of choice, but they don't test into the testing schools. Everybody hear him? Okay. He's right. Yeah. And in the schools of choice, I had 35 kids show up in each one of my classrooms every single day. My roommate taught at a neighborhood school. He had 15, 18 kids show up each day. I feel like those are the more motivated kids. Those are the more motivated teachers and generally specialized programs. That's where I'm at with the resources, but we have kind of the hardest job because we still have the same population in terms of disparity of skill level. But we just, we're overwhelmed by the number of students that we have. Do you see that as the same problem? What's happening? Well, we're attacking that problem more systematically by simply saying the kids in neighborhood schools have to get it also. And that's why we're pushing and tracking data, working hard on literacy and trying to give students skill sets by third grade. As these children move through the district, early childhood education, preschool education, full day kindergarten, small class sizes K through three, these youngsters that move into the pockets of the future will be far better prepared, have much more success, will be less in the way of behavioral problems and will not want to drop out because they can do this. And also when we get the kids taking algebra and algebraic thinking at sixth, seventh and eighth grade which we're working on, that, again, we'll point to success. People that are successful in this business called education, they don't drop out, they have high goals. And we're asking all of our young people to begin thinking about future education back here in the kindergarten, the first grade, well, what do you mean by that? Well, what are you gonna do when you get out of high school? Nothing, nobody in my family will know. You have to think because people in your family do need to do that. So that's how we're trying to deal with the neighborhood schools. We're setting higher standards, we're monitoring and their performance is going up as a result. But he's right, in order to hold on to some of the best, we have certain schools like Renaissance where you have to take a test to get in. So, you know, right away, you've got some of the best students there, most highly motivated parents behind them. And that's King, Renaissance and Cass Technical High School. And then he mentioned some other schools where there's schools of choice where parents can send your kids there but they have to get them there. Well, anybody's going to take the time to get their child from one side of town to the other is highly motivated and highly involved in their child's education. And they're gonna be a stronger parent. We're simply saying for all the rest of the schools we want to get to those kinds of performance standards and how do you do that? Well, you've got to train, work with those parents. You've got to get the kids to set higher expectations. You have to measure their skills and their behaviors and student achievement performance and monitor what they're doing and take responsibility for it as a teacher. These kids can do better. And when you demand that, they tend to do better. I could have happened overnight but it's happening in Detroit right now. We have one more quick question. Who's got the most stimulating and provocative question? Okay. All right. One of the topics we've discussed in our public management class is motivation. You were just talking about student motivation. I was wondering, has teacher retention been hard at all underneath the state of point in school board and what are you doing to retain qualified teachers and they get young and energetic people? Excellent question. But right now, as you know, No Child Left Behind says that by 2006, all the teachers have to be quote unquote certified. That means they're teaching their area of major. We've made major progress there. We've started out with about 750 teachers that were uncertified. We're now down around 300 that are uncertified and we're trying to close that gap. So that's one of the things. As far as motivation and believe it or not, our turnover rate is 3%. That's very low. Very low turnover rate. And now with the tough things we're gonna have to do in order to balance our budget, we think that turnover ratio will probably stay in the same spot. That really speaks volumes for our teachers and our principals. Not many of them leave. Turnover rate in most organizations is much higher than 3% a year. However, motivating these folks, I meet with the teachers six times a year is tough because they have tough jobs. These kids come, many of them with some real serious deficits. They go home every day and come back. And you know, in very difficult situations. So the teachers in Detroit have to work harder, even to the extent that Wayne State University and New Detroit in concert with Michigan State have done research and talked to teachers. Many of them said they came to Detroit and they weren't properly trained to work in an urban environment. So we're really trying to close that gap. I don't know if you found that. And so we're trying to listen to what teachers are saying, what sort of preparation do you need to come there and be successful? These kids are like any other kids. Once these kids know you and know you care about them, they're just the most wonderful kids that you'll ever find. And sometimes your heart breaks when you see the situations that they come from that they didn't ask to be born into, but they were. And now for them and some of them, it's a real challenge to overcome. Some of the things that some of us who had maybe a couple of parents and highly motivated young upbringing didn't have to deal with. And some of our kids deal with more. Thank you very much, Dr. McDonough. Okay, thank you. Thank you very much. I heard that you get up at three in the morning and so we have a little coffee vehicle for you. Thank you very much. I enjoyed your class. Look for you out there to help us in the future to some of these issues. We need your minds. Get ready.