 Good afternoon, and welcome to the Ford School. I'm Susan Collins, the Joan and Sanford Wildean here, and it's really a pleasure to see so many of you joining us this afternoon for a discussion of a very important topic. So on behalf of the Ford School, I'd like to welcome you to another in the Ford School series of distinguished lectures, policy talks at the Ford School. We're very honored today to be joined by the honorable Margaret Spellings, former U.S. Secretary of Education and currently President and CEO of a D.C.-based public policy consulting firm. Ms. Spellings' complete biography is in your program, and I encourage you to read more about her very extensive background in forming and crafting education policy at all levels, from the local school board to the White House. She, of course, was one of the chief architects of the No Child Left Behind, perhaps the most ambitious and far-reaching public education policy initiative of the past 40 years, and we could not be more pleased to host her today as she reflects on what we've learned in the past 10 years as the legislation was passed and where we might be going forward. Today's lecture is hosted by the Center for Local, State, and Urban Policies Education Policy Initiative, and I'd like to thank my colleague, Brian Jacob, for his hard work and his leadership, both of close-up and EPI. Our lecture is co-sponsored as well by the Nonprofit and Public Management Center by the University of Michigan School of Education, and Dean Debra Vaughn will be joining us shortly. We appreciate collaboration and partnership on this lecture. I'd also like to welcome Regent Julia Darlow. We are delighted to have you with us. Thank you for joining us here today. I believe that State Representative Rick Olson is also with us, and we are very pleased that he will hopefully be joining us later, so perhaps he's not with us yet. He represents the 55th District, which includes Saline and other areas within Washtenaw County and Monroe County, so we're very pleased that he will be joining us later today. So with that, it is my great pleasure to introduce to you the Honorable Margaret Spellings. Thank you, Dean. Thank you very much, and thank you for being here this afternoon on this blustery Michigan Monday. So as Susan said, I've been involved in education policy for a good while now, longer than I probably care to admit, and what I love about it, and for those of you who are thinking about careers in public policy, it's a great one because everybody's an expert. Everybody has an opinion about school, you've been to school, you have kids in school, and it's very much something that consumers feel like they have expertise on, which is the beauty and the bane of it. I have had the opportunity to work on behalf of local school boards around the state legislature for a couple of governors, one of whom became the President of the United States, and I'll get into some of that. And what I want to do today is talk about no child left behind in federal policy and this kind of great audacious goal that we set about 10 years ago to really leave no child behind. And so I hope you'll come away convinced because I'm sure some of you, some of you I know, are skeptics. So we'll see if this actually will work because I'm very technology challenged. Let me just say that. So I won't take too much time on this, but I think it's good to start with how we got here just briefly. And I know some of you all know this because you're studying education policy. So pardon me for those of you who are already experts beyond the expertise that you have as a user. So the federal rule in education, and this is what's going on in Washington now, and we constantly re-litigate and reframe what set of grown-ups ought to decide things, ought to make policy on behalf of children. And the Federal Department of Education really was established as part of the whole civil rights movement in the mid-60s. Prior to that, it had been a department within HEW, Health Education and Welfare. And Jimmy Carter made a commitment to the teacher union that if he was elected, he would create a freestanding department. Well, he wasn't elected, but the department got created in any event, or his first secretary served only a brief period of time, and then he left office. But what the whole idea of a federal role was to level the playing field. We had been through a period, as part of our civil rights debates, that it was presumed that states really couldn't be trusted to see about the needs of every single child. And that Title I and these big federal programs were really derived and designed to make sure that they were set up to level the playing field, to provide some commitments, whether they were special ed kids or poor minority kids, that that was a federal imperative. I love this quote from Senator Robert Kennedy when this all was going on in the mid-60s about what was kind of a precursor to accountability. And that is that he said, I want to change this bill because it doesn't have any way of measuring those damned educators, and we really ought to have some kind of evaluation. Am I standing in the way of that thing? Some evaluation there and some measurement of whether any good is happening. So that was a little bit of a, there's the gentleman that's standing in front of the thing. Okay, so it was a civil rights imperative in the early days, then came fast forward to the mid-80s or so, a nation at risk. That's gonna be 30 years next year, 30 years ago, amazingly so. And it was a real wake up call to our country. We had sort of thought that education was fine and dandy, no problem. Didn't really think about it, but what we learned in that report was that we were doing a pretty sorry job, especially with respect to poor and minority kids. And what that netted was a lot of activity in the states. A lot of governors, the president H.W. Bush convened a summit. Bill Clinton was the head of the National Governors Association at the time. There was a lot of activity going on in states around standards and accountability and sort of the precursors to what would become No Child Left Behind. We also saw a lot of educational entrepreneurship. This is when the charter school movement started to be discussed. Teach for America, troops to teachers, some of these more innovative things that were a little bit one off at the time, choice measures, Milwaukee, so on, were starting to take hold. So then came No Child Left Behind and we went from this idea of 1,000 flowers blooming, lots of states doing their own things, little entrepreneurial this and that, to something that was more national in nature. And when President Bush, I was working for him at the time in the Great Lone Star State, he ran as a so-called compassionate conservative. And if you were Republican in those days, you were against the Department of Education. He was the first real federal candidate that started talking about a federal role. Most of the orthodoxy and the Reagan era and so forth was to abolish the Department of Education to return education policy making completely to the states, et cetera. And we'll talk a little bit more about that in a minute. But if education was your number one issue in 96, you voted for Clinton over Dole by 62 points. I mean, if you cared about education, you voted for Bill Clinton, period. When Bush was elected, he and Gore were about the same. And Bush talked a lot about education on the campaign trail and he had the luxury, I would say at the time, to talk about federal investments and to talk about revenues and so forth. So what we saw was a lot of interesting bedfellows, some strange political coalitions that began to develop between the civil rights community and the business community in favor of a more vigorous federal role and more accountability opposed by sort of what I'll call federalist Republicans, old style, no federal role kind of Republicans and the teachers unions. And it's been a really interesting journey. Okay, so what is no child left behind? I know you've read a lot about it in the paper, people talk about it, but I wanna take a moment since you have to listen to me for a few minutes to talk about what the policy really does say. And no child left behind really is more than a slogan. It actually describes what it is that we're trying to do in the law. What it says is that we really mean to, we really aim to educate every single child, PS, virtually every single child and we'll talk about some of the exceptions to that and rightfully so, over a period of time, in this case 2014, two state-established grade-level proficiency, whatever that means, as described and determined by the states. We know that states pay about 91 cents of every dollar for the provision of education and it's a very small investment that comes from the federal government. We're gonna do this, we say, and no child left behind, by finding out where every child is in these two gateway subject areas of reading and math. We're gonna test every kid annually and we're gonna disaggregate or separate the data by student groups so that we know how all the Hispanic students are doing in a particular campus and district, how the African-American students are doing, special ed and on and on. And so it's a pretty simple notion, very profound, powerful, but really hard to do because we are and were woefully short of doing those things. So when I talk about the all students on grade level by 2014 with reasonable exceptions, I think this is one of the things that is most misunderstood about the law. It's as if we're trying to expect people who are profoundly or severely handicapped to expecting them to achieve at high grade-level standards. That's not the case. On any given day in any state in this country, many, many children are out of the accountability system because they're transitioning to English. They are profoundly disabled. They, there aren't enough of a set of kids, Hispanic, special ed or otherwise to be congregated on a campus to have reliability for accountability purposes. So there's a lot of reasons that some number of children are out of the accountability system and I think our question is, are those remaining the folks that we ought to, the children we ought to be worried about getting to grade level by 2014? I often say to parents when I've addressed campuses and the like, when do you want your kid on grade level? As for me, I want my children working on grade level when they're in the grade that they're attending. And I think we have, if somebody walked into your family and said, we think we can get your grandchild, Mr. School Board member on grade level by 2014, you'd probably have your kid out of the school by that afternoon. And so I think what no child left behind aimed to do was challenge what Bush then called the soft bigotry of low expectations that it's okay for us to want that for our kid, but it's not okay for poor minority, African-American, Hispanic, you know, fill in the blank, kids to want that for their children. So that obviously is where the rub comes. All federal legislation or nearly all federal is a federal legislation comes up for renewal or reauthorization periodically. This law has been overdue since 2007, and that's another story. I love this cartoon that is sort of about our face at place in the global world. You know, when, when no child left behind, the bar is too high. And then, you know, with other competitors around the world, you're up, come on, tubby. It's not so hard in Asia way over the bar. Uh-huh. So no child left behind. How is it working? What is it doing? You know, sometimes I say in Texas, we would say we're pleased but not satisfied. We shouldn't be satisfied. I'll talk about where we are, but you know, we are seeing some encouraging things. One is states have built accountability systems. When Bush was elected, only, you know, a handful of states had what I call real accountability systems that had annual measurement and disaggregated data. Most states had snapshot systems where kids were tested once in elementary school, once in middle school, and once in high school. And you didn't really know what happened between elementary school and middle school if there was slippage. So states have created infrastructure where they know a whole lot more about who went when, where, and how. That's only good enough if we're taking that information and doing something with it. And parents, of course, have a lot more information about their students and academics, if I might say, Brian, and others know a whole lot more. And Susan, you all are doing a lot of research and public policy explaining now that we have a meaningful data set. The NAEP results, you know, we have, we definitely have seen improvements for our most disadvantaged kids. That's where the focus has been. I'm a big what gets measured, gets done fan. And this is not a very good chart, but it shows some of the gap closing. This is the old test and the new test. Let me get to this one. It's a little easier to see. On the right-hand side of the diagram are gains made by, the purple is black nine-year-olds, the green is black 13-year-olds, red is Hispanic nine-year-olds, and blue is Hispanic 13-year-olds. So you can see it's, we've got a long way to go and it's not been uniformly successful. Older kids are struggling more, but, you know, we're moving in the right direction. Urban achievement, urban achievement, urban gaps have improved, but we have a lot more to do. Today in this country, if you're a minority, you have about a 50% chance of getting out of high school on time. You know, that's scandalous, worrisome. Sometimes I say if half the school lunches served a day in our cafeterias were tainted, we'd be on fire without rage, but the fact that half of our minority kids aren't getting out of high school on time, seems no big deal. So that's what No Child Left Behind is all about. Mythbusting, you've been to cocktail parties, looks like most of you have been to cocktail parties. And what do you hear about No Child Left Behind? You hear that it's, you know, narrows the curriculum, that all this focus on reading and math is hurting problem solving or history or arts education on and on and on. And I think a couple of things I would say, and I'll show you a little, some data in a second, we haven't seen any deterioration in other subject areas. So the NAEP civics exam, we're seeing improvements there as well. So, you know, the thesis behind No Child Left Behind is, if you can read and cipher, you're probably gonna be able to do better in science and history and other subjects. No Child Left Behind is a floor, it does not say to states, you cannot have assessments in history or social studies or science or whatever, it says you must have them in reading and math. We just don't see the narrowing of the curriculum really show up. Too much testing, this is when you hear a lot. And the federal law requires states to test one time a year in reading and math in a standardized, reliable, kind of valid way. That's what the federal law requires. Now is it true that school districts and states in the March to make progress on those one time a year assessments embed assessment throughout the year? Yes, they do. That's very sound educational pedagogy. But this law requires one assessment in two subjects one time a year. 2014 as an impossible goal for us to have kids on grade level, we do hear that and we are seeing, we're woefully short of meeting that goal. But I would suggest that if not then, when can we get our kids on grade level? And without kind of the power and the prod of a timeline, it'll be hard to get there if you don't know where you're going. This over labeling of failing schools as being too punitive to schools, I think is something that you hear a lot as well. The law uses the term of our needs improvement, but the press I think often labels schools as failing. So when 50% of the minority kids are getting out of high school on time, I would argue that lots of our schools do need improvement. But you've read a lot about the failing schools, we're punishing schools and so on. Secretary Duncan a few months ago said, if we don't reauthorize no child left behind, 82% of our schools will be failing, labeled failing. The fact of the matter is it's about 50% of the schools that are labeled needing improvement in the final analysis after the data came in, not wildly overstated in my opinion, but we'll see. A major decrease in teacher satisfaction actually, teacher satisfaction was an all time high in the early days of no child left behind. It's at a low right now. You may have seen just a couple weeks ago some teacher data came out. And frankly, I think it's related to some of the pay for performance stuff that's going on around the country, which we'll talk about, but on its face, assessment and disaggregation really, I don't think was the culprit. And then one of my favorites, the focus on low achievers at the expense of our gifted students, the Nickelbee kids will, as they're sometimes called NCLB, will be dominant in our policy debates and that will hurt our gifted learners. We haven't really seen that show up in the data. Here's a slide. You can see that even at the 90th percentile all the way down, we're seeing not aggressive, not wildly amazing, but certainly no degradation at the high ends either. So where are we today? I'm worried that reform is in retreat. And what, that's the wrong thing? That the combination of, and frankly, the high watermark is what the administration is doing. My successor, Secretary Duncan, in the absence of congressional action, which is easily put at the feet of both Republicans and Democrats, has had to do something to bridge between this long overdue reauthorization. Congress hasn't done their job since 2007 and anticipation of a new law. So what the Obama administration has done is they've announced a set of waivers. Your waiver is right here. I'll tell you about it. Is this it? He's got 26 of these to get through. I'll get to the part about the Z scores in a second. But they have laid out some quid pro-quoes and there's gonna be some litigation around this that says if you do these things that we in the Obama administration wanna see done, common core standards, pay for performance, et cetera, then you're eligible for a waiver. And here are some of the goodies that are out there for you. 2014 goes away. Targets for high levels of proficiency. There's a focus only on the lowest performing schools, the bottom 15% of schools, the other 85% of schools in our country are out of the net. Today, every single school in this country feels the power or the pressure, whatever you wanna call it, of no child left behind. If you're in Fairfax County, Virginia, or Darien, Connecticut, or Beverly Hills, California, and you have special ed kids or Hispanic kids, you gotta worry about them because they're there. This focuses very much on low achieving and largely urban-only school districts. It requires college-ready standards. This common core, we'll talk about that in a bit, and the teacher evaluations linked to student achievement. We have had 11 states approved. Their names are up there, you'll see. And then 26 more states, and the district are waiting for their approval. That's your plan, I'll talk about it in a bit. But basically, we're creating now, instead of a federal platform, a crazy quilt of education policymaking, which I'll talk about some of the specifics in a minute, around the federal role. Just last week, he said he was inclined to consider district level waivers. So Detroit, Chicago, Houston, so again, crazy quilt on top of crazy quilt, and I will say that the Department of Education is gonna have a very, very, very difficult time monitoring and forcing and understanding what's going on in this crazy quilt, and I'm a little bit worried that it's kind of a plan to obfuscate and confuse what's going on out there. As for reauthorization, so Arnie's had to do what he had to do to make the engine go. We're still out having school, and the real world while Rome burns in Congress fiddles. But here's kind of what they're up to. I've just told you about what the Obama administration has done. The Senate bill and the House bill are both very similar. Obviously, the Democrats are in charge in the Senate, the Republicans are in charge in the House. The good news is we have bipartisanship, the bad news is it's real sorry policy. And what they have done in both cases is focus only again on the lowest performers, the lowest 5% of schools in the Senate, just low performers to be determined by local school districts in the House version, a retreat from standards, from the deadlines, tutoring choice, all of the things that go with that, all under the banner of enhanced local control. Okay, I want to talk to you a little bit about about how we're seeing this manifest itself in reality. These are some of the waiver requests, and I'll talk about yours in a second. I'm gonna start with New Mexico at the bottom. Their plan just on its face says all children, baloney on math, we think we can get 85% in math and 87% in reading, and that's all we aim to do. So if you're in the 15% of Hispanic families, or especially the families, just, I mean, I don't know who's gonna select whether you're in or out, but we don't aim to educate all children in New Mexico. Minnesota and New Jersey, and this is something very creative in Massachusetts a little bit likewise, what the target now is to close, to narrow the achievement gap. So to cut the achievement gap in half, whatever it is, reduce it. Okay, well that's moving in the right direction, but it's far from kind of this aspirational goal of everybody sometime fairly soon. So just reducing gaps is the approach that many states are using. Let me say a quick word about Michigan, just cause it's so confusing, and I don't know if Susan, if you've looked at it at all, but it is a nightmare. What I loved about it was in the letter, the preamble, their overarching statement was they aim to get to an achievable level of performance for kids in Michigan. So I guess if it's achievable, they're doing it today. So victory. In the Michigan waiver, there's something called the Z-score, which is a very complicated formula, and this is the student Z-score is the student scale score minus the statewide average of scale scores over the standard deviation of the scale score. This is the cheat sheet. And then this whole, this discussion of why we're gonna use Z-scores, et cetera. So the idea that most educators or parents could understand this kind of very statistical mumbo jumbo and what it meant to their kid is, I think, optimistic. Let me get back on my thing. But I wanna believe, I did something to the deal. I mean, this is gonna happen. So which slide do you want? Just anyone that I can get the thing big and on the scope board. Here it comes, oh, you did it. You must be one heck of a dean. Let me just say that, wow. Okay, so back to the kind of the advertised topic, this whole kids versus adults. We've talked about all of the policy wonkery and what is often not discussed very much is what about the students? And there's loads of blame to go around here. Union school boards, governance, financing structures, all act to carry on the existing system. As I said, what I'm most worried about now is kind of a hide the ball approach, this obfuscation. 26 different state waivers, local district plans, Z scores and reducing achievement gaps and just a whole carnival of numbers that minority parents in particular, educators, not the least of which and parents are gonna be very challenged to understand. I also hear a lot these days and usually get a question which is what I call the blame the parents phenomenon which is well if only the parents would this or that. We can't do our job because the parents aren't doing theirs. And we all know very well that parents are challenged and families are challenged but I think it ends up getting translated as a way for the system to let itself off the hook. And I used to say I sent the best kids I had to school and I know most parents do. So this kind of this constant tension between the role of the parent and the role of the government. That's why I sometimes ask where is the outrage? Spending just quickly, this is federal spending. You can see it's way up. You've seen the achievement slope is very slow to flat. This is the federal spending, the stimulus, obviously that's not sustainable over the long haul, that giant increase. I will say the administration did get a lot of leverage at least changes in the law whether this will actually net out into real policy change time will tell but they did get some good things happening out of the race to the top dollars whether they got that much out whether it was that worth that much money we'll find out. Okay so let's talk a little bit about politics. As I said, everybody's an expert on the topic. Everybody has a perspective, I love that. Interestingly these typical Republican Democrat policy divisions don't show up here. It's like immigration. I spent four years prior to my time in the cabinet working as a domestic policy advisor charged with a more general portfolio of things, labor, transportation, justice issues like immigration, et cetera. And so we have this fun and very interesting politics of the unions and the arch conservatives aligned against the civil rights and business communities which makes it kind of fun. And the early days the business and civil rights communities carried the day. I'm concerned about that not being the case now for a variety of reasons. Unions, you might think I'm against unions. I'm not. Unions are paid to act in the best interest of their members. That's what they do. They do it really well. It's not their job to represent kids. They're job to represent adults and they're damn good at it. Politicians of all kinds and stripes, my observation after 30 years is they just want the noise levels down. Don't want a bunch of whining superintendents or school board members or you name it. So just keep the noise down. So we've got a couple of constituencies politically right now. As I said, this whole, and we've heard it a lot on the campaign trail, get rid of the Department of Education. And I guess intellectually you could sustain that argument if you eliminated all the federal funding. If we truly were gonna say we don't mean to have any federal role, but the idea that we'll keep a federal department and spend money, but not have any taxpayer accountability or requirements attached to it seems a little odd in my view. We have kind of the union and Democrat issues as I've talked about. So you should see that the first phenomenon shows up on the R side. The second phenomenon shows up on the D side. And then parents are all over the board. I'm gonna title my saggy pants phenomenon story. I was in Tennessee last week and the legislature there just recently debated the saggy pants legislation. You might have read about it. I mean, it's the thing about basically a dress code that kids have their pants too low to attend school and so on. Of course, the media is all over the saggy pants situation. It's on the front page news, so on and so forth. And my friend, the commissioner there, they had a hearing on the bill and saggy pants was up first. And then the Tennessee plan to close the achievement gap, their waiver, all of the real media issues. After saggy pants got done, every parent and every media outlet in the room left, no one stayed to discuss the gaping achievement gap in Tennessee, but we are all over saggy pants. You see parents talk about school lunches, seatbelts on buses, school schedules, et cetera. Not that those are not important issues, but I think the achievement gap deserves at least as much attention. Okay, so what do we do? How do we move forward? As I said, there are some legitimate conservative positions. This is what we tried to proffer during the Bush days is that we ought to have a vigorous, but discreet federal role and ought to be about taxpayer accountability and whether we truly were meeting this great civil rights goal of educating every child. This perennial issue of recalibrating state and federal and local control, the old he who has the gold makes the rules. What role is education as a part of a global knowledge economy? I was a part of the Council on Foreign Relations task force that was unveiled last week that my former cabinet colleague, Condi Rice and my friend Joel Klein, the former chancellor of the New York schools, were the co-chairs of. And basically the whole frame for that report was, we have a national security imperative. We cannot and are not preparing our students to serve in the military. And so that's a national imperative, a national priority. Therefore, we need national policies around it. So this ongoing state versus local control, as I said, what I worry about is while we argue about who's in charge and who gets to decide, our kids are getting lost. So what do we do about it and where do you fit in? Obviously, as I've said, and we know this kind of intuitively, sometimes I think we know it in a macro level, but we don't necessarily personalize it enough. And that is our nation and our economy and this state and your town and my town, we are gonna be in a world of hurt if we don't do a much, much, much better job of educating our kids. I've had the opportunity to travel around the world, representing our great country and see kind of the appetite, the hunger, the drive, the investment that's going on in China and India and Latin America and Africa even about access to education and not only access but quality in education and we're debating the niceties of seatbelts and stuff while others are starting to kick our butts. Obviously, improving education, my former boss used to say that the best criminal justice reform was a sound education system, the best healthcare reform. All roads lead to sound educational systems and I think we know that the things that we've done there really have what has set us apart as a country in the world. And then as I said, personalize it to your own kids. What do you want for your child and your grandchild? Do you want bare minimum grade level achievement by 2014 or do you want your kid performing at least a grade level today? So what can you do about it? I will say that no child left behind gave you a lot more tools, a lot more information that you had prior to that. You can get on your state education department website, you can get on your local school district website and find out how your campuses are doing, the qualification levels of teachers there, subgroup accountability on and on and on. And I think we're to the point where we can have a more rational debate based on facts and information as opposed to mythology or opinion. Of course we need to speak up and ask our politicians to be accountable, expect them to know their business and please don't come to Washington because you'll be so depressed. You might be better off talking to your members of your state legislature but the kind of the knowledge levels of some of both sides of the aisle in Congress is kind of frightening. There was a hearing earlier this year where one of the members literally asked what's a local education agency, i.e. what's a school district? And of course you can be a good role model yourself, a good parent, a good mentor, a good grandparent, I mean connect personally with students that are in your lives because of course that's where it starts. So I will stop on that somewhat optimistic note and I hope that what I've said will be enough grist for the mill for some good questions. Yes, sir. I'd like to ask about the other countries that are doing better than we are. I've had the idea in mind at least from my own perspective that maybe some of that has to do with the fact that we are attempting to achieve equality whereas the other countries like the Chinese and the Japanese are aiming their efforts primarily at the smart kids and letting them get really ahead which makes them appear to be ahead of us because their brightest are perhaps even brighter than ours. What is the difference that has been identified between those countries and what we're doing here? Well, a couple things I would say. First I would not acknowledge you're right. We in the United States of America we aim to do something that not a lot of places in the world attempt to do. And that's why we think of ourselves as a great nation that can provide opportunity for everyone. So certainly there's an element of truth of what you say. It's also true and there's a new report out of the Bush Institute at SMU, Southern Methodist University called the Global Report Card that says that even our best kids, Beverly Hills, whatever excellent school district you can think about, Highland Park, Dallas, whatever are falling short with their peers around the world. So even our most gifted students are falling short. The other thing I would say is, especially in Asia and India and China in particular, they're gonna beat us at a numbers game, right? So we've gotta do a better job of educating more people to higher levels because they got a billion people. And so we don't have the, if we're gonna continue to lead the world economically we have to provide more of this across the board. The other thing is our jobs, and you know this better than anybody in Michigan, most jobs require some level of post-secondary education these days, especially the fastest growing jobs, 16 years of education, not necessarily a baccalaureate degree, there's all kind of dispute about how much college, but some levels after high school. So if our labor market needs 16 years of education and we have half of our minority kids not getting out of high school, and many of the kids who do get out of high school completely underprepared for post-secondary work, and we got a long way to go. And so, you know, you're not all wrong, but that certainly has implications for us too. Yes, sir, in the back by the door. Say again. On college movement? I'm not familiar with the on college movement. On college. Oh, on college. Is this idea that we don't need too many more people with baccalaureate degrees that? It's more like a movement away from, you know, college is not necessary for success. A lot of people are pursuing jobs with college degrees that don't require college degrees. Yeah, and I mean, I think there's some validity to some of that, you know, we need more people with 16 years of education, high skillet, et cetera, not necessarily a whole lot more people with gender studies or Latin American studies and not only to pick on you, if you're getting a gender studies degree, but or an English degree or whatever. I mean, we need people with high levels of capability in the STEM fields and where, you know, have big shortages. I think there is an element of truth to that. I also think however, that when we start to have those kind of talks, you know, guess who it is that's shifted off to shop class or shifted off to tracking systems where you're not college material. And so, you know, we have to be really careful about that. That, you know, skill levels don't get translated as a two-tier system that, you know, affluent people that can, you know, afford to pursue and are set up for success, go one route and others go another path. We've tried it before and we are, you know, suffering the consequences. So I'm worried about that. Yes, sir. I'm concerned about the kind of information that our citizens have and if I think about you as a cabinet person, you were rushing into a meeting, you probably had a very concise, well-colonel-plated decision panel. It wasn't a book in the, I think we need to think about institutions which deliver that kind of concise information to citizens on education. Because it's very difficult for citizens to understand what's based on what's out there. Now, for example, in Michigan for the last 10 years expenditures on K-12 education at the state level have had a steady downward trend. And I think as a percent of personal income. And so it's a lower and lower priority that's been true. Democratic administration prior to the current public administration continues. I don't think most people know that simple fact that our policy makers in Michigan of over time just are putting K-12 education at a lower and lower priority. I think it's a one-page document of, I think it would be useful for people to know that. And then they can judge, in this day and age, whose education is smaller than others. The idea is on how we can get citizens concise, well-developed information on the sort of you expected, the unit. Well, we know a couple things about how people get information about education. They get it from teachers. If you're a user of the system, you get a lot of information about school from educators. And they get it from a variety of sources, not sometimes the unions, other teachers, on and on. A couple things I would say to that is, yes, I think we need to find ways to convey what kind of priority, this is the whole tension between investments on behalf of the elderly and investments on behalf of the young. I mean, that's the next big thing in domestic policy, that and productivity, which I'll say a word about in a second. But I also think that people who have watched their own household budgets shrink and so forth want confidence from us as educators and us as people in government to know that we're doing the smartest, most effective things we can do and that we're being as productive as we can with resources. And there is a do more with less expectation and attitude these days. And I think one of the things that we're starting to see around the country as a policy area is we focused a lot on infrastructure for student achievement, testing, et cetera. And the new thing has gotta be, how do we use resources on their behalf? And if you asked, you remember the school board, I mean, how much does the third grade cost in your district versus the fourth grade? How much is chemistry versus biology? How much is X program versus Y program? We really don't know very much. We don't know what other enterprises know about how to operate their business. And that's the kind of thing that policymakers are starting to demand so that we can figure out, well, can technology solve the science problem or the foreign language problem or whatever? And can we ensure our publics that they're getting the biggest bang for their buck? I mean, I agree with you. We are probably underinvesting in education these days, but underinvesting for what, to what end, and more money is just, A, we don't have it and B, we can't make the sell until we engender, I think, greater confidence in our system. That's just my observation. Yes, sir? So it seems from my perspective that the focus on testing is very measurement-based and results-based. I was wondering, could you shed some insight regarding what's being done at the federal level to provide constructive advice to make strategic strategies used by teachers in classrooms more effective to address educational problems for more of a root cause and to improve teaching styles and classroom structure? Is there anything being done on a federal level regarding that? Yes, and this is one of the really interesting things that a federal role can and should do. And I'm looking at the woman behind you as an important educator named Susan Newman, who was party to that kind of the aftermath of the brain research that beget a lot of knowledge about how young children learn how to read. And with that information, that frankly came not from the Department of Education, but from the National Institutes of Health. We learned a lot about based in science, based in real research, and it became part of No Child Left Behind, a billion dollar program to help teachers and students learn how to read more effectively. It's gone through many iterations and is not funded at that level now for a variety of reasons, but it strikes me that that's exactly what the federal government ought to do, is bring to bear best practices, sound research, and the right tools to help teachers do their work better. And we frankly have done a poor job of doing that for them. We cannot ask every teacher to be a magician and a research scientist in his or her classroom every single day. And there's too much sort of artistry involved when we ought to be deploying a lot more science and research around these very, very thorny challenges. I mean, it's hard to teach non-native speakers how to speak English and learn to read English and Cypher and whatever. That's not something you just wake up and do without some capability and some skill. And we need to get much smarter about how we get that research out into the field more rapidly. And we're a long way from doing it. There's a whole institute at the Department of Education. Deborah Ball actually is appointed to the Institute for Education Sciences, whose job is to get that information out. But yes, there are things going on in that way. Yes, sir? Hypothetically, if they did eliminate the Department of Education, would states be able to choose whether they continue public education or would they be required to? Well, most states have it as a matter of their own constitution that they will provide some level of, I mean, most, I guess all of them do, whether it's in their constitution or not, that I can't speak to. But yes, it's a state responsibility. I mean, I guess theoretically they'd have the authority to not have school. But if you took local control to its farthest end. Yes, sir? So just to my reference to the saggy parents issue and the comments you also made as far as if there's tainted school lunches and the level of excitement or whatever it was that brought people out. I guess my question is, how do you think you can recreate that excitement or that enthusiasm, which really, I think, to me, it seems that people were like, I think it was your personal right that it was taken away, and that's why they showed up. And so how do you create the perception that this is your fundamental right where people feel like the fact that I'm not getting a good education is what's, that's outrageous as I'm part of the saggy parents. I think that is, man, that is the $64,000 question and one that I would welcome the answer to. We had a little lunch today with some graduate students and talked about just that issue. But how do we get a sense of urgency around this problem? In the post-Sputnik era, we saw Russia take us, beat us in the space race and it kind of beget a whole national movement and some civic pride around that. I don't know. I mean, gosh, do you? Yeah, no. I mean, what will it take? And I think it's kind of a not my problem type thing or people think you see survey after survey that my school's good, everybody else's school stinks. And I think, frankly, people at all income levels are deluding themselves about the quality of their experience often, which is not to say there aren't some great schools. But I mean, I don't know what it's going to take. China and India ascending economically for us to say, holy cow, I mean, I find out. What do you think, Brian? You're the expert. I have to ask a question. I will think about the saggy pants challenge. But now I actually want to take the opportunity of having here to ask you what and looking back on the child left behind, I think that your experience in the administration, either what would you have changed then or would you change now? And you were kind of, I mean, you made comments about waivers and you had some things that were good or bad. Either things you couldn't have got then for political reasons or now after the lessons of 10 years you think should be changed. Yeah, no, there certainly are. And you know, everybody knows this. Legislative bodies pass laws based on what they know then. Duh, just like the decisions you make in your own life. The reauthorization process is set up for us to say, oh, okay, we've had some experience with this, let's change it. Okay, the fact that we are five years coming on to six years overdue, you know, of course. I mean, the system is designed to be organic. People often said to me, well, how come, you know, you did this, you know, a system that didn't accommodate growth. Well, the reason we didn't is because no one had annual assessment. You can't do growth from year to year without with a snapshot kind of accountability system. So states had to build all of that and it took many years, five or six years to get those systems that now allow us to give educators the rightful credit for the progress that they're making along the way. And if we had had that before, we would have done that. I will say, and I was asked about this at the lunch, you know, the highly qualified teacher thing is kind of a mess, it is a mess. And, you know, the political equation, I mean, George Bush needed one thing out of no child left behind and that was annual assessment and disaggregated data and a goal, some consequences. The Democrats wanted the highly qualified teacher thing because it was all about raising the profession, driving pay forward on and on. I mean, certainly, you know, meritorious reasons. But, you know, legislating obviously, as you know, is the art of compromise. We got accountability, they got the teachers and there's lots of other stuff in there as well, clearly, but. So I think those are a couple things. I think the whole role of choice in the statute was not well-derived or well-designed. There were a lot of incentives in the system for it not to be offered in meaningful ways to parents, you know, on and on. So, sure, I'm not one of these. We didn't make any mistakes or we didn't learn anything, people from the law. Certainly there are some things that we would and should do different when we have an authorization, whenever it is. Yes, ma'am, and then we'll ask you again. There's in education some kind of conversations about where US stands in terms of the testing and that we maybe don't do as well in that because it's more content-oriented and what we do do well and have done in the past and in fact that other countries try to emanate us and are coming in, is that creativity, problem-solving approach? And what do you see about that? Do you see the common standards helping that assessment? I think assessment from multiple choice testing stands in the way of assessing that. How do you have a sense of where we might go and how that might benefit education? Yeah, well my hope is obviously that they're not mutually exclusive and they shouldn't be and that this idea that we're gonna have children who can't read or cipher at very, very basic levels that are wildly creative and innovative is kind of a non-starter in my mind. So I think we're trying to do both. I think in my humble opinion, the creativity thing comes less from our schools than the way we think about life and our place in it in this country. It's a meritocracy, we have a lot of freedom and those are the values that engender creativity as much as what's going on in the school in my humble opinion. I don't know if there's been any research on this sort of thing, but I think it's the way we Americans approach our world and our life and our problems. But again, there are ways we can measure those sorts of things and like I said, what gets measured gets done. If we value creativity, let's figure out how to measure it and hold ourselves accountable for doing it. Yes sir, I said I'm calling you again. Great question. I think it's a mixed bag. Obviously I would defend this more muscular role around poor and minority students because it is part of our civil rights framework as a federal matter. Have we done that always and everywhere? Heck no, we certainly have not. And so I think it's a mixed bag. I mean the aspirations of the 1965 law were strong but the strategy was put the money out and hope for the best. And we had flat achievement for a long time. So I mean I think as people whine and complain about no child left behind, to me that's a testament to the fact that it's working to make the system uncomfortable, not an indictment of the failure of the law. I'm a half empty, a half full kind of gal, you know what I mean? Don Lynn. Thank you. We talked about the waivers and you mentioned that there are 11 states that have received 126 more in process. Almost of equal concern to me to the high school graduation rates is what I will call the state achievement gap that in this country, the state that you are born into, especially if you're of a lower income and of limited mobility is going to have as much of an impact on your opportunity in the future as possibly your race or socioeconomic background. And no child left behind allows so much state and local control that we know when you compare state assessment results to the NAIT exam that there are states who are reporting proficiency levels that when that is then compared to state to state, there are huge variances. I mean Tennessee is a 60% spread of the number of students proficient according to the Tennessee state exam versus NAIT. Massachusetts is actually 10% more than the NAIT exam shows, which is almost a 70 point spread between those two states alone. What do you think the federal government or maybe not the federal government, maybe more regional coalitions can do to reduce this gap? And does the federal government play a role there in ensuring that even if we were at 100% proficiency in each state, you're still not state to state at a uniform level of education for all American students. Okay, well, first I wanna brag on no child left behind to say that the reason that you can cite the comparative nature between the NAIT, the education, national education report card and the Tennessee standard and the Massachusetts standard is because we have mandatory participation in our national education report card, which was not the case before no child left behind. An often unknown and unheralded part of the law. So the thinking behind that was that people like you or the great people of the state of Tennessee could say, holy cow, we're way down here with whatever and would do something about it. And I think back to this calibration and recalibration of the federal role, they're paying 90% of the load. Should they know their system stinks and have the opportunity to do something about it? Well, sort of didn't really work that way, did it? So fast forward to the common core, the so-called voluntary common core, so voluntary that you can't get a waiver without doing it. So is it really voluntary? There's gonna be lawsuits probably, another thorny federal versus state kind of policy. And so efforts like that, whether they're regional or national, surely can raise the bar and provide more truth and advertising. My only beef about the common core, and I don't think it's gonna do mind control or anything like that that some people are worried about, is that we have, I said this at lunch, we have 50 speedometers that say we're going too slow, 50 state accountability systems that say we're going too slow. So we're gonna get a new speedometer. But what about speeding up? What about the closing the achievement gap? We are so woefully short of meeting the pitiful Tennessee standards, it's not even funny. But we're gonna raise the bar and put it way up here, go Tennessee. What about speeding, see what I'm saying? And I know, having worked on behalf of school boards and in state legislatures and with state boards of education, that by the time the system grinds through the teacher training, the new books, the new assessment systems, the professional development, all the things that have to go into understanding the new speedometer, we're not gonna do very much speeding up in the meantime. Yes ma'am? So as far as I realized that this is the no childhood behind it is to instill in younger children, but have it ever been considered what we're prepping them for to graduate and go to college? Has it ever been considered that coming to where they come from they may not be able to afford college? And we know that student loan debt is currently a problem in the United States with the family economy. So how has it ever been discussed tying in some type of student loan plan or can being interest rates for federal loans or anything? Yeah, all of those policies get discussed, they're not really discussed in the context of K-12 education except to the following, that we think that before kids can be successful whether they can afford it, not that not withstanding in higher education is to make sure they can read and do math on grade levels. So that's kind of what the policy issue is before us. Sure, there are lots of things that we can do differently and better and there's tension around this too of course in higher ed. I had a whole commission called the Commission on the Future of Higher Education associated with that that Sue Donarski worked with on financing systems and how to simplify and do some things in much smarter ways. But in a nutshell, we have access problems, that means kids can't get into it and kids don't complete well enough because they didn't work well enough prepared, see no child left behind. Accountability issues, very little transparency, very little understanding about what magic is going on here at the University of Michigan or at the McComb Community College or whatever is McComb here or Chicago? Here, okay. I get a mixtape. There's a lot of them or any state that consumers really don't have very much information about the value if you will and all this sort of talk is just heresy so I'm glad I'm saying it towards the end of my presentation because I'll probably get run out of town and then of course the issues you talk about affordability and there's a lot of alignment between those three things. We're way, you know, Sue and I talked about it earlier today. We haven't gotten to kind of the nation at risk era in higher education. People don't understand it. People aren't going holy cow. This is an outrage, but we're getting there. Yes. So you talked about some of the myths that come up with no child up behind and one of the things that I've heard is that teachers are now self-focused on teaching to the test because I feel like they have to meet these certain standards and I've had teachers in Michigan come up and accused of cheating on these tests because it feels so much pressure. So I guess I wanted to know your thoughts on that and if you do that, is it cost-per-consent? What we could do to help alleviate that pressure? I guess we have to have a certain kind of measurement of how do we, for headed teachers, or encourage you just to not just teach the test of how that would incorporate in your overall curriculum? Okay, so that's a, there's a lot of angles on that thing. So starting with teaching to the test, is there anything wrong with that? If you have a curriculum, whether it's the common core or otherwise, that says this is what we expect students to know and you have an assessment that is aligned to that and measures that, great. Teach to the test every day, all day, okay? And that's the whole idea of it. So there's nothing necessarily inherently wrong with teaching to the test. When it begets cheating, obviously, we're not for cheating. No one's for cheating, at least of all, by our teachers. And obviously, it's very few isolated examples of teachers who cheat. I mean, just like God willing, isolated examples of doctors that cheat and lawyers that cheat and bankers that cheat and on and on. And we ought to call it out. Well, maybe there's a few more of them. We ought to call it out and be mad about it because it discredits the profession, of course. With respect to what can we do about it, what we're gonna see in the future, obviously, are assessments that are more embedded within technologically offered curricula that's more opaque, if you will, to the student and to the teacher. So this assessment's going on as part of the enterprise, more frequent and lower stakes, if you will, and can be corrected along the way. I mean, the thing about high stakes testing is that it's an event, and you kind of can't have your cake and eat it too. Either you're doing too much testing or it's too high stakes, pick your poison. So there's some common sense and there's somewhere. And I think technology is gonna find the way to solve some of it. Yes, sir. You've been very patient back there. Picking up on your title on the kids versus adults, I think we can look back at least a century and see that that's an issue that's going back and forth. It was right after World War I that there was a recognition that a third of the nation's young men flunked the tests for the draft. And that was perceived as a crisis at that time. And a lot of things happened. The National Research Council in 1923 or four set up the Children's Committee, which tried to look for solutions. And a lot of things happened in the 20s and 30s for that. Most of the funding wasn't federal. Somebody's asked about federal. It came from philanthropy primarily. A lot of things happened during the depression that really helped children, family, schooling and so forth. A lot of that was lost during World War II, but then there was a big renewal of things after World War II, as we all know. And somebody would say that was sort of the golden era of education, the beginning of federal funds for higher education and so forth and so on. But I think it's important that we don't just focus now and we sort of look back. Well, things were sort of okay then and these are recent problems because at least for the US it's at least a century old. You are so right. And I used to use a quote from the work in the early 20s. And basically it was the same discussion we're having now. Whether we can or should or need to leave children behind curriculum, it's all, nothing is new under the sun as they say, but you're absolutely right. A historian in the group. Yes, sir. You mentioned some of the entrepreneurial efforts by states earlier in your presentation during the 90s. I was wondering what you thought about the public school choice movement and other sort of choice and things going on and how those interact with no child left behind and where you see opportunities or challenges there. Choice is not really set up, the financing of education, let me put it this way, the financing of education does not really set up a system where the federal government can or should be the primary actor in choice options. So we used to talk about it because obviously on the Republican side of the aisle there are a lot of people who are interested in this, whether we could do some things from Washington. But when 90% of the money is coming from state and local governments, it's hard for me to set up in Washington, DC and compel you to spend those resources to go from school district A to school district B. And so it doesn't really work very well. Now in the District of Columbia, the DC scholarship program or state or local efforts like there are a few of around the country like Minnesota, I mean I think it's kind of a mixed bag of result, honestly, DC has I think some things to commend it and I would support it again. But I think it's been sort of a mixed, mixed bag. On the public school choice stuff, it didn't really work very well as part of No Child Left Behind for a couple of reasons. One, there weren't better performing public schools for those kids who were trapped in the schools that needed improvement to get to. It often didn't carry transportation. So it was kind of a dead letter as a matter of policy. I'm just saying, you know. And what is more, districts had no motivation, why would they, to advertise to parents that when your child was in a so-called failing school, a school that needed improvement, that those parents had access to title one dollars for tutoring or the option to go to another school. Why would they want to fool with all that? So, you know, poor and minority students, you know, often didn't realize they had those options and consequently the take-up rates, even the thousands of people who were eligible, it's, you know, minuscule. Yes, sir? Yeah, you mentioned teacher quality a few times and I was wondering what you thought were some ways that at the federal level that we could improve teacher quality or improve teacher training currently. Well, what I think we need to do is invite a lot more people into the profession. We need to expand the pool of people that we would consider for teaching. And just as we could not run higher education in America without adjuncts, people who are, you know, members of a profession that come one semester or teach in the afternoon only, or this idea that there's only one way you can come and be, you know, offer talent into our schools is if you want to work 185 days and, you know, all day, every day, you know, under these conditions and even though it doesn't really work out this way, you know, think of it as a lifelong career is erroneous. We don't run anything like that. You know, I'm a senior advisor to a management consulting company. They call me when they need me. They, you know, so on. And we have to just make our pool bigger for starters. The other thing we need to do is, you know, be welcome and open to a variety of providers, whether they're teacher colleges, teacher for America, local service centers, for-profit institutions, you name it, they can provide that secret sauce that makes a great teacher a teacher and let's figure out how we're gonna measure whether those people can be successful in front of young people and go to it. But we need to, you know, make the pool bigger by welcoming people part-time, subject area, career changers, et cetera, and make it much quicker to get in and out of. Yes, sir? Back. Along similar lines to the previous question. To what extent do you think that the problem is that we have the wrong people teaching versus the people we're teaching aren't doing well enough versus that it's more a matter of having students put in better effort or something along those lines? Probably all of the above. Well, first of all, teaching is hard and gotten harder. Expectations are higher. The populations are more challenging. The research base is thin and we haven't armed even our best people with good information about how to be successful and on and on and on. It's also true that we're not recruiting our best and brightest often into the profession. No, no, that ain't the case at the University of Michigan. But I think on the whole and in the main, we see that, you know, teacher candidates are from, you know, the bottom quartile of, you know, our young people. So that's the second thing. The third thing is we grossly misallocate our human capital in this enterprise. If you are, have a lot of experience and a PhD, you are teaching at Cream Puff High. Three AP classes at Cream Puff High. If you are brand new and challenged and very little experience, you're going to the most challenging educational setting in this country until you wash out. That's how we do it. So I think we might wanna, you know, think about ways we can do the other. And of course, that's all that's, those are union contracts, that's tenure, that's the way it works. If you stay long enough, you, it's like being an airline attendant, you know, a flight attendant, whatever they call them now. I see enough of them, you'd think I'd know. Let's see, yes, sir. You've mentioned this, but also, I was hoping you could elaborate a little bit more on what you can do to the appropriateness and prospect for something even approaching this form of accountability in my area. Okay, no one's gonna tell me, are you? Well, of course I don't think we should have no child left behind like accountability in the sense that we're gonna, you know, test every child and disaggregate and it's obviously a more complicated enterprise, et cetera, period. However, I do think there are some things that we can do that will give the public, give our consumer far greater information about what they're getting, how affordable it is and what their prospects for success are. And there are some, you know, fledgling efforts going on in that regard, the Collegiate Learning Assessment is one, the Voluntary School Accountability System is one of, sort of, but they're not very comparable. I mean, it's kind of hide the ball. So we can go a lot further than we're going now. And, you know, if higher education in America is so great as we love to think, and I think it is too, what are we afraid of? And I think we owe our publics that and I think, you know, resources are not gonna continue to come and, you know, there's, you know, you all know all this, it's, you know, affordability is a huge, huge issue and people think, well, you know, that your kid's coming home to live with you after a quarter of a million dollar investment? I hope not, I wouldn't say that. Jesus, sophomore, Alex. In the efforts to improve teacher quality, to what extent should assessments of teachers be based in test scores versus other means of assessment? Okay, that's a great question. But what, how much should student achievement be part of teacher evaluation? Okay, this is, you might be surprised to hear me say this. So, the teacher incentive fund was created in the Bush administration. It was a $50 million program. It was a pilot program. We had about 20 projects around the country in right to work states and union environments, you know, campus-based, individual-based reward systems all over the board to try to start to test this theory that we have no experience with. Fast forward, you know, five or seven years. It's now like a $500 million program and states all over the place are, you know, leaping into this. Now, might it be the cure for cancer? It might be. I don't think we know that yet. And I don't think we have built, you know, the kind of infrastructure and the kind of systems that are gonna support it yet. My observation in working with local school boards and school districts is that we have not done even the most basic kind of things on human capital management that you would find. Well-understood evaluation systems, well-trained managers, frequent feedback, you know, all the sorts of, you know, management 101 that you'd get at the business school around here. We don't have that in education. So, we're gonna go from almost nothing to, you know, PhD level ties between outputs, student achievement and personnel management. And this, frankly, as I said, is why I think teachers are so like, what the hell? Now this, you know, and may, as I said, I hope that it will net some good things, but I don't think we're ready to leap headlong there yet. Okay, last question. Then I was introduced one time after our last speaker, that was me, free margaritas will be served in the lobby. Yes, ma'am. I hate to ask a downer last question. They took the wrong, but that in education, as in healthcare, by the way, the United States spends more for people than any other industrialized country. And we seem to get less bang for our buck. One is that true, and two of it's true, why? It's true, and the why is because we can afford the luxuries and the niceties of debates like class size and benefit levels and school quality and technology and curriculum levels and advanced placement programs and gifted and talented and on and on and on. And these are luxury items around the world, if you will. As I said, in the developing world and most of the parts of the world, it's all about 80 kids crammed in, dying of hunger for knowledge, killing themselves to get to some level of attainment. And so I think we're rich enough to be able to afford to spend time and money on some of those issues. And that must be right, because Susan Orsky's shaking her head, yeah. So with that downer closing note, I will thank you for your good attention and thank you for having me.