 Today we are pleased to, I'm pleased to present Governor Roy Romer. He's the former Governor of Colorado for three terms. He's also the former superintendent of the LA Unified School District where he made substantial change here in the capital construction as well as other curriculum and instruction reforms. He is currently working for the strong American schools and on-profit. He's been advocating some positions that I think we'll talk about today. He's also chairing, I think, chairing a committee or organization called ED&OA. His goal was to promote education in the past presidential election. And he has been an advocate for standards in education for many years. He's been quite involved in education work serving the Education Commission of the States in 94-95 and the first chairman of the National Education Goals Panel. And so, without further ado, I'd like to introduce Governor Romer. Thank you. I've been screwing around with this button. Is it on? I think it is. I'm pleased to be here. And we have about 40-45 minutes that I'm going to chat and then have questions. Let me summarize what I'm going to try to do and then we'll do it. First, let me give you a little bit more background on who I am. You saw a little bit of a blib and I keep asking my staff why I don't get all my biography on there. I'm a rancher. I used to herd sheep. I'm an air pilot. I fly. I used to train people to fly airplanes. I owned and operated a ski area with a partner for 10 years of my life as a sideline. I've done a lot of crazy things. But I've been in the legislature. I was state treasurer. I was governor, school superintendent of Los Angeles. As you can tell, I had trouble keeping a job. All through that, I had a very serious interest and commitment to education. So today, I may call upon some of those experiences like the Los Angeles or even flying to illustrate some points. But I have experienced running a major urban school system. I did that for six and a half years. And I learned a great deal. It was a tremendously learning experience. I did that after I left being governor. And I have, having been governor 12 years, constantly think of education policy about how do you improve a particular school, but also how do you help a nation come to terms with its educational challenge. So what I want to do is very quickly I want to lay out just a description of the dimension of the problem. And then secondly, I want to turn to what are the elements of the solution. And I'm going to talk about two things. First, a package of standards, curriculum, and assessments. Second, quality teaching. And I just want to say up front, the most important thing of all is the quality of teaching. You know, you can talk about all kinds of other things of education, but it's the quality of teaching that really is going to make or break us. But the way we organize it radically affects the quality of teaching. Third, I'm going to look at it again as though you were in the East Room with the President of the United States. You were having a serious conversation about what ought to unfold in the next weeks and months at the national level on educational policy. So that's what we're going to have fun with today. And I really look forward to the dialogue with you. Adam is with me and he's going to run the charts. And first, I just want to describe the extent of the problem. Wow. I don't know how you're feeling, but Colorado or Los Angeles, everybody feels like they're doing pretty good. We're really doing very lousy if you look at where we are compared to the rest of the world. This I find one more reliable benchmarks available, and that's the PISA test. It's an international test, 30 nations, and this is really like the Olympics of 15-year-olds in math. And if you ran that Olympics, we are 25th from the top. Now, that is embarrassing. It's not just bad, it's embarrassing. Listen to the next slide. And I want to be sure that I'm not trying to push off on you false statistics. There's the TIMS test, which would give a more modest description. We'd be about 15th in TIMS. But I find this one is a more applied test, and this in science. We're 21st from the top. My memory is correct. Let's go to the next slide. And so what I'm just saying is that I just run across this all the time in Colorado. How is your school? Well, my school is pretty good, but I've got to tell you the whole system is bad. The same way you think about your congressman, right? And so I could describe the problem, which I think more accurately is the international comparison, but dropouts is another way to describe it. You know, 1.2 million in Detroit, a quarter. And if we're talking about the crucial issue of the United States, which is employment, economic health, you know, that's critical. And there's the financial consequence. Let's turn to the next slide. Leave it on for a moment. I was going to leave this one out. But this is 15,000 school districts in the United States, and this is out of order and logical thought, but I wanted to come back to it later. If you are a nation competing about the other 30, every one of those 30 have a more holistic approach as a nation to educational policy. We have inherited this system, and let's come back and talk about that later. I want to stay on need on the description of the problem. I'm looking for the next slide. This one. Thank you. Again, so you'll follow my mind. I really stopped talking about the description of the problem. I'm trying to tell you about some of the structure and the way we view it. We have a national test, Nate. And you'll see that we have a cutoff on the green line, and only three states among the 50 meet that cutoff, meet that definition. There's a basic definition of Nate, and you can see how many are there. But what I want you to look at is... Let's look at the next slide. This is typical of most states. We make an estimate based upon our own scores. That's in the purple of how proficient we are. In Michigan, this is your percentage, and I'm trying to see the year. Do you know the year, Adam? 2006. And the orange is how nape rates you as proficient. During the campaign, I went to Iowa and then Des Moines. I asked the Rotary Club, you know, how proficient are your eighth graders? They said 65%. You know, nape would say they're 35% proficient. You compare them to Singapore? They're 25% proficient. In other words, when we have these state standards and drag out a scoring against them with our state tests, we have our own set of rose-colored glasses as to how we look at them. And so one of the things that we desperately need is an honest x-ray of educational proficiency that all of us can say, yeah, that's it. When I go to a doc and have my lung x-rayed, I want them not to give me the Colorado standard of how healthy the lung is. I want them to give me the best in the world. I really need to know my condition or else I can't change my behavior to cure my lung. This is so basic. We'll come back to that. I'm trying to get rid of the slide so we can really talk. Go ahead. I think we're done with them, right? Okay, now, what I wanted to do was to quickly use that set of charts to describe the degree of the problem. I've talked about it in the last year. I've been in charge with others of trying to make education an issue in both presidential campaigns. We succeeded to some degree. And this was a part of the charge, to really lay out because the description of how serious it is because a lot of America doesn't believe it. Now, rather quickly, I want to turn from that to what do we do about it? And there are a number of things, but one of them that I want to really emphasize this afternoon are we need to raise the expectation of this nation about what is proficient and we need to change the belief of the nation that all children can reach that level. That's a fundamental thing. When I went to LA, Los Angeles, again, it's the second largest district in the country, more students than there are in Colorado, they didn't believe that all children can learn. Haven't for years. You know, the process of education is the process of sorting those that can make it and those that can't. And I just go at it and I think the nation needs to go at it on the basis that all children can learn and all children can learn at a high level because that happens in most places in the world. It ought to happen here. And so I think that when we start talking about solutions, we begin with our current legislation, which is called No Child Left Behind. And as you well know, it leads it to 50 states to set 50 different standards. And I think the next president, the new president, Barack Obama, has a wonderful opportunity to say we need to have a common understanding of how good is good enough. And let's talk about how we get there. I think you can very quickly, and I've been on to this one for 20 years. I was chairman of the original goals panel way back when, appointed by President Clinton. No, no, the first president Bush. How do we get there? One, we could legislate it. We tried that 10 or so years ago on history, and it got defeated in the Senate about 99 to 1 because we didn't do the right groundwork. Legislation is one, another way to go is to try to work with states and engage them collaboratively to develop a common set of standards. And I think that this president has an opportunity to choose that or a method in between. But achieve, and some of you undoubtedly are familiar with achieve, it's an organization that is bringing states together in the diploma project, and they have 40 states working on it now to talk about the exit exam for high schools being more rigorous, being benchmarked against the world, and being more authentic in terms of meeting the needs of America. Well, I think that we just put one of the suggestions on the table that the president of the United States, I think has the opportunity to call in 50 governors, 50 state school officers, right now, and say, we simply have got to find a way to be more competitive in the world. We've got to find a way to have a more common expectation throughout the country. This is a very mobile nation, and we need to arrive at that fairly quickly. And the president, you know, could turn to NAPE, or some federal committee or organization, and say draft a set of standards and let's legislate it upon these states. I think a more effective way to go would be to turn to the 50 states and say, I know you're all working on this. I'm going to do an incentive package on many things. I want to put some of that incentive money on the table right now to help you do a new experiment. And he would say to the states, I want 15 of you to agree within six months to come back with a common set of standards and have a way to benchmark them against the five or ten best nations in the world annually. You do that, and you commit to aim for that and carry out that policy in your own state, including the appropriate assessments related to it. You do that, I'll put this incentive package on the table. One, I'll pay for the design of your tests. Two, I'll pay for the administration of your tests. Three, I'll give you a package of incentives regarding to improving the quality of teaching. And he would say, this is all voluntary. You don't need to do that. I'm not forcing you to do it. But if you voluntarily agree to do this, here are incentives that are very, very useful to you. And he could say, I want to start with 15. More can join immediately or you can join later. I just got to do this on a voluntary consensual way, but I'm going to put enough incentives on the table where it makes sense for you to do. Now to make that policy effective, he's also at the same time got to say it's a second layer for those that don't want to participate, that doesn't leave them totally out of the action. What I'm saying in summary is the following. Now is the time for the President of the United States to say, we have got to find a way to get a common set of standards in this nation. And this is very important. A common set of assessments. Now I want to stop and use some analogy. The most national standard I think we have is the AP courses. AP are national and they're a very good set of courses. They have a standard, they have a curriculum and they have an assessment. The two non-profits, ACT and College Board, SAT, they have a set of standards that they are developing and are behind their transitionary tests. We could turn to them and develop a national standard. So I want you to know that in the practical world we already are using national criteria for standards that we have not got that accepted by states. Now why I think this is so critical is that we just can't continue to let states kid themselves about a standard that's false. Now let me give you my experience in LA at this point. When I went to LA, I, Los Angeles, I knew I had to begin to reform that district by expecting higher standards, having curriculum that was really rigorous that got us there, assessments that gave us periodic diagnosis of each student and had to improve the quality of teaching. That was the package. And so we in that district went to the national testing companies and said, give us a diagnostic set of assessments in math. First grade to ninth grade every 90 days. Paid millions for that. Did it alone as one district. That was what was done. If I could have paired with 15 states and done that together, I would have saved money. I would have had others to benchmark against and it would have given me political support for the community I was working in. But you get the point, if you really want to do this job right now, you can't call up the Montgomery Ward catalog on good packaging and order it off the shelf. What we need is a curriculum based center standards, curriculum and assessments that's coherent. And there can be more than one so that you don't have, you know, anybody knocked out in the publishing industry. And the point about back to the president. What I'm interested in his leadership is the achieve organizations going the right way. You ought to go talk to them. They're working on the senior standards for graduation. And they need to back map those down to the fourth grade, third grade. I want to stop and draw a simple diagram because I found that sometimes you talk about standards but if you can visualize it, I'm going to draw a series of steps. One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten, eleven, twelve. Now, before I talk about schools, I want to talk about training a pilot to fly an airplane. I used to own a company that trained pilots to fly. There are certain things you had to know and had to do, whoops, I said eleven twice. There are certain things you need to know and be able to do to fly an airplane. And you'd come and pay me several thousand dollars and I'd train you. And so, you know, step three is to land it. Man, we had some very good assessments. We would ride with you and see whether you could land the dog on plane. And if you bounced it off the runway and you're sitting alongside it, that's a test that has consequences. And so, what we would do with somebody who has a trajectory, we would immediately say, wow, we got to correct that one or else you're going to kill somebody and kill yourself before we take step four. There's a curriculum that's aligned. And let's say step seven is navigation. You can't navigate it. You're going to fly into a mountain. But you understand, it was a expectation of standards. You know what it is? It was a federal licensure. It was very, very tough. Two, we had to have a curriculum that took you through the steps to get to that standard. And we had to have quality of teaching to get there. But what was critical was the periodic assessments because it told us what you knew, what you didn't know and helped us then train, use the next period of instruction in a better way. Now, let's go back to LA. I got a kid in the third grade working on fractions and that kid is way below class level. We, every 90 days, would assess that student and the teacher would be five third grade classes at building. Those five teachers would all sit down together and they had 31 questions. Everybody missed question 17. You know, they used the test, the diagnostic test not only to help know where the student was but it gave a reflection about how effective the teaching and the learning in the classroom. Now, that, I wanted to, by this illustration, simply say that it didn't enough to talk about standards alone. You know, I got a book of standards here. They're very technical. What you need to talk about is something that can help that fourth grade teacher every day of the curriculum year know whether or not I'm spending the right kind of time, whether I'm spending it effectively, whether I need help for the student or need help for myself. So it's standards, curriculum, quality of teaching and assessments. That's the package. Now, let's go back then to this map. You want to show it on the thing again? How do you, as President of the United States, when you're looking at an economy, what's the unemployment rate in Michigan now? 11. Okay? You all understand how badly, this thing is biting the world, it's biting us really bad. President of the United States, you're sitting there with your staff and you know you've got to keep the nation safe, you know. The next thing is you turn to the economy and say, how do we get it right? The first thing, you've got to get the money flowing through the banks. But the key thing is having workers usefully employed producing something the world needs. And that takes skill. And we've got 25 nations in the world who are better than we in math. So the President is sweating blood. He says, what am I going to do with that when I got a nation in which you're on a school board? What's the size of your district? 1368. 1368 students? He's one of 15,000 in the country. How do you then create public policy and education that begins to correct that? Now, Tony Blair, when he took over in England, one of the first things he aimed at was how do you change the educational policy of a nation? They have more tradition in all these other countries of acting nationally. We don't. We're state's rights. Not only state's rights, we're district rights. And I think that now is the time that we need really wise federal leadership. It doesn't trample on that tradition which we have, but helps lead it to a higher level of performance. And I think to summarize once again, I think the most effective thing the President can do is to help states collaboratively arrive in groups of common standards. And I say 15 ought to be a beginning. And I begin with math, science, and language arts and leave history alone. We can fight about that later. And I would couple it with some real federal research on the quality of assessments. And just before I leave it, I just want to tell you this is what is so critical. When I started spending these millions to get diagnostic tests in California, I learned a whole lot about testing. Summative and what is the other word? Formative. Different kinds of questions. But you can't expect an individual school teacher to do this alone. You can't expect a district to do this alone. This is highly scientific stuff. And you take Algebra II in high school, there aren't that many forms of doing Algebra II properly. We could get to where we truly could assist ourselves with national standard, arrived at consensually butchered by good research on tests that give you assessments that's really, really a good one. And that is so critical because as I watch the assessments in my own district, people will teach to those because there's consequence in them. And so you've got to be sure you have the right tests. Back on the airplane analysis, it's all right to teach to the assessment if you got the right assessment. Well, I want to delay that piece out. But then I want to return to the quality of teaching because even though my own work in the last few years has been most focused upon standards, and I know you've got to begin there, but ultimately it's the quality of teaching. When I came to LA, one of you in the room, one of you in the room did an inquiry with, before this conversation. And the person had graduated and undergrad and gone out to teach. And there were about 120 people out of that college who went to teach that year. And I asked him, how many of these teachers you'd like to have teach your own child? And his answer was 50%. And they paused and said, no, that's too high. 30%? Now, I believe the 30. When I went to LA, and I've got to be careful about this, but if I went to LA and said, teachers were competent in teaching in the elementary grades, teaching, not, I've got to state this right, we're teaching competently in their present status of learning, I wouldn't have said more than 30% either. Now, what do you do when you've got a system that is turning to everybody who graduates and with a teaching certificate, hiring them, giving them 10 year and keeping them for 40 years? Your year's not going to get it done. Now, what are the best nations in the world doing? I'll use two. Korea and Singapore. In Korea, they have a restrictive admission into the teaching profession. Top 10% get into teaching in Korea. And elementary school is more restrictive than high school. You can't get into teaching in elementary school unless you have a master's. You can teach high school without it. Now, they've made some value judgments in their policy, but the key to it is its restrictive admission. Let's talk about Singapore. Singapore also is restrictive, but when you are admitted to the School of Education, you're given a paycheck. You're on salary. You are paid while you're in school and you're guaranteed a lifetime job when you get out, provided you maintain the quality of learning. And what has happened to the culture of teaching? It is the highest in those countries. Teaching is rated above law in both of those nations. So what? And I want to recommend a study to you. It's done by the McKinsey group, and it has a kind of a blank paper cover, but it's a summary, they looked at the world and about what it really needed, we needed to do worldwide to improve teaching. And they came down on three things. One, you've got to improve the quality of people you bring into the profession. Two, you've got to train them a whole lot better than we're doing now and have a continual training for them. And three, you have to have a system that insists that every youngster is in front of a quality teacher and is reaching for the highest learning performance that is expected. And I think of this chart, it's just whenever you get a kid and any one of these classes is below grade level or below expected level, you need a teacher. It's quality enough to bring them back and has time, extra time to do that. Well, I began in the last year to spend a whole lot more time thinking about the quality of teaching in addition to standards. And I'm fascinated because there are many pieces of evidence throughout the world that you can't get there unless you're more restrictive in the admission of who comes into the profession. Because we have this pattern of taking some ordinary performing people and giving them a license and giving them tenure and then you got it for 35 years. Now, some you can upgrade their performance during the course of their employment. But again, there's a lot of evidence out there that the key issue about quality teaching is the quality of mind of the person who's doing it, regardless of experience. Now, I don't mean to demean the experience of knowing about child development and growth, but I tell you, acquiring the skills that we want our youngsters to acquire, it requires intellectual inquiry and you need the most literate people you can in that profession. Now, what do we do about that? I don't have any easy transition from restrictive admission to the practices of this country. I've thought about the following options. Why don't we get the president to create some educational academies like the Naval Academy, the Air Force Academy? Go create six of them. Just locate them throughout the country and screen people rigorously to get on them, pay them a maintenance while they're in there and direct them to exceptional employment as they get out. That has flaws, but it's a way of trying to get something going to get that issue on the table. Now, I've been talking about the admission of people. Let's talk about how do we, again, you can tell what I'm suggesting here, it's the quality of instruction is the most essential thing in terms of reforming our system. And how do you get and improve it? You want to recruit better people? You want to train them better? But also you have to have a system of management that understands what good instruction is because if they don't, if the management, the principal and others don't understand what good instruction is, you'll play hell getting it reinforced in the classroom. And so you've got a problem of administrators knowing what good teaching is. And we get a whole lot of administrators that aren't spending a lot of time in quality teaching tracks. So I wanted to lay that on the table. Again, to summarize, my head is constantly thinking in terms of national policy, what can you do to raise the standards, make them more uniform, get them applied to every student and have curriculum which is aligned to those standards and assessments which is a package. How do you get that created? Secondly, in terms of improving teaching, what kind of assistance can the federal government legitimately give? Now I want to move from there to higher education. This is an area I don't know. I don't know enough about this. I didn't ever serve in it. I didn't take education courses. But I am very thoughtful about... Again, I'm talking about the restrictive admission issue. Higher education, and when I was governor in my state of Colorado, we had some institutions that turned out... turned out, I would say, a whole lot of teachers. And they were not the higher end of the class. They were in the lower third. And that's where most of our teachers come from. The lower third of those who are tested in college. And I'm just interested in how do you, in higher education, measure the quality of your product? I know when you get to the graduate level, you have a much more individualized way of doing that. But in the undergraduate level, there's no exiting sin. And did you pass the course, get the grades that you needed for passage and graduation, you know, the individual professors? But I'm just curious, because if you're eventually going to improve the quality of teaching throughout America, we need to have some thoughtful consideration of how do you ensure that there is quality coming out of an institution responsible for training teachers? Now I want to wrap it up and turn to questions. The, I am, it's very interesting. We have an interesting perspective on this. I was a governor for 12 years. I was a school superintendent for six and a half. I was chairman of the National Democratic Party for a couple of years. And I am now at age 80 focusing upon how do I bring my own mind to terms with what I ought to be advocating as a citizen or as whatever to help cure this problem or improve this problem over a period of time. And there are a lot of good-hearted people who are trying to do some very important things. One of them is to think about the charter group. I was always very supportive of charters when I was governor and one of the first in the nation to do so. And I think that charters are very helpful because they try different things, but also it is a check against the public school system, an alternative to it. And there are some public school systems that are so poor performance, you need an alternative for them. But yet charters are not tackling their kind of isolated illustrations of good practice, but they're not tackling the main policy issues that we face as a nation. And I have thought about talking more publicly about can you get there from here working with 15,000 districts. Now it's not just the districts, it's the way they're governed. I worked for one in Los Angeles that had seven board members and they were elected in the city of Los Angeles. It's a big area. And so you know money counts, right? In the election of school board members in an area and who has the most money to put on the table? The unions. And I'm a Democrat, I'm pro-union. I worked for a board that during my labor negotiations my board members just happened to come in and sit on the other side of the table. That didn't happen once, that happened repeatedly. That was, you know, you take what you got and you work with it. But I don't want to lose the train of thought. I was trying to conclude my conversation with you by saying that I sit and I think about what it is we need to do. And the conclusion is you got to move on it at every level. If you're running a school district of 1,500 kids you got to do the very best job you can to make that an illustration of good practice. If you're in a state you got to do everything you can to be sure that that state has uniform expectations that are high and policies that are implementing it. If you're thinking about it as a nation we got to be cutting edge. We got a very unusual opportunity now because somebody's going to spend one hell of a lot of money in the immediate months ahead quote to stimulate the economy. That is a once in a lifetime opportunity for us to shape some of the spending of that money in a way in which we create economic activity but in an area that let me just say just researching for better tests or other methodology an area that doesn't get that much attention. Thanks for letting me share all this with you. Love to have your comments or questions. Go ahead, sir. I'd be interested in who it is. Tell me who you are when you speak. Good. Thank you. Appreciate that. You presented assessments as maybe driving the change. I think the next stage would really be curriculum and that has something to do with improving teacher quality because some of the research shows that teachers perform best when they're trained with the kind of curriculum they'll be using in their schools with dozens of different curricula that you can't design in teacher education programs for that. And I agree with you also that the central and most difficult problem is actually quality of teaching and teacher professional preparation. But the idea that you emphasize the recruitment problem of admitting highly qualified people as if you have to have a certain kind of gift to be a competent teacher I would juxtapose that with your rhetoric about expectations of high achievement for all students. Yeah. And remind you that teaching is the largest profession in the country. There are 13.7 million teachers. So the idea that we're going to solve the problem by enlisting a highly qualified demographic maybe is not something that could really scale up. On the other hand there are professions like nursing with a similar demographic where I think we do have competent programs of professional preparation. Ordinary people can learn to teach well if they're taught and professionally prepared to do so. The teachers we have in the schools are the products of the system for climate change. So there's no reason to expect them to have the knowledge and the skills that we want them to achieve. So I think I would place more emphasis on the quality of teacher education programs and the professional development and the general support the teachers are provided in their work. I appreciate that question. I want everybody in the room to know I hope I showed appropriate humbleness about my understanding of this approach of being restrictive. I mean I am reading about it I'm looking at other nations and I see how well Finland, Korea, Singapore do with being restrictive I don't know how to do it here and so I'm not advocating that we do it so that's the first point. Secondly, you did catch me and that is if I expect all students to reach a high standard why not teachers? But the point I was trying to make is that and I maybe have a bias here but I think the best teachers are the ones who are most intellectually curious and I know they need to understand the development stages of a child they need to understand a lot of psychology but I think the best teachers are the ones who are intellectually curious to transmit that to students and also have a rigor of the mind that can help us really sort out truth and non-truth in history and other matters I think you're saying that's an innate rather than something they can learn No I think you can learn that it's not innate but I think you need to learn that to be a good teacher Good What? Yeah I just think the rote business of taking kids through literature is over against really helping them dig deeply into the nuance of the writing is life or death critical and same in math I've seen a lot of teachers go through the rote business of fractions in which kids don't understand proportionality at all they just don't know how to do the formula but I just think intellectually curious people are the ones you learn most from Great, yes Yeah I don't see there's any reason that a national assessment avoids that political pressure at the point when you really tell reporters of the country that their school are failing they're not doing a good job their students don't understand the political pressure becomes overwhelming to change that assessment What? Let me answer the first one It's a good question I'm a politician and I was thinking as you asked the question there have been times in my life that I couldn't handle the heat and let's talk about gay I'm a country guy I didn't understand the issue of gayness and I learned it and I learned it really well and I began to spend a lot of time with the community and I got into the gay marriage issue and I knew I was off base with my state but in that particular case there was an initiative to curtail the expression of gay rights and I as governor led the opposition lost it and then it went to the Supreme Court became a case Evans v. Romer but I mean I have been in that scene but on the education thing my answer specifically is the following I think the nation is ready first I think a whole lot of people know it's that bad and they want somebody to be honest with them secondly I think that it is a matter of economic survival I just flashed the image that came in my mind I saw in some paper today it was probably a Wall Street Journal the container ships 22,000, I don't know 12,000 containers on one ship all being built overseas and all being owned by overseas and I read the article very very carefully the world's commerce are going to other folks and so if I were still governor of Colorado I would be very happy to sit down with them and say I want your kid to have a good life I'm going to tell you that when you get that kid out looking for a job at age 26 he's going to be 26th in line because that's where he is with math you know 25th I think they're ready to believe that and I think you could put out in Michigan and in Colorado our proficiency based upon what the 10 best nations in the world is is 37% folks don't cry that's just what it is it's the same thing of I want to tell you the truth about the CAT scan on your brain let me tell you what it really is and then you say and here is what we're going to do about it that's what I think people are hungry for I got to tell you I think this nation politically and the Obama election is a part of it but I don't think it's all of it yet I think this nation is going to demand more truth than they have in the past because you see they've been lied to about global warming they now see the water rise I really believe that there is a there is a market for political candor and even audacity on it that's my own view but I'm not running for office right now but your second one I didn't finish a part of my description when I said the 15 governors said we will go for this higher standard one of the things that the president needs to put on the table is an exception to leave no child behind his timelines you have to give the timeline to a new state a new timeline now one of the really critical things is when you really expect a high level of performance for all students and you've got a K-12 system what do you do about the guy in the 9th grade who missed all that you have to phase it in why don't you flip on that chart on Los Angeles of elementary school I had this problem in spades this is the period of time I was in Los Angeles and the blue is the state average kid in elementary this was Los Angeles we were so poor you couldn't help it it would get better but over the period of time of six years you'll see that the our points of increase were about 270 the state's average was 130 and we had some very poor kids 72% Hispanic etc that we could prove that we could do that was what that package did but let me show you middle school let me show you middle school that's middle school you can see that we had a much slower rate of improvement and you've got to bring a kid in math you just can't throw him into algebra if he hadn't had the proper preparation so you have to build in those lower grades this is one of the things I'm personally so frustrated with the standards movement nationally everybody's working on seniors do we have the right standard for graduating seniors I'm worried about the standard for third and fourth grade math and first and second grade language arts because here's where you lose them you lose them down here and now let me show you high school high school there's an aberration you know what happened here the we were you can't believe this we were short 150,000 seats in Los Angeles when I arrived just a seat a kid in a high school in a public school and so we spent 19 billion we passed four bond issues and we're building 140 new schools and so we opened a bunch of schools in that year and we built them all in the poorest portions of the city and so this chart was based upon the rate of each school so it had an aberration but you can see we have been increasing but we haven't closed the gap at all now what happened in terms of public policy in LA I made a mistake I started at the bottom and worked really hard but the drop out rate was near 40 to 50% and some political movements in LA picked that issue and began to bombard the district as a failure and it is viewed as a failure when I left not failure but it was viewed as not as successful as other urban districts and it was because politically I had invested in the basement going up and my investment is paying off because if you go back to the elementary we're just about you can see that spike from 727 right there at the end the changes that we made are still operative and so that's just a little bit of statistical stuff other questions yes ma'am who creates this curriculum being well here first I haven't used the word national curriculum I've used standards that are aligned nationally and I've used tests which I have tried to avoid the word national because I think that we need consortiums of states you've got to begin with 15 who say we agree that this is a set of standards and we're going to benchmark them internationally other states can join that but in the diversity of this country I'd be very happy to have another group of 15 in math if there's a math war out there we wouldn't do that but at least you have a group that minimum nucleus is 15 because there is real collaboration in that so you don't have one standard only but I would hope that we could work toward that but on curriculum and I've been thinking hard about that I think you have to have multiple cracks at curriculum think about what you do in AP AP has a standard test that's why I package standards and testing together but the curriculum will vary you'll have a preferred reading list or reference list but teachers can add their own I don't have that worked out either but I think I am worried about having a monolithic national standard and curriculum because then you'll have the Texans and some others begin to debate creationism and I just think you need to have alternate packages of curriculum but the way you begin to benchmark is use a test like PISA that will give you quote international benchmark so yes there's confusion in how we do that but I think that the way that's not to happen given 15,000 districts you've got to have some national impetus and that's why this new president's got to create it and there's a step of getting the governors together and creating out of that or he could turn to a nape or some alternative and say give us a national draft that's benchmarked against the world and then I just think it's better to have states work with you because if they're going to have to implement it with you it's not just getting a state to agree states don't have control of their own education in Colorado I got 185 districts the Constitution says knock it off governor you haven't got anything to do with these districts in terms of curriculum they are the ones who do it so we got a lot of embedded culture into the way we have organized schools in America yes ma'am they are intertwined let me go back at your question start with math and language arts in science because I think there is a common core worldwide about what that is and I think that you do not dictate a national curriculum on it but you have common standards and assessments and you can even have a set of a test assessments that have 80% common core and then variation curriculum I think you need to leave to alternate approaches now when you get beyond the three basics and into history, civics art music I think that you've got to be very much more open about let's take art I have a daughter who is an artist I think that there are probably I don't know this field and there are ways that people can judge quality because they do that and they're very open to the new forms of expression and art and then music you've got to find some flexibility but if you get it in the hard core subjects I think that it will raise the real fundamental problem is that we are not expecting enough of our culture in the education of the young people below and a part of its television and the nation is going to hurt unless we raise that level yes wait a little louder what the key to me in that question is holding them look if you set this system up I think for the federal government to help participate financially it has to be the rules of performance that they don't need to be so tightly defined that you hold a person rigid I think the key that you want to do is to make it transparent I think that the parents of America and the citizens of America will hold local and state officials responsible and accountable if they know the truth but right now there's not very easy for them to get hold of the truth so I don't think the holding is that much of a barrier now there is you see as a nation we have something in stake in terms of quality of our armed services our national offense we're all dependent upon it and so we grant the federal government certainly way to hold us accountable for having a quality military force I think education is also a resource of the nation and I think the nation has a responsibility not to let us fall as low as we are but it also has a responsibility of working with other levels of government so that they have some partnership and how they work it out over time but that's just a part of the pluralism of America in terms of levels of government and I think we've got to plow into it to leave it the way it is now it doesn't make any sense to me to have a national agricultural policy a national coal policy and not have more rational national policy about what is our expectation for education over a period of time and are we getting there and what are we going to do about it yes some consistency in standards and assessment expectations but I think it's clearly not sufficient we have lots of districts and districts have consistent standards within themselves and yet we have pockets of low achievement we've had that for a long time now you've talked about some of the ways in which you would need other pieces to kind of reach those higher standards I'm very curious about your personal experience both as governor and in LA what did you find is the kind of most successful strategies and or the greatest challenges to running a district like Los Angeles or to have overseeing at a very broad level education in Colorado let me talk about Los Angeles the greatest challenge is in Los Angeles first was just to work out the politics of the city and the board and the mayor I'm a pretty practiced politician but that took as much skill as I ever had to put on the table just to work through the politics of a district board at seven and owned a television station once a week and used the television as a way to communicate to the public I mean one day one board member had the room totally full of African Americans and it was all about me being a racist that kind of thing that's a little challenging but that wasn't the major problem the major problem in LA was to focus the district on the quality of instruction they had lowered their expectations you can see from the chart so you had to make them believe once again that all children could learn and that they can learn at a high level that was the greatest problem the next greatest problem was to get at the pattern of teaching within the district now I chose to do something that is not universally applicable to all districts this was 450 elementary schools and you know some districts will disperse the authority just leave it to the school, give them total let them create it you can't do that in LA they didn't know how to do that the average experience of the principals was two years and so what we did we said we are all going to use one way of learning to read and it was open court, phonetically based and it was rigorous very tough we then said we are going to spend two and a half hours a day at it for every child in the elementary system that's what brought our scores up in math we rose more in math than we did in language arts and I just cut out science for a couple of years that was a tragic thing to do for kids but we were so low we had to learn to teach again and 50 of the better schools we gave them they could opt out they opted out after three years they came back and opted in because they had seen the progress we had made and that was a strategy and a tactic that just that district was so far down that it had to have that but then we have a problem of moving toward better comprehension and open court as a challenge for that transition and so we began to buttress it but we didn't throw it away and that's why I think somebody raised it earlier about quality of teaching is related to the curriculum that's my answer yeah well in LA I felt the greatest challenge I had was improving instruction but I had 65,000 gang members in my system it was really a lot and when we would build a new school the most critical thing was to rearrange the patterns that kids would walk to school we would have to go out and carve out corridors and try to space people along corridors because we were crossing gang lines that's a problem and that's a real problem and you got to get to the atmosphere of safety and you got to get at the bullies you have to get out a whole lot of other things to make a system work but here in one school I created the principal I chose the principal put him in there because he was absolutely excellent in dealing with those human problems he could lead every gang member had his personal telephone he was wonderful in all that but he didn't have any sense of what good instruction was I had to take him out so you got to do both LA is just a challenge it was fun never learned as much as I ever did in any other part of my life I did doing it this week well first we would this curriculum open court is a very excellent curriculum it really gets the job done but it is by the bulk I mean you could walk into any classroom third grade and they'd be doing the same thing the same hour and we had to we were so bad we had to have that rigor but it was tremendously rich curriculum and we would train those teachers we would pay them to come six days training before school would open on reading alone and we'd do that year after year after year we really worked at training teachers then the most effective professional development was the diagnostic assessments if you're a teacher 25 kids in third grade and you're looking at your students and you have a record over time and you sit down with other five teachers and you're talking about each individual student what are we going to do I remember one of those young ladies was Hispanic young lady in the third grade and she was very bright she was doing excellent in five categories of the test but bad in fluency so we dug into her family and there was no English spoken at all in the home and so working with a teacher we took her day and made it so that she had to converse had to be fluent in English with colleagues let me tell you how far I carried this business because we were building it was a very big district very run down I had 25 million dollars I was going to change the furniture and I'd seen all these classrooms of these chairs with the arm, the single chair all in a line well that young lady would talk to be fluent because she was at a table conversing working as a team and so I ordered them not to buy any piece of furniture that could not be rearranged in a group system-wide and all kinds of flak what in the hell are you doing well it was crude and I don't want to always manage that way but I had to try to communicate that and I'd learned enough about teaching then that you need flexibility in the classroom to move students around and I like the model that I often got out of Asian schools of kids working in groups well thank you very much Governor Robert