cc >> Gloria Ladson-Billings:
Good morning and welcome to our panel on "Beating the Odds."
We're going to be talking about creating a tipping point that
will ultimately disrupt the cycle of poverty.
My name is Gloria Ladson-Billings.
I'm the chair of the Department of Curriculum and Instruction
and faculty affiliate in Educational Policy Studies.
You will note, however, I don't have an office in this nice
building. [LAUGHTER]
I don't think in the 20 years that I have been here at the
University of Wisconsin-Madison that I have seen two education
stories on the front page of the "Daily Cardinal."
One of course is about this wonderful building, but the
other is about DPI and the new education proposals.
And I think that they are relevant to the issues that we
will be grappling with in this panel on poverty and disrupting
that poverty, certainly the issues of school funding and who
gets what are central to our understanding of what equitable
education looks like. Before the talk actually begins,
I have the distinct pleasure however of presenting an award.
I don't get to do that very often either.
So I'm going to ask Donald Fraynd to come join me
at the podium so that he can receive the 2010 Distinguished
Alumni Achievement Award. Donald Fraynd began his
education career in Omaha, Nebraska, in a volunteer
teaching program. The North Dakota native had
graduated from Creighton University with a BA in theology
and planned to give a year of service back to his school
before going on to medical school.
But he loved education too much to leave.
After six years as a teacher, an administrator at a Jesuit
college preparatory school, he came to UW-Madison
to work on his doctorate. After earning his PhD in
educational leadership and policy analysis in 2002,
he became principal at Jones College Prep, one of Chicago's
selective enrollment schools. During his tenure as principal,
Jones was recognized among the nation's top 100 high schools
by "US News and World Report" and became the first Chicago
high school to win the US Department of Education's
Blue Ribbon Schools Award. He has a collaborative
leadership style focused on empowering teachers to take
ownership of their classrooms and to operate as independent
and free thinkers. He strongly believes in
challenging every student to their full potential
on all levels. Arne Duncan, as CEO of Chicago
Public Schools, appointed Fraynd to lead the Office of School
Turnaround. Now in his third year, Fraynd
oversees a bold initiative to transform chronically
underperforming schools into high performing schools by using
a comprehensive reform model. And I am pleased, on behalf of
this University of Wisconsin School of Education, to present
Donald Fraynd with the UW-Madison School of Education
Distinguished Alumni Achievement Award.
[APPLAUSE] >> Donald Fraynd: Thank you
very much, Gloria.
Ladson-Billings: So now, in traditional UW-Madison fashion,
we give you something, then we make you work.
[LAUGHTER] >> Fraynd: Very good.
I want to thank you all very much for this opportunity
to be here today. I want to thank Dean Underwood,
and I want to thank all of the professors that I had here in
educational leadership. I think I would not have been
able to do the things that I'm doing in Chicago now without the
mentoring and the skill building of my professors.
I even get choked up talking about it.
But especially Colleen Capper, my adviser who believed in me
and really pushed me hard. And so thank you very much.
What I'd like to do in today's presentation is talk to you a
little bit about the history of Turnaround in Chicago and a
little brief walk through the turnaround work nationally, the
national turnaround landscape. Talk with you about our values
as an organization. We are actually now called the
Office of School Improvement, and I will explain why that is.
I want to talk about the cost of doing nothing, and that's really
how I see this work as falling under the umbrella of disrupting
the cycle of poverty when we look at some of the statistics
around what happens when you do nothing about our lowest
performing schools. Our audacious goal as an
organization and then I'd like to dig in and become a little
bit technical about how we actually do the work.
So our approach and our model. And then take a look at our
preliminary results and then moving forward.
So I hope somewhere in here you'll find something that is of
interest to you, and then we'll certainly have time for
questions afterwards. So before I talk to you about
this disturbing distribution curve, I wanted to give you just
some bullet points on the context of Chicago Public
Schools. So CPS has 409,000 students.
45% are African American, 41% Latino, 9% White
and about 4% Asian. 86% of our system
is on free and reduced lunch. 12% are English language
learners. We have about 40,000 employees
as a district and a $5.3 billion budget.
672 schools in CPS, and 122 of them are high schools.
And what you're looking at in this distribution curve, which
is far from even being a bell curve as you can see, is the
distribution of our high schools by the meets/exceeds measure.
This happens to be for 2008 but this doesn't change a whole lot
if you went back several years. So you can see that a good chunk
of our high schools are below 20% meets/exceeds
for many, many years. And these are our high schools,
as I mentioned. Our high stakes test is the
Prairie State Achievement Exam which the primarily the ACT.
So it's a tough nut to crack. It's not an easy exam.
But you can see for many, many years we've had schools falling
below 20% meets/exceeds and a good collection of them in the
single digits for many, many years.
So you know what that translates to in terms of the buildings
where you have buildings where 2% of kids read at state
standards, 2% of students know how to do math at state
standards. So this is a very disturbing
situation. One other context point I'll
talk about with Chicago is that it's mayorally controlled.
So we do not have an elected school board, we have an
appointed school board. And I know we could do all kinds
of deconstructing of all that but it's an important context
piece. So what our district did for
many, many years was what I call kind of one off.
So the CEO, Arne, and Barbara Eason-Watkins, who was our chief
education officer at the time, would find a great principal and
would ask them will you please go do that really struggling
school. So there were a lot of these
kind of Arne and Barbara one offs for many years.
And then I think after years of looking at this distribution
curve, Arne and Barbara said no we've got to become a lot more
systematic about this. So Barbara asked her staff in
2000 to start doing research on how a district might come at
this systematically, and they established the office in 2008.
And we started as the Office of School Turnaround, but we've
expanded into a couple other models.
We had our first schools in 2008, two elementary schools and
three high schools, then we have one predominate partner called
the Academy for School Leadership.
They did one high school and four elementary schools in the
2008-2009 school year. And I remember the call, it was
April of 2008, Arne and Barbara called me while I was principal
at Jones College Prep, and they said the elementary stuff is
going pretty well but nobody really knows what to do with the
high school. Will you consider leaving your
principalship and come run the high school aspects of this
work? This was April for a school that
was going to open in the fall. And so I got some of my good
friends together, people who I felt were really smart, and we
said what do we say back to them?
We said CPS always screws stuff up.
They never fund it right. They always forget that they did
it. They stop it after one year.
So let's come up with a demands list and then we won't hear from
them again. And so we called them back
we said okay listen, Arne and Barbara, it has to be
well-funded, and not just for one year.
We aren't going to do this halfway.
Number two, we have to have total decision making power over
the school. We're not going to do this thing
where we feel like a principal needs to go and you are Barbara
are going to sit on it and hem and haw and worry about aldermen
making notice, etc, etc. And you've got to have our
political backs because we know this is going to be one wild
controversial ride. And they thought about it for a
couple hours and actually called back and said okay and said
where can we transfer some of our last discretionary funds
from this fiscal year so you can get started.
And we're like oh, no. [LAUGHTER]
Now we're like, we've got to build this thing.
And it's April. Then shortly thereafter,
Arne went to DC and thankfully, that's Ron Huberman in the
bottom left, has been very supportive.
As you may know if you've been keeping up with Chicago news Ron
will be leaving in about 15 days.
Our mayor is not running again so we're in a very kind of
unstable political conditions which is very new for CPS.
I know that's normal for most school districts, but we've had
the same board for like 15 years, and Arne was one of the
longest running CEOs, Ron has just gotten established.
So it's kind of a big question mark politically for us.
It will be an interesting ride. But I was sure how familiar
people would be with this national landscape of school
turnaround so I did want to spend a little bit of time on it
because there's been some significant changes from past
practice. And so one of the thing that is
Arne did was took a lot of what we were doing in Chicago to the
federal level. And one of the pieces was the
school turnaround work. So if you start up in the upper
left you can see the federal role.
There are two main ways that the federal government has shaped
this and made this into a national priority.
But let me back up and say that I often like to say that this
work has three different ceilings.
One of them is a political ceiling which I briefly
mentioned a little while ago. The second one is a talent
ceiling, and the third one is a budget ceiling.
And Arne called a group of probably about 50 different
groups to DC shortly after Obama took over and said, this was a
group of charter providers, educational management
organizations, some district leaders, and said this is the
group that we think has the most potential to actually do
turnaround work at scale. And we, as a school district,
had been added about a year and a half and we were considered
veterans in the room. Us and Green Dot, which is a
charter organization in LA, and then our partner AUSL.
And he said I want you all to work on how to get the talent
together, I want you all to work on models and I am going to work
on removing the financial excuse so that you can no longer say
there's not enough money for this work.
And so what you see there in the upper left are Race to the Top
and then you see SIG, which the School Improvement Grant program
which has actually been around for quite a while but was really
willy-nilly and was at maximum $500,000 per school but usually
was more like 200-some thousand dollars per school.
And the states, as you can kind of see moving to the center,
would just kind of give those things out willy-nilly too.
It was just a really unstructured, undefined, very
kind of low, relatively speaking, not that you bulk at
$500,000 but relatively speaking pretty low funded.
So what they did was radically increased the amount of school
improve grant funding to a $2 million cap per year
for three years. So now you're looking at
$6 million over a three-year period for one school.
A significant increase. And of course I think most of us
know about Race to the Top. Additionally, the feds have
given the states a lot more kind of guidelines that they have to
use when giving out the school improvement grants and it has to
be a competitive process. So no longer was it you just get
the grant. You now have to show that you
actually have a good plan, and you have to use one of the four
federal intervention models. So you have turnaround, and
sometimes people call all four of them turnaround, I often do
that. Turnaround, technically speaking
in the federal definition, is when you totally reconstitute
the staff. So you can't hire back more than
50%. You radically change the
programs in the building. It is the full implementation.
Restart is when you do all of that except you have a partner
like an AUSL or a charter management organization that you
ask to lead the work. Transformation I often call
turnaround light. So you don't reconstitute the
staff, but you do put in a bunch of new programs and do a bunch
more professional development. And then closure is pretty
self-evident. Big requirement with the
exception of closure is that the students who are enrolled there
have to be able to come back the following year.
And that's what scares off a lot of our charter friends because
they're used to building schools grade by grade.
This is different in that the students stay.
So Office of School Improvement, we have kind of four different
buckets of our work. One is portfolio management,
meaning that we lead portfolios of schools, elementary schools,
high schools. The second bucket over at the
top is innovation and productization.
So we've had the benefit, we're now going into our third year,
we've had the benefit of making a lot of mistakes, and we've
hopefully learned from that and we continue to learn more as an
organization and we create, and a lot of folks in education
don't like this terminology so you can either call it a best
practice or an intervention, we call it product which bugs some
people. But you call it what makes you
feel good. [LAUGHTER]
It's the packages of stuff that you actually do in the building.
And you'll see when I explain the model what that looks like.
Operational support just in terms of helping schools move
right through the bureaucracy and not have to rely on the same
"supports" that other schools get which is usually a
bureaucratic mess. And then performance management.
But the reason we're no longer called the Office of School
Turnaround is because we've also moved into managing our
relationship with our restart partners, and then also we're
moving into, in the upcoming year, transformation.
We haven't done transformation before, remember that's the
turnaround light. And then while we don't manage
school closure we do weigh in on those decisions.
So currently we are in 17 schools with our systematic
turnaround model. You can see how they break out
2010 us and our partners. Our partners have a good many
more elementary schools, as you can see.
And we have one more high school.
The way we've broken it out is our partners tend to feel pretty
good about their elementary strategy and not so sure on
their high school strategy. So moving forward, we're taking
the high schools, and we're kind of just the opposite.
But approximately 10,000 students are in one of our
turnaround schools either run by my office or our partners at
AUSL. So this list of values is kind
of the product of about a six-month kind of values jam.
Many of you have read about how IBM did the values jam.
So we did a lot of kind of similar activities, and this is
what we came up with. One thing that I do want to
point out is the accountability for tangible results, especially
student test score gains. Another potentially
controversial thing that is embedded in our values.
And the way we talk about it is that when you have a building
with 2% meets state standards, we don't have the luxury of
being able to debate the merits of standardized tests.
Our kids just need to learn the skills to do better on them.
Once we get to the middle of that pack in the bell curve, we
now can start debating whether or not this is a good measure of
learning. But I'm confident that our kids
can do anything they set their minds to do including do better
at the ACT, even if the ACT is flawed.
That's kind of how we look at it.
A lot of debate about that but it's ended up in our values
section. Beat the odds is probably by far
the most kind of phrase that captures our values the best,
and it's why it's the title of the presentation.
But here's the bottom line as the brutal facts as one of the
perceive presenters said: our turnaround students are far more
likely to be victims and perpetrators of gun violence
more so than the rest of the students in CPS.
So one of the things that Ron did when he first came into CPS
was did a massive analysis with crime lab statistics, police
database, Chicago Public Schools database and I think BCG or one
of the big consulting firms donated time to create an
algorithm to figure out which kids were most likely to either
engage in gun violence or be the victim of gun violence.
And that algorithm has produced a list about 250 or 300 kids who
are the most likely to be the next victims.
And we've created three tiers of support in the district where
the kids in the top tier get 30 hours a week of mentoring
support. So we've essentially bought
these kids a very extensive social network of support.
Mentors who eat dinner with them, drive them places, take
them places, help with homework. We have more kids per capita in
that top tier group than any other groups in CPS.
So the odds are that our kids will be more involved with
violence, odds are more than half of our kids won't graduate
and out of those who do graduate only about 15% of them will make
it to college but most of them will not finish college.
And most of our kids will go on to be unemployed or very
underemployed and the vast majority will have shortened
lives and debilitating poverty. Those are the odds for the kids
that we work with. So we talk a lot about how
that's not acceptable. So you have to beat the odds.
And that's really a rallying cry for us.
Just to put a human face on it, I did want to show you a piece
on CNN that featured one of our students from our first high
school. Let me pull that up here.
Bulletproof everything. >> His name is Kendall.
He asked that we only use his first name.
If I gave you money right now and said go get me a gun, how
long would it take for you to come back with one?
I couldn't answer that question.
I couldn't answer that. >> You couldn't answer that or
you don't want to answer? >> I can't but it would be
quicker than what you think. >> He's a 16-year-old high
school sophomore who says in his world the illegal gun culture is
everywhere. >> How prevalent are guns in
your neighborhood? We're only a block from your
house. How easy is it to get a gun?
To get a gun? >> Yeah.
Like for a baby to get a pacifier.
That easy. >> That easy.
I mean you know somebody that knows somebody that knows
somebody that's got a gun. >> Kendall shared his
impressions on his two-mile walk to school one morning through
one of Chicago's toughest neighborhoods: Englewood.
And you describe Englewood as what?
War zone, a kill zone. >> It's that bad?
It's that bad. >> How often do you hear
gunfire? >> Out of a week?
Yeah. >> Probably three times.
People get killed going to school, man.
In fact, 373 people were killed by guns last year in
Chicago alone, one of the highest murder rates by guns per
capita. >> It's something you adapt to
like an animal. I'm used to it.
Kendall says he's been offered a chance to buy a gun
and refused. Says he's never owned one but
has had close brushes with gun violence.
You're 16 years old? >> Yes, sir.
You're telling me you've been shot at before?
That's exactly what I'm telling you.
Does that sound normal to you, a 16-year-old that's been
shot at before? >> I mean, does it sound normal
to you an 11-year-old getting shot in the head?
Not at all. >> It's reality now.
Most of the issues with violence and guns, is it a gang
issue? >> Majority of the time, not
really. >> Not really.
Just a bunch of kids with nothing to do.
If somebody came and asked you, the mayor came and asked
you how do you solve the problem, how would you answer
him? >> For one I'd get these kids my
age more jobs, man. >> I know some people had an
eventful summer. >> For now the mayor's office
and Chicago schools hope special mentoring programs in the
classroom help keep teens like Kendall on the right track.
It's just the point, man. I don't want this forever.
I don't want this for the rest of my life.
I want something different. I want nice things.
So I think one of the most powerful statements is his last
one there not wanting this forever.
And we really see it as our role in the turnaround schools to
provide these opportunities. Kendall goes to our first high
school, Harper High School. And that was a walk in kind of
the two- or three-block area around Harper, our first high
school. Kind of pulling back up to the
10,000-foot level to talk about what powers, this is a national
priority and it is a district wide priority.
Some of you may already be aware of this but it's only about
2,000 high schools that produce half the nation's dropout
problem. And relatively speaking, that's
not very many. And that's something that we as
a nation with as much as we have done, putting a man on the moon,
solving complex engineering problems, etc, etc, we can
handle 2,000 high schools, right?
Probably in a fairly quick amount of time if we all put our
minds to it. But that's the idea behind the
national priority. But why care?
Obviously it's the right thing to do.
You could come at it, and I think I heard something else
really intriguing in the last presentation about needing to
put this sort of thing in terms that everyone can understand.
So what you're about to see in the next few slides are actually
the product of what's called the civic consulting alliance in
Chicago. They take all the big consulting
firms and do pro bono work for social projects that promote
social welfare. So the idea of what I asked them
to do is create a set of data that would show anyone, but
especially business people and people who are very much into
facts and figures, why they should care.
And it was called The Cost of Doing Nothing.
And that's kind of key question here is what are the social
costs of doing nothing. And also what's great about this
for use in Chicago is that this is all Chicago and Illinois
data, though I bet it wouldn't vary a whole lot when you go
other places. This, I'm sure many of you have
seen in the research before about the difference between
earning power. So lost income, lost personal
income is one reason we should care.
Students with no high school obviously make far less.
This one I think is really intriguing.
And I knew it intuitively but I'd never seen it visually about
how much cash the state and federal government lose due to
dropout. And the blue bar is actually the
feds. And so you can see annually how
much tax revenue is lost if you leave a bunch of people down
here in the no high school zone. And so can you see how this is
why it makes sense that this is a federal priority?
Say you're just the businessperson from the
congressional budget office, why an investment in school
improvement, if it works, will actually pay off in the end
quite substantially for the federal government?
Dropouts have been twice as many years in poverty, again I don't
want to be repetitive for folks who are really immersed in this
work. I have a little bit of a typo at
the top. It's actually $1,900, the feds
and state government actually lose out.
Let me make sure, I'm losing my place here too.
Here's where I had the typo. It's $1,900 between no high
school and high school and about $3,200 when it comes to no high
school versus some college work. Public assistance, you can see
that line is the average amount of public assistance aid that
people get is obviously substantially higher for those
without high school. So it's costing society in terms
of public assistance. When you look at the criminal
justice system, you can see the percent of incarcerated
populations. You're far more likely to be
incarcerated if you're a dropout.
You also see very much of a gender and race disparity with
6% of all male dropouts being incarcerated, and 18.5% of all
black male dropouts are incarcerated.
So I'm talking about the financial impact here but when
you talk about the broken dreams and hurt of families that's even
bigger. Health considerations, you can
see on the left that those who drop out report a much less or
many more issues with health. High school graduates live
longer than dropouts. And this just kind of summarizes
the finances for each of those things.
Lost income, 8508. Lost state and federal taxes,
1920. Lost state tax revenue,
additional public assistance costs, additional criminal
justice costs, and by the way that does not even include the
Chicago police which every day that we dismiss, for example, we
are pulling about five cruisers off the beat so they create a
perimeter around our high schools when they release for
the day. So if you added in the Chicago
police costs, you can about imagine what that would total
to. So about $11,600 per dropout per
year. This is something I'm sure you
folks already know well, but it just kind of puts it into
graphical form that increasing income level has those benefits
and decreases those expenses. Increasing the things on the
left decreases the involvement in the criminal justice system.
So I'm trying to make the connection here, not necessarily
for this audience but for the audiences of folks with power
who don't necessarily think about these things all that
deeply that we can really make a difference, we can really do
something big that will affect a lot of things if we tackle this
work. So another little video here to
introduce you to our model and then I'll get into some of the
technical aspects.
Students in Chicago's most underserved schools face many
challenges. Neighborhoods with high crime
rates, single parent households, even homelessness.
Statistics are grim regarding grades and performance.
Truancy, violent misconduct, graduation rates and, frankly,
survival. >> My mom and my dad went to
this school, and I wanted to come here.
And when I got here it wasn't what I expected.
The students yelling at the teachers, the teachers didn't
know what to do. >> You would see a lot of angry
kids that wanted to fight and the reason why they fought were
they didn't even have a good reason.
I was in a classroom with a lot of loud obnoxious students.
No one ever wanted to pay attention in the class, it was
not a school. >> In 2008, CPS created the
Office of School Turnaround and launched the first turnaround
high school and another following in 2009.
The effort has resulted in an entirely new culture and climate
in these schools. Along with higher expectations
for academic performance. Thus began the work of ensuring
that the students, despite facing social and emotional
hurdles, are provided with opportunities to succeed.
It's one thing to read about poverty and it's one thing to
read about the plight of schools in New York or Chicago or LA or
to read about gangs. To actually go in and see and be
a part of it actually really puts a sense of urgency behind
the work that we do. >> The physical environment is
improved. Teachers receive extensive
training that includes three weeks of professional
development instruction with emphasis on classroom
management, building relationships with students and
raising expectations. >> The turnaround team and the
support that they give to me helped, first of all, open my
eyes because I think that we, as principals, we come to a table
with a different mindset. So it helped me to put
structures and processes in place.
It helped me to look at things that I may not even have
considered, for example care team and anger management
groups. They also come with the wealth
of expertise. So everybody that sits on that
turnaround team is assigned to someone in the building.
Turnaround is a comprehensive approach that looks at the
school as a holistic organism, from human capital to culture
and climate to teaching and learning, community and parent
engagement. The ultimate mission of
turnaround is to comprehensively change a low performing school
into a high performing school without moving the students.
It's the adults and the programs that change.
Athletic programs are reenergized to create incentives
for students while improving attendance, behavior and grades.
When you try and get kids to school on time so early in the
morning, you have to give them some type of incentive or
something to do to keep them going and keep them coming.
So we have the morning basketball.
They come in, they play basketball, they have to come in
and talk to me. If they have any problems the
day before, I kind of help them out the next day when I see
them. They sometimes wonder how do I
know everything that goes on. I ask them just questions about
their life that pretty much nobody's really asking them.
During the first half of the turnaround year, known as Phase
Zero, the staff spends much of their time helping students
understand new and more rigorous behavior and academic standards.
Teachers, administrators and all staff meet weekly to discuss and
share data. They celebrate successes and
develop action plans for areas where the data indicate
problems. >> The curriculum of the school
or just the teaching has changed.
There's a lot of support for teachers.
The department meetings structure are different.
Change in human capital, we have more staff in more places.
The counseling department has increased.
We have a community representative, a person that
her job is to actually bring in community resources.
The principal identifies chronically misbehaving groups
of students and enforces strict discipline policies.
They're angry because of certain things at home.
It's not the school that made them angry.
They were angry before they even walked in the door.
So we're trying to keep the battle with us winning and
helping the kids at the same time.
So they know that things like attendance and being to school
on time and making it to class on time.
So we keep the halls, we do hall sweeps and turnaround was really
big on a lot of those things because it keeps the building in
order. >> During the first year of
turnaround, serious misconduct drops dramatically, attendance
increases, there's a jump in PSAE scores and the rate of
freshmen on track to graduate grows incrementally.
The first year of turnaround focuses on primarily on school
stabilization, culture and climate, and family engagement.
Parents and members of the community are welcomed and
engaged as a vital component of the turnaround process.
Higher gains and test scores are expected in turnaround years two
and three. Realistically, turnaround will
take five to six years to complete.
Stark statistics tell us that turnaround cannot afford to
fail. >> The money, the resources and
making sure that turnaround schools are sustainable and that
the interventions and resources that they put into the school
that we're building a capacity of the individuals that to be
able to work and still complete, because it is a lot of work, and
complete the assignments and tasks that are put before them.
Moving forward, a challenge is to remain committed for the
long haul for these schools and for the kids and families in
these schools. >> I want the kids to be better
than they were when they walked in the door.
When they leave after four years, hopefully we created a
better product than what walked in the door.
Things just take time and I think that people say they
realize that, but when it comes to the bottom line of here's the
data and here's what we've got to get to they want it right
away. So I would really hope for even
the community to realize that things just take time.
There are meaningful signs of progress but lasting positive
change must be sustained. Our students need the support
and partnership of the greater community to ensure that they
become the valued citizens they aspire to be.
I feel like everybody comes together and it's like a family
in here. I be happy to come to school
every day. >> It's nice to know that
someone actually cares about you who's not at home.
I have somewhere else to go to where I can feel safe and still
learn. >> The only way a student can
actually fail at this school is if they just don't try.
I really, I like it now and I'm proud to say I graduated
from here.
So that was our propaganda video.
[LAUGHTER] Everything is not really
quite that smooth when you're doing the work.
Just to be totally transparent there.
But I wanted to walk you through, I also wanted you to
hear it from staff and students. But in terms of the technical
aspects, so what exactly to you do with one of these big broken
high schools? We start with human capital and
we look at that. You can see the image that I'm
working with here is that of a building or building blocks of a
house. Human capital is at the
foundation. If you don't have talented
people in the right roles, none of this is going to work.
And I'll get into that in a moment.
School stabilization and community parent engagement are
the next layer of the house there.
And again, I'll get into that in a little bit more depth.
Climate and culture and community resources next.
And then teaching and learning built upon the foundation of
those things. So then moving more into human
capital, but let me back up and give you one more piece of
history. So after that panicky call when
Arne and Barbara said yes, one of the first things we did is
took a big piece of butcher paper down to the bar at the end
of the block and we got buckets of beer and we spent hours and
hours there with pencils and this piece of paper and we said
we are not going to be constrained by what's been done
in the past or what's there now, let's totally create a school
for the kids who are going there and let's just free ourselves.
So we did a lot of kind of org chart things, we created
different roles. For example, we don't hire a lot
of traditionally trained school counselors.
We tend to hire social workers with trauma informed care
backgrounds. We created a position called the
coordinator of logistics and master schedule building, and
all logistical functions come out of the counseling center and
come out of a lot of other places where there are people
who are supposed to be doing kid work but they end up doing a
bunch of paperwork. So we created a person who will
do all paperwork and who will build the master schedule and
all those sorts of things. So role clarity, org chart,
recruitment and hiring of the right people which I don't know
if the districts you're familiar with are like this but CPS
doesn't even have clear job descriptions for every role.
So we rewrote every job description that we created and
we made sure that our job postings were very clear about
what we wanted. We had to kind of completely
remake the human capital side of the organization because it was
not built for this turnaround work.
We also believe strongly that you have to grow people.
So when you have a brand new staff especially, you've got to
put a good amount of time in the summer to getting them ready and
training them in the turnaround work.
And then you have to have this be ongoing.
If you choose turnaround, you're going to have to hire 120, in
our case about 140-150, new positions in a period of three
months, and then train them up and have them ready to go.
So you have three months to do a pretty big job.
You end up with about 3,000 applicants if you do it right.
We contract with the New Teacher Project, which is Michelle
Rhee's organization, to do national recruiting for us and
to do initial screening, and then we have a fairly extensive,
not even fairly, it's a pretty extensive three-hour group
interview with six different modules in it.
If you make it out of that portion of the interview
process, you then go and do a sample lesson at the school
that's being turned around. Not expecting a perfect lesson
because you don't know the kids there but to kind of see how you
react and bounce off of the kids in the school.
A family community interview. If you make it through all that,
then we do a reference check and then we make you an offer.
So it's a fairly extensive hiring process.
Another part of the human capital piece is making sure
that people understand that a portion, not all because we know
the data is flawed and data systems are not perfect, but a
portion of the evaluation system is related to the student
outcomes which is also very clear in the job description
which is also very clear in the job posting which is also very
clear in the hiring process. So there's no mystery about
that. School stabilization.
These buildings are very, very broken.
Everything is broken. So we walk into these buildings
and there's no difference when you look at the hallways,
there's no difference between class time versus passing
period. I'm sure some of you have been
in these really broken high schools.
So one of our security guys talked about hall sweeps, that's
what we would consider a product.
There's a whole operations manual with training programs,
kind of a checklist, a rubric. So what you saw with Harper's
hallways there are the result of a very clear hall sweep product.
Progressive discipline. We see deans and administrators
just making the discipline decisions willy-nilly.
So chewing gum could either get you suspended or it could get
you nothing. So you've just see these crazy
pieces. Another one of my favorite but
very tragic examples is the seniors who, once we do their
transcript analysis in Phase Zero, have two years
of world language left for their senior year.
Didn't take classes that were anywhere near the graduation
requirements. Thought they could to take PE-3
to skip PE-2. No guidance and counseling.
Completely broken transcripts. Summer grades that weren't
entered. Just a mess.
Attendance processes that don't work that either lead to way
over-reporting attendance or not reporting attendance at all.
Kids with special needs who are not only neglecting to get an
inclusive environment but don't even have an up-to-date IP.
So even the basic compliance functions are broken.
So school stabilization is a set of strategies, products, efforts
to fix all the basics. Community and parent engagement
involving parents and decision making.
We have a bit of a controversial arrival on the scene which we're
trying to get better at in that we're doing a lot more proactive
work out in communities before the turnaround decision is even
discussed. But over the last few years,
it's kind of been the board makes the decision and then we
have to kind of react. We're trying to be a lot more
proactive. But once the board does make the
decision, we start monthly focus groups, we start meeting with
key community groups, community agencies to figure out who's
concerned about the school, who'd like to weigh in on
decisions, engaging parents in what's your vision for the
discipline tolerances of the school.
When you walk in what do you want to see?
What's interesting is parents are always much more strict.
They want you suspended for cussing.
I'm like have you been around here?
[LAUGHTER] We'll clear three-quarters
of the place out if an F-bomb gets you suspended.
Can we just wait a little while before we get that strict.
But you engage parents in the decision making and then you
also institutionalize these programs.
These schools don't have your annual freshman parent night.
They're totally devoid of these institutionalized community and
family events. And so that block works on
decision making and institutionalizing those things.
While the school stabilization block is about kind of some of
the consistent discipline consequences, the culture and
climate block is about making sure that the school is warm and
healing. So when you come into a
turnaround school, you'll see what we call splash all over the
walls advertising incentives for attendance and honor roll and
most improved interim assessment scores, just trying to create
motivation in kind of a warm environment.
We do tier two research-based practices such as CBITS and
Think First which are anger control groups and trauma
recovery groups. We have a care team that was
mentioned in the video that analyzes each case and decides
where to route students as part of the behavioral health
program. Another very important factor is
that last one there. So we do an extensive amount of
training in the well managed schools program.
So obviously discipline, behavior is an issue in these
schools, a big issue, a huge issue.
It was important to us when we sketched out that grand plan
that every single adult respond to behavior in a consistent
fashion and using the same language and to do so not in a
punitive way but in a way that builds social skills for the
future. So we do an extensive amount of
training in a comprehensive behavioral framework program in
the school. Community resources.
This is the block where we look at who in the community can
provide before and after school programming that connects with
the school's mission. So pardon me there.
And often the people with the most positive influence in
students' lives are right in the backyard of the school.
And so this looks for those people and engages them and
finds structure in consistent ways for partnerships.
Teaching and learning, it is the most important but it is
impossible without the other blocks behind it.
Standards aligned, we use interim assessments that are
tied to the state tests. Ultimately we would like to use
computer adaptive assessments, but we aren't there yet on the
high school level. We are on the elementary level
so we use the Scantron Performance Series which is
adapting to the last answer that the student gave which is giving
you a much finer tuned sense of where the student is at.
But most high schools, certainly these schools, weren't using
interim or periodic assessments. We train teachers in standards
based unit design. Another interesting but tragic
fact, another thing we do in Phase Zero on entry is assess
all of the student's reading levels.
And it's been on average about a 6th grade reading level for the
high school. Which means you have a fair
amount of students in the third, fourth, fifth grade levels.
So rather than crying about that we bring in READ 180 and we
implement the heck out of it. We could bring in another one
but we found some success in READ 180.
And we take any student who reads below sixth grade and put
them in an intensive reading program and get them caught up.
We also have common planning time by department built into
the school day, and then a weekly grade level pod meeting.
So one discussion of what I consider kind of the vertical
integration about courses and course teams and the curriculum,
and the other is a student focused conversation, IE the
grade level pods. And I know I've only got a
couple more minutes before we want to open it up so I'm going
to speed through a few more slides here, but another point I
want to make is when we went into some of these schools, we
found unopened packages of software and books from the
past. So we actually went in and found
an early 1990s edition of the READ 180 software at Harper.
And how many times do we know that you pour stuff on a school,
I learned this from you guys, the professors in the room, and
it doesn't work. It's not an issue of resources.
So we have a very tight what we call performance management
system, this slide calls it focus and alignment.
This was designed for a different audience.
But performance system which entails a very tight weekly
meeting that I go to, that my staff goes to, and the people in
the building present out. So it has a different theme
that's usually tied to one of the blocks.
And the people actually doing that work in the building have
to bring their data, put it on the a screen, it's a U-shaped
table, and we talk about both fidelity metrics and student
outcome metrics. And we try to create an
environment where it's not bad that something's going poorly.
It is bad to not have a plan but that's part of our performance
management framework. We talked a little bit about
this, about time, about the Jell-O theory of school reform.
Trying to get your board and your district to make a four- to
six-year commitment is quite a challenge.
Battling it out with the budget office every year, feeling like
haven't we had this conversation for the last three fiscal years,
this is a four- to six-year commitment.
You cannot reduce the amount of investment that goes to Harper
High School. So just fighting those battles
every single year to ensure that it's a four- to six-year
commitment. You can kind of see the phases
and how the investment goes up and then tapers back down.
I know I'm rushing through it. This just kind of visually
reinforces what I talked about earlier about which aspect of
the model is focused on and when.
And these phases aren't necessarily tied to the years.
They're more tied to certain competencies.
And then phase three which is the transitioning back to being
kind of a regular school in the district.
Another way to look at it is kind of a Maslow's
hierarchy-esque sort of way of looking at the model.
I'm speeding along because I know I am at my limit.
Results. So our elementary schools are
doing really well on the left. The top graph rank orders the
district's areas by value added. You can see that our area on the
far left far outranks even the second place finisher.
And what I always tell my people is you have to do that because
it's like a rubber band. You got to pull the kids out of
this low, low spot by always being in the number one growth
spot. High schools are a tougher nut
to crack, but we have seen some great progress with the student
attendance rate, with misconduct, freshman on track,
our one year dropout rate. Harper, these are Harper's
numbers, the school that was featured in the video, did
double its PSAE. Now mind you that was from about
3%-ish to almost 6%-ish, but it was still a move when they
hadn't had a move in about a decade.
What we're most concerned about and putting all of our
organizations energy on are these red spots which is a high
school value added measure which is not looking so good.
So nearly all of our energy is focused on the academics,
particularly in Harper. Fenger, you may recognize the
name of this school. This is the school where Derrion
Albert was beat to death about seven blocks away.
It kind of hit CNN right when the president was flying to
Cologne to promote the Olympics. That's another point I would
make, when something like that happens people just love to beat
these schools down. You wouldn't believe the
pressure on me to fire that principal, to change this,
people wanted to fire me. This happened eight blocks away
from the school, it's tragic, it's one of our kids but it is
not the school's fault. But the politics of this stuff
is crazy. And what you usually happens is
these schools get beat up, and that's part of the political
backs thing. Marshall is our new one, if you
saw Hoop Dreams, that's Marshall.
On the west side, the other two are on the south side.
So in the future, continuing to scale this by pulling the red
schools, kind of the most struggling ones in the areas,
pulling them out for work in our office, making sure that we have
the capability to scale by having all of our interventions
and products and plans in scalable fashion.
So there we go. I know I'm a few minutes over.
[APPLAUSE]
I want to thank Donald again, congratulate him again
for being our distinguished alumni, but also for doing
the work that he's doing. I guess the simplistic answer is
we have to get a Wisconsin grad in every major city.
[LAUGHTER] We have a distinguished panel
here of Professor Allan Odden from the Ed Leadership and
Policy Analysis Department. We have the director of the
UW Institute for Research and Poverty, Timothy Smeeding, and
our deputy state superintendent, Michael Thompson.
Now I've probably moderated enough panels to know if I don't
tell them something, they're going to tell me and tell you
what they want to say. So I'm going to reign them in a
little bit. >> We might do it anyway.
Yeah, you might do it anyway, but at least I'll give you a
little bit of a structure. So I'm going to ask you to
imagine that you've got unlimited financial resources
to transform a high school, but you can only do
one thing the first year. I want you to think about what
is that one thing. And I reason I'm phrasing it
that way is because our tendency as academics and people who are
working in schools is to have a lot of stuff we want to talk
about, have that all in the newspaper and have the
electorate and the citizen's eyes glaze over.
So I want you to just think about if money's not the object
here, if the resources are not the object, what's the one thing
that you would want to do to transform a high school or turn
it around? >> Let me start by saying that
we all should be really, really proud of Donald.
Not many people go through a university like this, end up in
a tough city, in a successful high school and becomes a
turnaround agent for a high school.
It is unbelievable. So I'm enormously proud of him.
[APPLAUSE]
And as that one, I think it was the "Sun Times," had a picture
of him on the paper when he got the award, and it said
how can we clone this person? So we'd have to learn
how to do that. >> Send him to Milwaukee, too.
I like the question. I have an answer for it because
I've studied school improvement strategies and I've got a book
10 Strategies to Improve Student Learning and they're similar
across urban, rural and suburban school districts.
I've looked at the finance side and a lot of what districts and
schools do to dramatically improve performance, and Donald
implicitly talked about this, was to reallocate resources.
Another piece of the strategy is to be relentless.
No excuses. They're in a tough environment.
No excuses, we heard no excuses about whatever, they're going to
do it. But the one point that was going
to mention and that I will mention here is his foundation
which is human capital, talent. Can you imagine Bret Bielema
trying to do what he's doing now without John Clay and without
James White and without Monte Ball and without Lance Kendricks
and without Nick Toon and without Steve Tolzien.
They could do all the training, etc, etc, and they would not be
ranked fifth or sixth. You need talent.
And what we sort of like in education is the stories of the
districts that start with pretty good talent.
So the story of Montgomery County, right outside of
Washington, DC, which began their trek by really do well by
low income minority students who entered that system in the past
10 to 15 years. They started with a pretty good
core of teacher and principal talent.
And they didn't have to get involved in some of the things
I'm going to talk about and that I know is going on in Chicago.
Whereas places like Washington, DC, and Chicago and New York
City and Atlanta had a real talent problem to begin with.
They had low quality, they had some good teachers and
principals. Basically, they had a very low
quality talent pool of teachers and principals.
So if we look at what they did and what they need to do, the
question you can say is how do they get talent?
Well, they begin doing some recruiting in some universities.
So Chicago began recruiting at UW Madison, Michigan,
Northwestern, they didn't used to recruit there.
But their primary strategies have been to work with
organizations outside of traditional higher education.
So Donald mentioned it. What they do is they work with
the New Teacher Project. And the New Teacher Project
recruits early career changes from law firms, financial
services, organizations that have all kinds of people with
majors in math, science, statistics, kind of the shortage
areas. They work with Teach for
America. You can recruit some top talent
in the country, UW Madison can, but you can't recruit Harvard
people to Chicago until they've earned their bachelor's degree
or Princeton, Yale, even Northwestern, all the top
colleges. And so a major piece of the
strategy of getting talent in these urban school districts,
this is getting it in at the front end, is recruiting from
nontraditional sources which is controversial in many higher
education contexts. Then what they do is they're
relentless. They want to be relentless in
making sure even from that top talent pool the only people they
keep are those who are effective in the classroom.
And Donald had a piece in there, I don't know if you saw it,
they're going to evaluate people in terms of, in part, their
impact on student learning, which is controversial.
Then the next piece is what do you do about all the experienced
talent that's there, or people who are there, that are
ineffective, many of whom are ineffective?
You have to do the same thing. You start a major professional
development program that gives everybody the chance.
Then you have to institute the same evaluation system.
You keep those are who effective and you have to move out those
who are not. All of these strategies for
building a human capital foundation are highly, I'm just
going to end by saying, highly contested in the education
community, and most of us in the education community are railing
against what those places are trying to do.
But when you look at what they do in Chicago and many urban
school districts, which have most of the 1,000 or 2,000
schools that produce the dropouts, most of whom are low
income and minority, we have to rethink that foundational piece.
It takes all the other pieces but without the foundation you
can't execute any other strategies.
How long of an answer would you like?
Well, we have about 10 minutes, well actually
we started late so medium. [LAUGHTER]
I'm not an educator, other than being an educator
and a professor. I've been doing that
for 35 years. And what I'd like to talk about
at some point is how to improve the odds a little bit from
outside the school where I think the real problem is because, as
you can see from Don, that schools are trying to do
everything. But I will talk to you about a
school. Our Wisconsin Idea tour, two
years ago when I came here, took me to South Division High School
in Milwaukee. Now South Division, immediately
we were told by the kids there, we were led around by the 10
best students or 10 of the 15 that were going to college and
five of them were athletes. And we were led around and we
were told what's going on here and the first thing, this isn't
the worst school. This is not the worst school.
Okay. So we meet the principal.
And this is what I think is probably what I learned from him
anyway. He spent three years trying to
provide a safe place. A place where teachers would
feel safe and students would feel safe to learn.
My Jesuit education my father took me dragging and screaming
to the high school and told the prefect to discipline if he gets
out of line and he did. This is different.
What this guy did that was very inventive is he hired a gang
banger. He literally used money to hire
somebody who used to be a gang leader, and he had four guys,
huge guys with him and they knew everything that was going on
inside and outside of that school.
They knew who was fighting with who, who was doing what wherever
and they were able to use, by whatever means, to produce,
after three years, a safe school.
You can see these white triangles where kids could go to
be safe. Kids had to be on time.
You couldn't take your cell phone to class.
This was really amazingly good. At the end I said this is great,
now comes learning. Now we have an environment in
which you can learn. He said I'm retiring in August.
I said it's May, who's going to follow you?
We don't know, they'll pick somebody and send somebody down
in August. Who doesn't know anything about
what you're trying to achieve here, doesn't know anything
about where you're trying to go and what you're trying to build
here. I could tell you more stories
about the high school that I learned, including some of the
issues a lovely young woman, African American woman led us
around and her biggest problem, she said, was first of all
figuring out how to take books home.
Then she figured they let her do that finally.
And the second thing was fighting her family because they
didn't think she should study. They thought this was bologna.
They thought that you're a chump by trying to study and get ahead
academically. She was going to Sunny Parkside.
The other woman who led us around was the valedictorian and
she came here. She was the only student in this
whole high school that was coming to the flagship
university school in her state. One.
O-N-E. So we need all the same things
that you talked about I think, and especially centralized
control to back up the ability to make change and to stick to
it. So I shudder.
I'm torn between going back to the school and seeing what's
going on now versus what was going on then.
You must all know that the Milwaukee school system is such
a disaster we can't race to the top, we can't race anywhere.
Schools in receivership, it's just a really tough situation
and you need somebody like Don to come in with what I would
call -- and try and make a difference.
But what I'd like to talk about next, not now, next time around,
is about the tough odds. Improving the odds by improving
the families and the neighborhoods and the quality,
not just in teachers, but of parent/student relationships and
parent relationships and so forth so that when people come
to school more of them are prepared to learn and you put
them in this environment and you hope they'll thrive.
Thank you. >> Well, thanks.
If that was medium, I'll go short.
First of all, Don, I do have a deep appreciation for what
you're doing in the Chicago public schools.
And as Allan said you need that relentlessness.
And I have to tell you, though, Milwaukee has that
relentlessness with the new staff that's in there.
With Gregory Thornton as the superintendent, Naomi Watts and
Heidi Ramirez and that's what they have.
They're working night and day, and the descriptions of what Don
gave about the turnaround schools are what's happening in
Milwaukee and they're already showing some attendance rates.
They've got a long way to go but they have this hope.
And if you go down there and visit you'll have hope with
what's going on in the Milwaukee Public School District, I can
guarantee you that. And I just want to think about
something as we're talking about high schools and figure, what
was it 2,000 high schools where all the dropouts come from.
I just want you to think about something.
Is that the cause or the symptom?
Because kids coming into high school reading at the fourth
grade level is not a high school problem.
It's an elementary and middle school problem.
And so we have to go back and intervene early in kids' lives
so they don't get behind. We all know the statistics about
kids their drop out and their reading rate and all the people
that are imprisoned, they're reading rates.
It doesn't happen in high school, it happens before.
And I agree with all the strategies that need to go on in
a high school to continue that involvement.
We're sending kids there that are that far behind, the problem
is not at the high school and we always put a lot of blame there.
Now, I'm going to go right to your question, Gloria, about
what we would do if we could only do one thing and you had
all the money in the world to do it and I'd say keep your money
because there's not one thing. We can't simplify this.
But if you pushed me I would take the money and I'd hire a
really good principal. >> Okay, go ahead.
My background, I guess, I run the Institute for Research on
Poverty, and we believe in the Wisconsin Idea and so we have a
Wisconsin poverty report we do each year, that's one thing that
we do. And if you look this year you
look within Milwaukee County, just within the county, one
county now, we're not talking about the rich counties on the
outside, in the county child poverty rate in Whitefish Bay
and Brown Deer and all these other places 2%, central city of
Milwaukee 50%. Within the same county.
We try and help the state. One of my colleagues, Katherine
Magnuson, who's incredibly well-known and respected as an
early childhood educator, just completed for Tony Earl,
Mike's boss, and for Reggie... >> Bicha.
Bicha, thank you, an evaluation of the early
childhood education program for Wisconsin that laid out a map of
where to start early so that we can get at the problems we've
got. And I have a Thursday seminar
series on insecurity instability in education which will bring
people here to work with WCER and others.
So from all of that what I wanted to say is that the
problems are big. First problem is parenting.
The hardest thing to admit is that not all parents are well
qualified. Now the way I usually start this
talk is I say is there anybody in this room who didn't think,
forget from the birth, from when you knew your child was coming,
okay, the conception of your child, ever thought they weren't
going to college? Raise your hand if you're one of
those. No way.
My kid is going to college. So parents do everything they
can to help their children. This is always going to be true.
They will do everything they can.
But some kids get born to the wrong parents who aren't in
stable situations, who aren't getting child support because
the guys were in and out of jail and they don't have their rears
pulled up, they don't have a job, if you don't have a job you
can't pay child support. You're losing your job because
your car broke down and then you're being evicted.
We have a wonderful study about eviction in Milwaukee that was
the whole front page of the New York Times from one of our
graduate students. Can you imagine a kid when
they're not eating, they're not seeing a doctor and so forth
trying to go and learn. And it's just really incredibly
bad. So I think we need to start with
that, and if you ask me what's the most important thing to do
there, I'll say one thing, to give young women and young men
who aren't doing well in school something to look forward to
other than having a child before they're 20.
A third of the kids in this country come from mothers and
fathers, mainly mothers, who dropped out of school.
The median age of first birth is 19 years of age.
Then they go on and have three kids.
In other words, they pull up the birth rate dramatically.
High school only, including GED, first kid at age 22, a little
more than two kids. You go down to college
graduates, first kid at 28 or 29.
Two college graduate parents who have done all of the stuff that
you're supposed to do. In other words they, completed
schooling, they found a job, they found a partner and they
made a plan. Then they had a kid.
The difference here is you had a kid, you didn't finish school,
you didn't have a partner, you don't have a job or a career and
you never had a plan. And so this makes the odds
really, really hard for a kid like that to get through school.
And I think that's probably the most important thing.
And we'll talk about early childhood education and other
things later, but I'd like to give you better odds.
I think that's all I'm trying to say.
I agree with Mike that you're dealt a deck that's really hard
to win a poker game with and you're doing the best you can.
It should be incumbent in the rest of us to provide you with
better material to work with in some sense.
Thank you. >> So before I open it up, I'm
going to ask Don if he wants to respond to anything that he's
heard. >> That said, I think that we
need to do a lot more regardless of who comes through our door.
We've really screwed a lot of stuff up as the field of
education, and I think there will come a time, even in my own
schools, where I will feel comfortable saying we are
running on all cylinders and everything is doing great, now I
can turn and start criticizing other places.
But as a system I don't think we're there yet to be able to do
that. So that would just be the one
comment that I have. But I'm eager to hear other
people's questions. >> Okay, so at this point I'm
happy to entertain questions from the audience.
It can be directed to Don or anybody on the panel.
I'll start here and then Doug. >> Hi, I just want to say that I
don't believe that kids are born with the wrong parents.
I don't believe that. [APPLAUSE]
And I think that some kids are born in situations
where families have to struggle with the institutionalized
racism that has been in place in this country for centuries.
And based on that, families can't succeed.
So for example, in the Latino community, the immigration
status of a lot of families about 12 million or 14 million
people in this country it's like a poverty trap for them and also
for the kids in their family, even if the kids were born in
this country because even if the kids were born here they have to
work at an early age to provide to the family or stay at home
and provide for and help with childcare and other situations.
So my question and comment is around that, the immigration
status. I believe if we are serious
about narrowing the gap of, especially, Latino students, we
really have to take a look at a lot of the policies.
And one of those ones is immigration policies.
And I really hate when people come up to me, I work at
Centro Hispano, one of the main community centers here, serving
the Latino community and they really care about the kids,
but when we talk about immigration it's like oh, I'm
sorry, they broke the law, they came here and they should
be deported. So my question is for, I don't
know, anyone who would like to answer, how we can take into
consideration this immigration status and somehow include it
into all of this vision because when that student doesn't have a
social security number, that's student knows that it doesn't
make sense for him or her to spend all of those years in high
school and then college if that student is not going to be able
to find a job in that field later on.
So someone on the panel want to respond?
Love to respond. I agree with you about
immigration. We had another young lady who
led a group around and they were all whispering behind her back.
She ranked about fifth in Division High School.
She's a Latino. Her mother was making her go
back to Mexico and not go to college.
She had to go home. That was it.
That was what she was supposed to do and so forth.
And it was heartbreaking the way that the teachers and the school
was trying to work on the mother to let her go to college.
This kid needs to go to college. And the idea was no.
So I'd like to change that. This school, South Division, is
an immigrant school. You can go back there and look
at the basketball teams in 1915 or Polish in 1925 or Slavic and
so forth and so on. But I'm telling you, I do think
there's some issues with parents.
75% of the guys under age 30 in this country are fathers.
Less than half of them live with their own kids.
The chances of an, if you take this high school dropout group,
the chances that an unmarried woman and an unmarried man have
a biological child together, the chances that one parent or the
other will have a child with another partner are 65%.
So if you're not there you can't help.
I know there's a lot of well meaning people who are trying to
fight the odds and are having a tough time and we need to
improve the odds is all I'm saying.
I'm not saying parents are bad. I'm saying that parents need
some help. They need structure.
They need lots of other support so that their kids can show up
at school so that they can meet with teachers, as Don was
saying, and be able to interact with the school to meet their
own kids needs. >> Doug.
[INAUDIBLE] >> They've got a microphone for
you, because we can't hear you. >> So the first question is,
we have stories of short-term turnarounds.
We don't have a lot of stories of long-term turnarounds.
So you mentioned this phasing out after four to six years.
What do you have in mind for the long-term?
The second question is, so you went through the program here
and you mentioned the field of education has screwed a lot of
things up, and I totally agree, but I'm wondering whether you
have practical advice for us, so you've been through the program,
looking back on what you did, what would you see as things
that we could do better to create more of you?
I don't know if you want to do that.
[LAUGHTER] No, thank you for the question.
So the first one was about the kind of long haul.
The simple answer, I don't know. Harper is our trail-blazer and
so as Harper enters into something then we begin to solve
it. I'm trying to get better at
staying ahead of that. Those value added academic
results really bugged me and so almost all my energy is on that.
But then I think in another year or so I'll be able to start
thinking about what that transition looks like.
So I could make something up to sound cool but the answer is I
don't know. My concern is that we as a
district and a nation not take our focus off of this.
I think that's more likely to happen than my inability to
formulate a plan. I have some ideas but it's just
not front burner yet. But I think the reason I have it
in there as a phase is to force us to get to that transition
planning because that's another thing we do horribly.
We put a program in a building, the grant expires and then
everything goes back to normal, and I don't want to do that.
Secondly, if we can figure out a way to have this standards-based
debate without graduating undergraduates who don't have a
clue how to help kids learn the skills and the standards, that
would be really cool because I am having to train every single
undergraduate in the college readiness standards and how to
do backwards design and standards-based unit, and I know
those things need to be debated. There are racial issues, there
are classist issues, there are learning style issues with
standardized tests, but can we just spend 25% of our time in
undergraduate teacher education on that and 75% on how to
actually do the craft to raise the test scores but not go in
there blindly thinking test scores are the only way one
learns. Do you kind of get what I'm
trying to say? I want to honor the debate but I
also need teachers who aren't going to look at me with crossed
eyes when I say, hey, English teacher, the ACT measures word
choice and main idea and compare and contrast and you have to
teach the students how to do this.
And they look at me like I'm a literature teacher who knows how
to deconstruct the standards movement.
I don't need that. That's great but I just can't
have that initially. So I know I am being very
critical. >> We taught you to.
And I know that we don't do enough deconstructing and asking
deep questions about why things are the way they are, but at
least in this work we need a little bit more practical skill
building skills on the part of teacher undergraduates.
I've been told that we have to vacate the room.
I thought we actually could stay.
But I've also been told that the commons is clear so I'm going to
ask you, first of all, to thank the panel, and then we're going
to try to migrate over to the commons so we can still ask
those questions. [APPLAUSE]