cc
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
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
And I think that they are relevant to the issues that we
will be grappling with in this
that poverty, certainly the issues of school funding and who
gets what are central to our
education looks like. Before the talk actually begins,
I have the distinct pleasure
I don't get to do that however of presenting an award.
So I'm going to ask Donald Fraynd to come join me
at the podium so that he can
Alumni Achievement Award. recDonald Fraynd began hisshed
education career in Omaha,
teaching program. The North Dakota native had
graduated from Creighton
and planned to give a year of Uniservice back to his schoology
before going on to medical
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
he became principal at Jones policy analysis in 2002,
selective enrollment schools. During his tenure as principal,
Jones was recognized among the
by "US News and World Report" nand became the first Chicago
high school to win the
Blue Ribbon Schools Award. US Department of Education's
leadership style focused on empowering teachers to take
ownership of their classrooms and to operate as independent
and free thinkers.
challenging every student to their full potential
on all levels.
Public Schools, appointed Fraynd Arne Duncan, as CEO of Chicago
Turnaround. Now in his third year, Fraynd
oversees a bold initiative
underperforming schools into to transform chronically
a comprehensive reform model. hAnd I am pleased, on behalf ofg
this University of Wisconsin
Donald Fraynd with the School of Education, to present
Distinguished Alumni UW-Madison School of Education
[APPLAUSE] Achievement Award.
>> Dovery much, Gloria. you
Ladson-Billings: So now, in traditional UW-Madison fashion,
we give you something,
[LAUGHTER] then we make you work.
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
educational leadership. I think I would not have been
able to do the things that I'm
mentoring and the skill building doing in Chicago now without the
I even get choked up talking of my professors.
But especially Colleen Capper, about it.
and really pushed me hard. my adviser who believed in me
What I'd like to do in today's And so thank you very much.
little bit about the history of pTurnaround in Chicago and aa
little brief walk through the turnaround work nationally, the
national turnaround landscape.
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
how I see this work as falling doing nothing, and that's really
the cycle of poverty when we under the umbrella of disrupting
around what happens when you do loonothing about our lowestics
performing schools. Our audacious goal as an
organization and then I'd like
bit technical about how we to dig in and become a little
So our approach and our model. actually do the work.
preliminary results and then And then take a look at our
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
some bullet points on the curcontext of Chicago Publicjust
Schools.
45% are African American, So C41% Latino, 9% Whitents.
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
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
So it's a tough nut to crack. whiIt's not an easy exam.CT.
But you can see for many, many
below 20% meets/exceeds and a ygood collection of them in the
single digits for many, many
So you know what that translates years.
where you have buildings where to in terms of the buildings
standards, 2% of students know 2% of kids read at state
standards. how to do math at state
situation. So this is a very disturbing
talk about with Chicago is that Oit's mayorally controlled.l
So we do not have an elected
appointed school board. And I know we could do all kinds
of deconstructing of all that but it's an important context
piece.
many, many years was what I call So what our district did for
So the CEO, Arne, and Barbara Eason-Watkins, who was our chief
education officer at the time,
would ask them will you please would find a great principal and
school. So there were a lot of these
kind of Arne and Barbara
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.
2000 to start doing research on Show 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
We had our first schools in 2008, two elementary schools and
three high schools, then we have
the Academy for School one predominate partner called
They did one high school and Leadership.
2008-2009 school year. four elementary schools in the
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
high school. really knows what to do with the
principalship and come run the Will you consider leaving your
work? This was April for a school that
was going to open in the fall.
friends together, people who I And so I got some of my good
said what do we say back to felt were rethem?smart, and we
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
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
are going to sit on it and hem needs to go and you are Barbara
making notice, etc, etc. and haw and worry about aldermen
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
where can we transfer some of our last discretionary funds
from this fiscal year so you can
And we're like oh, no. get started.
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
As you may know if you've been supportive.
will be leaving in about 15 keeping up widays.icago news Ron
Our mayor is not running again
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
longest running CEOs, Ron has yeajust gotten established.the
So it's kind of a big question
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.
school turnaround work. So if you start up in the upper
left you can see the federal
There are two main ways that the role.
this and made this into a federanational priority.haped
But let me back up and say that I often like to say that this
work has three different
One of them is a political ceilings.
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
groups to DC shortly after Obama probably about 50 different
group of charter providers, tookeducational managementas a
organizations, some district
group that we think has the most leaders, and said this is the
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 removing the financial excuse on models and I am going to work
there's not enough money for so that you can no longer say
And so what you see there in the this work.
and then you see SIG, which the School Improvement Grant program
which has actually been around
willy-nilly and was at maximum for quite a while but was really
was more like 200-some thousand $500,0dollars per school.sually
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
kind of low, relatively speaking, not that you bulk at
$500,000 but relatively speaking
So what they did was radically pretty low funded.
improve grant funding to a increased the amount of school
for three years. $2 million cap per year
$6 million over a three-year So now you're looking at
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
use when giving out the school of guidelines that they have to
be a competitive process. So no longer was it you just get
the grant.
actually have a good plan, and You now have to show that you
federal intervention models. you have to use one of the four
sometimes people call all four So you have turnaround, and
that. Turnaround, technically speaking
in the federal definition, is when you totally reconstitute
the staff.
50%. So you can't hire back more than
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
more professional development. of new programs and do a bunch
self-evident. ABig requirement with they
exception of closure is that the
have to be able to come back the students who are enrolled there
And that's what scares off a lot following year.
they're used to building schools of our charter friends because
This is different in that the gstudents stay.
So Office of School Improvement,
buckets of our work. we have kind of four different
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
practice or an intervention, we call it product which bugs some
people. But you call it what makes you
feel good.
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.
But the reason we're no longer And then performance management.
Turnaround is because we've also called the Office of School
relationship with our restart partners, and then also we're
moving into, in the upcoming
We haven't done transformation year, transformation.
turnaround light. And then while we don't manage
school closure we do weigh in on
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
good about their elementary oustrategy and not so sure ontty
their high school strategy. So moving forward, we're taking
the high schools, and we're kind
But approximately 10,000 of just the opposite.
turnaround schools either run by students are in one of our
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
what we came up with. siOne thing that I do want tois
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,
being able to debate the merits we of standardized tests.of
Our kids just need to learn the skills to do better on them.
Once we get to the middle of
now can start debating whether that pack in the bell curve, we
learning. But I'm confident that our kidsf
can do anything they set their
at the ACT, even if the ACT is minds to do including do better
That's kind of how we look at flit.d.
A lot of debate about that but
section. it's ended up in our values
the most kind of phrase that Beat the odds is probably by far
and it's why it's the title of captures our values the best,
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
more so than the rest of the perpetrators of gun violence
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
of the big consulting firms datdonated time to create anone
algorithm to figure out which kids were most likely to either
engage in gun violence or be the
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
the kids in the top tier get 30 suhours a week of mentoringre
support.
these kids a very extensive Ssocial network of support.
Mentors who eat dinner with them, drive them places, take
them places, help with homework.
that top tier group than any We have more kids per capita in
So the odds are that our kids will be more involved with
violence, odds are more than
and out of those who do graduate half of our kids won't graduate
it to college but most of them only about 15% of them will make
And most of our kids will go on to be unemployed or very
underemployed and the vast
lives and debilitating poverty. Those are the odds for the kids
that we work with.
that's not acceptable. So we talk a lot about how
And that's really a rallying cry So you have to beat the odds.
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
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.
school sophomore who says in his >> He's a 16-year-old high
everywhere. wo>> How prevalent are guns inis
your neighborhood?
house. We're only a block from your
To get a gun? How easy i>> Yeah.get a gun?
Like for a baby to get a
That easy. pacifier.
I mean you know somebody that knows somebody that knows
somebody that's got a gun.
impressions on his two-mile walk >> Kendall shared his
one of Chicago's toughest toneighborhoods: Englewood.gh
And you describe Englewood as what?
War zone, a kill zone.
It's that bad. >> It's that bad?
gunfire? >> How often do you hear
Yeah. >> Probably three times.
People get killed going to
In fact, 373 people were school, man.
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
and refused. offered a chance to buy a gun
has had close brushes with gun Says he's never owned one but
You're 16 years old? violence.
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?
really. >> Majo>> Not really.me, not
Just a bunch of kids with nothing to do.
If somebody came and asked
you how do you solve the you, the mayor came and asked
him? problem, how would you answer
age more jobs, man. >>>> I know some people had anmy
eventful summer.
and Chicago schools hope special >> For now the mayor's office
classroom help keep teens like mentoring programs in the
It's just the point, man. KI don't want this forever.
I don't want this for the rest
I want something different. I want nice things.
So I think one of the most
one there not wanting this powerful statements is his last
And we really see it as our role forever.
provide these opportunities. in the turnaround schools to
school, Harper High School. And that was a walk in kind of
the two- or three-block area
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
2,000 high schools that produce ohalf the nation's dropoutt
problem.
not very many. And relatively speaking, that's
a nation with as much as we have And that's something that we as
solving complex engineering donproblems, etc, etc, we canon,
handle 2,000 high schools,
Probably in a fairly quick right?
minds to it. amount of time if we all put our
national priority. But that's the idea behind the
Obviously it's the right thing But why care?
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 product of what's called the the next few slides are actually
Chicago. civic consulting alliance in
firms and do pro bono work for They take all the big consulting
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
facts and figures, why they people whshould care.uch into
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
other places. This, I'm sure many of you have
seen in the research before about the difference between
earning power.
income is one reason we should So lost income, lost personal
Students with no high school care.
This one I think is really obviously make far less.
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.
feds. And so you can see annually howe
much tax revenue is lost if you leave a bunch of people down
here in the no high school zone.
why it makes sense that this is And sa federal priority?his is
Say you're just the businessperson from the
congressional budget office, why
improvement, if it works, will an investment in school
quite substantially for the actufederal government? end
Dropouts have been twice as many
want to be repetitive for folks who are really immersed in this
work. I have a little bit of a typo at
the top.
and state government actually It's actualose out.0, the feds
Let me make sure, I'm losing my place here too.
Here's where I had the typo.
school and high school and about It's $1,900 between no high
school versus some college work. $3,200 when it comes to no high
that line is the average amount of public assistance aid thate
people get is obviously substantially higher for those
without high school.
of public assistance. SWhen you look at the criminalms
justice system, you can see the percent of incarcerated
populations.
incarcerated if you're a You're far more likely to be
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
you talk about the broken dreams financial impact here but when
bigger. aHealth considerations, you cann
see on the left that those who
many more issues with health. drHigh school graduates liveor
longer than dropouts. And this just kind of summarizes
the finances for each of those
Lost income, 8508. things.
1920. LosLost state tax revenue,es,
additional public assistance
justice costs, and by the way that does not even include the
Chicago police which every day
are pulling about five cruisers toff the beat so they create awe
perimeter around our high schools when they release for
the day.
police costs, you can about imagine what that would totalo
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
and decreases those expenses. inIncreasing the things on thes
left decreases the involvement
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
something big that will affect a difference, we can really do
work. So another little video here to
introduce you to our model and
then Itechnical aspects.of the
Students in Chicago's most
challenges. Neighborhoods with high crime
rates, single parent households,
Statistics are grim regarding grades and performance.
Truancy, violent misconduct,
survival. g>> My mom and my dad went to,
this school, and I wanted to
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.
kids that wanted to fight and the reason why they fought were
they didn't even have a good
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
hurdles, are provided with facing social and emotional
It's one thing to read about opportunities to succeed.
read about the plight of schools poverty and it's one thing to
to read about gangs. in New York or Chicago or LA or
a part of it actually really To actually go in and see and be
the work that we do. puts a sense of urgency behind
improved. >>Teachers receive extensiveis
training that includes three
development instruction with emphasis on classroom
management, building
raising expectations. r>> The turnaround team and the
support that they give to me
eyes because I think that we, as helped, first of all, open my
with a different mindset. prinSo it helped me to putable
structures and processes in place.
It helped me to look at things
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
Turnaround is a comprehensive approach that looks at the
school as a holistic organism,
and climate to teaching and learning, community and parent
engagement. The ultimate mission of
turnaround is to comprehensively
into a high performing school cwithout moving the students.l
It's the adults and the programs
Athletic programs are reenergized to create incentives
for students while improving
When you try and get kids to attendance, behavior and grades.
morning, you have to give them school on time so early in the
something to do to keep them some type of incentive or
So we have the morning going and keep them coming.
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
Zero, the staff spends much of turnaround year, known as Phase
understand new and more rigorous their time helping students
Teachers, administrators and all behavior and academic standards.
share data. stThey celebrate successes andnd
develop action plans for areas
problems. >> The curriculum of the school
or just the teaching has
There's a lot of support for changed.
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
of students and enforces strict chrondiscipline policies.roups
They're angry because of
It's not the school that made certaithem angry. home.
They were angry before they even
So we're trying to keep the battle with us winning and
helping the kids at the same
So they know that things like attendance and being to school
on time and making it to class
So we keep the halls, we do hall on time.
big on a lot of those things sweeps and turnaround was really
order. because it keeps the building in
turnaround, serious misconduct >> During the first year of
increases, there's a jump in drops dramatically, attendance
freshmen on track to graduate PSAEgrows incrementally. of
The first year of turnaround
stabilization, culture and focuses on primarily on school
Parents and members of the climate, and family engagement.
engaged as a vital component of cthe turnaround process.nd
Higher gains and test scores are
and three. expected in turnaround years two
take five to six years to Realisticacomplete.around will
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
able to work and still complete, of the individuals that to be
complete the assignments and because it is a lot of work, and
Moving forward, a challenge tis to remain committed for the
long haul for these schools and for the kids and families in
these schools.
than they were when they walked >> I want in the door.be better
When they leave after four
better product than what walked years, hoin the door.reated a
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
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
become the valued citizens they communitaspire to be.hat they
I feel like everybody comes together and it's like a family
in here.
every day. I be happy to come to school
someone actually cares about you >> It's nice to know that
I have somewhere else to go to who's not at home.
learn. where I can feel safe and still
actually fail at this school is >> if they just don't try.can
I really, I like it now and I'm proud to say I graduated
from here.
So that was our propaganda
[LAUGHTER] video.
quite that smooth when you're doing the work.
Just to be totally transparent
But I wanted to walk you there.
hear it from staff and students. through, I also wanted you to
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.
working with here is that of a You can see the image that I'm
house. building or building blocks of a
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
the next layer of the house community parthere.gagement are
And again, I'll get into that in
Climate and culture and community resources next.
And then teaching and learning
those things. So then moving more into human
capital, but let me back up and give you one more piece of
history.
Arne and Barbara said yes, one So after that panicky call when
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
we are not going to be this piece of paper and we said
in the past or what's there now, constrained by what's been done
for the kids who are going there let's totally create a school
So we did a lot of kind of and let's just free ourselves.
different roles. org chart things, we created
of traditionally trained school For examplcounselors. hire a lot
We tend to hire social workers
backgrounds. with trauma informed care
coordinator of logistics and We created a position called the
all logistical functions come out of the counseling center and
come out of a lot of other
who are supposed to be doing kid places where there are people
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.
recruitment and hiring of the right people which I don't know
if the districts you're familiar
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
not built for this turnaround the organizatwork.ecause it was
We also believe strongly that you have to grow people.
So when you have a brand new
put a good amount of time in the staff especially, you've got to
training them in the turnaround summer to getwork.them ready and
And then you have to have this
If you choose turnaround, you're be ongoing.
our case about 140-150, new positions in a period of three
months, and then train them up
So you have three months to do a and have them ready to go.
You end up with about 3,000 applicants if you do it right.
We contract with the New Teacher
Rhee's organization, to do Project, which is Michelle
to do initial screening, and national recruiting for us and
not even fairly, it's a pretty then we have a fairly extensive,
interview with six different extensive three-hour group
If you make it out of that modules in it.
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
A family community interview. If you make it through all that,
then we do a reference check and
So it's a fairly extensive then we make you an offer.
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
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.
that. So School stabilization.out
These buildings are very, very
Everything is broken. So we walk into these buildings
and there's no difference when
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
There's a whole operations product.
kind of a checklist, a rubric. manual with training programs,
hallways there are the result of So what you saw with Harper's
Progressive discipline. We see deans and administrators.
just making the discipline
So chewing gum could either get you suspended or it could get
you nothing.
pieces. Another one of my favorite but
very tragic examples is the seniors who, once we do their
transcript analysis in Phase
of world language left Zero, have two years
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.
entered. Summer grades that weren't
Attendance processes that don't work that either lead to way
over-reporting attendance or not
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
So school stabilization is a set functions are broken.
to fix all the basics. of strategies, products, efforts
involving parents and decision Community and parent engagement
We have a bit of a controversial making.
trying to get better at in that we're doing a lot more proactive
work out in communities before
discussed. the turnaround decision is even
it's kind of been the board makes the decision and then we
have to kind of react.
proactive. We're trying to be a lot more
decision, we start monthly focus But once the board does make the
key community groups, community gagencies to figure out who's
concerned about the school, who'd like to weigh in on
decisions, engaging parents in
discipline tolerances of the what's your vision for the
When you walk in what do you school.
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]
of the place out if an F-bomb We'gets you suspended.ters
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.
decision making and institutionalizing those things.
While the school stabilization
the consistent discipline consequences, the culture andf
climate block is about making sure that the school is warm and
healing.
turnaround school, you'll see what we call splash all over the
walls advertising incentives for
most improved interim assessment attendance and honor roll and
motivation in kind of a warm scores, just trying to create
We do tier two research-based practices such as CBITS and
Think First which are anger control groups and trauma
recovery groups.
mentioned in the video that analyzes each case and decides
where to route students as part of the behavioral health
program.
that last one there. Another very important factor is
training in the well managed So we do an extensive amount of
So obviously discipline, schools program.
schools, a big issue, a huge behavior is an issue in these
It was important to us when we issue.
that every single adult respond to behavior in a consistentn
fashion and using the same
punitive way but in a way that language and to do so not in a
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
And so this looks for those people and engages them and
finds structure in consistent ways for partnerships.
Teaching and learning, it is the
impossible without the other most important but it is
Standards aligned, we use interim assessments that are
tied to the state tests.
computer adaptive assessments, Ultimately we would like to use
high school level. but we aren't there yet on the
so we use the Scantron We are on the elementary level
adapting to the last answer that Performance Series which is
you a much finer tuned sense of the where the student is at.ving
But most high schools, certainly
interim or periodic assessments. these schools, weren't using
based unit design. We train teachers in standards
fact, another thing we do in Another interesting but tragic
all of the student's reading Phase Zero on entry is assess
And it's been on average about a levels.
high school. 6th grade reading level for the
amount of students in the third, Which means you have a fair
So rather than crying about that fourth, fifth grade levels.
implement the heck out of it. We could bring in another one
but we found some success in
And we take any student who reads below sixth grade and put
them in an intensive reading
We also have common planning program and get them caught up.
the school day, and then a time by department built into
So one discussion of what I wconsider kind of the vertical.
integration about courses and course teams and the curriculum,
and the other is a student
grade level pods. fAnd I know I've only got ae
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
found unopened packages of into some of these schools, we
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.
So we have a very tight what we Itcall performance managements.
system, this slide calls it focus and alignment.
This was designed for a different audience.
But performance system which
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
table, and we talk about both tfidelity metrics and student
outcome metrics.
environment where it's not bad And we try to create an
It is bad to not have a plan but that something's going poorly.
management framework. tWe talked a little bit aboute
this, about time, about the Jell-O theory of school reform.
Trying to get your board and
six-year commitment is quite a your district to make a four- to
Battling it out with the budget office every year, feeling like
haven't we had this conversation
this is a four- to six-year for the lacommitment.scal years,
You cannot reduce the amount of investment that goes to Harper
High School.
every single year to ensure that So just fighting those battles
commitment. You can kind of see the phases
and how the investment goes up
I know I'm rushing through it. and then tapers back down.
reinforces what I talked about This just kind of visually
the model is focused on and earlier abouwhen.ch aspect of
And these phases aren't necessarily tied to the years.
They're more tied to certain
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
hierarchy-esque sort of way of kind of a Maslow's
I'm speeding along because I looking at the model.
Results. know I am at my limit.
doing really well on the left. So our elementary schools are
district's areas by value added. The top graph rank orders the
far left far outranks even the You can see that our area on the
And what I always tell my people second place finisher.
it's like a rubber band. is you have to do that because
this low, low spot by always You got to pull the kids out of
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.
numbers, the school that was Harper, these are Harper's
double its PSAE. featured in the video, did
3%-ish to almost 6%-ish, but it Nowwas still a move when theyout
hadn't had a move in about a
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
So nearly all of our energy is is not looking so good.
particularly in Harper. Fenger, you may recognize the
name of this school.
Albert was beat to death about This is the school where Derrion
It kind of hit CNN right when the president was flying to
Cologne to promote the Olympics.
make, when something like that That's another point I would
these schools down. happYou wouldn't believe thebeat
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
backs thing. that's part of the political
saw Hoop Dreams, that's Marshall isMarshall.one, if you
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
the capability to scale by office, making sure that we have
and products and plans in having scalable fashion.entions
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]
here of Professor Allan Odden Wefrom the Ed Leadership andl
Policy Analysis Department. We have the director of the
UW Institute for Research and Poverty, Timothy Smeeding, and
our deputy state superintendent,
Now I've probably moderated enough panels to know if I don't
tell them something, they're
what they want to say. going to tell me and tell you
little bit. So >> We might do it anyway.n a
Yeah, you might do it anyway, but at least I'll give you a
little bit of a structure.
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.
that way is because our tendency And I reason I'm phrasing it
working in schools is to have a aslot of stuff we want to talke
about, have that all in the newspaper and have the
electorate and the citizen's
So I want you to just think about if money's not the object
here, if the resources are not
that you would want to do to the object, what's the one thing
it around? transform a high school or turn
we all should be really, really >> Let proud of Donald.ng that
Not many people go through a
a tough city, in a successful unihigh school and becomes a in
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've studied school improvement Istrategies and I've got a book
10 Strategies to Improve Student
across urban, rural and suburban Learning and they're similar
I've looked at the finance side and a lot of what districts and
schools do to dramatically
implicitly talked about this, imwas to reallocate resources.d
Another piece of the strategy is
No excuses. They're in a tough environment.
No excuses, we heard no excuses about whatever, they're going to
do it.
to mention and that I will But the one point that was going
which is human capital, talent. mCan you imagine Bret Bieleman
trying to do what he's doing now
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.
And what we sort of like in education is the stories of the
districts that start with pretty
So the story of Montgomery good talent.
Washington, DC, which began their trek by really do well by
low income minority students who
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
Whereas places like Washington, IDC, and Chicago and New York.
City and Atlanta had a real talent problem to begin with.
They had low quality, they had
principals. Basically, they had a very low
quality talent pool of teachers and principals.
So if we look at what they did
question you can say is how do and what they need to do, the
Well, they begin doing some recruiting in some universities.
So Chicago began recruiting at
Northwestern, they didn't used UW Madison, Michigan,
But their primary strategies to recruit there.
organizations outside of have been to work with
So Donald mentioned it. What they do is they work with
the New Teacher Project.
recruits early career changes Afrom law firms, financialt
services, organizations that
majors in math, science, have all kinds of people with
areas. statistics, kind of the shortage
America. They work with Teach for
in the country, UW Madison can, Ybut you can't recruit Harvardt
people to Chicago until they've earned their bachelor's degree
or Princeton, Yale, even
colleges. And so a major piece of the
strategy of getting talent in these urban school districts,
this is getting it in at the
nontraditional sources which is fcontroversial 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
keep are those who are effective talent pool the only people they
And Donald had a piece in there, in the classroom.
they're going to evaluate people I don't know if you saw it,
impact on student learning, inwhich is controversial.ir
Then the next piece is what do
talent that's there, or people you do about all the experienced
ineffective, many of whom are who arineffective?t are
You have to do the same thing.
development program that gives You start a major professional
Then you have to institute the everybody the chance.
You keep those are who effective same evaluation system.
who are not. and you have to move out those
building a human capital All of these strategies for
going to end by saying, highly foundation are highly, I'm just
community, and most of us in the contested in the education
against what those places are educationtrying to do.e railing
But when you look at what they
school districts, which have do in Chicago and many urban
schools that produce the most of the 1,000 or 2,000
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
we started late so medium. minutes, well actually
I'm not an educator, other [LAUGHTER]
and a professor. than being an educator
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
you can see from Don, that the real problem is because, as
everything. But I will talk to you about a
school. Our Wisconsin Idea tour, two
years ago when I came here, took
in Milwaukee. Now South Division, immediatelyl
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
the worst school. aThis is not the worst school.t
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
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
huge guys with him and they knew leader, and he had four guys,
inside and outside of that everything that was going on
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.
You couldn't take your cell Kidsphone to class.ime.
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.
I said it's May, who's going to He said I'follow you?in August.
We don't know, they'll pick somebody and send somebody down
in August.
what you're trying to achieve Whhere, doesn't know anythingut
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
issues a lovely young woman, learned, including some of the
around and her biggest problem, Afshe said, was first of alls
figuring out how to take books
Then she figured they let her do home.
And the second thing was that finally.
didn't think she should study. fighting her family because they
They thought that you're a chump They thought this was bologna.
academically. She was going to Sunny Parkside.
The other woman who led us
she came here. around was the valedictorian and
whole high school that was She was the only student in this
university school in her state. coming toOne. flagship
O-N-E.
that you talked about I think, So we need all the same things
control to back up the ability and especially centralized
it. to make So I shudder. stick to
I'm torn between going back to
going on now versus what was the school and seeing what's
You must all know that the going on then.
a disaster we can't race to the Mitop, we can't race anywhere.h
Schools in receivership, it's just a really tough situation
and you need somebody like Don
call -- and try and make a to come in with what I would
But what I'd like to talk about next, not now, next time around,
is about the tough odds.
the families and the Improving the odds by improving
not just in teachers, but of neighborhoods and the quality,
parent relationships and so pforth so that when people comed
to school more of them are
them in this environment and you prepared to learn and you put
Thank you. hope they'll thrive.
If that was medium, I'll go >> Weshort.anks.
First of all, Don, I do have a
you're doing in the Chicago deep public schools.r what
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
Heidi Ramirez and that's what superintendthey have. Watts and
They're working night and day,
gave about the turnaround schools are what's happening inn
Milwaukee and they're already showing some attendance rates.
They've got a long way to go but
And if you go down there and they have this hope.
what's going on in the Milwaukee visit you'll have hope with
guarantee you that. And I just want to think about
something as we're talking about
was it 2,000 high schools where hall the dropouts come from.t
I just want you to think about
Is that the cause or the something.
Because kids coming into high school reading at the fourth
grade level is not a high school
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
It doesn't happen in high school, it happens before.
And I agree with all the
a high school to continue that strategies that need to go on in
We're sending kids there that are that far behind, the problem
is not at the high school and we
Now, I'm going to go right to alyour question, Gloria, aboute.
what we would do if we could
all the money in the world to do only do one thing and you had
because there's not one thing. it and I'd say keep your money
But if you pushed me I would We can't simplify this.
really good principal. take the money and I'd hire a
My background, I guess, I run the Institute for Research on
Poverty, and we believe in the
Wisconsin poverty report we do Wisconsin Idea and so we have a
we do. each year, that's one thing that
look within Milwaukee County, Ajust within the county, oneu
county now, we're not talking about the rich counties on the
outside, in the county child
and Brown Deer and all these poverty rate in Whitefish Bay
Milwaukee 50%. other places 2%, central city of
We try and help the state. Within the same county.
Magnuson, who's incredibly One of my colleagues, Katherine
early childhood educator, just completed for Tony Earl,n
Mike's boss, and for Reggie...
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.
series on insecurity instability And I have a Thursday seminar
people here to work with WCER in educatand others.ill bring
So from all of that what I
problems are big. First problem is parenting.
The hardest thing to admit is that not all parents are well
qualified.
talk is I say is there anybody Now the way I usually start this
forget from the birth, from when in this room who didn't think,
okay, the conception of your you knew your child was coming,
going to college? Raise your hand if you're one of
those.
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
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
pulled up, they don't have a and they don't have their rears
can't pay child support. job, if you don't have a job you
your car broke down and then You're losing your job because
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.
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.
that, and if you ask me what's So I think we need to start with
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
A third of the kids in this country come from mothers and
fathers, mainly mothers, who
The median age of first birth is dropped out of school.
Then they go on and have three 19 years of age.
In other words, they pull up the kids.
High school only, including GED, birth rate dramatically.
more than two kids. firsYou go down to collegetle
graduates, first kid at 28 or 29.
Two college graduate parents who
you're supposed to do. have done all of the stuff that
schooling, they found a job, In other words they, completed
made a plan. they found a partner and they
The difference here is you had a Then they had a kid.
you didn't have a partner, you kid, you didn't finish school,
you never had a plan. donAnd so this makes the oddsand
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
things later, but I'd like to chilgive you better odds.ther
I think that's all I'm trying to
I agree with Mike that you're dealt a deck that's really hard
to win a poker game with and
It should be incumbent in the rest of us to provide you with
better material to work with in some sense.
Thank you.
going to ask Don if he wants to respond to anything that he'sm
heard.
need to do a lot more regardless >> That said, I think that we
We've really screwed a lot of of stuff up as the field ofor.
education, and I think there
schools, where I will feel will come a time, even in my own
running on all cylinders and comfortable saying we are
can turn and start criticizing everything is doing great, now I
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.
people's questions. >> Okay, so at this point I'm
happy to entertain questions
It can be directed to Don or from the audience.
I'll start here and then Doug. anybody on the panel.
don't believe that kids are born >> Hi, I just want to say that I
I don't believe that. with th[APPLAUSE]rents.
And I think that some kids
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
for the kids in their family, aeven if the kids were born inso
this country because even if the
work at an early age to provide kto the family or stay at hometo
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
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
but when we talk about they really care about the kids,
sorry, they broke the law, immigration it's like oh, I'm
be deported. they came here and they should
know, anyone who would like to So my question is for, I don't
consideration this immigration answer, how we can take into
into all of this vision because when that student doesn't have a
social security number, that's
make sense for him or her to student knows that it doesn't
school and then college if that student is not going to be ableh
to find a job in that field later on.
So someone on the panel want
Love to respond. to respond?
immigration. I agree with you about
led a group around and they were We had another young lady who
She ranked about fifth in all wDivision High School.back.
She's a Latino. Her mother was making her go
back to Mexico and not go to
She had to go home. That was it.
That was what she was supposed
And it was heartbreaking the way to do and so forth.
was trying to work on the mother that the teachers and the school
This kid needs to go to college. to let her go to college.
So I'd like to change that. This school, South Division, is
an immigrant school.
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
75% of the guys under age 30 in this country are fathers.
Less than half of them live with
The chances of an, if you take their own kids.
the chances that an unmarried woman and an unmarried man have
a biological child together, the
other will have a child with chances that one parent or the
So if you're not there you can't another partner are 65%.
I know there's a lot of well help.
fight the odds and are having a meatough time and we need tog 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 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
So you mentioned this phasing out after four to six years.
What do you have in mind for the
The second question is, so you long-term?
and you mentioned the field of went through the program here
things up, and I totally agree, but I'm wondering whether youf
have practical advice for us, so
looking back on what you did, yowhat would you see as thingsm,
that we could do better to
I don't know if you want to createdo that. you?
[LAUGHTER]
So the first one was about the No, thank you for the question.
The simple answer, I don't know. kind of long haul.
so as Harper enters into Harper is our trail-blazer and
it. soI'm trying to get better atlve
staying ahead of that.
results really bugged me and so almost all my energy is on that.
But then I think in another year
thinking about what that or so I'll be able to start
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
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
debate without graduating undergraduates who don't have ad
clue how to help kids learn the skills and the standards, that
would be really cool because I
undergraduate in the college am having to train every single
do backwards design and standards-based unit, and I know
those things need to be debated.
are classist issues, there are There are racial issues, there
standardized tests, but can we learning style issues with
undergraduate teacher education juon that and 75% on how toin
actually do the craft to raise
there blindly thinking test tscores are the only way onen
learns. Do you kind of get what I'm
trying to say?
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
teach the students how to do and contrast and you have to
And they look at me like I'm a this.
to deconstruct the standards literature teacher who knows how
I don't need that. movement.
have that initially. That's great but I just can't
critical. So >> We taught you to.ry
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
building skills on the part of little bit more practical skill
I've been told that we have teto vacate the room.s.
I thought we actually could stay.
But I've also been told that the
ask you, first of all, to thank the panel, and then we're goingo
to try to migrate over to the commons so we can still ask
those questions.
[APPLAUSE]