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tv   U.S. Senate  CSPAN  August 21, 2009 9:00am-12:00pm EDT

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talking to us about learning progressions and phil was there. i think the conversation was a really good one as we start to think about what are the grade spans or grade clusters look like? is it individual grades? well, kids don't develop in need little grades. maybe they are 1 to 2, 2 to 3. i don't know the answer to that question. ..
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the council of great city schools, its nea, the aft, a number of groups representing practitioners to get their input as well and it's all been very, very helpful for our work teams apps they've gone back for a second version of the college and readiness career standards. that second verse will come out in september and we hope to get an equally robust amount of feedback on that. and we're going to leave that document somewhat open until the that as things progress on the k-12 side, we might have opportunities to relook at that, so that's kind of the overview,
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where we've been and where we're going. i'm going to let ilene talk about the what the pro sets looks like -- process looks like and then we want open it up and get your feedback and engage you in the process and the work that we're doing. ilene? >> thanks, scott. i apologize for my late arrival. when i got to the train station, they told me my train was cancelled, so i had to take a later train, so i apologize for showing up late. i just want to start off where scott left this conversation, which is what is the process for developing these standards? and in terms of timing as he mentioned, our official public draft as opposed to the least public draft, will be out mid september. there will be a 30-day comment period. so that's an opportunity for anyone and everyone to give us
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their senseúof what they think we missed, what they like, what other evidence we should be examining in order to bolster these college and career readiness standards. i also hope that that provides an opportunity within states, within groups of educators, within districts, to really take a look at those documents to say, is this the set of standards we really do hope that students have mastered once they exit high school? and certainly we would wish that many students will go even beyond to, but if students have accomplished this set of knowledge and skills, will they be ready to be successful in any kind of post secondary education and on a path to a successful career.
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standards, once we have then reviewed the feedback, we will then begin our work on -- we'll then have one more round, perhaps two, depending on the level of comments, we will then begin our work as scott mentioned on the k-12 standards with an aim of having those developed for a first public draft to be released in december. so let me back up and talk a little bit about who's at the table and what sort of process we're using. we've tried to build many checks and balances into this approach. so in designing the college and career readiness standards, we tapped three groups that have what we think is the best research base and a lot of experience in doing this work. and that is, a.c.t., achieve and the college board. so they had individuals represented on that very first
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standards development work group. we've also identified a pretty long list of expert feedback reviewers, so as the standards development work group has been putting drafts together, they have sent those to these experts for pretty quick turn-around feedback. in addition, as scott referenced, we have shared these documents in their development stages with state education agencies, with governor's offices, and a number of national and content organizations who we thought could provide some very rich initial feedback and continuous feedback as we do our work, so, for example, we have been having conversations with the national council of teachers of english, the national council of teachers of mathematics, the nea, the aft, the council of great city schools, which in fact brought together a pretty big group of
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about 20, 25 superintendents and other leaders within districts to provide us feedback. so we have been incorporating that as we go along. we also have been working on some of the communications aspect of this as well. and so we have a national forum on common core state standards, and many, many groups, many acronyms you would know are represented as part of this national forum, and we have had both some face-to-face meetings with these groups as well as just e-mail communications to say, this is what's happening, what are your thoughts, here's what's coming, because a lot of their members are key to making this work successful. and then finally, but quite importantly, we have an expert validation committee. and the role of this validation
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committee will be to validate not only the content of the standards, so these are the folks who are going to look at that evidence base and look at the final standards and say, do these seem right? but they will also be validating the process and ultimately state adoption of the standards. now, we have not named the validation committee yet, the invitations are out to those potential committee members at the moment and the way that we identified those folks was we asked states, we asked a lot of the members of our national forum, to nominate people to that committee and then we had a group of six leadership governors from the national governors association and sixth executive board members from the council of chief state school officers, they reviewed the
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list, they decided who should be invited to be part of this validation committee. so we will be announcing that soon, but right now, they are getting their invitations and deciding if they want to take on this important task. so that's the process. one thing i want to make sure to underscore here is scott and i have been focused in our presentation on the standards and the development of the standards and getting the standards right, and that's important and that's necessary, we want to have the right targets and expectations, but we also recognize that even if we have the most perfect standards document in the world, that is just the start. the real challenge is in the implementation of the standards. do the teachers have the instructional strategies that will help kids get to these standards. do they have the supports that they need? do they have the resources that
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they need? are we training our teachers to help them be successful in teaching students to these standards? are our assessments keyed right? are we in fact sending the right messages with our assess opinions about what's expected and do we actually have a system of assessments that helps gives us good information along the way and not just at end points about where students and the teaching and learning is doing quite well and where it falls short and how we need to improve. do we have the instructional materials that are going to be helpful in this effort. so i want to acknowledge that there are a lot of implementation questions, there are a lot of instruction questions that surround this and we are beginning to have many of those conversations with a number groups we've mentioned, plus others, you know, for
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example, we've had meetings with some of the publishers. we've had conversations with folks about how do you use open source to help support some of this work. so we're trying to be at this point, as expansive and as creative as possible about what do we need to do in order to make this effort, not just the writing of the standards, but helping kids meet the standards successful. so i'm going to end there and scott and i are happy to take questions as well as thoughts. and actually, one other thing i do want to mention, because i think this might come up, is scott referenced, we had 46 states sign the memorandum of agreement. and that agreement was to participate in the process, and to seriously consider adoption of the standards. obviously, the states have not adopted the standards yet, they haven't seen the standards yet, so the conversation based on both the -- what sort of
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structure we have in each state, who has to approve the adoption of the standards, that's going to look different in each state, and that is going to be an important conversation in each state as we get to, once we have the final standards, if they want to adopt and what are some of the particular considerations to each state context. so now i really will conclude my remarks, and we're happy to take any questions or thoughts that you have. sure. >> i just wanted to say -- [inaudible] >> do you want to take that one or -- >> judy, when you say philosophy, can you help me out with -- our own internal philosophy. [inaudible] >> fewer, clearer, higher, we is our mantra. >> so i think the fewer, clearer
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higher -- we spent a lot of time and you all know, mile wide and an inch deep. there is so much -- i took my middle school, my newly minted middle school student to orientation yesterday for the first time. and i was overwhelmed, i had forgotten, it's been a long time since i've been if a middle school as a student, i had nor gotten what we do to kids at the middle level, about how much stuff we compact at the middle grade. there is an immense amount of curriculum that's taught k-12, but certainly, we start getting into 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, we packed a lot in there. one of the things that we've talked about, and i think our standards have been very clear, we said that fewer, clearer and higher, the parents needed to be able to understand what their students were expected, that students could actually not only
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articulate what was in the standards, but also be responsible for their own self-directed learning, that it was -- those standards should be able to be communicated to policymakers about what was essential for students to know about -- in order to be ready for college or career and the thing that has led us in the higher, clearer and fewer, we said to state would ever have a reduction in their current standards, that we needed to make these fewer, so teachers could actually teach the curriculum as opposed to having to race through and not really spend time going deep into the curriculum of what those standards really were, and then higher, clearer and fewer. clearer, so we could articulate what they were to parents and the general public. that kind of has led our work. if you've looked at the standards, they are very -- i think they're very clear. they are fewer. i think as we get into the specifics of the k-12, we'll see an expansion and more specifics at the individual grade levels.
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but we wanted to make sure that we were not only covering the essential content, but really getting deep and allowing teachers and administrators to really think about what was essential for students. i think, you know, one of the things that's interesting about you start thinking about the fewer aspect, is that it does allow teachers to think about much more robust and much more deep learning and knowledge that's built on a solid base. the thing about the standards, as fewer doesn't simply mean we've tossed out a bunch of stuff either. they really are evidence based. they stuck to the mantra that they have to be research and evidence based. when you look at what singapore does, you look at -- the first standard on the writing actually has six different countries, has a very similar standard and it's singapore, it's hong kong, it's taiwan. i mean, you can go down. it's a very robust set of
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standards. so we didn't just throw out things, that we didn't think were important. we focused on the essentials of college and work ready and that's really driven the philosophy behind what's in there and why. >> yes? >> first, i want to applaud your effort and your work. i never thought in my lifetime we would be at this point in terms of national standards, so i comment you for that. -- commend you for that. are you also planning on parallel working towards fat assessments, because we do know, as ilene, you said this is just the beginning, with you do foe that instruction drives assessment. so how hopeful are you that the states will adopt the national standards, understanding that they are going to have to then revise their state assessment to match the standard, which is a very expensive proposition, so
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i'm wondering if -- what is going to be the incentive for them to be able to do this, is the federal government supporting in terms of the development of these new assessments to match the standard? >> when we had the meeting if chicago with 37 states represented, one of the things that particularly the state superintendents emphasized -- we gave them draft memorandum of understanding, and they said, we don't see assessment in here. this is not going to be real unless assessments are linked to these standards and on their urging, we added to that memorandum of agreement the second phase of this work will be to develop a lined assessment, so i think that the state leaders recognize exactly what you're saying. in terms of support for this, we
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do have what arnie duncan announced, the $350 million for the development of a common assessment, so i think that begins the conversation. in a way with some resources on the table. we also know that if we develop a rich and robust system of assessments, it's going to cost more than that. so i think that is the start of a longer conversation. there are a number of states who have done some good work, for example, on formative assessment, we want to feed that into the conversation, but the intention, yes, is to make sure that we have a strong and really thoughtful set of assessments that are linked to these standards, so that we are sending messages to teachers, to kids, to school administrators, about here's what we think is important an we're measuring it. it. [inaudible] >> you know, the time line is conversations are beginning now.
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the time line is we're all looking at race to the top applications, we're all looking at, you know, what are the parameters around the $350 million. i don't want to give a specific time, because i think it's still up in the air, but i guess my vague answer will be sooner rather than later. but we also know that states and districts have cycles of assessment and development, research, so this is not something that can be done overnight, which is exactly why we need to start having these conversations rights now. >> just another clarification in terms of timing, the memorandum that the state signed does say that states will seriously consider adoption and that they would do so within three years. so one of the things that we wanted to -- we were trying to balance, we understand are all sorts of standards, developments and assessment cycles in states anwar want to be cognizant of
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that and respect that. on the other hand, we don't want to write the standards and have states dragging their feet for 10, 15 years before they really do adopt, so that's why we moved to that three year marker. [inaudible] >> and what would be the effect of some of those school districts across the country? >> we've had a lot of conversations with both the department as well as hill staff, keeping them well abreast of where we're at. i think the secretary was here yesterday, the secretary has been very supportive of this effort. hill staff and key members of the education committees have been extremely supportive. we went up on the hill, i think, i don't know, a couple weeks ago, before they went to recess and shared with a number of them, kind of where we're at. they are very supportive and looking for ways within
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reauthorization to include support of the common core, and figure out ways exactly to your point about ayp, what does it mean when you put a new set of he standards in. are we going to give states a window to adopt, will there be an ayp window, will ayp even matter if we go to a growth status and they go centric. i don't know the answer to that. i saw you kind of clap. i don't know what everybody else's opinion is, i think the department -- the hill especially is thinking that there's a growth model component that they need to start moving towards for everyone, so i think if you go if that direction, then the ayp question gets a little bit -- they'll obviously address it there, so i think there's a lot of conversations to be had, both if reauthorization as it relates to where the common core goes, where assessment goes, and how that plays into ayp and the rest of eaea, so i guess stay tuned is the short answer, but we've been very cognizant to make sure
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that they're in the loop, all the way along, so that we don't get blind sided and vice versa downstream when states start to adopt and move into the implementation phase of this work. >> time for more questions? >> yes. [inaudible] >> yes. and we have already been talking with a number of science groups. we want to get this right, but science and social studies are definitely on our radar and we've already begun some of this conversation. >> two questions. first, i know what's on your first group, your secondary group, but why would like the national school boards or any administrative groups like the asaa weren't part of the secondary group and were they
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part of the forums and will they ever been involved and secondly, is there any fears to move more towards federal entanglement, the amendment that says education is really the right of the state and the federal government? >> in response to your first question, i just condition mention them. the national state boards of education, aasa, the school board, the secondary school principals, there's a really long list and they have definitely been part of it. we understand that those are important constituent to be part of this conversation. we have had them on the national forum, and have shared -- we've shared some drafts, or shared drafts with some of those groups. and have gotten written feedback, not from all, but i know offhand, the secondary school principals we did, i
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don't think we got written comments from aasa, but we have shared drafts with them and sba, we have gotten written comments. in response to your question about state leadership for this work, we have tried to be very clear from the outset that this is a state led initiative. there is no federal money that is going into the development of the standards, there are no federal representatives sitting at any of the tables. we haven't asked them for feedback on the standards. this is truly a state-led initiative, and those are the 46 states on whose behalf we're doing this work. in fact, the secretary i think acknowledged this when he made his announcement about the 350 municipal dollars. he was pretty -- $350 million. he was pretty clear about saying this would not be something that is run by the federal government, we are putting the money on the table. but it would be for a consortium of states to do this work, so i
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represent the governors, scott represents the chiefs, we are in agreement with you that this needs to be a state led initiative. >> i'll add one other thing to that real quick, as part of the moa that the state signed, there is actually -- we were very clear to say this is a voluntary effort. at the end of the day with these standards come out, if state x and state y take a look at them and say sorry, we can't sign on, there's no penalty if you walk away. we hope nobody does that. we actually think that these will be significantly rigorous enough that states will look at them and say, ah, it's the right thing to do, but at the end of the day, if you decide this is not going to move the bar for us, then it is a voluntary effort and states are free to say it's been a nice ride but we're out of here. i hope that doesn't happen. i want to make that clear that we've been clear all along.
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voluntary, state led, and the federal money as it relates to the assessment i think is a nice bonus, it's a nice incentive for states to get involved and to adopt. so i understand how the co-mingling and the potential. one of the things we've also said is long term, we don't want this to be a one-shottest, but on the on the other hand, ccso and ggsa are not in the standards development game. i think this was an effort by our members. we've talked about what is a board or some kind of agency, public-private partnership look like that is the managing agent of this process long term outside of the federal government, but also outside of necessarily our two pe purviewso all of those things are up for conversation as we move, but clearly state led and state owned and voluntary i think is the issue. >> now this is a state led initiative and 46 states have signed on, what if you're one of
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the four states that have not, what opportunities will there be? >> that's a good opening, because it's now 47 states actually. we just got -- missouri just signed, and -- the others are interesting, but missouri just signed, primarily because they were in a transition between governor, board, and their chief state school officer. now that everybody is on board, missouri is on, so we actually have 47 statesúand three territories of 50. the other states who have not are south carolina, alaska, and texas. so in several of those states, two of those states, it's a political issue. in one, texas, it's really an issue of the board, and they didn't think that they could get the board to adopt, so i think there are -- there are issues in each state as to why they have hot ennot to. we've said all along, if you want to come in this thing
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downstream, if you take a look at the next version that's out or see the k-12 and say wee missed the boat, we want to get in, we'll let you in. to go farther, jim rex, who is the chief state school officer in south carolina, was actually one of the members who helped select our validation panel. there are opportunities for both at the policy level, and i at this even in the development phase for folks from those states who are not involved in the actual work, to be a part of the discussion of how this transpires. we hope at the end of the day, they'll take a look at the end of the day and say we want to be a part but we won't exclude them if they make that decision downstream. >> just in response to your question about how could we be involved, even if it isn't through the purview of the state, i think, you know, we have these documents out for public comment, an we certainly welcome comments and feedback from anyone. i think another route is through
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organizations that you may be a member of, providing feedback, if it's through aasa sa or great city schools. i think there are opportunities to weigh in and also get more information through some of those entities, if you aren't in a state that is participating in this fully at the moment. >> and ilene can't say it, but now that there's a new governor in alaska, pain that changes things too. i don't know. >> and i want to, you know, i want to thank phil as you can imagine, the work of the standards development groups has been tremendous. they have been working very hard, they've been reviewing mounds of feedback, and gearing up to review more, so i want to really just publicly thank phil for all the work and the leadership he's provided and if
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anybody has any particular detailed math questions, he's your guy. [applause] >> phil, i don't want to put you on the spot, but would you likee to say a few words about your involvement? for those of you who don't know, phil is the fellow at america's choice and has been involved in the development of standards for a very, very long time. >> it might be interesting to understand how evidence was used to construct the standards in mathematics, at least the ones i know, and it counts for ways in which these standards do look different from typical state standards. in the big picture, tim's warned us that we have a bad habit of having a curriculum that's a mile wide and an inch deep. act's curriculum survey that you heard a little bit about yesterday, was very useful, and
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i must say, act had more data and evidence that we could use than any other single source. they really do have a research base that's -- that i recommend to any state to use. but there, the college faculty were pretty clear, if you look at what they thought was important, they wanted deeper understanding and more robust proficiency with the fundamental ideas of advanced mathematics. they did not want -- they were clear about this too, coverage of loss of advanced topics. when they asked the high school teachers, this is what cindy referred to yesterday, high school teachers think the students want lots of advanced topics an they don't want deeper understanding and proficiency of the fundamental ideas.
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so this is consistent with what we saw from tim. when you look at the actual standards from places like singapore and so on, you see it there too. less topics, more depth. when you look at the actual books, fewer pages than days of instruction. there's no textbook if any those asian countries that has much more than 150 or 160 pages for a year. and a lot of them, 120 pages. we have what, 900 pages. so there's the same message, no matter where you look, you see the same message. when you look at state standards, compare those to singapore standards, for example, our state standards have far more in them. and so one of the things, when the states are looking at it, they have to get used to what fewer means. fewer means more focus and more depth. so how did we get our focus? one of the things that would
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happen is we would come upon a topic, see all 50 states had it in their standards, then we'd look at the data, the achievement data and we'd see less than 20% of the kids in the country are learning it. so something is wrong. all the states are teaching it, but hardly any kids are learning it. then when we saw that, we said, this better be important, because we have to spend more time on it. if it's important. which means we have to cut something else out. so then we started looking, how important is it to college faculty? if they said it wasn't important, then that really became a strong candidate to come out. because it wasn't working and people said it wasn't important. maybe we should teach it later. and then we looked very much at not just hey, we weren't just cutting things out, we were looking for the coherence and
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the evidence helped us get that coherence, it was important for -- sometimes things are in there, because they're mathematically essential for the coherence, but all in all, this is a different process than what you typically go through to get state standards. and i really want to compliment the governors and the chiefs for setting up a process that was not political. we weren't trying to get agreement. we were trying to design something that worked for teachers and they made it very clear what our mission was. it wasn't to come out -- the assignment could have been, can you come out with a set of standards that's kind of the consensus standards of what states already have? in other words, a grand celebration of the status quo. they didn't say that. they said it's time to take the next step, states are ready to take the next step, we want this state-led effort to define what the next step is and that's what these standards are, so states
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are expecting to see a validation of what they've already done, but that's not what they're seeing and i miss compliment the states that they took this at its face value and they understood what was going on and for the most part had been very positive. so the working conditions we had, aside from the time lin ile said that is true conversations are beginning and the way these guys work, that means they want to be done by christmas. these are short time lines. >> >> i was just going to say, we spent time yesterday in here talking about price that our kids and our country are paying in the achievement gap between the united states and other countries and i would just likee to say that you guys are fabulous to be leading this effort. the governors and the chiefs, to be leading this effort, to give
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our kids the same opportunities as other kids around the world and i just tremendously want to applaud you for all of this effort. >> thank you, ken turner from colorado. i'd also like to build on this idea and convey congratulations from colorado for the work that's being done. the idea that we're working in a systemic way with many moving parts at one and it build on the point keeping in mind the assessment end of it and if the end game is to actually move the needle on the things we care most about, which is to say, how do we compare internationally, then some attention to how ayp will be reformulated, will drive an awful lot of activity. what's the grain size, are we down to individual students, is it growth that matter, if so, is it at what increment and these are huge questions that -- i mean, i know you deeply understand this and we
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appreciate the thoughtfulness, it's just an atta boy is what i'm offering. >> just to underscore that. we've already begun some conversations with the national assessment governing board that remembers to ask some questions about, well, what will this effort mean for nape in the future, are there ways to embed international bench marks into nape, some new hey zestments, so we don't have the answers yet, but i think we're getting really good at a lot of the questions and some of these points that you made about, what are we measuring, how are we measuring, are we able to see how not only states are doing internationally or the country on average, but can we get a preliminary deeper into that -- little deeper into that information, so i think these are really tough but important questions and if we can use a lot of this to leverage teaching and learning, and giving more kids opportunities to be globally
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competitive, we're going to be much better shape and we owe it to the kids to do this work and take on this challenge. >> i don't want this to be a mutual admiration society, but ken, your crew in colorado and orrery view helped us immensely in getting some of the discussions about assessment on the table, so thank you. ilene mentioned it briefly, one of the things we said is assessment is the key piece. the other pieces i don't know if we talked about, we also said in our moa with the states, the work that we do not only immediate to new forms of assessment but new forms of teacher training and development and curriculum design because without those two pieces, i mean, i think ilene did say, we can create the greatest standards in the word and align it to a terrific assessment that tells a lot, but if we don't have the resources on the ground with the curriculum and the teachers that translates the standards, then we missed another huge opportunity. so i think that's the other piece that we're longer term
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thinking about. where all the alignment pieces come together, but again, thank you for your work. >> thank you number one for being here, but i think you set some of the context in the room also of where the chiefs, four or five years ago, when this conversation surfaced with the chiefs, i mean, it was -- i'm going to talk a little internal, it was knocked down, dragout, folks, so to have this evolve to where it is today, and to have 47 now states and the governors and the state chiefs sign on to this process is a clear indication of how much growing has taken place across this country, because this was a heated topic, as it first started, you know, four years ago. i mean, you could just kind of cut it down the room in terms of people who said no, we don't want any part of this. so it's really evolved into this really exciting stuff, really exciting work, but to have that many chiefs and the governors sign on that this is something we want to do, and again, it was strictly voluntary.
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if you don't like what you see at the end of the day, then you have an option out of this. but the bottom line here is i think just to set that context a little bit more in terms of how much this has really escalated in the last four plus years is just truly phenomenal and when we met in chicago and we saw the synergy in that room in terms of how soon can we do this and yes, phil, it is an extremely tight time line, to doubt about it, but all the states have to look at when they are going to do the frameworks, when they're going to do their adjustments. in arkansas, just a quick example. we had our english language arts on the docket to go through the revision this summer. we changed that just for this sole purpose and we put that on hold until this happened. and our teachers were very appreciative of that, because there was no reason for us to go through and do that again and have to come back a year and a half later, whatever, and do the whole scenario again, but i just want to kind of set a little bit
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of that context, but thank you guys for being here. >> can i ask one more question before you switch? are the act and s.a.t. tests on line to the standards you are looking at it and if not, then why? because that's the big deal. if we're looking at kids who are going to go to college, we want all of our kids to go to college, that test is fundamental for them. and then why can't we use that as a national test instead of continuing spending, spending, spending money and developing new things and not using the money for other things? >> well, as you know, the standards aren't complete yet, so you know, the level of alignment, we can't say. obviously the college board and act were at the table, they came with their data. certainly both organizations have learned a tremendous amount through administering those hey zestments over -- assessments over many years, so that feeds
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in to what are we setting as the college and career readiness bar. i think as you mentioned, that is certainly, as we open up the assessment conversation, i think that your question is one that is an important one to have on the table and discuss, you know, what is the assessments, how does it look, how can things that exist now be changed, modified, so i think that is an important consideration that we should -- and one other thing i do want to add is that i didn't mention, but some of the conversations we've been having are with some of the higher ed institutions, and something that is not working well now, for k-12 and post secondary education is when students go through their k-12 career, and they do find on the state -- they do fine on the state test and then they show up, at post secondary institution and need
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remediation, that's not giving them good information, it's not telling them truly how they're doing, if they want to go to college or two-year technical school, etc., so how can we send better signals to students and also, to teachers in the k-12 system about what is expected in order for kids to go without needing remediation, so that's something we understand needs to be a part of this discussion as well, so thank you for the question. >> and thank you, ilene and scott. thank you very much. this is just a very, very important topic today. you know, what stands out to me from this morning's discussion is that we're virtually all in this together. and to me, that says a whole lot. a lot of our questions this morning have been around the assessment part, and so that's a good segue to the next part of our discussion. we've asked charles barone, the
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director of federal policy for the democrats of education reform, if he will kind of talk to us about accountability systems and what might be in the wind as we move forward and again, the first part that we have to get done right is a clear understanding of what we want our kids to know and be able to do and then the companion question is how do we assess that. charles? >> thank you, pat. thank you all for being here. it's always great to see all the folks who are responsible for doing all the things that you know, policymakers expected them to do to be coming out and talking about this, so i want to leave time for questions, just
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to get some feedback from y'all. let me tell you a little bit about democrats for education reform. it's been up an running for about two years. we're new york-based. it was started by some folks in new york city, who were involved in school reform there. primarily charter schools. and they had run into some political obstacles in terms of expanding their charter schools or getting public school space and they saw that there were politics involved in this. and i'm probably going to talk more about politics than most people who have spoken here, but that wassest genesis of democrats for education reform. but as an organization, we're interested in a broader range of issues, teachers, assessments, standards, turning around struckling schools, data syste systems, so we're much broader
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now. let me just say, what i've done sort of the last 15 years, i started out as a direct service provider to special education children in a residential setting. i moved on and did some research. and then in 1993, i went to capitol hill and worked for senator paul simon, and that's where i became aware of pat harvey, and then i went on to work for congressman george miller, who is now the chair of the education committee, and don't throw anything, but i was his point person on no child left behind or as i've been calling it, the law that should not be named. bad brand now, so i'm pretty sure the name is going to be changed. and one thing that we loved about pat when i worked for senator paul simon, he was from illinois. pat was a principal in chicago
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at that time and we used to have people come in and say we can't do this with title one, we can't do that with title one and we'd say go talk to pat harvey, she's doing it, and so pat harvey was yes, we can. before it was even fashionable to be yes, we can, so it's so great that we reconnected around this. i'm going to try for candor today, just to get some discussion going. and y'all can react to that, but i've been doing this for a while. and so there's some political pit falls to all this, and i think nga and these folks are headed in the right direction. it's very encouraging to see everybody coming together around this stuff. we think and we've been saying this all year, that with race to the top, this is an historic opportunity to really do some things that people have been talking about for a long time.
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the feds just put out $95 billion to public schools, and a lot of cases, that just fills in budget holes. and in a lot of cases, it was necessary to do that. in others, you know, there was movement of money, maybe that didn't necessarily have to happen, but democrats for education reform, we kind of consider that the cost of doing business, and that the -- that was generally education, and we see the 4.35 billion or 4 billion, if you take away the $350 million that the department is going to use for assessments as driving systemic reform. and less so generally to education, because it's -- it's less than $100 per kid in the united states, and more to build systems of education that drive other things. and a lot of these things are not necessarily going to cost money. they just involve better use of
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money that's out there right now. i think the $4 billion, the way we see it, is that it's venture capital. it's a l voluntary program, and i think our answer to folks is, if they feel like this is going to compel them to do something they don't want to do, don't apply for the money. that's our answer to this. this is a competitive program, it is not supposed to go out via formula to states at whatever it would be, $90 per kid in the united states, and i think we even see title one a little bit that way. it was never meant to be generally to education like impact aid. it was meant to serve poor minority kids, lep kids, neglected kids, delinquent children, youth, so i think
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we're trying to reframe this a little bit to refocus it on the original program of title one that started in 1965. this is my third round with the assessment standards reform issue. when i came to the hill in 1993, it was a little bitelock it is now. everybody was talking about health care, i came as a fellow, and every fellow in my pool pretty much wanted to do health care and i had come from a setting where i was doing research and intervention in schools, and so i did education and that's when goals 2000 got up and running, and then president clinton's esea, which built on his 1989 charlottesville summit, which nga was very involved in and helped get going and it was really all the things that are in federal law now that people are very aware of, standards,
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assessments, ayp were all in that law. they got tightend to say the least in twat 2001, but they were all in there, but i will tell you, i was cleaning out my office, honestly, over the last weekend, not even looking for things for this presentation and i came across a "washington post" editorial, 1994, which was when goals 2000 and esea were passed and it was all about how this was going to be the time where we were going to set world class standards. and have aligned assessments. and it didn't turn out that way. i think it was a good start. probably politically, it was necessary to start there, and then build these efforts. all these things happened over time but i think that context is important to keep in mind and then in 2001, we heard similar
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things from the bush administration and people on the hill. the -- there was to way that we standards or fat assessments. those things -- national assessments. those things had been defeated before and the whole gist of everything was we were going to have the state tasks an naep and ncob about require every state to participate in naep. a now states didn't participate until then. we were going to have a collect. a lot of people aren't aware that these state tests have been rescaled to compare them with naep. so for me, this races to the top and with nga, it's the third time around and that's for me. there are been various efforts before that. so iagus think it's important to -- i just think it's important to get it right this time. let me just say a do you mean of things of what we think is important with regard to the common standards. we really think that they need
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to be vertical, meaning the way ilene talked about not only the standards, but the teaching to back it up. good assessments. i mean, that's another block we've been around a couple of times. esea right now, all the things people want in terms of assessments are in the law, that they be mostly measured, that they hey zest higher order skills, that they're not all multiple choice hand it hasn't happened and we could have a discussion about why it hasn't happened, is it the money or is it a political process, but just having those policies in place are not going to -- on paper, are not going to necessarily mean that they happen on the ground. you need the teaching, you need the assessments, you need the curriculum, you need the support for schools to turn around the money, including the $3 billion that secretary duncan and president obama put in race to
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the top. i think they're going to put guidance out on that next week. so look to all those thoings. -- things. t-higher standards as we are in common standards and let me give you an example. california has high standards. some of the highest in the country. delaware is somewhere in the middle. but if you look at black kids in t-and lep kids in delaware, they do better than the whole population of california on average. if you look at the averages for black kids, the averages for poor kids, and the averages for lep kids in delaware, they do better than the average for the entire state like california on naep, so we don't think that high is necessary, but it's not sufficient.
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if you look at delaware, they have the advantage of being a small state, so it's easy to coordinate. i think california should be broken up into maybe like 10 areas where they can do things locally, like delaware does, but delaware has a very integrated system. they're align like some of the people we're talking about here in terms of their curriculum and their teaching training and they've had some really good people there. we've talked deeper about rogue states, we agree with ilene, you know, somebody wants to break out of this effort, we're not going to be upset about it, even though we hope everybody does it. but if somebody else want to move quickly, that's fine with us. we think college entry, in terms of these common standards, absolutely necessary. united states like new jersey that has pretty high standards,
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but they have two separate high school exams, which drives the curriculum in the schools. if you take algebra in cam ben or jersey city, it's not the -- cam den, or jersey city, it's not the algebra they take elsewhere. there's a different set of standards that drives things. california same way. the state mandates that you take a particular set of courses in high school to get into college, it's called a through g, in some schools, there aren't enough classes for every kid to take them. they line up for them, they are closed out of them, and i mean, you can literally go to a high school where you are unable to complete the course work you need to get into csu or uc. so lest we line all this stuff up, it's not going to mean so much.
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we need to have the teachers in place and we need to have the curriculum in place and there needs to be open access for everybody, so that if we're going to close achievement gaps, we have to give everybody the same chance and an equal opportunity and that's what really we're about. all this stuff. i think we need to learn from past efforts to develop assessments. i think act is really committed to looking at this and trying to do things differently, but in the past, we've heard all this good rhetoric, but when it comes down to it, a lot of the vendors just sell people the same product they have on the shelf and they repackage it and that is a to stop and it was impressive that secretary duncan, when he spoke in north carolina at the hunt institute a couple months ago said i'm not here to subsidize the testing companies necessarily. i'm here to make sure kids have better assessments and if that makes them mad, that's ok with
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they. i like some of the open source talks that was here today. i wrote a paper in november and said maybe people can come up with items and they're part of an open source and then states can pick and coast what they want from that and have a common assessments that's built from that, but if they want to pick offer some pieces and have theirs being unique, that would be fine, so you would have like some overlap. state, common, and then some things maybe that they would want to do differently. let me talk about accountability a little bit. and try to wrap this up in five minutes from now. congressman miller was the primary driver of accountability, so again, don't throw things, but let me talk about what we think is important. one is comparability, and this is -- i'm not speaking for miller, i work for derf, there
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has to be this aggregation, an i don't agree with some people that say if you take out the federal role, that these things will necessarily happen. in 2000, before ncob was passed, only six states disaggregated their data for poor students. only seven states disaggregated their data for english learners. 11 states desaggregated by gender and ethnicity. one state ago getted for migrant students and one state that we know of actually had a goal to close achievement gaps and that was texas and that's how bush got some leverage. congressman miller was talking about it before he was even candidate. so i don't think that necessarily you can set earth standards and then expect that
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the political pressures will work out such that you can narrow achievement gaps. i know that we were lobbied by california, the state that had a lot of interaction with working for miller, they had a system where the expectations for poor minority children were 80% of what they were for everybody else. i don't mean a growth model where they started to measure growth. i mean that they had one target for everybody and the target they had for poor minority children was literally defined as 80% of the population and they tried to lobby us to accept their structure under nclb and we said no, so i don't think these things are necessarily going to work out. i think you need time lines. we can argue about what they're going to be, but i think you need to have a time line, because there were no time lines before, and on things like graduation rates, where you don't have an issue about dumbing down, you don't have an
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accountability issue, where schools are going to be sanctioned, very few states have any kind of time line for graduation that's ambitious or that involves closing achievement gaps, so i don't accept the argument that because you have ayp, that's necessarily only thing that's driving down standards, or that if you lifted the standards and said everybody figure out how fast you want to get there, that there would be a time line because we don't have that with graduation rates and it's a very different situation than tests. the measures have to be statewide, so you can compare a kid in, you know, concord, california, with concord, massachusetts, or you know, camden, new jersey, with camden, maine. :
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>> i think everybody who has looked at the accountability system knows that it is not. that's the rhetorical goal, but the safe harbor provision and nclb it is mathematically impossible to ever have your amo's, your annual management objectives need 100%. you have to reduce this number of students were not proficient by 10%. so if you're at 40%, and this is for subgroup school level, all you have to do, you have to get to 46% for next year. if you are at 80, you have to get to 82. so each are you only have to reduce the percentage of students who are not proficient by 10%. and i'm surprised that seven years after the passage of the law we still see newspapers that say i don't know how we're going to get to 100% by 2014. all of our schools will have to close. i don't know why people say that. it's just not true.
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and i know people don't like to hear something that they believe seven years that it is not true, but it is not. i challenge anybody in this room to get back to me with a mathematical scenario where they have to get anywhere close to 100% by the year 2014. if you're at 90%, next year's goal is 91. you can go ad infinitum for 100 years, the goals never going to be 100%. it's just not. and i make people very uncomfortable when i talk about this, but i think everybody is doing a disservice to the debate when they say this. [inaudible] >> excuse me? [inaudible] >> that they have or haven't? stator schools? >> schools. >> yeah, sure. and again, you have to make more progress under the safe harbor the lower you are. so if you're at 40, you have to
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go to 46. if you are at 20 you have to go to 28. the higher up you go the less you are expected to get. so we are saying if you are really low, ramp up quick. that's what we said before. we can argue whether that is too high or too low. that is a legitimate debate to have. but that's what it is and that's what the debate needs to start before we'd even, you know, what is going to be acceptable to people in terms of growth. 1 percent a year? two, three? should be differentiated for schools that are at different levels? i don't know but i think you have to start with the facts. and the last thing i will say is, growth models, i wrote a paper for education sector in the spring on this. some of these growth models are problematic, and i won't get into all the technical things, but there is a huge transparency problem. and i think one of the things that has happened with the data is that civil rights groups and parents have been able to take the data and look at it and have a discussion about what's needed
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in their schools. there is error in data, but i think there is error in human judgment that we've had before. and the data has made things a little -- it's drawn brighter lines then been more decisive. in tennessee, texas, ohio, and pennsylvania, their growth model goes through a whole complicated mathematical structure. and instead of proficient score, you have something that is on the way that you derive through this mathematical model. but nobody knows what the target is for indicating any school because its proprietary information. so if i'm a. i go into the school in tennessee and i say, oh, yeah, the schoolmate ayp, where is my nation why did my kid make ayp? what was his goal this year. they can't tell them. because it is proprietary data. it is derived through a multiple progression, so i think both
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models are great but i think this transparency issue is going to be huge once people start taking a look at what's publishable because the states that are doing it this way where they show you an equation that is this long and say trust us, the kids are somewhere on the way between what they are now and proficient they are going to be confused. i mean, when i was in school, we had sra. and people are too young for that. i see some people that probably were not but we had a color-coded -- [laughter] >> i know that i'm probably in the upper 10% of age. but we had a color-coded box, and i think it was read unwanted and purple on the other. purple was the highest. and so i knew and my teacher knew if i was in red, i had to go to purple. or if i was in light dut blue he is where i was. you can't do that under the
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standard model, which is the value added model for the texas model which isn't standards. you know you are somewhere between red and blue i mean red or purple. but you don't know where you are. so a parent goes in and says what colorcode is my kid at last there is a proficient, somewhere between red and purple. that's the answer. i've had this back and forth with sanders. so it ain't about me, i'm just saying transparency is going to be a key issue in all of this. so again i said i was going to be candid. i think these are just things we have to have on the table in terms of discussing facts around this stuff. i think everybody here wants the same thing. this is about kids, where they are. i'm not against being realistic about some others, and i know everything is going to change. i mean, one thing we know is the law is probably going to be -- the law is going to be a lot different at the federal level than it is now. and we just don't know where that's going to be, but i think
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we really have to start with the facts and realistic assessment. not where we don't want kids to be. not what we don't want an accountability system. but what do we want, where do we want kids to go, what is realistic. because a lot of times you just hear what's not. i will wrap up with that. i know we ran over a little bit of time here. i will stay here long as you want. i just don't want to hold you up and going out to be forgetting coffee, whatever you want to do. and. >> okay. >> okay. thank you for having me. thank you very much. [applause] >> were going to take about a 10 minute break, and then we are going to be delighted because were going to have john deasy and he will share with us a lot of his thoughts. which have been very, very successful for him in the past.
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okay. [inaudible conversations] [inaudible conversations] [inaudible conversations]
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[inaudible conversations] [inaudible conversations] >> you're watching live coverage of a conference on how to better
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prepare students for college and careers. educational testing company acth and educational consulting firm america's choice hosting this event today. the event now in about a 10 minute break in our live coverage will continue when it resumes. in the meantime, we will show you one of our citizen videos as congress continues its summer recess. we have been asking you to send in your videos, listening to you, if you have been attending town halls and learning more about what you think of the various health care proposals being debated. one of the citizen videos that we received follows representative eric massa of new york at a town hall meeting. we'll watch that now during this break. >> we as a nation, with great privilege, are embarking on a great debate. i have yet to speak to many americans who think we cannot do health care better. the overriding information i've
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received to date is that if we do nothing, if we do nothing, we as a nation, elderly, young, men and women, rural and urban, will suffer greatly. and we have seen that. so the great question is what do we deal? and how do we build enough consensus so that what occurs, we can all have some bit by an. now people have been very objectionable. others have been passionately forward and in favor of it. but it has given me great heartache, because many people on both sides have said things about this bill that are simply not true. now, if i had to vote today on this document, i would not vote for it. but not -- [applause]
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>> but not for many of the reasons that you hear about in the mass media. and some of those reasons need to be dispelled. there is nothing in this bill, nothing about abortion. in fact, federal monies by federal law cannot be used for abortions, period. it is federal law. and those who read of this bill and develop great emotions should understand that. there are other things to be concerned about here i got an e-mail, all capital letters, all mike goodes, page 425, mandatory euthanasia counsel. [laughter] >> don't laugh because it is a very serious issue. how many saw that e-mail?
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how many have seen that. it has been going all over. let me just do something here. it's not easy reading. it really isn't it's not easy because it's a law and it is written by lawyers, and it has to be very, very precise. well, the problem is, the comet was let's fix that. i'm not sure i want laws that are not very complicated and very carefully written here i want the experts, and i am not a lawyer, to be able to compose documents that will withstand the test of a trial by jury. whatever it is. and so it is incumbent upon me to do my homework to read this. it is supposed to be difficult, not supposed to be a walk in the park. even though we are in a park. let me just read this one paragraph. i'm going to get a sip of water from time to time here.
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here's to hanging tight. >> can we ask questions in. >> i will answer everybody's question who has them. as an example, of a lot of the things that are distracting us from the true things that must be debated about health care, it has been said that this bill contains mandatory euthanasia counseling. this is what it says. under medicare programs, at explanation by the practitioner of the continue of end-of-life services and support available, including how they compare in hospice and benefits of such services must be made available upon request. that's a big difference. now we learned this --
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[applause] >> to answer the question why, why would that be in there? we learned that the hardwood. hospital administrators and doctors came and said this must be in there because we have far too many americans who are right that a situation where they cannot speak for themselves in medical situations, and therefore the hospital, the doctors and the families are caught into a trap, and therefore upon request of those services should be available. and that is a far cry from what i read on the internet. >> backlight at the park hyatt washington covering a conference today on efforts to better prepare students for college and careers. the testing company a.c.t. and educational consulting firm america's choice hosting this event. it is in about a 10 minute break. we should be wrapping up shortly and our live coverage will continue. a quick programming note that at
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11:15 about one hour from now, on c-span, we will be covering today's white house briefing with press secretary robert gibbs. again, that on our companion network c-span at 11:15 this morning east coast time. one of the questions, i make it a number of questions from robert gibbs today on the end of the cash for clunkers program. the associated press reporting this morning that one month and nearly $3 billion later, the cash for clunkers program is about to wrap up at the government is hitting the brakes on the enormously popular car rebate program which will end monday night. president obama told a philadelphia talk show yesterday that the program has been a resounding success, so for 450,000 vehicles have been sold, generating about $2 billion in rebates. while many dealers are not happy because they have had to wait longer than expected to get their money, the president promises that the cash is coming. the administration says it has tripled the number of people
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processing dealers applications to try to speed things along. there are no plans to seek more money to extend cash for clunkers. again, that program supposed to wrap up this coming monday night. according to the ap. here we are covering an education conference on college and career readiness. it should be resuming in a few moments. live on c-span2. [inaudible conversations] [inaudible conversations]
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[inaudible conversations] [inaudible conversations] >> ladies and gentlemen, we need you back in place so we can begin.
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[inaudible conversations] >> well, you know, if you look around this room you're going to see a lot of us smiling as i entered his our next speaker. john deasy was a superintendent in prince george county, and we have the pleasure, we, meaning america's choice, had the pleasure to be his partner there and work alongside of him during his tenure there. but the whole country was watching him.
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what they saw was a smooth leadership, smooth but aggressive. and you have to have that combination of skill if you are actually going to transform things. sometimes i say it's a little bit like going to a dentist, and you know, he says this is not going to hurt and then actually the next minute or so he says the tooth is out. [laughter] >> well, john has that kind of leadership with some very thorny issues that would have many, many people thinking that they just could not do that level of work. he made it seem like it was easy to do. and so that's why it was such a pleasure to watch them in prince george's county. and for those of you who don't know, he is now working with dates and he is using that expertise that he has developed not only in prince george's county, but also in santa monica. and he is spreading that across the country. i am sure he will spend a few
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minutes telling us a little bit about his deep dive in michigan with gates. but more so than that. and chatting with john he wanted to talk about just what i said a few minutes ago. about how can we get things done. so, john, thank you very much and we're so happy that you are able to join us today. [applause] >> no one ever wants to use that this was a smooth and aggressi aggressive, the dentist definitely much more so like having root canal without novocain would be the nicest thing anybody has said. but thank you. i was thinking when charles made a comment about california going into 10 new states, have lived there for seven years. i said they have one or two small financial problems at the moment. my god, they could never afford all of the new flags.
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it would be absolutely problematic. [laughter] >> forget the fact of all the other issues. it's a real privilege to be here this morning, and i'm going to speak a little bit from the work i'm doing at the bill and linda gates foundation and the role that i get to serve them the deputy director of education, but i am much more interested in talking about the work that i really believe that we are about. i would like to share a approach, not the approach, but the approach as to how we compos pieces of this work. and i want to talk about the consequences of being successful at pieces of his work when we do that. and leave sometime for you to push back, and i hope you will do that. around some of the things i would like to say and talk about. so for me, this work has always
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been around the moral imperative of assuring that our schools do not violate the fundamentals writes that the youth have when they come to be in front of us. and advance, but i think are the most significant social justice issues that we face in our communities. and i don't want to like bring people down this morning, but i want to really begin by reflecting on some pieces of data, which are things that we should be really mindful about in the work that we do with youth. i know that i was prince george's county, you know, surrounds a two thirds of the district of columbia here in d.c. it is a very, very impacted place. about 135,000 youth and 90% are african-american, and about 8% were latino, 1% were white anglo, and 1% of youth were pan
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asian. and counting, this is a really tough place. it's a very tough place, so you know d.c., we border northeast and southeast. and a huge chunk of accounting inside the beltway is a place where kids live daily in communities that experience very high degrees of violence and very high degrees of kind of abject apathy about what we expect of them and what we can do for them. so i was really taken several months ago when i was reading an editorial that confirmed a lot of the things that i worry a lot about. and the economist -- an economist who writes for the economist magazine named lexington pointed out that america no longer has the largest ferris wheel in the world anymore. and we no longer have the
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tallest building in the world. as a matter of fact, we no longer have the largest shopping mall in the world. but there is one thing that we take first place in the world, and that is the incarceration of its population. so while the u.s. has 5% of the world's population, we incarcerate 25% of the world prisoners. and one in 31 adults in this country are either on probation or incarcerated. in some states in this country, 14% of the population cannot vote because of convictions. won in three african-american males in alabama cannot exercise the right to vote because of a past conviction. there is 1.7 million youth who show up in public schools every morning where one or both parents or guardians are incarcerated. and i refer to these as prison orphans. and they come to school every
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single day. there is on an average for african-americans today family income at 74% of family income for white families in the united states. nearly a third of african-american families have zero or negative net wealth. in 1865 in this country, african-americans owned 0.5% of total u.s. wealth. in 1990, 135 years later, african-americans owned 1% of total u.s. wealth. almost half of african-american and latino families in our urban centers are too poor to qualify for the full child tax credit that the united states
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government allows on income tax. on any given day this morning, in cook county prison in chicago, there are 10000 inmates, 76% are african-american, and 20% are latino. so when our schools, african-americans make up 16% of the youth who come to our front door. there are 28% of the juvenile arrests. yet 30% of the referrals to court, and many straight out of the front doors of our schools. there are 37% of all youth who are incarcerated. there are 38% of all used today who are in lockup, which is different than incarceration. and there are 58% of all of the youth currently housed in adult centers of correctional facilities in this country, and
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another 24% of the youth are latino. i really do believe that it is graduation or incarceration for so many of our youth. and for the place where i worked, this is like dead serious. this wasn't, you know, we really need to get kids to 100%, or 90%. i really considered myself and effective superintendent. ivan, i can manage a calendar like there is no tomorrow. i am remarkably rude and make lots of mistakes, but i could manage a calendar. and i think that one of the saddest moment of my last superintendency was the morning i realized that i am unable to physically attend every kid's funeral. i was just unable to keep that schedule. you get shot on the way on the subway, you get shot at home, youth are murdered at parties,
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youth are shot after graduation parties, youth overdose, youth died of aids. it is just mind-boggling around this piece. and so the realization that that is our collective work, i think at times needs to just simply be called out because that's kind of the moral underpinning that i really want to talk about this work with. now, it is sobering, but it is easily forgotten. it is easily forgotten when we are trying to get high school schedules in order. is easily forgotten when we are trying to deal with layoffs. it is very easily forgotten where trying to manage, you, $1.8 billion budgets. it's almost instantaneously forgot what we're trying get through negotiations with our labor, but the reality is every single one of those things is a lever that we can or cannot choose to pull to do something about, about that data.
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so i keep that data very present, and i think it is important to talk about that and i think it's important to talk about that and have a center of courage to talk about that. and for me, that center comes on the realization that, you know, like no big shock, i am a white male. and the reality is with that comes all sorts of invisible privilege. and understanding that, when you walk into, at least in my case, or actually in any case, that i traipse along this kind of back knapsack individual under an indivisible privilege for majority of khmers who don't look like me, is that you, mike and think you have two choices. you can just work to try to move at the edges of this issue of race and poverty.
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or you can summon the unearned religion and do everything in your power to actually address the three issues that were central to the work i do, and that his agency, access and acquisition. and that is what was the only question in interviews when you join my team. if you don't believe that every kid can acquire, this is your acquisition, the same rigorous cost work and show that they can do that at the same level of the privileged brothers and sisters, then this is like nothing personal. but i don't want you anywhere near my kids. if you do not believe that your fundamental role is to build agency and others who don't have that, so that they participate in this democratic thing we call
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the united states society, and can earn a living wage and can have health care and a roof over the kids heads and house, and that that is actually the purpose, not adult centered issues, but that's the purpose, this is nothing, you may be a spectacular human being. i just can't have you in this job and the last these, of course, is access. if you have any qualms whatsoever of what is going to take to be really clear that youth have been has further marginalized, either deliberately or unconsciously, but in fact marginalized, from access in public schools enjoy not going to work to call that out and get that, then i do really need to say, not here, not now. there is a lot of calories you can work in, you know, go. because i can't have your. i cannot afford that around this work.
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and that's how we fundamentally hired our team to do this work. and i was blessed, i'm going to kind of weave a couple of pieces around some success, which is great to it is awesome. i mean, your comment about double-digit gains in schools, you know, where 9% of the kids were proficient, and we leave three years later and you've got 60, 71% of youth who are scoring proficiency. you know, relatively and i take you would say that in maryland relatively high standard is really good, but the trapdoor and that is thinking that that was a really successful thing, because it's not. because i want to return to those data points i started with. until the prison industrial complex pipeline of schoolhouse to jailhouse is fundamentally disrupted, you know, don't con ourselves into thinking that that was a big success. and that disruption for me is
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very much around the two levers that i would like to share a little bit about in terms of thinking, and that is in structural capacity and human capacity. so i think for us it was really clear, and whether that was in the places i've worked in l.a. or the places i worked in maryland or the places i work in rhode island that being crystal clear about the organization's belief system around acquisition, and access and agency were central to trying to get some of what can be a pretty daunting task to move forward. so why human capital and why instructional capacity? i guess it's because i don't believe anything else really matters, with all due respect. and it's not that i am saying one is as laissez. i am saying it doesn't matter.
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so if what matters is that those issues before you, but and i keep saying a particular for youth. all of the youth. and everybody actually had been historically marginalized. so in my last situation, it was the collective all, and in many of our situation is the majority around at work. human capital is alongside of instructional capacity a single to most levers that we can pull. and we spend so little time deliberately trying to disturb the system so i know that we know this, but -- kind of the dirty little secret around this is the central office, or i affectionate call the beast, the central office is perfectly designed, i mean masterfully crafted to prevent actually any of those things from happening. it is not designed to do that.
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and i say that mm going to give two examples around why that's the case. it requires willful disruption of practices around that. so let's just take the staffing of schools, for example. staffing of schools usually has a guideline, seniority, applications, there is like millions of people somewhere on some poor who are responsible for getting teachers in front of youth. and they do that, and hopefully do that well, although most times they can't get that done in terms of opening up school, many classrooms don't actually have a person in front of them when we began. but no thought to the idea that actually matters tremendously who is in front of which youth. not a factor that there is a teacher in front of kids.
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and so some kind of jarring examples of that come to a peace when we first came to the county and realized that what we wanted to do was for me to understand my number one responsibility, and that was youth. so on the second day i asked, i said i really want a student from every high school. so there was like 31 youth, and i said i want them pulled at a random ss number because i'm not going to let you tell me who i should do because i know who i will get. so we called them in. you know, the press can be there but you can't participate, very transparent. teachers will be my guest but you can't open your mouth. this is actually me and youth. i will be calling you guys later obviously and begin a conversation. and i said i really want to know what i need to do well for you. and i was really prepared, like most of us probably would be. you know, we need better sports teams. we need more and finer band uniforms. i need a far better lunch, and i
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was completely blown away that the conversation included none of that. and it started right off by a kid there looking me square at the face and say you can get me a teacher and so i said, there'll, what do you mean by that? he goes, so i didn't have a single teacher all of last year. i said can you claim that? he said jack, i'm a high school sophomore at central high school and i'm going to use actual examples. and i have seven classes in my day. and i did have not a single teacher in the entire year in seven classes. i had nothing but substitute the entire year. i have never had a teacher. so maria looks over and says you think that is bad? and she is at another school. she said i have an ap spanish teacher who doesn't speak spanish.
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so she doesn't speak spanish. so right now we learn spanish by watching spanish films. and all i could think of was, oh, my god, they're going to watch, this will be like a really, really insane way of trying to teach ap spanish. josé goes, yeah, i have a physics teacher who tells us he doesn't know physics but we can look it up on websites to figure out this stuff. and he encouraged us to use our phones in class to access the website. so i am saying, you know, this is pretty bad. and it was without a doubt the one who silently in his conversation and let this work for as long as we were there. he goes, what is a pa class? and he turned back and said ap class. so he said what is an ap class? and in any matter of two modes, what was very apparent, at 31
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high schools, and only seven high schools had ap classes. and so you can imagine what the next morning cabinet meeting was like. which they won't always like his. they were in same. they were very hard-hitting, and they were very data-driven. i said i want a roster of every single high school. i want to understand who is teaching ap, how many courses, how many sections. and people looked like archey worried about bus pickup? i said, no i'm not worried about busted a. did take the trains and bus ways to school. what we found out was the system had ahistoric guideline, the only way it was safe because it was written in where and that is the seven majority white communities and the seven communities of privilege, got ap courses. and the remainder, which is the overwhelming rest of the high schools had no ap courses. and so we said that's going to change. it's going to change immediately. we're going to do the apa, basic
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ap courses in every single high school next year. and that was just not possible, you've lost your mind, you will destroy academic, you know standards as we know them or ever. kids get ready for this. and the response was was really simple and that was if you don't believe it, you have to leave. but they did deliverable is there has got to be a college board trained teacher who knows spanish, who can teach ap and every single one of the damn high schools next year. and that was a task that we laid out their and the team was spectacular. i mean, the college board honestly did it for free for us. we got them all trained, you know, hundreds of teachers. and i am actually, i am sliding into the dreaded notion feeling this is really going to be a good way to. this will be great. so it's now july 15 of the next year, all these courses have been run. they are in the school spirit and i'm doing the usual, i sepulveda rosters, i just want
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to see overfull. how much of a problem are we going to have. i am visualizing parents coming in, you know, protesting that the kit can be an ap. and truly much to my shock was that 70% of the courses have been canceled in june for no enrollment. and so i said what are you talking about, no enrollment? and what of course had happened was that the system didn't allow youth to know that the courses had been put on the books, and counsel kids out of taking them. because you won't be successful. you will fail. this will hurt your attempt in your gpa. you are not prepared. i mean, you know, i love you baby, but it's just not good for you. if i heard that one more time i think i was going to vomit about how much i love the kid and just how bad this is for the kid to do that. so that began the process of setting fine, forget the schools.
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you have 15 days to schedule 10% of every kid in to ap courses, overwrite all the schedules and put them in there. and any guidance counselor that says otherwise is going to be terminated on the spot because this is what this system does around this piece. we lost a lot of guidance counselors in july of that year. [laughter] >> and a lot of guidance counselors. and they just weren't -- these are good people. this is not, you know, these aren't people committing crimes. what they're doing is they just didn't believe an agency acts as an acquisition so therefore they can't be near our kids. i am pretty good about that piece of it. and we did what most people do, and that is you build some of which courses and you build double periods so that youth who haven't experienced a peak it the same kind of privileges that parents who know how to qaeda manipulate the system get, and we build tutorial sections and pataki is how to use supplemental taxes and so forth and so on. so the data is coming and the
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data is coming and the tests are coming and we underwrote all the tests. aborted all of that kind of stuff. and teachers are lined up at every board meeting, you know, you're going to see this is terrible. it's going to be this mass education destruction as we know it. and the data came in, and we had a 47 percent increase in youth who were taking ap courses, no kidding. i can even do the math. if you're going to put that in there. that wasn't an astonishing notion of the astonishing notion was the percentage of those youth who got threes, fours and five. and it was 67%. and i shouldn't have been surprised because all we had done was failed to include them. we had just denied access. and then we understood that this requisites and there are counseling session you have to go to to get into an ap course. we kind of eliminated all that stuff. so the story is not that lots of kids did really well, which is
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fabulous. it is that the system is designed to prevent this from happening. the other story, which i think is really critical around this, is we weren't delivered, they actually could have been in front of the person, very nice person but just didn't speak spanish. it would've been of no help. and this deliberate ability to have to build instructional capacity was essential. we didn't have it. and we could have pretended that we had and created a whole division to do that, but the reality was we didn't own that. and not because i'm here, but i would say this wherever i was. and i have not worked as a superintendent unless i have agreed that he would partner with us, and that is there are places i have to begin by having external partners help me build that instructional capacity. and america's choice did this really deliberately around the fact at the end of the date the system has to own it, and that
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the teachers have to actually own the knowledge and the ability to pass that on, and it has to be deliberate and systematic. so it can be one off as much as difficult and it can be just those who want to go. and when you choose to do that, a lot of times our extra partners would come in and say, you know, people aren't coming. and then you have to go out there and say they must do that. or we're not going to build in the literacy blocks, like this printable dismal building and because, therefore, you know, ceramics won't happen and we had promised the ceramics teacher to do that. and sometimes you say you can't be principle here anymore. you just can't. it's over. and in the first year we had 47% of our principles had to change careers. they just can't be leaders around that piece. and we had to face that. and every time that happened, we had to sit and talk about the
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data. this is not about you. you know, you have agency. they don't. i take money off of peoples kitchen table every single day in the form of tax dollars and i converted to your salary. so there is a fiduciary and a moral obligation to deliver as a result of that, and it is not to keep you employed. it is for the purpose of this organization, which i want to be a high reliable organization, it is to advance achievement and opportunity for youth who have not had that. now i do that through employment and i do that through valued implement, and phenomenal people. but it's not the primary purpose of this. when we talked about this idea of building instructional capacity and human capital, one of the things had to be really clear was how schools got staff. so schools that historically were underperforming were the last to be filled, vacancies. no one wanted to go there.
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and there were some pretty scrappy areas. you know, let's be really clear about that. but over all, no one wanted to go into the schools. and the schools that have been high-performing, or in my case moderately performing, which was counted as high-performing, they had 10 applications for every vacancy. and so as i would watch the summer go along, it was really clear what was going down. and that is h.r. officials literally would go and say you want to be at roosevelt. you don't really want to be at auxin help if it is a better place for you. it is a better match for you to be there. and to what we realized was we had to beat delivered and disruptive about this whole piece. and so we then said to hold a joint apartment, called the man and said so here's the game plan. we will be real clear about how you keep employed here. there are three deliverables. will measure them every two weeks. and if you hit those, you remain employed. if you don't hit those, you
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don't remain employed. so it's very, very simple. and that is, we are going to have zoned schools and other schools. and so the schools are the most difficult schools we have in the system, and they have to be staffed before memorial day. every one of them with a highly effective and highly qualified teacher. and then, you can staff the rest of the schools did you have the whole summer to do that piece. and of those goals presented to staffing were posted all over the district walls, and people were crazed about it. absolutely crazed about it. you know, you are doing this on the backs of people who have supported the tax is. i said and you will. you have to pay taxes to live here. don't worry about that whole piece. what we are going to do is we are going to be equitable about how we treat kids. and this was not going to be equal. and so we begin a really hard conversation in the community between equity and equality. in a quality, everybody gets treated about the same which is a very nice notion. and equity, those who have the
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least get the most. and we were kind of under that. i was unabashed about that. which meant that that's how money got distributed. is methow personnel got distributed and men have decisions internally went out in the system. and so what was amazing was the difference alone about actually asking people to make some choices about how they were going to do their work against a district standard. that was pretty clear. fill the slots first. and we did lose a bunch of h.r. it didn't work out for those employees over that period of time. but what was really clear is we didn't open school without a single classroom filled with a credentialed employee, and if they have taught before, had a history of student achievement over time that was significantly better than their counterparts. so when we say that the organization must be
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deliberately moved, that's our responsibility of round this. this is no news to anybody in the room. america's choice is not inexpensive to do. it's expensive. most good things usually are. and it doesn't go everywhere. and when we tend to put it in places that this sum of money, and of course like us, we have to be approved by a board have to be placed in front of you who doesn't have stuff, usually lots of chatting in a class while this is a terrible thing. the reality is that was our principal, equity, not equality. and we deliberately moved in that direction. and it raised for us this notion of how we built this instructional capacity in teams across schools and i think a lot about this in terms of what we would call inside the escalator effect. and if you think about carrying
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all of this junk in your briefcase and on your knapsack when you come out of the subway and to walk up the stairs when escalator is not working, you know, you now that feels like. you are just trudging along trying to do this and that's what it feels like to be a teacher alone trying to get better at, arguably, incredibly difficult task. so teaching reading to use is rocket science. let's be very clear about that. okay? so it's really difficult. by doing that in isolation from my colleague next door is even more difficult. so we set about being really public with the place and say, okay, the reality is we don't really know what else do or else we would be doing it. so we assume really it's very hard conversation to have with faculty because everybody was to say i know what i am doing. well, we don't or we would have done it. actually don't know how to teach the acquisition of reading. i don't know how to teach theory
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in mathematics. actually can't get people to understand redux equations in chemistry. and just called that out and saying so there it is. now, that wasn't so bad. but we can find out. and we had to find out collectively. and we worked with colleagues, many of whom are in this room and i have tremendous respect for putting up with us as we pushed really hard to move the place to be more receptive to this difficult work. and as we thought about this, i had to somehow frame why i pay people who are teachers. and i thought about this, and then eventually came out and said it, and it makes a lot of sense to me. it may not do you, and don't use this if it doesn't sit with you will. i don't pay people because that they come into the school system with a credentialed for a degree and they are a certain range in
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the salary schedule. and because you had the ability to do the job. that's great, but it is not why i pay you. i really believe that if we are a group of teachers in a school, all of us right here, and everyone knows that there is the most effective math teacher in the northwestern high school. parents know if there is a lie, cheat and steal to get their kids in front of her and they know that i am not and they don't want to. there is this constant tug-of-war about protecting me and my incompetence in this issue, and not making more superior than anybody else on the team. and we know how that kind of goes. and so we can either continue to perfect that really kind of perverse notion, or we can simply say you're right, mary, you have it and i don't. and so as a system, i pay to make me as smart as she is
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around this work. clasclassclas wwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwc >> and needed folks to come and build content knowledge and content expertise and then for
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me to show how i was struggling with it and how i was improving with it. that is an escalator. that is stepping on with the same set of problems as the school, but i get this list. and the list occurs when a group of us start to build our capacity. if i can do that the money that i have invested in vera's salary gets spread across the system. and that was one of the things i really learned from watching. there is a deliberateness. make sure that the fight to get the system to be receptive around this is cleared and to make really sure at that the adults in the system need to own both the new knowledge and the process of gaining this knowledge. and it was a good lesson around that stuff. so we really clear about what we had to do. we really care about what we were trying to do. we were also pretty clear about
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what it looked like if we were succeeding. we needed to be clear around the reports when we weren't successful. and i tried to do that by publicly writing to the organization. so i didn't do we newsletters and the superintendents corner, and i didn't have a blog. i didn't do any of that kind of stuff. i wrote in ways that i tried to model what was good, professional writing which is infrequent the best quality i could make and with a message about what we're about. so we would write to the organization, and then ask the organization to read it and discuss it. so making the case for high-performance organization. understand autonomy and empowerment. we wrote on our action, which was managed performance empowerment. we talked about distribution of money inside budgets, and from the system to the schools on the idea that it was an equity
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principle. we talked about the notion that the school was the center of change, and the central office was the service institute, not the institute. i believe leadership exists in the principal and in the teacher. our goal was to raise that, built that, expect that, hold that accountable, and serve that. it was a way to the public on our and about where we were falling down because it would happen every day. people are trying to build us up between the morning. and where we knew we had to do better because of your input around this place. so i am going to throw nine very quick things, and they are just the things that i believe word levers that help desk. one we're being really clear on, accountability and leadership. there is nothing private about a
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youth who doesn't graduate. they don't walk across the stage. they don't have a cap and gown on. there is a very empty seat in the civic auditorium. a very public act. there is nothing, in my opinion, on a taxpayer-based organization that is private about my kid. quarterly assessments, growth over time, imperfection and understanding, graduation rates all public. and in schools we encouraged leaders to make it public by posting it right outside your classroom and talking about accountability down to the level. so it was very much an issue of consequence as opposed to punishment. and people come to accountability thinking a lot about punishment. we tried to help people think about this in terms of
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accountability. we tried to be really clear that that was a fundamental notion of leadership. teachers work as teams, and principals were responsible for building a structure of capacity in the department's review. the two most important things they could do. if we could not do that we needed a leader who could. we were kind of unabashed. project management. how did you get this stuff done on a daily basis? so if you stay you are going to bring america's choice in. someone has got to run. every day. every weekend. you give a weekly roll-up report to me. what happens on wednesday? who is accountable for thursday etc. who gets the materials purchased and delivered? if you don't do performance management, you will run into the stuff i ran into, which was kind of amazing.
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two examples of a system that doesn't work well if you don't have performance management. we would run summer school for 10,000 kids. and the first summer i came at the end of the school year. no one would come to summer school. how can that be? no one is passing. bucket lids of failure. and everyone is like, you see, the parents don't support us. all this apathy. look what we're up against. it just didn't make sense. i don't see kids in school that way. with the mind of scratching we don't send reports out because no one ordered ink to post the report cards. so in august i wondered through the warehouse. thousands of report cards and letters. that is a problem. that is a problem. so we were overrun.
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the parents actually got the report card. seems simple, but that actually is part of this notion of execution in performance management. if teachers are going to sit there and experience the type of professional development that they are both uncomfortable with and haven't done before they need the material. someone has to order it, and someone has to unpack it. and someone has to deliver it. and that seems so elegantly simple. it is a lost art in most of our places. the whole idea, not everything is a leverage point for change. he had to choose them. it was really data, inspection, not a dirty word. i absolutely do inspect schools every single day. every single leadership official has to be in schools, not go and see how it's going. these are your eight schools. you are there tuesdays and thursdays. this is the five pages that comes back.
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this is the conversation that takes place. the general learnings. the problems we solve next week. we really deliver issues of inspection. feel heavy-handed. the whole idea of being really clear that, for me, the center of this had to be far less of a of a regulatory organization and far more of an auditing organization. one of our rules was to remove rules. we have binders like you could not believe. there were colossal collections of how not to get anything done basically. and the idea was to strip as much of that away and simply go to the things that make the most sense. don't violate the law. don't violate a right. don't break simple code. audit results all the time.
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teacher attendance, student attendance. if the student absenteeism, we wanted teacher absenteeism. if the student achievement, we went to who is being paid and what was their achievement. it led us to some very things. being public about those pieces, as well. being consistent and persistent was very necessary. communication. you just can't over communicate. if you are going to launch an initiative like we did with american 's choice trust me the memo that announces its is one of i would honestly say 50 you need to send out. not five, but 50. you cannot over communicate. i actually think people read what i send out. and they don't. many times they don't have the
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time to do that. so it is knowing the communication places inside the system. new principals, parent groups, who to talk to. churches. every weekend i was offered an opportunity to speak in our palaces of worship. i am a man of faith. i have no problem talking about that. they have given you a podium. you are up there. you have an audience. i am going to be talking about the unnamed miracles of the bible . i am going to talk about standards and accountability. i am going to have an opportunity to do that. it is a place where people listen and understand. all those places matter and a community. is not just the letter read that piece. being really clear about timetables. it's done on thursday and it's done on thursday by 4:00.
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the only thing i would ever quote from reagan is trust but verify. the notion of verifying is really, really important. it allows you to celebrate milestones. it does not allow you to run down the corridor like a crazy person because it did not get done. it gives you the points to show people that progress is being made. the can't feel that they can't handle the weight of what is in front of us. benchmarking. what are the better systems doing? people joked a lot about montgomery and prince george's county. at the end of the day there was the tally sheet. how better are they than us? how better is howard? how better are the top-100? so benchmarking is really important. so you want a benchmark against the standard of quality for what the budget looks like and then how we are comparatively. so if you are benchmarking against the lowest, you are really the top of the bottom of
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the barrel. if your are benchmarking work against an absolute standard it is daunting. last comment i make, and then i'd be glad to open this up. so i want to close by saying where i had some spectacular failures around the work. in hindsight my most common mistake is we weren't public about this as often as possible. i could not expect teachers to say, by the way him i actually don't know how to do this. it's just too frightening. it's to smothering to allow people to be honest. one was to be really clear that complacency is legal in al in te organization. and a little of it -- every place has some complacency. it is okay. even the most minute speck of it is toxic. so i think of complacency in the
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organization around the key work as the idea of it is radioactive. it doesn't matter how much. it still can tell you. yes, a lot of it will kill you quicker, but it will always do. calling out complacency is really important. sometimes you adjust to dawn tired. so a lesson learned. get other people to do it for you. we would create this little meeting at the end of every meeting where we would go and quietly and shut the door. and do heroes and zeroes. who had a zero moment today? who had a hero moment? if you could not call out a zero moment, you actually were the zero moment of the day.
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failure to create a strong coalition of believes in a large community. sometimes he'd just as sam there with you, and there aren't. sometimes the justice and the people did it and le don't get y don't. at one dance means everything to the person who gets to hear it first. this is their first time. and the proximity to matters a p matters a great deal. be right up front next to them.
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i think the other thing is declaring victory really q uickly, and declaring it quickly on things that don't really matter. everyone wants to feel good. otherwise we don't know if we can continue on. so create the thing that we will say is a victory on the get there, and don't lull yourselves like i did at times by saying this was pretty good, to. we celebrate this. interesting notion. i think the neglects at times anchored this change deep inside the culture. people talk about it all the time. a green transformation inside of don't even know what the heck that means. you read these papers and books around the stuff. i have come to realize that i may not know what it means, but when it is present it is deadly to continuing to work. so if it is not anchored, and
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people can't tell you the things that were in the system. find out what it's like when we get there. can't tell you what we were going to do we don't get there. it's not in the system. we have kind of drilled that down and tested for it all the time. of course you just tend to overdo that. last thought is, as you all know as well as i do, people are not going to like you for this stuff. they're just not. they're going to despise the most of the time. the best part is that they do it silently. the most painful part is that they tend to do it really, really probably. it is really their problem. it's not mine which is a good defense mechanism when you're
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just being pummeled to death at a faculty meeting. the reality is people are in need to set about being very deliberate have a support structure to help to this. decisions in this work like we all do that are unpopular. you will make decisions that are mistakes. it serves me well to the the public on both. that was a decision that was a mistake. there is a big difference between a mistake and unpopular. being clear about those is incredibly disarming. but that was a huge mess up. i take full responsibility for that. this is what i'm going to try to do to correct that. 500 parents are saying the school is closing? it persistently fills your kid. this is a really unpopular thing
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to do. really unpopular. if i were you i would be really, really angry that my kid is being cast out. i'm going to explain to you but we're going to do to a fully execute this decision and to support your child. and there is a big difference between the two of those. attending that i know, yeah, of course. this is never going to do it. when we close the school and the buses don't come on time, that one is on me. there is a difference between the two of those. but you need to be able to go at the end of the day. you need a team of county where you can just be totally vulnerable. the ability to be vulnerable is more important, in my opinion than the ability to feel good. vulnerability is where we grow as leaders around this place. i think a great deal about
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frederick douglas. i'm going to leave you with a quote by him. now many favor progress but deprecate agitation. they want to rain without thunder. they want the majestic ocean without a terrible roar. progress always comes at a price. the ability for you to guide the system toward gives me places to learn and other places to learn. so i hope that the odds were helpful. i really think you for the work that you doing a great deal. so thanks. [applauding] >> questions or thoughts? that was ridiculous. i don't agree with that all. that's actually a good
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provocation. [inaudible] >> what is going on at the gates foundation? >> the foundation has a c ollege-ready strategy which was redesigned two years ago. pressed very hard to bring a group of people. i absolutely that i was -- fell for the recruitment. the word that i the is the effective teaching work. it is working to build measures teacher effectiveness, a basket of them, which one is student achievement over time. and to help systems use this measures to fundamentally rethink how we hire and how we fire, how we award tenure, what is tenure, how we promote, how we place, and how we compensate
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teachers and leaders in the system. and then my other colleagues work to build the tools a lot of the stuff that we heard this morning around the common american comport, higher, clearer standards. how we provide support to teachers in the field, how we provide the support systems, another one of my colleagues is endeavoring on nothing short of probably the largest scientific study that i have never been aware of in public education around the research of measures of teacher effectiveness. we do lots of measures. but certainly one of the things that has not been done at this bill we are proposing, this is of $15,000,000.4 thousand classroom study. one of the things -- we act like lots of things matter. we act like security matters and placing. does it actually matter?
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the massive degree -- we pay lots of money, $80 billion a year in this country. does it have any relationship with effectiveness? most of us use one or three instruments. about the same. is what we are rating one linked to effectiveness? value added. an experimental design for lottery in second year. so we should get our hands around the noise inside. and the purpose, tosses back and say, here is what we know. what should we do about that? and then we have a colleague who works on state and district networks. so a little bit about the work that is happening. i do know that people at this amazing foundation -- valid want to say this. bill and melendez and warren.
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and that is, all this education is absolutely amazing. you know, two and and a half billion dollars in the next eight years that we are putting into this. it is a fraction of the work of eradicating malaria, global health, global agriculture, formal development. it is a huge, huge thing with many, many facets arounds trying to alter the global aspect of poverty. [inaudible] >> all of the work, which is working in some very concentrated places. working in a group of other districts for funding, a kind of deep strains of work around what i just spoke about. trying to think about how we think at national level about teacher voice, which is very
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important. how we think about the distribution of effective teachers across this country. and another piece is really thinking about how do teachers consume knowledge and research at a national level to mac and one of the projects we are really thinking about is going to be teacher tv. so most people can't tell you germ theories, but they note that washing your hands is a good thing without ever having studied that. most people think class size reduction is a good thing. the notion, is it or is it not? and so the idea is to try to get research consumable for teachers as well as master practices across the country. we hope to be able to bonds that
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that shortly. >> thanks. >> go easy on me. >> question. i understand that somebody went to the state for teacher effectiveness. there were a few states that were selected. minnesota was one. now the question for me is what i the expectations for the foundation for this is to do and then how can we as leaders and lance what the state is going to do? it's scary when you see the money going to the state and other research will go on. here we are again. >> a bit of clarification. the foundation, at the moment, is working to identify 15 states that will make an investment in some. that hasn't been decided yet. i think it will probably be less than 10 at the end of the
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vetting process. that will be about a year away before that money goes. a think you are referring to buying that just went out to help a group of states for one purpose only. that was to write the race for the top of the state which was a smaller investment for 14 to 15 states. it is on the deliverable is to wrote a competitive application. the other piece that is much more significant. when the states are chosen and announced i would strongly encourage superintendents to work collaboratively with your choice on the issue. it's going to be like we did. and that is labor, if it exists, governance, and schoolhouse a moscow summit are going to have to go laboratory work on the plan before any funding is distributed then
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all right. thanks. [applauding] >> well, we are ready for oura$÷ last session. we are trying to ask denise to join the table. >> watching a conference on efforts to better prepare students for college and other careers. brought you comments from members of the national governors association and the bill and melinda gates foundation. we're going to leave this event now and move on with our schedule. if you missed any of it we will show it to you later on the c-span network. earlier this week democratic congressman barney frank confronted health care critics at a townhall meeting in the dartmouth, massachusetts. this event takes place at the senior center and runs almost two-and-a-half hours.
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>> washington times columnist. marijuana trafficker of the 1970's. he is interviewed by kate stroop, founder of normal, national association for the reform of marijuana laws. >> go online and follow the latest tweets, video ads, uploads. also keep up-to-date with health care advance. house and senate debates, even upload your opinion. that c-span health care hub on the c-span.org / healthcare. >> putting this event together. also i would like to thank the director for this event tonight
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[applauding] >> this meeting tonight will be about the current health care bill down in washington, d.c. these bills consist of many complicated issues. the most prominent of those issues being those who can not afford health insurance. this particular subject could have been answered years ago if the wages of the middle and lower class had not been stagnant for so long. for the last 30 years this country has reverted back to a disparity that we have not seen since the 1920's. this has left many without the funds to afford health insurance. we need to bring back that economic equality that we saw during the '50's and '60's. that economic equality was the result of the new deal created by franklin delano roosevelt. just as social security -- thank
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you. just as social security was the main staple of fdr's new deal, health insurance reform is the main staple of president obama's new deal. [applauding] >> thank you. hold on. hold on. hold on. bring it down. well, we have a consensus. we actually don't have a majority of those who opposed and are pro. this is actually a split audience. thank you. thank you very much. ..
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to distract and obstruct real cognitive debate. [applause] [booing] >> keep it down. using fear as a catalyst to further your message bringing to to the table of progress. we need to remember above all the disagreements that we have and above all the party affiliations -- sir, can you please put that sign down. thank you. we need to remember that above all disagreements, and above all party affiliations that we hold we are all united here as americans and that we cannot be divided by those who use fear in
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order to win a debate. [applause] [booing] >> but we can be united in the idea of democracy and the ability to compromise toward the real solution for our country. so i ask that we move past those distractions and focus on the facts, on the issue and have a thoughtful and meaningful discussion here tonight and moving forward. congressman frank realizes the importance of hearing from his constituents and agreed to meet with us here tonight. i am sure he'll be able to answer any and all questions that we may have, and we thank him for the time -- for taking the time out of his schedule to attend this meeting here in dartmouth. now it is my pleasure to introduce to you, congressman barney frank. [applause] [booing]
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>> first, i want to welcome some of the national press to southeastern massachusetts, stick around for a while. go to the whaling museum, go to some great beaches. [applause] >> you are right next to two towns that together are the most important fishing part in the united states. look at the great work force we have here i'm very pleased we have been able to get some attention and i hope people will hang around and if you want to hit a nice beach or two, you don't have to go across any bridges. you're right nearby and you can enjoy yourself. second, i appreciate the democratic town of dartmouth. i note that somehow it's become fashionable to denounce
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partisanship. people can get their disagreements as members of different parties can get too bitter or overcome where there should be agreement. maybe it's paradoxal but a poll down in washington as to which people on each party thought -- members of the other party were the most partisan or the most bipartisan and i was kind of pleased that i was the only one who was picked as both one of the most partisan and one of the most bipartisan. [laughter] >> that's 'cause i think that's what it's supposed to be. there are areas that differ and that's why we have parties and elections and you should be very vigorous and you shouldn't allow those disagreements to spill over so you can't cooperate when you have some agreement. so i'm pleased to be here. i do want to explain why i'm here. i know that a number of my colleagues have been having town meetings and because a number of people have asked me for a long time i'm going to call on one of my own later, i have to tell you it's odd people are pressing us
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to have town meetings. anybody who has been around washington politics will know mark is laughing. town meetings have long been a form of self-aggrandizement for politicians. they'll tell you have a tough district, send a town meeting and send a postcard how wonderful you're going to be and people may not show up that much and town meetings -- and you get to get all this press. i have found frankly i get a more representative sample of opinion by accepting opinions as i have done tonight because -- and i do make it a point of accepting a wide range of invitations in this case because people have raised the issue i will have a town meeting in the summer well before the house votes on the issues and things will be more clarified. i will just begin on a couple of points that have come up now and i am going to throw this open. i will throw this open -- i read this bill and i read up on some of this stuff, my job in
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washington, d.c. is primarily working on financial regulation. just before we left -- yeah, we passed a bill that many of you don't like, i suppose, to restrict executive compensation. [applause] >> to keep excessive bonuses. we're going to restrict -- we passed a bill that the "wall street journal" was very angry about to prevent the kind of subprime mortgages that got into trouble. i was very pleased to see an article in the "boston globe" that many were critical of the effort to give people mortgages when we should have, in fact, been helping to get them affordable rental housing. and that's been a major shift that's happening now in the new administration. we're going to restrict derivatives. we are going to put some serious controls on leverage and that's been as i said my major focal point. but the healthcare issue i'm and any of those committees that's something i'll deal on and i'll go on a couple of the issues. first of all, i've been asked if
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i planned to participate in a public plan for healthcare. the answer is, i already have been. i'm 69 years old. i have been on medicare for four years. medicare is a government-run healthcare plan. [applause] >> it is a very good one. now, it is true that when it was passed in 1965, a number of people called it socialized medicine and it said if the government got into healthcare it would ruin everything. i don't feel ruined. i don't think most of my medicare recipients do. we also have in the bill -- one of the things i like a few years ago they passed a bill -- i voted against it because it wasn't funded and it had some other problems but they passed a bill to provide prescription drug coverage but did not allow any negotiation with the drug companies and had what's been called the doughnut hole where -- if you were old enough and sick enough at some point you had to pay without any help. this bill that's now before us will fill that gap. it won't do it in one fail swoop because they're going to pay for
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it and they made a deal with the drug companies who've agreed now under some pressure to reduce it. the other issue -- i have to say and there's a lot of legitimate debate here, but i have to tell you that i think the single most inaccurate argument i have heard in all my years in politics was that this was somehow going to compel death panels. there's a publication called the investors business daily, which had the misfortune of saying that steven hawkings who was the paralyzed brilliant physician that if he had to depend on the national health service in britain he would be dead. because they would say he was too useless. the only problem is mr. hawkings in britain and they have kept him alive. there's absolutely nothing in this bill suggests that there's going to be any compulsory death activity. in fact, there has been a threat to have the government intervene
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with regard to these end of life decisions but it came, frankly, from the most conservative element of the spectrum. it was in 2005 when the congress of which i was a minority member and the president decided to tell michael schiavo that he could not comply with the wishes of his wife and allow what was left of her life, which was simply breathing, artificially fed to end and it was the congress of the united states and the president who intervened and the american people were very unhappy, and i think they were right to be unhappy. and we won't see any repeat of that. what the bill says is this, if you want to consult with a doctor about end of life, if you want to leave instructions about what to do and get a doctor's advice about how to do that, the federal government will pay for it if you're on medicare. that's the whole basis for this death panel argument, which i think makes no sense. let me talk about some things i like about this bill and i'm
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going to throw this open. i have spent a lot of time, my legislative colleagues who are here -- we engaged, i have to acknowledge, in a practice that some people think is just awful -- we earmark. and the largest provider of new bedford, given the healthcare system in america, and the fact of a low wage city, they don't have enough money. can we get some money to help them. we provided money through the earmarks through the new bedford community health center for morton hospital, for st. luke's hospital. here's a list of earmarks that i've got, and over the years -- over the years i've earmarked for $8 million for healthcare. i don't like earmarks but in the absence of healthcare for the
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people i represent for people who don't have it, children, old people who don't make enough money, i'm going to earmark. we get this bill passed in the right way, we won't have to earmark anymore. the chairman said it's much better to have enough people to have income to do this. that's one reason. another -- i mentioned the fishing industry. one of the problems we have had as anybody who works with the fishing industry knows is the absence of healthcare through our fishermen. people doing a terribly dangerous job that's very important for the health of the rest of us and the economy of this region have not had healthcare. the catholic health system has tried to help. but it's hard to do that. and we have been trying to patch up healthcare for the fishermen but if this bill goes through in the right way, we will have done a major step towards providing healthcare for fishermen. what the bill says there will be subsidies for the purchase of insurance for people who work hard at 12, $15, $20 an hour and
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don't make enough money to buy healthcare under our current system and i think that's a very important thing and it's particularly important for this region. it's important for the people in new bedford and taunton and elsewhere our region is a potential great beneficiary. some people that are concerned about in the bill will have not much affect here in massachusetts because the massachusetts legislature passed its own bill that does some of these same things, but to the extent that it does new things, i'm for it. now that costs money and let me touch on this and i'll throw this open. that's where i do have some differences with the bill. i don't like the idea of linking employment to healthcare. i do think think that's a depressant of jobs. [applause] >> but i also want to expand healthcare to the working people of new bedford who might can't afford it. one of the things the president proposed was to cut back on some
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hospital compensation. i'm against that. for one thing, people think about hospital compensation, they may think about medical specialists. they're entitled and we want them to be well paid. who gets paid by hospitals hard-working people emptying bed pans at 1:00 in the morning. some of the hardest working people in this country are doing very difficult jobs in hospitals. i am not for cutting back on the low salaries they already get. i mentioned cartage christie. they agree to unionization. so i'm looking for other ways to finance this. now, i am struck by those who say, well, you don't care about the deficit. no, i do. and i do worry -- [laughter] >> about the deficit, that's one of the reasons, not the only one, that i voted against the single most wasteful expenditure in the history of america. the iraq war. [applause]
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>> somebody called out the bailout. i assume by the bailout you mean the bill george bush insisted that we vote for. i'll tell you what. here's the deal. when you're through yelling, raise your hand and i'll talk. all right. i assume by bailout you mean the $700 billion george bush asked the congress to vote for last year. by the way, do you disagree with that fact or -- well, you say don't blame it on george bush. >> we won't get your questions answered. keep it down. >> i do have this -- there is an indicator, i hope people understand, when you say things people cannot refute they try to drown you out. that's understandable. i understand people resent the
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fact that it was mentioning it was george bush's bill. by the way, when it comes to bailouts as people call them, whether general motors -- all right. let me talk about aig then. i'll talk about aig for a minute because aig was done by the bush administration with no congressional vote. it was the congressional -- it was the bush administration officials that decided to bail out aig. it was bush who first decided to bail out general motors and chrysler without a congressional vote. every single -- yes, bush -- on fannie and freddie -- i will be glad to respond so fannie and freddie, the bailout on fannie and freddie we passed legislation in 2007 in the house that george bush asked us to pass when the democrats became the majority. i guess laughter -- all right. [applause]
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>> well, the requests -- the requests probably -- excuse me, but i just got a request for somebody who voted for him twice than talk about something other than george bush. i understand it's from bush supporters. it's impossible to understand -- it's impossible to understand where we are without looking at the context. what's the lie, sir. somebody said i was a liar. what's the lie? what was the lie that i told? >> somebody said liar. >> why didn't you read the bill the t.a.r.p. bill. >> which bill? >> the t.a.r.p. bill. >> i did read the t.a.r.p. bill. [inaudible] >> i read the t.a.r.p. bill. >> he's a liar. >> enough! >> you're a liar. you lie. >> i am struck by the thoughtful
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level of discussion i get from people who can't disagree rationally. let me say this -- there's some contradictory yells but somebody asked me to talk about fannie and freddie mac and i will for a couple minutes. you want me to talk about it or do you want to just yell. thank you, sir. here's what happened with fannie mae and freddie mac. i was a supporter of their efforts to do affordable rental housing. under the bush administration, they began to increase -- they began to increase -- >> get out. get out. no. get out. >> ray, ray, i think -- i'd just
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ask the chairman -- i've asked the chairman to ignore the disruptions. my own view is this, frankly, and i felt this way all my political career. i used to tell this to people on the left. now i tell it to the people on the right. disruption never helps your cause. it makes it will like you're afraid to have rational discussion. [applause] >> you just drive people away. [applause] >> i'm not here -- this is the council on aging, not kindergarten. i don't expect anybody to be acting like a police officer. so you can boo, you can disrupt. we won't have much done. [inaudible] >> no, i'm going to finish -- we're here for a couple of hours. now patience apparently is not part of what you bring here but i think a few more minutes is important. because you asked me about fannie mae and freddie mac and bailouts. i want to repeat, everything that's now going on in the united states government, that
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people describe as a bailout, aig, the banks, general motors, chrysler was begun by and asked for by the bush administration. there was cooperation -- but those happen to be facts. laughter is a response to facts i guess is the only way to do it. some was done without congress like aig. with regard to fannie mae and freddie mac i did support for affordable rental housing. in the early part of 2000s george bush pushed them into doing more purchase of mortgages from low-incomed people. in 2004 -- 2003, i said i didn't think they had a problem. in 2004, i objected when bush forced them substantially to increase their purchase of mortgages for low-incomed people. in 2005 -- by the way, during the period from 1995 to 2006 and the republicans ran the congress. i was not dictating what
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happened and what did not happen. the republicans did not pass until 2005. in 2005, the house republicans passed a bill. george bush didn't like the bill the house republicans passed. the senate democrats tried to pass the house republican bill. the senate republicans killed it. nothing happened. i didn't have the power to do anything until january of 2007 and in march of 2007, we passed the bill to regulate fannie mae and freddie mac that the bush administration asked for. the senate didn't pass it till 2008. so that's the facts. no, i you will moan and groan in response but there won't be any factual refutation. now to get back to this bill, i think it's very important that we provide the kind of medical -- financial assistance to people who can't afford medical care. i agree with our chairman. we have had -- no, illegal aliens are specifically excluded from getting any assistance in the bill.
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[inaudible conversations] >> that's a lie! >> section 246 here says, nothing in this bill shall permit any payment to people who are here illegally. it's right in the bill. [applause] >> so that's in there. that's in the bill. now, what we are trying to do, though, is to increase wages in general. i support labor unions. i think they played a very important role in america. [applause] >> i think the antiunion efforts we have seen has helped depress our wages in america. but until we can get wages up higher, then i think we do need to provide the kind of graduated subsidy that we provide for people under this bill.
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so that's another reason why i am very much for it. as i said, it will help our hospitals which are so important here. it will help the working people here who are hurting. as far as other the other argument was that somehow there was something in this bill that's going to dictate treatments, there is a provision in the bill that says that they should do research on what medical treatments are effective and it says explicitly in the bill that this research shall never be used by the government to dictate any procedures or outcomes. it will be information available for people but it says it in the bill. and now i'll be glad to take some questions. yes. [inaudible] >> good evening, congressman frank. >> i'm sorry. >> quiet! quiet! >> anybody who has their hand up, i will acknowledge them.
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once i acknowledge you, please go to the center microphone so everybody can hear. it gets on the tape and on tv. but i will acknowledge you most likely by row because i'm sure everybody does have a question. so this lady -- this lady right here, yep, please go right up there. that gentleman in the blue will be next. thank you. >> president obama wants to cut costs and he wants to give us more choice in healthcare. if he is serious about doing this and you are serious about doing this why isn't there in any of the bills tort reform? [applause] >> you have more choice of insurance companies if you allow people to buy their insurance anywhere in the united states. free market, if they can go to any state to get their
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insurance, it would be -- that's not tort reform. tort reform is the lawyers. this is something else. >> more than one question, i'm sorry. >> competition. he wants fair competition and allow the people to make the decision. let us go where we want to go to get our insurance. >> well, here's the problem -- [applause] >> the problem in both cases is the conservatives in congress have long maintained -- >> come on! >> you run the show now. >> let him answer the question. >> i guess, this objection hearing is something you might not like is stronger than you like. it's called states' rights. that's the problem. tort reform has always been a subject for the states in america. your right to sue or not to sue for torts, for wrongs committed against you has been a state
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lawmaker since the late 18th century when the country was formed. so there was a lot of resistance to having the federal government federalize tort reform for medical care and presumably for everything else. that's similarly the case with insurance. 60 years ago congress voted to let insurance be a state issue. the question of who get to offer insurance state-by-state has been a state issue. i do think it should be revisited. in the meantime, though, this bill does, i think, substantially states should increase the amount that should be allowed through various private insurance companies. but the two issues you raise are both state issues and that's why they're not in this federal bill. it's the states that have historically regulated that. since 1946 with the act passed by conservatives again and the tort reform issue has been -- again, it's very held deeply by the states and it's been a state issue.
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>> good evening. good evening, congressman frank. thank you for coming here. i'm charles. i'm a registered nurse in the area. i want to ask you about fee schedules, fee for treatment, fee for service, the same thing which is in medicare. and if national health insurance is passed, it would probably have a similar fee schedule. whether or not national health insurance is passed with medicare, i'd like to ask you if you could work on getting all registered nurses in the united states quoted in the medicare fee schedule fee for treatment which is the same thing as free for service similarly the way the physicians are so quoted and paid. now, today, some nurse practitioners are quoted in the medicare fee schedule for selected roles. historically, no registered nurses were in there. nurse practitioner is a registered nurse with advanced education. it's my belief and i worked on this for years that all registered nurses who were licensed in their given states to practice registered
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professional nursing should be quoted in medicare fee schedules, which would provide more healthcare, rural, suburban, inner city, cheaper, more cost effectively. it would be like a physician expander or a nurse expander. nurses could then go out and become self-employed as a group, offices, specialized generalists, single partnerships. but it should be a career option for nurses. and the united states ought to consider that in the medicare fee schedules to have rns, registered nurses quoted for fee treatment. >> let me say i generally agree with that. again, when you talk about medicaid as opposed to medicare, as you know, this is and this is something people apparently were not fully aware of it's been a state issue. who gets to practice medicine and what they can practice, as you know, has been a state issue. one of the issues has been, for instance, a dispute -- and i generally i must say have been on the side of the nurses.
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cjdtqi sv friends who are docto. for example, anesthesiologists as you know versus nurse anesthetists. the states decide who can do what. i have been of the view, however, consistently that wherever the state allows a practice, that practitioner should be given the treatment you mentioned. so i am for increasing that but again, you have the question, whether or not it's -- for instance, midwives versus obstetricians, nurse anesthetists versus anesthesiologists. it's not easy for me to say, that those are -- those are decisions that have been made by the state, but i am for and i think it's -- it provides more -- less expensive medical care as long as it's a choice of the individual. if an individual -- no individual should be compelled to pick a nurse -- an anesthesiologist or a nurse anesthetist or a nurse practitioner or a doctor. i agree with that. that should be a matter of choice. but where it is consistent with state law that governs who can
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practice what, i am for doing what you say. i do want to read -- by the way, i found on page 36 of the bill that come out of the three committees, section 246, nothing in this subtitle -- nothing in this subtitle shall allow federal payments for affordability credits on behalf of individuals who are not lawfully present in the united states. that's in black and white in the bill. that's the only area of subsidy. so, no, there is no subsidy. there are already people who are here illegally who are not supposed to be on medicaid. some people sneak through. robbery is illegal and some people still rob. section 246 on page 36, nothing in this subtitle shall allow federal payments for affordability credits on behalf of individuals who are not lawfully present in the united states. next. >> only one question.

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