certainly. i haven't read that particular pleading that the you've talked about that was filed at different agencies, not the fcc, but right now i think by every market indicator the video marketplace is robustly competitive. >> host: we're almost out of time, commissioner mcdowell. senators snowe and warner recently introduced legislation to bring more expertise to the fcc. do you support that? >> guest: how could i be against bringing more expertise from the fcc especially when my home state senator, mark warner, is introducing the bill? we do need to make sure we have more technical expertise at the fcc. we have a bit of a brain drain. we have some wonderful engineers on staff, some of the best and brightest in the world, but some of them are reaching retirement age, and we need to be able to compete with the private sector to attract folks to come to the commission. if anyone's watching, please sent in your resumé to the fcc.

we need you to donate a few years of your life to public service. it's very important. >> host: and what is the role of stuart benjamin? >> guest: i've known him for a number of years. he went to, he taught at my alma mater, duke university, and is on a leave of absence there as our very first scholar in residence. and i will let him speak for himself as to his actual role, but he is there to, i think, to help us be a liaison between the commission and the academic community at a minimum. he's an expert on first amendment law, and he's a great guy. >> host: final question from cecilia kang. >> host: sure. you'll be at the consumer electronics show, and how will you be viewing what you see on the floor through a policy lens? >> guest: well, i like to go because it gives me very efficient one-stop shopping for what's.coming over the horizon for consumers over the next year

or two, and i'll be looking at whatever they present to me. there's always a surprise there, so probably, you know, a week from now we should be talking about what it was that i was most surprised about. but i think what'll be interesting to see is what sort of technologies are there to bring more online video content from the internet to your tv set. not just your computer screen, but your tv screen. what can we do to make that easier for consumers. i know there are a lot of companies trying to make that happen, so that'll be fascinating. and also what are some of the new wireless devices out there, what's the latest technology that folks are using and how's the spectrum being used in ways we couldn't foresee even at last year's consumer electronics show. so it's a very efficient way to learn a lot. >> host: as always, we appreciate you coming over to "the communicators." robert -- mcdowell of the fcc, cecilia kang of "the washington post." >> guest: thanks for having me. >> host: thank you.

>> secretary of state hillary clinton recently commemorated the conference on women's health issues. she now talks about the goals reached on a -- these issues will be part of her agenda during a three-nation pacific trip that begins this week to australia, new zealand, and new guinea. from the state department, this is about half an hour. >> thank you all very much. my goodness, thank you. wow, this is a wonderful occasion. several of us were quite nervous when we saw the snow start last night, so i'm delighted the sun is out and shining on all of you here as we gather for this the

commemoration of the 15th anniversary of the ground-breaking gathering and agreement in cairo. when i think about that and the thousands of people who were part of it who came together to declare with one voice that reproductive health care is critical to the health of women and that women's health is essential to the prosperity and opportunity of all, to the stability of families and communities and can the sustainability and development of nations, it makes me nostalgic. [laughter] for conferences that are held that actually produce results. [laughter] and give us a framework for moving forward. there is no doubt in my mind that the work that was done and the commitments that were made in cairo are still really the bulwark of what we intend to be doing and are expected to do on

behalf of women and girls. the year 2015 is the target year. part of the reason we wanted to have this commemoration is not only to look backwards, but to look forward. what is it we will do between now and 2015? remember what was expected of us, all governments will make access to reproductive health care and family planning services a basic right. we will dramatically reduce infant, child and maternal mortality. we will open the doors of education to all citizens, but especially to girls and women. it is somewhat hard to believe in retrospect that cairo was the first-ever global forum that recognized the connection between women's health, the quality of women's lives and human progress on a broader

scale. so i am delighted to join you in marking this landmark event, but more importantly to asking you to join with us in rededicating ourselves to the goals that we embraced 15 years ago. they remain critical, and they remain unfilled. i've had the honor and privilege as i look around this audience of knowing many of you, some of you for a very long time. and i know how committed many of you have been and continue to be. we have made measurable progress since 1994 in improving the health and the lives of women and children, especially girls. for example, the use of modern contraceptives worldwide has increased from under 10% in the 1960s to 43% in 2008.

we have greater access to neonatal care including medicines that prevent the spread of hiv from mother to child. we've significantly increased child survival rates. the number of girls enrolled in schools around the world has gone up. and we've come closer to aless measurable -- less measurable but still critical goal, the integration of gender into a range of global programs including our efforts through the united nations to bring an end to sexual and gender-based violence in places of conflict. however, vast inequities remain. too often still today in 2010 women and girls bear the burdens of regional and global crises. whether it's an economic downturn or climate change or

political instability, they still are the majority of the world's poor, unschooled, unhealthy and underfed. they are rarely the cause of violent consequences but increasingly violent conflicts, but increasingly they bear the consequences of such conflicts. we've seen that from the congo to bosnia to burma. and 15 years after the cairo conference, far too many women still have little or no access to reproductive health services including family planning and maternal health care. when we look at this deficit in health care for women, we can see what it means in terms of lost productivity, lost resources and lost lives. nearly half the women in the

developing world deliver their babies without a nurse, a midwife, a doctor or access to crucial medical care. global rates of maternal mortality remain perilously high. one woman dies every minute of every day in pregnancy or childbirth. and for every woman who dies another 20 suffer from injury, infection or disease every minute. more than 215 million women worldwide lack access to the modern forms of contraception, and this contributes to the nearly 20 million unsafe abortions that take place every year. sexually-transmitted diseases, of course, including but not limited to hiv and aids, claim millions of lives annually among

women. fistula destroys the lives of millions, and it is often the result of pregnancies that occur when a girl is too young. an estimated 70 million, that is 70 million, women and girls worldwide have been subjected to female genital cutting, a procedure that is not only painful and traumatic, but is also the source of infebruaries and -- infections and increased risks of injury during childbirth. now, as those of us gathered in the ben franklin room on the eighth floor of the state department know very well, the topic of reproductive health is subject to a great deal of debate. but i think we should all agree that these numbers are not only grim, but after 15 years they

are intolerable. for if we believe that human rights are women's rights and women's rights are human rights, then we cannot accept the ongoing marginalization of half the world's population. we cannot accept it morally, politically, socially or economically. [applause] so we're here today to examine the distance that remains to be traveled before the world fully realizes the icpd goals. this is a journey that the obama administration and the united states government will travel with you. but we need to travel quickly because we only have five years to meet our original goals. for the health statistics that i just mentioned, they point to the a broader impact. there's a direct connection

between a woman's ability to plan her family, space her pregnancies and give birth safely and her ability to get an education, work outside the home, support her family and participate fully in the life of her community. when a girl becomes a mother before she becomes literate, when a woman gives birth alone and is left with a permanent disability, when a mother toils daily to feed her large family but cannot convince her husband to agree to contraception, these struggles represent suffering that can and should be avoided. they represent potential that goes unfulfilled, and they also represent are an opportunity to extend critical help to women worldwide and the children who depend on them. investing in the health of women, adolescents and girls is not only the right thing to do, it is also the smart thing to do. that is why we are integrating women's issues as key elements of our foreign policy agenda and

in especially our global health initiative and our global food security initiative. that is why we saw the first appointment of an ambassador for global women's issues, and it didn't take me long to decide who should fill that position. it is why we are launching women's entrepreneurial efforts through the pathways to prosperity in latin america to insure that prosperity is spread more broadly including to women. it is why we are working with religious leaders in afghanistan and pakistan to increase access to information about family planning and preventive health care. we are doing all of these things because we have seen that when women and girls have the tools to stay healthy and the opportunity to contribute to their family's well being, they flourish, and so do the people around them. consider this one story from

uganda where u.s.aid works with the international planned parenthood foundation to provide health services and education to low-income women. among their clients are a group of teenage girls who call themselves the moonlight stars. their parents are dead leaving them the sole providers for their younger brothers and sisters without any other options, they were working as prostitutes. through this u.s.aid-funded program, they gained access to condoms and education to protect themselveses from disease and pregnancy. they also began taking classes in sewing and knitting and other kinds of skills that could be used to support their siblings without endangering their physical or emotional well with being. and thanks to this job training and the support that acaned it, many of the -- accompanied it, many of the moonlight stars have embarked on a new path of

opportunity for themselves and their families. while investing in women lifts many lives, the inverse is also true. in societies where women's rights and roles are denied, girls are forbidden from attending school, or they pay a very heavy price to try to do so. few have the right to decide whether or when to get married or become mothers. poverty, political oppression and even violent extremism often follow. maternal and child health are particularly important indicators of broader progress. in recent years we've learned more about the conditions that accompany political unrest. it turns out that one of the most constant predicters for political uphe'll is -- upheaval is the rate of infant mortality. in places where the rate of infant mortality is high, the quality of life is low because investment in and access to

health care are often out of reach. and that breeds the kind of frustration, hopelessness and anger that we've seen. we also know that child mortality is closely connected with maternal mortality. when a mother dies, her children are at much greater risk of dying as well. these struggles can't be separated and neither can their solutions. in the obama administration, we are convinced of the value of investing in women and girls, and we understand there is a direct line between a woman's reproductive health and her ability to lead a productive, fulfilling life. and, therefore, we believe investing in the potential of women and girls is the smartest investment we can make. it is connected to every problem on anyone's mind around the world today the. [applause]

so we are rededicating ourselves to the global efforts to improve reproductive health for women and girls under the leadership of this administration we are committed to meeting the cairo goals. we're committed to working in partnership with all of you. one of president obama's first actions in office was to overturn the mexico city policy which greatly limited our ability to fund family planning programs. [applause] we have pledged new funding, new programs and a renewed commitment to achieve millennium development goal five, namely a two-thirds reduction in global maternal mortality and universal access to reproductive health care. this goal is, again, critical to and interconnected with every other millennium development goal. but the world has made less progress toward fulfilling that

goal than any other. this year the united states renewed funding of reproductive health care through the united nations population fund, and more funding is on the way. [applause] the u.s. congress recently appropriated more than $648 million in foreign assistance to family planning and reproductive health programs worldwide. that's the largest allocation in more than a decade since we last had a democratic president, i might add. [applause] in addition to new funding, we've launched a new program that will be the center piece of our foreign policy, the global health initiative, which commits us to spending $63 billion over six years to improve global health by investing in efforts to reduce maternal the and child mortality the, prevent millions of unintended pregnancies and

avert millions of new hiv infections among other goals. this initiative will employ a new approach to fighting disease and promoting health. it will address interrelated health challenges together. for example, by integrating family manning, maternal -- planning, maternal health services and hiv/aids screening and treatment so that women will also receive hiv counseling and will be referred to an hiv clip pick they need one. -- clinic if they need one. we're now seeing the rise of the largest youth generation in the history of the world. they need and deserve to know how to stay healthy and through this initiative, we will be providing critical information to them. the global health initiative will also focus on helping countries strengthen their own health systems. we want to build sustainable health systems in countries. and it will insure that all of our global health programs

including nutrition, malaria, tb, hiv/aids are designed to meet the needs of women and girls. including by taking into account the many social and economic factors that have an impact on their health from sexual coercion to domestic violence to pervasive gender inequities. you know that hiv/aids is now morphing into a woman's disease and increasingly younger and younger women in many, many poor country can -- countries are infected. we know that expanding access to contraception helps only if women are empowered to use it, that protecting one's self from hiv is harder when one's life depends on staying in a man's good favor and that all the prenatal care in the world won't protect a mother and child from an abusive home. promoting women's health and children's health means improving the quality of their

lives on many levels, and it also means reaching out to men and boys to encourage them to become advocates and allies. so we have our work cut out for us, but we have an excellent road map in the cairo program of action and a worthy target in the millennium development goal number five. and we're going to need your help. in everything that we're doing in the department and at u.s.aid, we are injecting the needs and the roles of women and girls. we're asking for how women and girls can play more of a role in their societies, be more involved in peacemaking and peace keeping, assist in mitigating against and preventing climate change just across the board we are making it clear that there has to be special attention paid to the needs of women and girls. it's in america's national

security interests to do so. i want to close with the story of one woman whose life was transformed by the work that the people in this room do every single day. carolyn detina is a young woman from the democratic republic of congo who for years endured the shame and ostracism caused by obstetric fistula. eventually, she found her way to a clinic supported by the u.n. population fund, and she finally received the surgery, care and emotional support she needed to heal. then she started speaking out about her experience to fight the stigma and to let other women know that even in isolated places treatment is possible. her message has traveled the world. two years ago she came to washington and urged members of congress to support maternal the

health programs worldwide. and today the united states is proud once again to support the work of the u.n. population fund. but one advocate, even one with such passion and commitment, can only do so much. every woman everywhere deserves high quality care, not only at her most vulnerable hour, but at every single stage of life. that's our goal, and that's our responsibility. there's also a matter of simple equity and fairness. i've been in many places in many parts of the world where the rich, the educated, the well off, the connected, the powerful, the elite had access to every single form of health care. and yet it was denied, denied by law, denied by culture, denied by taboo, denied by regulation, denied by resources to the vast

majority of women in the same societies. that is unacceptable. so part of what we need to do is not only provide services to those who need them, but to change the minds and attitudes of those who can be responsible for delivering those services in countries around the world. i have said in many different settings on, i guess, every continent except an argumentty ca -- antarctica that the rights that women who have a position in society are able to command cannot, therefore, be denied to the women who live down the street or care for their children or clean their homes or plant their crops, and that we have to do a better job of making the equity argument on

behalf of girls and women, and particularly on behalf of the cairo agenda. i'm very optimistic and very committed that we can do this together, and i am very grateful for what so many of you have done for so many years. you have ridden the ups, and you have survived the downs. [laughter] you have worked in favorable political environments and unfavorable ones. you have seen the mexico city policy come and go, and you have stayed true. you've stayed true to your commitment, your passion, your belief that every single child in this country, boy or girl, deserves a chance to live up to his or her god-given potential be. i just want to urge that we do not grow weary.

i don't know about you, but sometimes it can seem a little bit hard to take. it is all so self-evident, it seems so obvious to the rest of us that this needs to be done, and we keep encountering obstacles of every shape and size. but, please, stay with us, and let's try to create institutional and structural change that does not get wiped away when the political winds blow. let's try to create markets for these goods and ways of funding them and educational and instructional programs along with our commitment to serve that will give women everywhere a chance to take their own lives and their own futures into their own hands. it is now my great pleasure, you've met two of my wonderful

team members. i want to introduce two more whom i see. one is rod shaw, dr. rod shaw, our new superb administrator of u.s.aid. 34r-z. [applause] rod, come here. come here, rod. we want to, we want you to get to meet him if you don't know him. we want you to support him as he makes the changes that are necessary to put u.s.aid back dusd -- usaid fore front. and now it's my honor to introduce our undersecretary, maria oar the row, and maybe, mara ya, you and rod could say a few words to close out the program. [applause]

>> well, i think probably one of the most important things that i can do is really thank the secretary. thank her not only for her words today, but also because in the remarks that she made to us we heard again the unwavering leadership that she has given in all the work that has been done to carry out the cairo program of action. and that leadership she expressed today not only because she gave us this sobering fact

of the reality that we face, but also because as she always does she reminded us of the individual woman in the village in uganda or in the a small slum in another city in africa or central america, that one woman's story that has really been one of the things that has propelled her to the support and to do the work that she's doing in which we all always have to remember is at the core of what we are doing. but she always, also reminded us that this leadership she has given is driven also by principles and by long-held convictions that she has been articulating for, now, decades. and so i want to, i want to just express my gratitude for having her be able to provide that kind

of leadership as we sit here not only celebrate, but look forward which is what she is asking us to do. and i think i probably, i'm speaking for all of you, and it's really a joy to be able to say this, but isn't it incredible to have a secretary of state of the united states to stand here and say that women and girls are front and center to the foreign policy and the the foreign assistance of this country? [applause] ..

and do it with the commitment and the determination that all of you has shown and the secretary has expressed, we won't be able to achieve and to move forward the program of action and the millenium development goal that we are seeking, so my thanks to all of you, and my -- certainly of after raj says a few words, i want to invite all of you with assistant secretary schwartz, with ambassador vivere, with administrator shah, to join us in a reception and to celebrate, as we move forward in this

struggle that we are all doing together. raj? [applause] >> thank you. well, as i'm standing between you and the reception, i'll be very brief. i'll just say, this has been an incredibly special week for me and for the united states agency for international development. on wednesday -- is it friday? it is. i can't tell. it's been -- on wednesday, the secretary delivered at the center for global development what i considered to be perhaps the most important speech ever given by a secretary of state, as it pertains to the subject of development and for those of you who have not had a chance to both read the text, and almost more importantly, see the delivery, it could only be given by secretary of state that has decades of commitment and understanding and knowledge for this mission, and i thought made a powerful and important point

about how this is a serious effort to make development central to foreign policy, and to use the tools of diplomacy and defense and development all to further our goals in a much more robust way than perhaps has ever been done. that was followed yesterday, by the secretary being gracious and willing to come to the united states agency for international development to swear me in, and it was a wonderful event there, but for -- with more than a thousand people there, and mostly our wonderful staff and our team, she made the point that she was in fact visiting us-aid on her very second day on the job, the day after she was sworn in, and she came back the day of after she gave a major address on development, and so the agency is excited, is energized, and is ready to live up to the principles that were outlined on wednesday and i know many of the core concepts that

she's talked about today. and i'll close just by saying, because as i too look around the room, i see so many partners high had a chance to look with in different environments an many of you sent e-mails over the past few days, so thank you very much. we will absolutely look forward to a deep and important partnership with you, as this work goes forward. that was perhaps the core operational guidance for the secretary for how we should operate in development that is different from the past. it's to do our work in partnership, not patronage. that partnership extends to the women and girls, who should be the primary focus of our efforts, it extends to the countries that need to lead and own the vision of change and the commitment to change, that's required for sustainable result, and that partnership extends to everyone in this room, that as i just look around, have created the technical and the policy and the programmatic innovations that we really do need to learn from, so that we can infuse the best practices of an incredible

discipline and incredibly talented group of leaders into a multibillion dollar development enterprise. so thank you. i look forward to working with you, and i look forward to speaking with you at the reception. thanks very much. [applause] >> a live picture now from the may flower hotel, how school districts can save money,

despite declining federal funding. this conference is hosted by the american enterprise institute. speaking now is frederick hess of the american enterprise institute. our live coverage on c-span2. >> all right. alwayanybody who reads newspapes horfollows events online is certainly aware that states and districts across the country t struggling with the fiscal situation in terms of school and system budgets.

this has been an unfolding news story for more than 12 months, and it's going to be a news story, unfortunately, for a while yet to come. if we take a look at this, we see that the rate of decline in revenue projections actually started back in about 2005, give or take, from the swing out of the last row session at the beginning of the last decade, and right now, what we're looking at is finally a situation where we are seeing zero real growth, more or less at the state and local level, but because about a third of school spending is property tax derived, and because property assessments tend to lag about three years, because of the nature of state caps, is that unfortunately, the collapse we have seen in residential real estate values and which continues to unfold in

commercial real estate values, hasn't yet played out in terms of state and local revenues. and in all likelihood, it's not going to play out until about 2013 or even 2014. so when we take a look at what we see in terms of say, the rockefeller institute's projections for state and local revenues, is that what you see with the dotted line up here, is the projection with the stimulus funds, which we see has cushioned the decline, and made it more orderly. but it has certainly not changed the bottom line, which is we are looking at steady declines going forward to 2013, and perhaps beyond. as the rockefeller institute has noted, fiscal crises are rarely solved in the first year, it can take three ar four years before finances recover. even if economic recovery comes sooner.

so the concern other is some of our conversations about the role of stimulus, about states hoping the race to the top might help them plug some of these gaps seems to suggest that what we're looking at is a short term crunch. the reality is something unfortunately is going to be with us longer than that, so if we take a look at the next slot, what we see isight now, in 2009, states doing dramatic midcourse corrections in budgeting. now, if you look back over the last couple recessions, the early 1990's and say 2001, what you'll notice is that even after a recession e, larger adjustments typically for the next year or two. well, what that means is in all likelihood t appears the recession ended just at the end of 2009. quarters three and four, 2009. if history is any guide, states are actually going to -- make

larger adjustments than they made in 2009, most likely in 2010 and 2011. and that's after the stimulus has run out. so what we are looking at here again, is a situation, in which we are not unfortunately starting to emerge from the tunnel yet, but in which we are very much still underground. what we have seen thus far from districts starts to reflect how we think about this. districts first responded in 2008-2009 by trying to squeeze everything they could out of the marginal accounts. if you look at the major cuts in 2003 -- excuse me, in 2008 and 2009, the three biggest categories superintendents tried thermostats, eliminating field trips, and deferring textbook procurement. well, unfortunately, you can only squeeze those accounts so far. there's just not that much money in them. so what we've started to see in 2009 and 2010 is a shift in where the cuts are being made.

we're seeing them being made much more in personnel, which is where the money is. we seem them being made -- see them being made in class size, see them being made in terms of laying of off person em, seeing them in eliminating instructional improvement initiatives, and again, in delaying the procurement of textbooks. in other words, we're starting to see the money cut where the larger number -- where the larger dollar figures are. the problem is, that very few superintendents in my experience are particularly pleased about the way they're going about this. there's a lot of reference to meat cleavers and the unfortunate decision and the question is twofold for the day. one, are there smarter, more strategic ways to make these kind of cuts, and two, can we use in fact this crisis as an opportunity to put schools and systems in a better position going forward.

and it sounds strange to think that way in education, but it's rolely not. three high performing companies have just gone through pretty severe strings of layoffs themselves between november 2008 and november 2009. cisco, ibm and microsoft, between them, laid off nearly 20,000 people, which is not a substantial chunk of their work forces, but in thinking and talking about the implications, the quote -- this quote from bill gates in october 2008, might be a useful for educators. he said we are an information upturn and the reality is, the crisis that has been created also offers an opportunity for district and state leaders to take steps that might otherwise be prohibitive. so as we look forward, the thing to keep in mind is that this is not arisis we just need to get

through. we're in for a long haul. we're probably not going to see fiscal 2008 revenues, we're not going to be back at that level on a sustained basis. probably for about five or sex years, until 2013 or 2014, and beyond that, looking forward, the fact is, that we have emerged as jim guthrie is going to discuss in a bit, from an era in which school funding has been a beneficiary for many political and economic developments and going forward, the aging of the population, the degree of fiscal stress on the u.s. government, competing obligations for higher education in health care, mean that funding situation for schooling over the next decade or two could very well be much grimmer than it has been in the past few decades, and if that's the case, these are not just measures to get us through a rough patch, these are measures to help us run schools that are going to excel in a new

environment. with that, her gois to look lik. the first panel is going to offer an overview of school spending and a little bit of what we know today about where and how this can find new savings. panel two is going to ask what savvy leaders can do differently when it comes to questions like personnel and technology. panel three is going to look at change has happened and how they have gone about it and panel four is going to focus on the barriers to change and what can be done about them. with that, we'll go ahead and get the first panel underway. the first panel consists of three papers, all of which are available out in the lobby for those of you here and at www.aei.org event 100164, for those of you watching at your computers or at home. there are three presentations, the first up will be jim

guthrie, senior fellow at the george w. bush and professor of public policy and education at southern methodist university. previously, jim was the patricia and rhodes hart professor and director of the peabody education at vanderbilt university. jim's paper is titled an overview of school spending. up second will be mark marguerite, she serves with the center on reinventing public education at the university of washington. her research focuses on education spending and productivity. a field is where she is now probably one of the nation's acknowledged leaders. her paper is titled, now is a great time to consider the per unit cost of everything in education. speaking third, is mike, mike has served as executive director of the council of great city schools, the nation's primary coalition of large urban public school systems, since 1992.

before taking that position, mike served as the organization's director of legislation and research for 15 years. mike's paper is titled, managing for result, in america's great city schools. we're privileged to have with us two terrific discussants today, up firskartik focuses on educatd economic development. he has worked with a broad range of clients, including social sector, public sector, high tech and industrial clients, and finally, we've got with us, jose tores, superintendent of school district u-46, illinois's second largest school district, with 53 schools, serving tremendously diverse population of more than 40,000 students. dr. torres was also a 2005brode

fellow. with that, jim, i'm going to ask you to get us started. >> thank you, rick. in the interest of time, and because of the nature of the subject, i'm going to forego the usual early morning efforts at humor and get right at this. my message is straightforward, and i'm going to give it in just a moment, but some of the things i have to say will not swallow easily with some of the individuals in the audience. i know that from prior experience. so i just want to lay the groundwork by explaining that there is not a number i am using today, which does not come from a united states federal government statistical agency. i didn't make up these numbers myself, and if you choose to in some manner challenge them, then we'll have to go back and talk to the budget bureau or nces, etc. now here is my thesis.

it's twofold. the united states education system over the last -- roughly the last 100 years, has enjoyed a remarkable fiscal benefit. even when you control for inflation, dollars per pupil have had an almost perpetual rise. when you look back 50 years ago, and you look at today, you'll see that the per pupil amounts have really -- actually, they've about quadrupled, even when you control for inflation. educators, myself included, we've had it good compared to what's coming. we've had it good for a long time. that's the first message. the second message is that there is emerging an almost inevitable stream of conditions, that renders this past fiscal

fortuitous pattern unlikely to continue, highly unlikely to continue. as i'll show in the last 50, 60, 70 years, where we've put our money is into people in education. we have hired many, many more teachers than would have been justified by enrollment alone, or by growth and gross domestic product. so approximately 60, 65% of school district expenditures are for the payment of professional educators. another 15% of what they do is paying the salaries of certificate people, of classified people. so about 80% of what schools spend is for people. and it is unlikely that any belt tightening as rick suggests, around bus schedules or thermostats or electric meters, it just isn't going to do it. the money here is in people and

that's where the change has to take place, almost assuredly. so the question is, how can that be done, in a manner which is not only fair, but also as best we can, rendering the system more productive for the students. so here's a modest step backwards. and then we'll go into the future. this slide shows expenditures per pupil back to 1920. up almost to the present. and then it has another curve of in which those expenditures per pupil are adjusted for inflation. one can see that even on an adjusted basis, per pupil spending has had virtually never ending upward trend over the last 70, 80, 90 years. there are two interesting plateaus in this, these are -- one plateau is right in the middle of the great depression. for two years, school spending was stable throughout the nation. and thenga

world war ii, school spending per pupil was stable throughout the nation, and then resumed the rise that you can see here. now, this just didn't -- these are national figures, but virtually, every kind of school district has enjoyed the same kind of growth over time. the united states department of education keeps statistics -- it disaggregates them by type of district, all the way from large cities, with which mike on my right is connected, to the very smallest rural districts. of the approximate 14,000 school districts in the united states, there's a high level of concentration in the big cities. the 25% of all students in the united states are in 1% of our school districts. 50% of them are in five of our

school districts. the remaining 50% of students are spread or distributed across the remaining 95% of our districts, so you can see most of our school districts actually are quite small and the big ones get our attention, but it doesn't matter what kind of district. per pupil spending over the last 70 or 80 years has been going up in all of them. now, here coming up is the point i made at the beginning and i'll emphasize. with you ask for what has school districts spent the money, what have they bought with this? overwhelmingly, they bought people. they have bought the time of professionals and of classified employees so on my left and your left, the upward trending line is the number of teachers that we have hired over the past 50 years, and it's now approaching three million, and the graph on the right shows the per pupil -- pardon me, shows the

teacher-pupil average over that same period of time, and we have a start point some 50 years ago, of about 27 pupils per teacher. today on average, we're at about 14, and still headed down. some of you who saw this morning's front page of "u.s.a. today," they had their usual informative graph and there was a poll across industries of the individuals who thought that they were most understaffed. it included government, and private sector, and it was educators who believed that the endeavor in which they were engaged, they were the most shorthanded of all, and they might be, i'm not here to argue that today, it's just that it has gotten a lot less shorthanded over time. now, in the paper, i spend some

time explaining why education has enjoyed this privileged position for so long. and there's a set of structural explanations and political explanations that one can read about, but the short term ar ist righting -- all of them are starting to evaporate, and likely will have this regre regrettable turnt this fiscal dividend in the future. so let me try to explain what's going to change this path. en route, i will point pout that education has held up very well rel tv to other sectors when it comes to employment over the last 5 who years. no other sector really has done as well, when it comes to employment. we've increased personnel faster than the rate of growth in gross domestic product. we've actually taken care of

education better than we've taken care of defense. education, spending and personnel have increased faster than defense, but moving on into the future, in a sense, the future is already here. hi undertook an analysis where i divided per pupil spending into gross domestic product. now this is not education spending in the aggregate. this is per pupil spending and what i see is that about in the mid 1990's, the percent of gross domestic product, which is allocated to each pupil's, each student's schooling in the united states, began to turn down. now, the overall amount of spending didn't turn down, though it is likely to now, but the amount we're al kateing per pewple as a percent of gross domestic product has already started to trend down and there's a set of conditions which i'll talk about, which i

think will intensify this. in the paper, i explain the constitutional change -- the constitutional provisions that have protected education for so long in state government, but now there's a set of things on the horizon that i just tonight think can continue this. by way of quick summary here, the number of households in the united states, with children, is dropping dramatically, so if you just want to look at the politics of this, the ability of -- for schools to support themselves is going to change politically, but it's also the intense competition with building public sector obligations. the infrastructure that we know badly, our airports, our rivers, our harbors, our dams, our second buildings, the

infrastructure just calls for attention. the national debt is now at $12.5 trillion and mounting. when one adds up all the unfunded liabilities for social security, medical care, prescription drugs, and public employee pensions across the states, the estimate is that there's $100 trillion in unfunded liability about to break on us in the future. let me go to the end, as time is with us. let me emphasize where i began. the money we now spend is in pupils, pardon me, in personnel, and it's just impossible to imagine that we're actually going to save a lot of money by paying attention to the 20% of the budgets, which goes for not people, so what do we need to do?

in my judgment, we need some belt tightening, certainly that will help, but in the long run, we have to look at the way in which we pave our professional personnel in education. we've got to look at the wave in which we distribute them, we've got to look for ways in which we can augment labor, with capital, we've got to start looking for the means and technology can begin to supplement or augment what teachers do and then if i had my way, i would try to change the mentality of all of us in education, to something far more experimental, where in we could understand that, like the medical profession, we continually must strive to find more effective ways to do our job, and adopt a mind set of fast failure. so my time is exhausted, and thank you very much. >> thank you, jim. thanks for a terrific start. >> good morning. so we know that the reality for

many districts -- ok, he's telling me to wait. so i'll just give you my preview then. the reality for many districts is that school districts are facing the budget cuts, we've already heard about that, and show what you have are a whole lot of people showing up for work, in school district or at advocacy groups or at school board meetings, or in state offices or county offices, etc., etc., and being forced to spend a lot of money -- excuse me, a lot of time staring at dollar figures. and these may or may not be accountants or financial wizards, but they suddenly got to be spending a lot of time making decisions on where to make cuts, so what i've done in this chapter is to suggest one tool that will help people wrap their heads around all these dollar figures, and that is to

break it done to the level of household finance, something that we all know and by that i mean per unit cost, so what i've done here is given let's see, six strategies, for how converting costs into per unit costs can help district leaders do what they need to do now, which is to take a look at their spending and start to make cuts and think about priorities and so on. so the first one i wanted to talk about was the tool that breaking school budgets down into per -- i pulled three headlines at the time i was writing this. new york was going to get a cut of $698 million. alabama, $800 million. sarasota was going to make a cut of $40 million. for all of us, including me, who stares at numbers all day long,

i don't have a sense of which of those are big numbers and which are small, unless you pull out the district's budget or the state's budget or the county's budget and start looking hat it, so what i went ahead and did is convert that into per pupil terms and you can seetalkg aboul cut, over $1,000 per pupil in alabama and close to a thousand in say set county. so what you get when you start pulling these numbers out is a sense of the real magnitude, in millions, with you're starting to look at exponents of zeros, it's hard to take a sense of what that really means. i think it's in this entire presentation is probably worth committing one number to memory, and that is that the average district in this country expense about $10,000 per pupil. so when you start to look at numbers that are close to a thousand per pupil, you can think in your mind, those are pretty big cuts, we're talking about 10%. and it's not just to think about numbers across districts, but in

the example in red, this is a district close to me in washington state, where the district a few years ago was looking at a proposal to spend $4.3 million upgrading the football stadium, so that it would also have a stadium ready track facility, and it was $4.3 million, with a 50 year life span and it seems like to all of us, maybe ho over 50 yea, that's a good numbers. so an analyst ran some numbers and figured out that per track student per year for the 5 who years, this was actuallytmen int that at the time was only spending about $8,000. this was actually a lot of money. a large share of the per pupil expenditure for track students and they scrapped it. on a similar big dollar figure, kind of thing, if you live in new york, you might have read about the new york city data system, which got a lot of news,

because it was an $81 million price tag, at a time when we're talking about budget cuts. and i think the newspapers and most of the commentary acknowledge this was a good data system, but do we really have the money right now to spend $81 million on that. here again, broke it down to the per unit cost over the -- a conservative life span for the data system, it's about $8 per pupil, so you get a sense that maybe that $81 million isn't such a big number there. so going upon to our next strategy, breaking down big numbers, does more than just convey magnitude, it also helps districts look for out of whack spending. and if you followed some of the research i've done, high spent a lot -- i've spent a lot of time going into schools and breaking down all the expenditures to find per pupil cost of different courses, and different activities. so sometimes i find things like

the average expenditure for a math and english class is about $400 per pupil, but the average expenditure for maybe ceramics is double that at 800 or 900. and here's one bit of data i've shown a few times in different places, but i went into a district and broke out the per pupil cost of different sports, and it's just staffing costs, so it's not uniforms that are really driving up the costs here, but as you can see, it really varies, so in this particular district, cheerleading topped the list in terms of the cost per cheerleader, much higher even than golf, so what this kind of analysis does for a district is allows you to look for out of whack spending and cheerleading was out of whack rel testify to some of the -- relative to some of the other athletic opportunities, and the idea

here, in addition to the idea in finding the higher ceramics blast is not to eliminate these things. i'm not a mission to eliminate cheerleading, but i do think there are ways that we can sometimes go back and find us an activity that's out of whack spending and then offer it at lower cost.r district, they did exactly that. cheerleading was offered as a class and moved it to an after-school sport, which is offered at much lower cost, changed the stipend and brought down the cost of cheerleading, thereby freeing up money that could go to budget cuts or to other services. so -- and that's the same kind of thing. if you find that your photography class is ridiculously expensive, you might think, are there other ways to offer photography. kids can still get photography but not drain the budget. the same kind of thing is happening here. this is another district in the hasty, where the cost -- east where the cost for advanced placement classes is really double what we're spending per

pupil on regular classes, inside high schools. and when you breakdown the, you start to see the big driving factors is the much lower class size than these a.p. classes. if it were the case, we just don't have enough kids to take the a.p. classes, that would be one thing, but it turns out in this district and in the state, there's a cap on a.p. class size. it doesn't apply to regular classes. now might be a good time to revisit that cap, since on a relative basis, it's really driving up the cost of the a.p. classes. so in hour next tool here, the idea is to use per unit terms to consider tradeoffs and i think this is maybe the most important tool for district leaders, especially if you're dealing with the public or special interest groups, or different other kinds of advocacy organizations. the idea is that we're going of

to -- maculates, so we can do this horthis. rather than propose a cut and then wait for everybody to lobby against it. so in one example, we hold th -e pulled theut fecast size, teachers salaries and so on and found that a very unpop latch $4,500 pay cut per teacher was the equivalent of adding two pupils per class, which was the equivalent of eliminating 1/6 of an aid per teacher, which was the equivalent of eliminating 2.5 hours of prep time per teacher. so put all these costs in per teacher terms, not per student, because we're thinking about teachers as potentially being one of the keefe audiences for thinking about these. so i'm not suggesting any one particular cut here, but rather,

by putting them out on the table, i think that district might be able to be a little bit more thoughtful about which choice they're making. and in fact, we've seen some districts make these kind of tradeoffs, and a lot of the smaller east coast districts, we saw tradeoffs this last year made between layoffs and salary -- and pay cuts, and we can model that out to, maybe you saw in the paper, but certain districts were saying, rather than do these layoffs teachers would surrender or pay back part of their salary and you can see very much how many teachers that saves. same kind of thing can be done with sick days, so to cost these kind of things out on a per teacher basis, empours the teachers to consider what the options are and what their effect will be on them. so -- in the next -- the next option, is to look at per unit

terms and when you think about school budgets, our tendency, when we implement cuts is to think that we're starting from hat level budget, all the schools are funded fairly, so when we're going to implement a cut, we'll implement pa cut that is, say, maybe we're cutting a librarian from every school, or so on and so forth. but the reality in most districts is that spending across schools is not even, and if you look at this chart, this is from the schools i pulled out and renamed from the district, where the schools receive about $5,000 per regular education student and different funds on average, but as you can see, there are a handful of schools, the montessori program and the kim ball program that are actually receiving from the district, resources more than the district average and a few that are receiving quite a few less. so if we're implementing cuts, it may be the case that one place to start would rather than assume that all the schools are

funded on a level basis, to go and pull those numbers on a per pupil basis and then consider putting your cuts in in ways that sort of are leveling down those schools that are spending much more than the average. and the last one that i'll discuss for today is how converting costs into per unit terms helps communicate with the public, something that not everybody loves to do, but it really helps during this budgeting process. and the idea here is that if you can put these numbers in per unit terms, in the same way i talked about with tradeoffs, and community indicate them out to the public, you might be able to have more traction with some of the reforms are trying to do and i thought i would bring you one example, one of the research studies we did this last year, quantified the to which seniority based layoffs result in more layoffs than a seniority neutral basis for layoffs. so here's how it works.

the -- when you go to layoff teachers, generally districts start with the most junior teachers, well, the most junior teachers have lower salaries than the average teacher, so they might be making $30,000 or $40,000 per teacher, where the average might be 5 knife thousand dollars. so if you -- 5 knife thousand $. you'll have to layoff more than 5% of your teachers if you're going to do it on the basis of seniority, because you won't be losing that much money. we quantified the extent to which that was true and what we found for say a 5% cut, you'd be laying off 75 teachers per thousand, versus 50 teachers, if you were doing some kind of seniority neutral policy. obviously, seniority bases are pretty dug in deep it in district policy, but we did see with arizona passing a new law this year, that prohibited the use of seniority basis alone, to

eliminate teachers, in part, as a way to save jobs. so as you can see, the information is a way to rally support for that change and on that note, i think highly stop there. there's a lot more in the chapter if you're interested in seeing what else we've done. >> say one more about the budget stability point. >> the last point was the budget stability point and on that note, what weir finding -- what jim talked about a lot, was the growth in expenditures, because we're using our budgets and converting them to purchase items, and then we manage our budgets in terms of those purchased items, which don't expand and contract with our revenues. but if you managed your budgets on a -- on a dollar basis, on a per pupil dollar basis and you allocate funds to departments and schools on a dollar basis per unit, what you'll find is that your allocations will expand and shrink with your revenues more directly, so it's just the basic idea that it

creates some stability in your spending, so you're not perpetually back at the table with your red ink. >> thanks. what was terrific about marguerite receipt's paper here is it offers us this concrete, constructive way of starting to think about challenges, and mike's piece does exactly the same thing. mike? >> great. thank you, rick, and thank you for the invitation to speak hat this important conference. i'm mike casserly, and my paper is entitled "managing for results in america's great city schools." it's very similar in many ways to what marguerite receipt described, but our paper lays out a new tool that allows the nation's big city school districts to compare themselves on a large series of key performance indicators and save millions of dollars by improving their operations relative to their peers. it's a good way to start this conference, because this new tool is indicative of how serious the nation's urban schools are about improving

their effectiveness and efficiency, jus despite the bad economy and it is entirely in keeping with a series of initiatives undertaken by the council of the great city schools to improve our performance, both academically and operationally. we have initiated the trial urban district assessment of nape that will include 21 districts as of the 2011 testing. we've initiated this key performance indicators project that i will be describing this morning. we've initiated our beating the odds series that rails out annual state test core data for all of the cities. we've also been conducting a series of research on why and how some city school districts show faster academic progress than others. we've done on the ground technical assistance on both instructional and operational and management systems in the big cities, and we've consistently supported national standards. in fact, soon, the council in conjunction with the american federation of teachers will be announcing as head of cities

that will be the first pilot site for the new common core. we've launched these and other initiatives, to spur reform and improvement in our big city schools and the results are paying dividends as our math proficiency and reading proficiency rates have improved substantially, since 2003. our key performance indicators project, i'm not sure where the slides are for this, our key performance indicators project is in keeping with our data driven focus. it is designed to improve management and operational efficiencies and effect testifiness, save money and redeploy more resources into the classroom and it is meant to help us resist the political instinct is cut spending across the board in the name of equity, if more choices could be made if better data were available. this project began some five

years ago at a meeting of our organization's chief operating officers and chief financial officers when the districts themselves were looking for tools by which he they could measure their non-instructional performance. compare themselves to each other, and to other non-education sectors, identify effective management and operational practices, and make better, more data-driven decisions abouteir human and fil capital. there were no such tools in public education at the time, except in a very limited number of niche organizations and nothing like what we were looking for in municipal government, so we have invented the tools ourselves. the process over the intervening years involved the development and testing of prototypes, brainstorming which indicators added value to the efficiency of the organization, research on indicators in the private sector, development of perform ants measures for each indicator, and designing of methodologies for defining, quantifying and aggregating data

on each indicator, all of which were put through a rigorous process. work teams from the city school systems were named and data were collected in a way that would en -- we have developed indicators or four major functional airplane i can't say and 77 corresponding power indicators. the four functional areas include business services, which also include food services, maintenance and operations, procurement, safety and security in transportation, finance and budgeting, human resource operations and information technology. the slight shows the subfunctions and the number of indicators for each. the power indicators representing areas that superintendents, boards, and other senior policy makers can use to gauge districtwide progress and examine the core health of the organization. the kpi's are performance

indicators are measures that managers and technical staff used to assess work in their respective areas. the reports that we produce include descriptions of each indicator, why it is important, now it is calculated and median value and range from high to low and what might affect the individual scores. let's run through three simple examples, so we can see what this looks like, and hopefully, you can see its potential and power and let's start with business services and transportation. transportation is obviously important because districts are responsible for getting kids to school on time. so we have indicators that measure the degree of on-time arrival of buses, per pupil cost of transportation and many other variables. parenthetically, as wee ound a s the district considered themselves to be on, including being 30 minutes late. you can see from the slide, that the per pupil cost of transportation in the major city school districts runs from $358

per child to $5,056 per child. each bar on the graph is a real city with real data on the 20 obviously, this is quite a range and may be due to all kind of factors. one cost driver involves the efficiency of a district's use of its bus fleet. this slide shows the percent of buses that are in operation on any given day, district by district. the results show that the values range from 94.1% to 69%. the median is about 85% of all buses in use on an average day. the potential for reduced costs in this case are fairly obvious. if a district had 100 buses and only 69% were in operation on any given day, it might be able to sell 16 in order to align with the median number, at the expected rate of a depreciation and save $320,000. enough to hire five extra teachers. the average large city school district by the way could easily

have somefy hundred buses and of save 1 point five million dollars by moving toward the median. without these indicators however, districts might never know that its fleet were out of assignment. let's take a look at another functional area. finance. financial operations are obviously important, because they gauge district handling of taxpayer moneys. one important indicator involves again fund balance. this is important because it signals an organization's ability to handle unforeseen contingencies and gfoa recommends having a balance of between 5% and 15%. one can see that values range from a positive 35-point five% to a negative 10.6%. the median for urban school districts nationally was 8%, well if side the recommended levels. still, there are cost implications for individual districts. one of the school districts had a fund balance of 9%. it could redirect some $6.8 million into the classroom.

in the case where the district had a fund balance of 35.5%, bereducing it to the median, it could of save over $79 million. another power indicator that i don't have a slide for, involves the average cost of processing invoices. this is the second most commonly used accounts payable indicator in the private second torl. the data indicates that the values range from about $65 per invoice to about $1.70, an enormous spread. the median is $5.19. again, the cost saving implications are substantial. a district with an average cost per invoice of $18 could save $136,000 for every 10,000 invoices processed if it moved to the $5 median. a district with some 250,000 kid, which is fairly typical in our organization, could easily process over $315,000 invoices per year, meaning a savings of

over $4 million. one final example, so i don't over well everyone with numbers, this is human resources, this function is obviously important because education is a people business, as jim indicated, and it relies on having appropriately trained talent, who shows up. one power indicator in this area involves a number of lost instructional days due to teacher absenteeism. one can see that absenteeism rates range from pretty close to zero to 11.1 paso robles. the median is about 6%. there are cost implications as well as student achievement implications here of course. on the financial side, a district with 10,000 fte teachers an an absentee rate of 11.1% could save $230,000. a district with 50,000 teachers could save $1.1 million by

cutting its absenteeism rates. we have many, many more examples in these and other functions. again, some 227 indicators in all, all of which you can find at our web site at www.cts.org. it's a little hard to calculate the potential for total savings but we estimate that a district with about 36,000 students, that is consistently in the bottom quartile of its peers could of save between $20 million and $50 million a year by moving closer to the median performance. a larger district might be able to save between 50 and $100 million by pursuing these targeted strategies, or about 5% of its budget. one has to be cautious with these data of course, because districts will sometimes rate poorly on one indicator or another for reasons that have nothing to do with eferns. for instance -- efficiency. for instance, a district could have high spending on

geographic, which serves lots of disparately placed magnet schools. the point is that these indicators compel districts to ask why their numbers look like they do and what they can do to improve them. paul of this is more than just interesting academic exercise for us, to see if we could develop these indicators much less collect data on them from a large number of cities. city school districts are now beginning to put this tool in to use to improve efficiencies and of is a money. it obviously couldn't have come at a more important time. we are pleased in many ways by our ability to get this far in the process, particularly since this work was done entirely pro bono with no financial support from any business, foundation, or agency, until recently with some backing with the hewett foundation. we know we have created something unique, cutting edge and enormously powerful. our next steps include fine tuning our power indicators,

extending the indicators in to instructional operations, delineating more clearly between leading and lagging indicators, tracking trends on the indicat indicators, developing standards, not just medians on the indicators, benchmarking our operations against other sectors, automating the data, by the way, we'll roll this out live in march, conducting case studies on the operational practices underneath the indicators, and con figuring the data in such a way that we can war game or ask various what if policy and operation questions to see what the result might be. we also know that there are important policy and strategic questions that are being asked from the research. we are paying very careful attention to this. finally, we are proudest of the fact that we have done this work ourselves. urban schools are not sitting around waiting for someone else to reform ups. we know that we are under enormous pressure to improve and

we are doing everything we can to rise to the occasion, respond to the pressure, operate more efficiently and teach our kids to the highest standards in these difficult economic times. the fact that we are doing so makes me very optimistic about the future despite this economic situation. thank you. >> thanks, mike. you know, at least for me, the data that mike presents is terrific. the paper has a lot more of this, and there's also a body of this work on the school's website, which is publicly available. it goes into much more depth in the full payment. mike? >> hello. i'm a partner at mckinsey and company, a consulting term, which does a lot of work in

education. my thoughts today are actually going to be a reflection of what you heard from the distinguished three speakers to my right. and it's based on a very practical experience of having gone through what you just heard. starting with what jim described, my conversations with superintendents, with principals, very much reflect what jim was talking about in terms of pressures they are facing today and the pressures they're likely to face going forward. the thoughts that mike was talking was also pretty interesting, because they actually are very consistent with the practical tools that we are applying when we actually serve school districts. four sort of main points i'll make. i think you have a slide up.

four main points. the first as i said, as jim pointed out, for most districts that we are talking to, the increasing pressure on their finances, both on the revenue side and also the pressure side, will lead to significant cuts and pressures. that's the focus of this entire day and we're seeing that in a very real way. the second thing we'll see in our work is there's probably no silver bullet. districts will likely need a range of strategies, both on the instructional side and the non-instructional side, to really make a difference and actually address these financial pressures. the third thing is that cost and service are not mutually exclusive. this is an interesting point, because it's assumed that when you have to go affordability cost cuts and -- go after cost cuts, the services that a

district provides gets worse. given what we are seeing in a school district, this is not necessarily true and there are lots of things that one can do to actually think of this has an opportunity, as was mentioned earlier. the last point i'll say is most school districts today, to go after this, are making decisions which are not fundamentally based in data. to actually do this well, to actually take a real look at the financial cost savings that are possible, we'd recommend looking at operational effectiveness and cost savings to be as much part of the reform agenda as a terrific work on education -- on instruction that the districts are doing as well. i'll talk about all these four points in a little bit more detail, but those are the broad themes that i wanted to cover, reflecting on the papers. i had a chance to read the draft versions and i hope you get a chance to read the final version as well. :

on the expenditure side if you break them into four broad buckets of non instruction operations, benefits, punic toward instructions services and instructional staff and programs, every pressure we see on those four buckets is one of increasing issues and costs.

interestingly, these pressures are not faced just in the school district but the people associating with them so vendors are as much facing pressures in school districts so this is not a problem contained -- likely to affect people beyond it and if it affects someone beyond it it comes back. not new but what do you do about it? we think there are eight key levers. on the left side of the four broad fell years the school finance system looks at. instructional staff, benefits and construction operations. they are very interlinked. attacking one of the more addressing one of them will address the other is. thinking of the realistically is particularly important. as we look at this we think eight letters. first is what we call strategic

sourcing. this is not simply negotiating with your vendors and asking for an extra couple percentage points. this is a lever which the private sector has employed for years which is underutilized in the public sector particularly education. it includes looking at in a very fact based when a the cost of the procurprocured services and. the third is leaner operations and the efficiency. this is related by thai yoda. this is just as applicable to services. ibm is one of the major organizations that applied this concept in the service environment. it is applicable in education and the instructional side and noninstructional side. effects costs and services and

efficiency as well. there are multiple benefit programs which look identical or have different cost structures to the district. there are also cases where marketing the benefits to the users brought very different results in terms of cost structure of the benefits themselves. the effectiveness which is looking at the central span and the parts associated with it and an assistant use of facilities in particular an urban school district with declining enrollments and other issues like charter schools, use of facilities is a significant savings opportunity and significant opportunity. seventh is performance

management. this is i will call it enabling environment of management required for any of these other levers to work. might commuter to having a system of key performance indicators that any school district looks at, follows, works with and targets in a very systematic way. performance management has been looked at as an instructional device we think is applicable from a non instructional standpoint. last thing is instruction program effectiveness and efficiency. there are lots of programs which even if you took the same cost level and same funding levels for a given instructional program, the effectiveness of them can significantly improve. this goes to the point that was alluded earlier that if you think of this as an opportunity this entire budget crisis, it can lead to significant improvements in effectiveness of

how we conduct operations in a school vote. those eight levers, what is the opportunity at stake? we found it is quite significant and quite huge and can have a significant impact on the budget deficits that many school districts are facing today. i think jim in his earlier talk pointed out that on average, significant budget cuts being 5% or a little hire. we are finding as you look at different categories of cost in its school district's budget you can capture savings at significant levels which are significantly higher. if you look at the four broad buckets i pointed out how the

percentages are pretty significant. the interesting thing about this, especially in the noninstructional side is as i pointed all earlier this is not necessarily about cutting service levels in each of these categories. in transportation and maintenance it is possible to achieve these without diminishing the service your pupils and students see in the school district. i will take one example on transportation as well to actually build on what was pointed all earlier. this is an example from a pretty good school district we worked with. some of the tools you heard. the left side of the page essentially started with benchmark. the top left is what i called internal benchmark mr. j which is for a given vendor, what is the cost per mile which as marguerite roza alluded to, a key way to look at it is the

best way to do an apples to apples comparison. this looks at eight different vendors for providing the same bus service -- the bottom left is not just internal benchmarking in the school district but outside. it looks like benchmarking in the private sector. there is something that we have developed internally which essentially is if you were to provide a given service in the most cost-effective way, and if you were to provide it assuming the profit margin what it costs and look at what you are paying for the costs in terms of differences. on the right hand side, how to go after it. what we've found is benchmarking tells you where to look, the

scale of the opportunity and balanced the problem. since then, how do i go about it and what are the analyses you need to capture it? i go through it very quickly. 30 seconds. very systematic way to look at it is a five step model which tells you where to look building a detailed, fact based, identifying levers and what your strategy is and how to implement. this is a time test approach to capture savings you established. i close by saying five core beliefs on how you might go about this, identifying savings, as much as part of their agenda as the instruction portion. second, cost and service levels are not mutually exclusive. operational efficiency cannot be delegated. this is as much about leadership

and principles as it is at the more valued level. change has to be urgent. it is unlikely to happen through drawn-out programs. it is better done quickly and fast and education agencies need to have the capacity to go after it and look at the mind set to capture it. >> speaking of the importance of leadership in all this, good morning, jose m. torres. >> pleased to be here. i will make my remarks briefly with regard primarily to setting context of the city and school superintendent rather than specific to each of the papers. in general i would say as you read the papers, especially mike and marguerite roza, as a superintendent i found them very useful. the tools might be helpful full internal management and external

publication. i had the greatest reaction to his paper but not because i don't agree that teachers, especially educators in general have this sense of entitlement mentality, but because in comparing the offense but it to education budget the bill $600 billion to $90 billion this year and comparing outcomes in terms of -- the student population has changed dramatically from 70% white population in the 70s to 55% in 2000 and lower, a flat outcome would be pretty good. especially if you compare the investment of defense and the outcomes that the defense budget has had if you look at peace and war and casualties. let me tell you a little about school district 46, largest in

illinois. the penny saved can tighten their belts while serving students better is not just a conference to come to. living this right now, $400 million operating budget, 4,000 students, about half of those are teachers. the others are operation support people like bus drivers. we are facing a $50 million deficit next year. we have four unions right before school starts. the administrators received no salary increases. their colleagues, anyone in the union, we would fulfil our contractual obligations.

to create a context six years ago the district had a $40 million deficit, because of overexpenditures rather than the revenue program but because of this process we are saying we didn't create this ourselves. we are part of a larger threat that is happening in society. to create context, we had a history of strikes. we have been there a year and a half and as i talk to community members, tell me the problems of the district, by the second month of hearing the same issues, when was the last strike? they said 1990 one. my kids never experienced it but i know there were strikes. that was significant. there were 20 days of a strike. the last item in terms of

context setting is no child left behind was the target of 100% of students, will guarantee that all schools who will, quote, be failing, in the context of trying to create support for efficiencies as well as revenues the girl you have an enterprise that by the changing standards that are defined by the federal government and why we publicize is already a failing enterprise. you notice i will not have a powerpoint we cut that in our district. [laughter] where do i cut? i would entitle something like complexity. one of the -- i will talk about four issues. one is contract obligations. i am already obligated to certain language in the contract and these contracts are

cumulative documents. they don't start every year with a blank page but there's a history behind contracts that are purposeful and the people who were part of these contract negotiations especially the teachers and administrators, not the superintendent who come and go, but definitely the board has commitment in negotiated contracts. for example one of the languages that was put in our contract recently or the last contract was in kindergarten through sixth grade, if a class reaches 30 students i am obligated to put an indicator in the classroom. as i think about where to cut i might increase class size but i have to cost in the factors that for everyone over 30 i have to

factor in the cost of the indicator. how many more students would have to put in to make the expenditure worthwhile? how many of you would teach a kindergarten class of 50 students, five-year-olds, we could go grade by grade level and say what is the threshold of the class size we ought to look at? the second example from contract are stipends. i have a $6 million stipend that is the extracurricular. if i were to look at -- create my four values and say my core values teaching and learning, sports does not into that picture or the chess club and all those kinds of things. believe me when i -- this year we made some major cuts, freshman teams and second string beatings, i had a board room full of people to advocate for

those particular students even though i was not cutting staff. i was outside protecting the corps. finally, we have in illinois, where we have to produce reductions and enforce notices. if we haven't noticed people that were not returning back, they come and stay for a year because we cannot do it but on march 15th, that creates other issues. when i have a state grant that hired people, the state in illinois that is $12 billion deficit, will tell me that they are not planning to but already hired the people. contract negotiations forced me to keep the staff. the second complicating factor is time. we mentioned how much time school leaders and management are spending on budget issues

and the 18 months i have been in the district, 15 months have been with great attention to budget issues. here is what is happening as a superintendent of my cabinet we're spending a lot of time on looking at the figures, thinking about the trade-offs. and we get to announce them and we can't announce them too early because we have a board room full of people because they don't see the entire picture so we have to announce it at a particular time. the people for greatest affected by this don't have a lot of time to think through what we went through in months of deliberation. that is an issue. another issue is targeted cuts versus across the board cuts. we were able to reduce the

number of certified nurse's, higher registered nurses to increase services in elementary schools by three hours of services. we had enough certified nurses and saved $100,000. you would think we would get accolades for that. the certified nurses were not very happy about that. so every cuts has a constituency that we would love to be inclusive but what happens is who wants to be included in a determination about which body you are going to lose? in a group at a cable the question always is who are you going to remember that hole seven people in a boat and who is going to be thrown off the island or the boat? difficult choices that we face, recently we made some budget

cuts, when the fall came along, the decision was childhood transportation, or stop extracurricular transportation. we value early childhood and prevention but we are not mandated and those folks will not come to the board as strongly as the extracurricular folks. these are difficult choices. we have issues that we comply with mandates. the state have a lot of mandates that cost us funding. they will not fund us and we have civil disobedience. finally i will say that in terms of negotiations, usually the teachers who are on the negotiating teams are the senior teachers who might be retiring in two or three years. when you talk about giving up a increase, 2% increase, they are looking at lifetime earnings.

they are looking at previous history with the deficit. they spent 35 years in this organization. they feel they cannot give up their pension for the rest of their life. i wanted to create the issue of complexity and deal with it a little more. peepers to help but the assumption is we lack the knowledge or tools, relax some of the tools. what we need is a very comprehensive approach. the political astuteness to bring people who are not going to like -- on the same side of the table. >> the point about complexity, the political and practical challenges, the end of the day. martin west in particular is going to talk about this set of issues. let me ask a couple questions

and i will open it up for conversation with the audience. jose m. torres raised a question about a comparison you may. you want to say a word about why it will be useful to think about the military expenditures as a metric and what the limitations are in doing so? >> the only reason -- in the paper there is a comparison with defense expenditures over time and comparisons with other sectors of the economy, manufacturing, mass transport. the only reason i brought those up is not that i would prefer we always be at war and we always be spending more on defense than schooling. that is not my preference at all. when education comes up against this curved bending set of conditions over the next 30 years, education is not alone in

this. virtually every other segment of society, every other segment of the economy has been facing these same things for longer. it has been going on longer. i am glad we have had a privileged position characterized as for the last 9 years but i fear it is over. that is my only comparison. >> mike, you mentioned one thing. it sounded like you haven't received a lot of interest in this particular initiative which strikes me as puzzling that there is not a lot of interest in the federal government or foundations in supporting this work. that seems surprising. can you say a couple words about why that might be or offer context on it? >> beats me. i don't know. there is enormous interest amongst the school districts themselves because it provides an enormously powerful tool.

we went five years developing this project and until the fuel that foundation stepped up with reasons support we did all of the work pro bono with teams of people from the individual school districts and programmers from microsoft who did the work pro bono. and transact communications in seattle did it pro bono. we approach blocks of foundations. the department of education and corporations and the like to see their interest in this. we were repeatedly told terrific work, thank you very much for doing it. but we don't believe we are going to be supporting it. i hope as the power of these tools become more obvious, more

investment in them will come to play. we had to make a decision about whether or not we were going to proceed with the development of these tools, something we really needed or we are going to wait until we get the money to do it and we decided it was more important to proceed on inventing the tools and not wait for others to come around to what we felt was obvious. >> let's open it up. we have a couple microphones coming around. two requests. please be kind enough to address yourself by name and affiliation. second, please ask a question. if we run into that favorite d.c. hobby of making a floor speech with no question in sight after about 15 or 20 seconds i will give somebody else a

chance. >> i am barry stern from the educational foundation. one question for michael casserly and two related for the whole panel. as one who has developed dashboards for community college and state i admire the nitty gritty work you have done to make these viable. two questions for you. to what extent do districts account differently in terms of how they account for different expenditures and is that a problem in getting comparable the and relating to that is to what extent you have been able to automate data collection, disparate data sources disintegrated into a common database and a common language getting these kinds of systems

that can be very expensive? >> i will be real quick. of the comparability thing. this is why it took five years to get this done because comparable the is a huge problem. it helped that we ran all of the process through a very rigorous process but that helped enormously. it also helped that what we did here was asked for the underlying data or the data on the underlying variables that did not ask the districts to calculate the key performance indicators themselves. we did all the calculations with variables that were all standardized ahead of time. so it helped our ability to get comparable data. on automation, this last data collection 9 just told you about we had three rounds of this. the last round of data

collection was entirely automated. everybody submitted all of their worksheets on line and when we go live with this process in march the district will attack into this and see what it would take to improve their relative standing and develop dashboards automatically that tell them where they are leading or lagging and assess where their district as a whole will be moving on these key performance indicators. >> you do this in smaller districts. what kinds of challenges? >> accessing the data for sure is difficult in part because oftentimes what we are doing is scanning information to look for of liars. why would say that the bulk of the information isut liars.

why would say that the bulk of the information is in the salary side. if you take them apart and look through them, that is where most of the information is. it will not be the information on transportation but 80% of the money being spent on salaries of some sort is where the -- >> is this something districts themselves are already doing? something they could easily do? >> it is something districts could easily do. is not what they typically do. if the district typically has a school budget -- a district budget that you may -- there may be 300 pages long. we're talking about salary files and a calculator where you break things up. different way of looking through

your information but it is definitely something you have to do separately while flipping through the other pages. >> jim snyder from i s holland. my question is directed to kartik javaram. to extend our your arguments original? many members of school boards don't have the capacity to do this. i see many sophisticated businessmen on school board. they have the capacity to understand the comparative analysis you are doing but invariably i observed they don't do this analysis when they are on the school board. i served on a budget committee and have loads of comparative data analysis compared to other school districts and there's not much impact on the decisionmaking so the question is are you talking about something that isn't being done?

or is this really an innovative type of argument? what is the nature? .. >> so sometimes they would send me information and i would take a look at the you might want to

look your. sometimes they would pull out information themselves. it's okay for superintendents doing it themselves. some cases it was just another sort of an inquisitive math minded person in the district, tasked with doing that. so i think you're right that it's not often the school board members who have that level, that level of type and concentration to get it done, nor is it necessarily their job. but i have seen that when it starts to happen in districts, it takes off and it gets done a lot. and often is the superintendent who gets excited about it and then make that happen. >> just added one additional thought. i agreed with marguerite completely. i think maybe for the reasons that jim cited, we in public education have a had to think in this direction in part because the revenue stream has been on an upward trajectory on such consistent basis that we haven't had to thank so much about

efficiencies in the way that we are not. this field that marguerite and us and karen and others are kind of pioneering here is being done in response to those pressures. but in order to present some more thoughtful tools for how it is we can improve our efficiencies, save money, and not hurt the underlying services for kids. but it's a recent and evolving field, that's for sure. >> i don't, for a moment, want to beat up on school board members either. but i think the principle problem here, our audience, marguerite, isn't really school board members. of the eight or 9000 superintendents in the niceties, there are a lot of districts, 13000 of them, superintendents are almost never framed to think in the manner that the two of

you have just exhibited. that is an unusual superintendent. to have that preparation and has that mindset. >> next question? >> thank you. mark snyder. most of the discussions seem to be focusing around sort of marginal changes around existing practices. can you talk to the issues about fundamental redesign of our school structure and processes, the role of technology, as part of that, an example might be looking more towards seat time, more fundamentally look at sort of a zero-based, baseline budgeting approach to redesign what our schools look like? >> mark, actually i'm going to speak to that briefly, but the next panel is going to come exactly the question you before. why do you speak to that

briefly. >> i will. mark, i think you've hit the nail on the head. if you would look back in time and see what one farmer does in the united states today, we feed our nation with fewer people directly engaged in agriculture then we educate our nation. agriculture has become remarkably productive over the last 30, 40 years. similarly, virtually everyone in this room remembers when checks had to go to a federal reserve clearinghouse, and it took three or four days. we couldn't begin to handle the financial system in the nation today without the automation that accompanies our finances. and the last example is, remember, for those of you who are really old like i am, there used to be telephone operators. they are the one to place your call. with the void of telephone communication today, that would be impossible. everyone would have to be a telephone operator to make it work. this system of our schools has

just got to begin to look for ways to augment labor. i'm not saying replace it, but it's got to supplement labor with some kinds of automation. and around me, what i see is in reading. reading is an unnatural act for human beings. it's not like talking. it's not like walking. reading is -- requires a whole different world network for humans to engage in. yet it is crucial for all of us. about 1 percent of children can learn to read on their own. one or 2%. most of us need instruction and we take that instruction at different paces. there are remarkable computer-assisted instructional programs now that assist students who are slow in reading and gives them the attention that a classroom teacher can not afford to give forho is particularly slow. that's the kind of place where automation computers can really promote productivity for us. >> that's terrific. let me ask you just briefly. it sounded like before, you were

a clearly a superintendent who has both the inclination in some of the training to apply the kinds of tools we been hearing about but it sounds like you're suggesting in terms of thinking about transformative change, that there are obstacles even in the way of leaders who might be interested in pursuing those options? >> that's absolutely correct. we hear of people saying build of the airplane while the plane is flying. how do we create a new structure when children come, and they are coming for the first time to the center price and the people have experiences, all have their best way to do it. so the issue is, everyone thinks that they are an expert in running a school district. and people have had their own personal experiences, and so

that's adds to the complexity of the enterprise. i would love to be able to create a brand-new school district out of scratch, but we don't -- we're not able to do those things, and even -- let's take class-size. this is a large class-size year, right, and so maybe a classroom in a high school, we could go to, i've heard people say let's do 150 kids, in classes and pay teachers 100,000, 150,000 for those people who are willing to teach those large class-size is. where are we going to put those class-size is? our schools have 30 -- square footage for a school is 30 students. so to create a transformation, it creates a major investment. and we haven't figured out the political will, nor the processes to actually create new schools in this country yet. >> jim?

>> gym class and from the george w. bush institute. thanks for an excellent panel. i may have misheard this record, but i thought you said that spending on education was $90 billion compared to $600 billion for defense which i think the defense number is correct, but did you say 90 billion? i thought i had read somewhere. i think the figure is actually 500 or higher. 600 billion. >> from the federal government budget. that's a different story. >> for public schools, elementary and secondary. >> that's right. just to make sure everybody's on the same page, federal government provides in a typical year roughly eight or 9 percent of k-12 expenditures. we spent roughly 600 million nationally, currently because of a ara, the federal share is up to states like this current

your. >> is going to be about 50% when we look back at. >> next question. >> i'm sam. i'm simply a parent. i want to stay from a parent viewpoint. i see a lot of analysis here. it's all on business systems pretty much come ongoing school systems. certainly very important that what i would like to see, and maybe it's coming up, is analysis based on the product, which is student achievement, so if we look at student achievement and what schools produce better students, or better product, if you will, and then backed that up to what best practices will equal that student, achievement. is that coming up? where is that any analysis of?

>> mike? >> i'm glad you asked the question. we actually have a very detailed kind of long-term study that's been gone on, the results of which will be out this spring that takes a look exactly at that question. and compares major urban school districts across the country that have gotten outsized gains on the national assessment of educational progress and compared their instructional programs and systems with a school district in major cities that haven't. and then backed that up with very detailed analysis of their instructional operating systems, finances, staffing patterns and the like. so there is more work coming up and more and more people are kind of thinking in these directions pics i suspect the research is going to get better, sooner rather than later. >> how do you approach this set of questions? >> it's interesting.

very similar to what mike said. we published some stuff which actually is related but doesn't exactly and to your question, which is the achievement gap, and district under different school district around the country, how we're going about closing back at. the question i think you're asking is, our different districts financial strategies having a meaningful impact on the achievement gap strategies. that's the question you're asking? >> sorry. >> and i don't think there's a good research on that specific topic that what we are finding, is that the districts that are doing very well on the operational side of the house, tend to also be much more focus on instructional side of the house as well. so the best practice is in a district that's doing one thing, tends to be transferable on the other side of the house as well.

is what we're finding. i don't think -- i won't be able to point to a definite practices that can correlate the financial performance to the academic performance. >> with that, to this question more broadly, for what it's worth, my $0.02, is because we don't have the kind of granular analyses that we're seeing presented here today, by mike, by marguerite, and because mckenzie, that are in working with districts, because they have not made this information public because it's proprietary data which they put a lot of sweat equity into collecting which they then share on a client basis, is we actually, in a large-scale, don't have the kinds of analyses which let us say in any thoughtful fashion, which is the behaviors or cost savings actually seem to drive achievement. so in some sense the answer to your portion is, it's a great question, but one of the reasons we need the kind of thinking

analysis we are seeing today is because we are not ready in any meaningful way, shocking as it may be in 2010, to answer the question you asked. mike? >> yeah, i agree with that, rick. a lot of these so far are fairly proprietary in nature, and you have to kind of hard the company in order to get access to the data or the methodology. i think one of the things we feel so good about and what we've been able to develop is it's not proprietary at all. it's completely free. there was no external investment that went into it, so we're hoping that over time, that people are going to have wider access to it and it will produce a broader effect. >> quick last question. >> this will be my concluding remark. as i looked out over this audience, and in some ways rick, both for fordham and aei, i think we may have missed targeted this conference.

i like everyone here. that's not the problem. leadership is going to count a lot here. who is a that's going to be able to take the ideas that we virtu today, not mine but the others, who can take these ideas and run with them, implement them and make them real? it is more likely to be superintendent than almost any other actors i can think about. and that's where i think we ought to be giving consideration, to what kind of preparation, how can we bring these ideas to their attention productively? >> that's a trigger point. was that i'd like to think a panelist for a perfect first session. [applause] >> we're going to reconvene for the next session, focus on precisely these questions of how do we think more broadly and transformative leap about the cost structure. [inaudible conversations]

[inaudible conversations] [inaudible conversations] >> so a short break here, and after the break we will continue our live coverage of this all day for him with educators from around the country on school funding cuts in the face of challenges to improve student achievement. is from the american enterprise institute. few programming notes. today on our companion network, c-span, and report on highway safety, service efforts by state governments to address distracted drivers, team drivers and drunk drivers. the report lists the best and

worst of state driving laws and views on a state-by-state basis. upcoming bills in congress to push states towards higher safety standards. live coverage this morning. that's 11:30 a.m. eastern again on c-span. president is meeting today with labor leaders, and before that, afl-cio president richard trumka talks about unemployment and the economic future or working families. we will have that life in the national press club at 1 p.m. eastern, and that also on c-span. >> while we wait for this panel to resume, a conversation on the attempted bombing of or a passenger jet headed to detroit on christmas day. this is it's about 45 minutes. we will show you as much as we can before the form on school spending resumes.

>> brian michael jenkins senior advisor with the rand corporation, former captain with army special forces has testified numerous times on capitol hill about counterterrorism international and homegrown terrorism. wanted to start by looking at 2009 with major hasan, the somalis who have converted or recruited from minnesota the five young man from northern virginia that went to pakistan. of course most really, a flight 253 incident, the alleged bomber there. what does that say about recruitment efforts by al qaeda and other radical jihad groups both here in the u.s. and abroad? >> al qaeda continues to exhort its followers to violence worldwide. what has happened of course is this conflict that we're currently in has really completely destroyed any notion that armies are made of of individuals from a single nationality under a single

organization, what we see are individuals from all over the globe in the case of the attempt on the northwest flight from nigeria who received training in yemen, to go to europe to board a plane to carry out an attack over the united states. or we see young men in minnesota recruited to go off and fight in various jihadists fronts in yemen, pakistan, iraq and elsewhere. so it is truly, truly a global conflict that makes no distinctions between the front line and homefront. and makes no distinctions between combatants and noncombatants. the battlefield is everywhere, everything as a target. >> and some of your writing you talk about the difference between recruitment and radicalization. tell us a bit about that. >> radicalization itself is not a crime. many of the founders of our country would have been

described as radicals in their sense to have, to be fervent in one's beliefs. does not create any danger in itself. it is when one carries that belief further and attempt to implement, not through a political process, but through self recruitment into terrorist violence that we become concerned about it. so the issue is not radical views. the issue is the implementation of those radical views, or the imposition of those radical views through terrorist violence. >> will get to phone calls in just a moment that i want to take you back to some testimony that before, house appropriations committee house appropriations committee and holistically. this is for you to go, and you wrote, or report them to say that in order to focus limited security resources, we must be able to employ selective method

systems to fast-track identified travelers to the latest versions of computer assisted passenger screen. selected search based on observed behavior. has any of these in your mind, the sort of recommendations, and fully implement it to your satisfaction? >> not really. when it comes to aviation security we are still falling and a sense of what would be an early industrial age assembly line model. that is, we do accept those receiving secondary search, we do exactly the same set of processes and procedures to every passenger boarding an airplane. the problem we face there is that passenger loads are increasing. the number of procedures that we have to take passengers through have increased since 9/11, taking off your shoes, no liquids, more hardware being deployed to the airport. the number of tsa screeners is not increasing.

so at some point the system breaks. and less we can get to a system that allows us to focus more on some, and perhaps take some risk with other portions of the fly population, then in a sense we are simply going to see the system collapse. >> how do you get around the issue of not wanting to profile but wanted to identify potential threats, both before they come to the airport and at the airport? >> when we talk about profiling in a security sense, we're not talking about in terms of racial profiling or ethnic profiling. put aside constitutional concerns. that simply would be stupid security. i mean, that terrorists have demonstrated that they can recruit individuals of any nationality. we have people arrested in north carolina last year for being involved in terrorist activiti activities, whose hair was blond and eyes bluer than my own. so that would be dangerous to

that. when we talk about profiling, we're talking about patterns of travel. we're talking about patterns of purchases a ticket. were talking about at the actual airport itself, patterns of observed behavior. to get kind of a silly illustration, but nonetheless that if somebody walks into a building in the middle of august in washington, d.c., wearing a heavy overcoat, that's going to attract some attention. it should. >> we have calls when. prescott arizona. good morning. >> caller: good morning, mr. jenkins. my name is mark, and i may former special forces soldier. i'm very disturbed by the notion that our president claims that gitmo is the biggest recruiting tool and damages our national security, yet i would say that

successful attacks like the one conducted on 9/11 are a bigger recruiting tool, far more important to the jihadists than any treatment that is given to prisoners. and even unsuccessful attacks like the christmas day bombing attempts in detroit are tremendous recruiting tools for anyone who's willing to emulate themselves in order to kill a few americans. is a glorious thing that attracts these people to have their 72 virgins in paradise, and their chief concern is finding towards glory of allah. they don't care that much about the people that are and get mo until they are sprung out of there, would you agree with

that? >> guest: a couple of old soldiers will agree and disagree on a couple of points that in terms of guantanamo being used as part of the jihadists narrative, which portrays what they believe is a western assault on all aspects of islam, and is sending our troops the way we treat people, at guantánamo, that does come in fact, enable them to exploit that and use it for propaganda purposes. at the same time, you're absolutely right in pointing out that the real recruiting posters here are the terrorist attacks that al qaeda and its affiliates carry out. that's what terrorism is all about. these are recruiting posters. every one of these attacks is meant to attract a funding to their cause, to attract

volunteers to their cause. so that they can participate in what they describe as this epic struggle, which is the binding mandated. >> host: brian on our independent line. go ahead. >> caller: yes, good morning. one of the core reasons for afghanistan seems that we were there to take away an area where the al qaeda congregate and launch their attacks from. given the fact now that they seem to be everywhere, doesn't that reason for being in afghanistan sort of evaporate? no, it really doesn't. i mean, the fact is that while they can't exhort individuals to carry out violence everywhere. the difference between the situation, say, before the

dispersal of those training camps in afghanistan and the situation that we certainly don't want to see occur again, is where they are able to set up secure bases and a track ballinger's from all over the world, and have their operational planners look at that continuing flow of talent and put together operations like 9/11. that enabled al qaeda to operate at a much higher level of sophistication than previous terrorist groups. while they are still able to exhort -- >> and we will leave this portion of this morning's "washington journal" now to return to the mayflower hotel, the american enterprise institute hosting the conference today on how school districts can save money and improve student achievement, despite declining local, state and

federal funding. second panel just been introduced that you are watching live coverage on c-span2. >> and redesign and reconstruction of how we deliver primary secondary education in the united states. and that's exactly what this panel is going to be discussing. very interesting papers on exactly that point by john child and steve wilson. and to inspire discuss, michael podgursky and michelle mclaughlin. and without further ado let me just say the presenters have 12 minutes each. to discuss 10 minutes each and if everybody is brisket we will have time for some conversation and discussion. take it away, john chubb. >> good morning. this morning and in the first tell you heard about mostly operational savings. now were going to switch to the topic of educational opportunities. the country for the last two

years has been going through the worst recession since the great depression. and every industry has been under enormous, enormous pressure to change. education is not unique in that regard. i want to start with an example to illustrate this. the state of hawaii, like many other, every other state in the nation has been under enormous pressure to try to do with its budget gaps. it came to the decision last summer that it would balance its education budget by reducing teachers salaries for the year by 8%. but also, by closing school for 10 percent of the days for the school year. that is, every friday for 17 days. lots of political reasons why that happened. obviously, not good for kids. the economic crisis is leading to budget balancing but also,

also potential reductions in achievement. clearly a bad thing. at the same time, general motors over the last couple of years has enjoyed a 50% drop in its sales in response to that, it went into a supervised bankruptcy, massive restructuring, eliminating multiple brands, laying off many workers, closing down scores of dealerships. and they're hoping to be a much better company as a result of this. are the changes in education measuring up to the kinds of changes that are taking place in the private sector? it doesn't appear to be the case. but in both the private sector and in the public sector, we have the same kind of situation, which is high spending, high spending relative to what consumers need, and results that are less than desirable. in this time of economic crisis, what's going to happen? happen? are going to come out of this

with something much better, a more productive system? or will he come out with more of the same. it would be a tragedy in education as a result of this crisis all we do is tighten our belts and don't do anything better for our kids. the opportunity in education goes beyond the operational opportunities that you saw this when. there are, in fact, great opportunities, both for cost savings and i would argue for ac look at all the technology of education. the technology of education as jim guthrie and others emphasized this morning, has several well-known characteristics. one, it is very labor intensive. half of school budgets go to teachers. 70% go to other kinds of educational personnel. it is also a system that is based entirely, as does i emphasize, on whole group instruction. which is a teacher with a classroom and kids, taking his point is, 30 kids or whatever. that is how education works for

almost every child in public education. there are a lot of issues with whole group instruction. it's very difficult for kids to receive individual attention. it can be very demotivating for a kid who was behind, sitting in a large class where they can't keep up the pace has to be, one, for kids who are very, very different, very, very different levels. very difficult for teachers to supervise kids as they practice. very difficult for kids all to master content before the class moves on. and then in addition to that, this whole group model is led by teachers who, on average, on average, i want to emphasize, are mediocre and not up to -- not up to the job. so that the technology of education today. it is possible with computer-assisted technology for the technology to be different. as one of the questioners emphasized, educational

technology today is capable of doing remarkable things that it's obvious that kids today are digital natives. they take to technology and a fully intuitive way that they are highly motivated by a. and the best instructional technology has all kinds of benefits that it has the possibility of presenting lessons to kids in multimedia, not just a direct presentation by a teacher. it allows for kids to move through lessons at their own pace. it can be highly interactive. it's not just presentation of a video butt back and forth with technology. and allow students to practice as they work through problems to be guided by additional problems that identify their weaknesses and tutor them intelligently as the terminology goes. it's possible for assessment to take place on, literally, on an hourly basis and to in response

to the assessments. it's possible for teachers to work with kids one on one online for them to get more individualized attention. it would be terrific for certain special-needs. jim jim guthrie mentioned reading them in the software instruction, and also for cognitive training. this is a system that is also passionate it's not just about technology because with online instruction, teachers are also involved online. the great thing about technology is it's possible for the technology to do a lot of the heavy lifting that teachers currently have to do. it takes care of lesson preparation and takes care of preparation of assessment that it takes care of a lot of the assessing, the grading, reporting, and so forth it and allows for teachers or working with kids online often one on one, to just teach. and lest anybody think this is some sort of newfangled idea, online instruction has been in

the marketplace for at least 30 years and there is a lot of evidence on the effectiveness of particular software, as well as the overall effectiveness of online instruction. now onto the economics. this is something that can be very good for kids. it's also something that makes economic sense. first at taking a look at the ratios to terry moe, my colleague and i, just publish a book entitled liberating learning, and the reason for that book looked at lots of online charters. these are schools in which kids are full-time and online instruction. try to understand how their staff, what the economics look like, and so this is an illustration based on looking at a large number of online charter schools. staffing ratios are very different. graders, people who specialize in a nightly student essays, giving feedback within 48 hours. they generally are working with 200 kids simultaneously. advisers, those who are paying close attention to gets, making

sure they are staying on pace. they are at 60 to one ratio. synchronous to does, they are in ratios of 150 to one but the overall ratio of educators to kids in an online environment is about 35 to one. you compare that to the brick-and-mortar environment which is teachers, 15 pointed to one and educator's overall 15 when. at about two and half times more efficient online education on a full-time basis. this is a compared his a the economic the full-time online schools to brick-and-mortar schools. and what you see here is this is assuming full funding, that goes to the different categories for teachers, 52% brick-and-mortar capital that aren't on my. 26% budget savings. other savings in transportation and food, online schools to meet face-to-face. there are some transportation cost and would cost. but there are huge savings in that area as well as the teachers having any. on the other hand kids have to have computers 11. internet access, and so relative

to budges its about 10 percent versus 2%. that's a present additional. the instructional systems, these elaborate computer-based instructional systems, the technology, content and so forth is considerably more expensive. that's a 25% investment technology interregnum technology. versus only 3%, that's all the schools put in the curriculum. they don't rely heavily on teachers. but net net there is a potential online full-time online instruction of 11% savings over all. that's a big number. now i want to stress that nobody thinks in the future i'll kids are going to sit at home in their pajamas and go to school. supervised by their peers who will not be working. that's not a model. networks for most families. currently there are about 100,000 kids and full-time online schools that can conceivably go to 1 million. but in the future most kids will be involved in hybrid schools.

hybrid schools simply without making too fine a point on it, an institution where kids will attend. part of the time they will be receiving instruction directly from teachers, and part of the time they will be receiving instruction online. when they are receiving instruction online using technology there will be fewer teachers involved. the opportunity here is not only economic, fewer teachers, but it's also possible to optimize the next. let's say i do very well with technology. i can do for that. laissez iphone with a particular subject better with technology or better with teachers that you can optimize the mix of kids are getting what they need and what ever mix is appropriate. whether it's technology or teacher based. there are all kinds of things that technology can be superb for pick it can accelerate, remediate. it can do with the whole problem of extraction not being able to be customized to the individual needs, he took his.

of hybrid schools. this is where it gets impressive that if you take a simple model of a hybrid school and use a six-hour day, let's assume that in case 25, kids are receiving one hour, just one hour instruction online. and while they're receiving that instruction, rather than being supervised by a teacher, by the way, is not now doing instruction, they are just supervising in helping, that you work in ratios of class size of two to want instead of one-to-one. that would be the model for k-5. middle school your looking at two hours a day, the same supervision ratios. by high school when kids are more mature, three hours a day with three to one supervising. what does that mean and mean of teacher savings? 7% fewer teachers in elementary, 14% fewer in middle, and 29% fewer in high school. over all, averaging across the 13 grades, that's a 15% savings in teachers, relative to the

budget. 52% being devoted to teachers. 8% savings or $800 per student with a modest hybrid model. now you have to pay for the curriculum. that reduces the savings somewhat but over all you're talking about a 5% or $500 savings per pupil on national basis. that's $30 billion nationally. summing up, moving from the model that we have today to a model that changes the mix of teachers and technology. this can be good for both kids and it can be good for taxpayers. you have lower cost, $30 billion are possible right now. and then you also have the potential for, not only better instruction technologically, what a better quality, better quality teachers within the schools. and the way that works is through the reduction in the

demand for teachers, with the 3.8 million teachers in the system today. if you had a 16% reduction by moving to a full-scale hybrid model, that would require us to hire 600,000 fewer teachers than we do today. and with 600,000 fewer teachers required, the possibilities and is enormous to raise the average quality of teachers. better technology to better mix of technology and higher quality teachers is a better outcome for kids. and that's really what productivity gains are all about, getting more bang for the bu and for the first time in history, it's possible that education could, in fact, get more achievement for the dollar. thank you. >> perfectly timed to take it away, steve. >> okay. if it is -- is the powerpoint ready here?

good morning. i'm going to address the question of the efficient use of teachers as we've all heard this morning. again and again, we are mainly buying teachers, and nearly all of the dramatic increase in spending over the last 30 years, also over a much longer period has gone to reducing class size and changing ratios. and yet over that whole period, achievement has remained essentially flat. so the urgent question now more than ever, of course, is could teachers be deployed more effectively, boosting achievement by lowering costs? i would like to submit you today that this is an eminently achievable objective. and what i'm going to look at very briefly is we raised through these points is what specific and practical initiatives could just undertake that would decrease compensation costs while improving outcomes?

and so to study that, thanks very much to marguerite, i look at a specific district in the northw midsize, 29000 students, 37 elementary schools, about 60 percent from property. employs about 2000 teachers, and teacher salaries will all-stars and benefits ads you'd expect about 84% spending. this district like so many others is facing a dramatic decline in revenues, or the threat of that. and what can they do? so i look at three different initiative categories. the first is staff deployment and instructional technology initiative. the second is a teacher quality and a third is program initiative. i want to stress that as we go after the inefficiency of class-size and now teachers are use, we can't do this in isolation. we also have to, at the same time, pay much more attention to teacher quality. there will be fewer of them but they will have a harder job to

do. so the first one is of course the obvious. we have to increase class-size. i know this is heresy in many circles. but there is no alternative, and i was justhat relatively easy to do. increase class-size in this case, an initiative number one, by two on average. different amounts in different grades. and you'll not only have these benefits, 17 points explained in savings in this district, but you also have unaccounted saving or saying i don't account for here for many other things. now you may worry about increasing class-size, but in fact because it's more or less an article of faith, that and have better outcomes. up the data do not support this. if you look at the largest experiment on class-size in tennessee, the benefits from much smaller classes, classes that were much smaller that are actually practicable, 13 to 15 students, known as proposing

that's achieva will let alone it is climate you so have modest gains. that's not much. for the level of investment that it took. california tried to mandate this at scale. districtwide. dismal outcomes. and you can see in the last bullet they're just how expensive it is to get a 375% decrease which should be roughly like a star. you would have to spend 30% more on spending. and all the while, we have that curious and disturbing fact that the highest performing districts around the world, highest performing countries don't use small class-size. page is much larger class of. one of the most interesting pieces of research looked at this in detail. marty west and others, and found that it's a question of your teacher capacity. good teachers capable teachers, can manage large classes with ease. but it's not just about size but

it's also about who's in the class. not how big they are. class formation i think is a much neglected topic. if you have students of widely prerequisite knowledge in the class, the teacher's desk is really requires a hero to achieve. if insteadws t skills in advance, just the way if you were in college and went to chemistry to class, you would show up at the door if you haven't mastered the skills of chemistry one. and yet that's the circumstance that routinely attends in schools every day. so if you fix that problem by paying attention who is enrolled in your classes and if you overcome some of these current, training mystifications like differentiated instruction, then you actually have a manageable task. you prevent learning gaps from forming in the first instance by frequent assessment. not assessment that is worrisome and disturbing but is something that just is like breathing every day for kids. and mainly to inform teacher practice so that teachers know

whether they were successful in what they just taught. than any mastery basic curriculum you could progress up to the grades successfully. and just very quickly, two instances i'm going to focus on the program for the moment. this is a school that has 50% point higher outcome. nine years in a row everyone went to college. performing above, top performing school. charge in the orleans parish. 30% less cost. than the districts surrounding the. delivering far more for far less. so the second initiative is, get rid of teacher aides above first grade. no evidence to support its instructional valuable. we say there. six-point 4 million. complement teacher led instruction with a hybrid approach as john has discussed. allocate perhaps one quarter in independent line. we now have new technology tools that find it really work.

it's a very exciting time. so even adding in the ft for the learning lab, the capital investment and so on, we still delivered a whopping 16.2 billion in savings from moving to more of a hybrid. an example of this is rocketship education in san jose. hybrid model 100 minutes a day. $500,000 savings per school, and the third highest scores in the state for demographically similar schools. next, unpopular but essential. we've got to stop this practice of having five or 10 percent of the teachers in the district be teachers that no one wants in their schools. and usually superintendents rotate them precisely across the school so no one is burdened too much by them. this is an obscenity, of course. and we have to do something about it. so this would save six-point $4 million from that.

underperforming teachers to the obstacle has been it so expensive to do anything about it. the first step is to turn to mckinsey or an organization like that to put in place a meaningful assessment system. so in chicago, we have .3 percent of teachers are rated unsatisfactory. this is not the real world. some people teaching is their calling, and for others it isn't. and we need to face up to the actual situation. i think recent word account in "the new yorker" magazine and others like the rubber rooms are finally awakening the general population to the situation, and maybe for now, especially in light of these financial stresses, we will begin to do something about it. read that professional development. most of the pd spending is scattershot, ineffective and doesn't result in student outcomes or demonstrable improvement in teacher performance. so if we were to retain in place

50 percent of the legacy spending in bellevue, and replace the other 50 percent of it with stuff that is much more like what you see in some truly innovative new initiatives like the teacher you program at hunter college that doug and others are doing, where you are teaching specific instructional skills, but we will instead be looking at how do you organize behavior in a classroom, how do you do cold calling effectively, how do you improve on answers that aren't really the answers instancing that's the right answer, how do you stress that right is right and alyssa to correct answer? these are a collection of small skills that define the difference between mediocre teaching and reach great teaching. they can all be codified and they can all be taught. establishing a teaching fellows

program. we need to come in for going to do this especially, we need to radically improve the quality of who's in the classroom. and until such time as we can reform teacher training institutions in this country, a whole other topic, we can simply and a sense bypass them. and we can create a fellows program that induces capable people, whether they are from top graduate schools or whether they are professionals at midcareer to enter teaching. and modeled on programs like that in new york and chicago and boston, that has been very results. in new york, it's not a minor initiative that its 17000 app events per year. accounting for one third of new math teacher that this is not a savings. this is a necessary investment, coupled with all of the savings from changing the ratios. i think we also need to increase teacher pay. we need to make teaching a more attractive profession, financially, to attack those

they kind of people we're talking about. and we need to very much reform how we pay to who is in the classroom. this would save a 13.8 million right here. through a combination of different initiatives. vérite, differential pay, so we should pay more for teachers that are in shortply. it makes no sense to recruit that it's really hard to find in science or math teacher in high school that we would not be offering more money to take that person out of working in a high paid job in the technology sector, for example. we need to be able to compete with those other alternatives for those particular teacher to need to pay more for hardship situations. if you are working in the toughest schools, you should make more money. so we need to stop paying for what does it matter, you know, for the last 50 years we been paying for two things that don't matter at all. we pay for seniority and there's no data that suggest that beyond three years you get anything better.

in terms of effectiveness. that's the hard fact. and we're paying for masters degrees which also shows no correlaticorrelati on to teaching effectiveness. so we start paying for what does matter. teachers who get great results, teachers in scarce supply, teachers with distinguished academic backgrounds. we need to align with we've heard some about that and wonder more about that today, i suspect that this will deliver nearly $8 billion in savings. and i will skip over this. we need to address teacher absenteeism. this would result in approximately $3 million savings in this particular district by closing the gap as we heard about earlier between the industry norm and those of schooling. even if we just got 75 percent of there but offering financial systems. we could achieve that goal. been last on the program side just to pick one, if we did much more work on establishing robust

pre-referral mechanism to special education. so many students that in a special education, by the way almost never leave it. could stay within a more robust and effective regular education program and would not be labeled as somehow defective. this very much needs doing, too, i think it's all told this is about $42 million ofings in this particular case that substantially more than is needed to meet the part of, say, 7% reduction that the district is facing. so i think it's really -- this is an opportunity as we heard about earlier. this is actually a time for opportunity for innovation. and probably the most important thing to do is we need superintendents who have the leadership to be able to step up and say, it's time to stop investing in a failed reform strategy of smaller class size.

the results are chimerical. it's never going to happen. and it's appallingly expensive and there are alternatives for delivering great results for less money. and i think the community can help with this by providing a national center to provide legal and technical assistance to exactly those kinds of leaders that would contemplate these kinds of controversial and difficult initiatives. thank you. >> thank you very much, steve. michael podgursky? >> this is the one that didn't work. thank you. okay. well, thank you. i have some slides, but i sent them in a week ago, and then of course being an academic, i think about what i really want to say the night before. so i'm going to sort of follow

these, and just make some remarks and tried to keep it short so we can have some discussion. these are both very interesting papers that they are fairly footnoted. i mean, one reaction is we should go do the stuff and evaluate it and see if it works. because these are on the face of it, very plausible models for cost savings and improvement. i just want to make a couple remarks here. one is about, and jim guthrie kind of beat the heck out of this, but i would just put it up again. this is a chart of teacher hires, teacher employment, non-teacher employment and student in romans. now, i didn't go back, like jim did. i start in 1980. and it's indexed at 100.0. but you can see the situation

we're in now, we begin to think about a recession, teacher layoffs are downsizing. it's in a context in which the employment, the number of bodies on the payroll, just far, far outstripped and rolled growth. so there was just a huge absorption of manpower in the sector. over this period enrollment grew by about 20%. teaching employment grew by i think 44%. and nonteaching employment even grew faster. over the same period, real spending per student grew by 2.2 present. and average teacher salaries grew in real terms from about 45 to 49000. one of the things i'd like to point out is, if we had held those staffing ratios constant, nor to if spending per student goes up by 10%, you can either

lower staffing ratios by 10%, race day, hold staffing ratios constant in base pay by 10% or any combination of the two. that adds up to 10%. if you had held the staffing ratios constant and held a mix of compensation between benefits and salaries constant, you could have been talking about 80000-dollar a year teachers now. in other words, you could have pay of the teachers could have risen by 2.2 present to you. in fact, district, again, the opportunity cost of going to this labor-intensive policy is the pay increases that you forgo. now i want to jump ahead here and talk about -- steve has talking about you know, this trade off of class-size and this class-size in stating his. one of things that struck me, and i'm happy -- marguerite and

others have drilled into this more and i look forward to audience comments, but i just made up a slight here. the left bar, the left for bars, in the four years of treatment groups in the star experiment, so this is kindergarten, first, second, third grade. so these were the treatment groups with small classes. so it was 15.1, the number of students in kindergarten. it went up to 16 students. okay. now on the right, we see the current student teacher ratio in the united states is 15 when it. of course, that's an average of states like my own, the student teacher ratio is 13 points have been. so i guess one question i have in my mind is, why do we even have to trade off class-size? you can take the whole star thing as true. and still, given the level of class we have, it seems to me you could implement the sizes with the staffing we have,

obviously you're going to trade off something else. . . >> the benefit cost are -- and again for all of these staff that are on the school's ra are an ongoing source of cost increases. steve sites in the paper that bob and i wrote in "education next" published in "education

next" that looked at the difference between employer contributions -- employer cost for pensions in public schools for teachers versus private sector p sites it's 4.2% number. now these are data from the bureau of labor statistics. it starts in march '04. so the left-hand side is march '04. that's the earliest they start breaking out teachers. the last date is september '09. you can see the upper line is the teacher trend and the lower line is private sector technical. you can see just over the period, with the gap from the time the article was published, the cap has grown from 4.2 to 5.1. i apologize, i don't have a

slide. the later exposed slide. but this shows up in the employment cost index data. you know, we're in a recession. consumer prices if you look back 12 months, consumer prices have fallen. if you look at employment cost overall, salaries and benefits in the private sector, it's dropped from running at about 3% a couple of years ago down to 1.2% year after year. but in k-12, public k-12 education, those compensation cost are still rising at 2.6% a year. so even in this recession, even with the budget difficulties of the state, these compensation cost are still rising as of the last quarter of data at 2.6% a year. so, you know, the bottom line here is labor is expensive. there's -- the sector has absorbed a lot of it.

and it's costly. and the cost keep rising. what we have a are couple of papers here talking about strategies to bring more efficiency. what do i have left? give me a time. two minutes. okay. so i don't have -- i can't do most of this. >> you can yield the rest of your time if you want. >> i'm going to use like a minute. i'm going to put a marker here. so i move away from data. this is just and anecdotal. it just seems to me the papers have made a good case for these investments. my observation is mr. wizard. i learned most of my science in elementary school from reading out and mr. wizard, he was on tv every saturday. he was great. but it raises the point of scalability. if you get in a plane, they fly over they call my state the flyover state. if you look at the window, you'll see a lot of nothing. but, in fact, you'll be looking

at a school district. everywhere you look at it, there's a school district down there. it's always instruct me that these school districts are trying to stab chemistry classes and so on. it always struck me that what, rather than trying to recruit, you know, have four rule districts, trying to recruit four chemistry teachers at $30,000 a year, why we can't move to some kind of distant learning model, paying one of these $80 or $90,000 a very good one and beam them in somehow. this is what is called scalability, if you read the book "black swan" there's a lot of discussion in this in terms of pay. in higher ed, i can't comment on most of this -- we do this a lot in higher ed. we take some of the best, put them in classes with 500 students. i'll close with just one observation. you know, the teaching company

is really a fascinating company. and i buy a lot of their products. they go around. they are finding the best professor in the united states. they are going to put us out of business too. they interview them. and audition them, and then they put these things on dvd and mp3, these guys are fantastic. i watched this guy, there's a guy at the university of texas that does calculus. i bought it because i hoped my daughter would watch it. but she wouldn't. i watched it. this guy is great. there's another guy that does a fantastic, like a modern day mr. wizard doing physics, introductory physics. it strikes me. again, this is -- i don't have evidence on this. it just seems to me at least in the area of stem to address these problems through these kinds of technology models,

augmentation and distant learning is just untapped. and at least superficially seemed to be a strategy that could be more cost effective than this, you know, just endless expansion of the k-12 payrolls in this area. so i'll stop there. >> thank you, mike. it isn't just stem. i learned more about classical music from the teaching company than i ever did from school or college. last but not least. michelle? >> thanks. can you hear me? i'm going to take this in a slightly different direction. they make several policy recommendations. my biggest take is that he's making a argument that the district best investment is in a people contracting. that's hard to argue with. where as temple paper is putting out there that technology could make up for the lack of uniformly great teaching that takes place across the school

districts. one of the thing that is chubb says in his paper with whole-group instruction, even extraordinary teachers will not be able to help every student succeed, especially if many are underachieving. we can't expect all to extraordinary. therefore, technology offers a solution. in my view,ing sort of weighing the two papers together, i think i fall more what wilson is talking about. i share, i think his paper is optimistic as well. that seems to be where i lie as well. i think the core issue is the quality of instruction. there's really not any way to get around that. and what's behind that is of course how we prepare and support teachers. wilson mentions teacher u, which our folks, teachers america folks in new york participant in teacher u, i'd like to talk a little bit about how we approach this work. we have a textbook that we developed called teaching is

leadership. we're releasing a version actually this month or early next month. we're hoping to share the knowledge that we've accumulated by looking at our exceptional teachers and really enter into a conversation in this sector about what we can do to better prepare and support teachers in general. one of the things that we focus on that we found in our high performers is their ability to invest students in their work. chubb says in his paper, students begin lessons unmotivated. they will simply not make the hard effort necessary to learn. degreed. i couldn't degree more. but i'm not sure that technology will motivate students. i mean -- i'm not sure how you get students to engage in the technology if they have this pass of not being successful and don't feel like they want to engage in the work and doubt their own ability to do the work. so for me, i don't see

technology as being able to address that issue. and so we have a section in this book and we certainly talk with our members about that. how do influence -- how do you invest studented in their work. i'm going to talk what ways. one is developing the understanding that they can achieve by working hard. it's sort of i can. developing the students rational understanding that they will benefit from achievement. i want. our focus to teach in school that are underresourced where kids come from poverty and they have a lot of natural disadvantages coming into the schools. i think some of them -- many them have not experienced success in school. there is a huge amount to work to do in terms of changing the orientation and belief that they can succeed. i think there's a lot of work that has been done. we certainly have capitalized on that work in our text that others -- i'm sure other

successful teacher preparation programs do as well. carol is one person who talks about moving from fixed to mind gross set. that's where we have to go. it's really hard work. i don't want to minimize how hard the work is for teachers to do. but we have to do it. i get the feeling -- i've read some of the wilson's other work. i think he understands us because he's studying the high-performing school networks where it's being done. i'm not completely cynical about the possibility of online instruction to improve learning and perhaps decrease cost through just working with rick, i've seen the work of wireless generation. i'm very impressed by what they do. they are sort of a tool. i'm not sure they fit in the scheme of it. but i think they are enabling, using these handheld devices teachers are able to provide immediate and direct feedback to student is incredibly powerful, and so i'm excited to see that

kind of work in our sector. i'd like to, you know, say a few more examples in chubb's paper to get me around my mind on what this work looks like. i would also like to put to the discussion or audiences, what about differentiating roles. one the issues is that we have a school with lots of teachers. we have teachers aids. do we really have different roles where people are doing doing different things. like, for example, hospitals and whether there's anything to learn. i'm not sure hospitals show that there's cost savings. maybe they do. and finally, just on a final note, i guess i feel -- i don't know if i feel like poking at rick's misanthropy. >> we all do. >> i just approach all of this with a strong sense of

optimism. >> thank you very much. poking at rich is a part of the game in washington. you said your schools are underresourced. i know about the schools that people go to. if you did the kind of analysis on those schools that steve wilson did of that district, are you sure you'd end up that they are underresourced? >> i can't really speak to that. i do know that the work of margaret rosa and others have shown that there is inequity and resource allocation between schools. >> largely because of lower teachers salaries because of new more junior teachers, i think. >> yes. >> okay. why did you find steve's paper for optimistic than john's? >> i guess because in speaks about the motivation piece and that's sort of why i chose to focus, i think it's a little to say, well, it's really hard for a teacher to invest students.

so we have to turn to technology. i think that's letting the profession off the hook. i think that's the hard work of teaching? you have to figure out how to do it. you have to figure out how to invest students and people in their lives that are influencers in order for kids to really succeed. >> one more for you. then i want to give the authors grief. if schools adopt to the of kind of hybrid model such as steve and rich eluded to. if schools adopted a hybrid model, what would tfa do in it's preparation or supervision of its people to adapt to that? >> yeah, i think that's a great question. i think in terms of what they do before the district, it might not change that much. i can see this being very different. i think at the regional level,

we are always. we're in 28 states plus the district. we're in over 100 school districts. at the regional level, we're always looking for alignment between what we do and what the districts are doing. i'm confident we'll figure it out. >> okay. mike, you said you are academic, the papers are very thoroughly footnoted. i love that. you know, -- i wondered if you flew over the university of missouri and look down, would you also see a whole lot of nothing? [laughter] >> nevermind. nevermind. john, this question gives you a little bit of a conflict of interest with your day job, i know. but you seem to take for granted that schools using an online earning would have to buy at least or license it from a

proprietary company. could you not envision of the evolution of a kind of open-source version of this that school and school systems could use more or less for free? >> i think that's not only possible but i think it's eventually likely. i think that the high-quality content will become publicly available. and the businesses that work in this area will find the best way to add value. so it may be that -- it may be that the content -- the content becomes easily available. at a no cost or very little cost on the internet or something like that. but where businesses at value are building the systems to help school districts and schools make use of that information. i mean, one the difficulties -- one of the difficulties with the

use of the internet and technology right now is that there's tons available. but it's not structured in a way that's easily accessible for kids. so a kid outside of school who's highly curious and has access to a computer and the internet may learn a lot as they, you know, surf -- as i surf the web. but being able to take all of that information, harness it, sort through it, identify what's really good and what's not so good, and organize it in a way that is most effective for instructing kids at different levels, that requires, you know, a fair amount of engineering. and a big school district might invest themselves in engineering that. or a company may find that that's a good way to bring value to the school districts. >> okay. steve, i thought i heard you both talk about more homogeneous

classes or special ed kids or did i mishear both or one of those recommendations? >> yes, both. >> and you think they are consistent? >> yeah, i'm not sure i see the inconsistency? >> well, ordinary more homogeneous classes means giving the teachers a room full of kids who are all about the same level of achievement or ability or some come -- combination of the two. >> yeah, so i think the first thing is if you have a stronger classroom than fewer students are not going to succeed in it and be pushed off to special education. i agree with you, you also have to have another mechanism that isn't special education. i think most districts rely on special education as really their only reflective, remedial place. so what i would be suggesting is classrooms that are homogeneous in the sense that all students

within it have mastered the precursor concepts, but heterogeneous in the sense that is mechanism by which students who are falling behind can cap up very quickly and be returned to the regular classroom. absolutely, that has to be a piece of this. what we shouldn't be doing is shuffling students, especially african-american boys, for difficulties that are school defects and not intellectual defects. >> you also -- just one more in the special ed area. when you talked about doing away with classroom aides as a cost-saving, expect for special ed aides. did i hear you right? >> i'm not particularly attached

to that. even if you didn't go after anything and just looked at the regular ed piece, that what you could do. >> okay. somebody else in the room was saying to me the other day with special ed nearing 1/3 of the cost of district budget, carving it out is something that we just don't touch as we redesign the rest of the system is probably unrealistic, short-sided, and very costly. >> so what i'm suggesting is that we -- the most effective way to go after it as a cost problem is to much, much more thoughtfully restrict entry to it. >> okay. john, do you see the technology as -- i promise my last special ed question. do you see the technology as a major asset for disabled youngsters in learning? >> i think the technology can

make a big difference for specific -- well for specific issues and then general issues. first, and i'll just give you a few examples. first the reading. for kids who have lots of opportunities to practice the basic skills of phonics through exposure in the home environment, learning the decoding process comes relatively easy. for kids from disadvantaged backgrounds, they don't have that. when they get to school, it requires much more practice than opportunity in class. there's terrific software that gives kids opportunity to sound out letter combinations to create words, to get feedback through speech recognition and to practice one on one in a way they never could in the classroom. if the kids don't have the opportunity to practice, they will quickly be referred to special education and then become issues throughout their school career.

that's a straightforward example. other examples more generally that are kids in special education often have difficulty processing can the modality of instruction in a traditional classroom. they could be in a traditional, but they could be supported with technology that would be able to read them -- read their lessons to them while they are -- while they're reading the lessons along on a page provides more opportunity for practice, more opportunity for customized feedback. talk about response to intervention, rti, which has swept the nation as the sort of the both latest good idea and late estimate depending how you watch it be implemented. the but the basic idea to those interventions, can be much more easily support -- implemented with the support of technology that can with teachers simply trying to do it unaided by

technology. >> this is a question to create an opening for mike. maybe i missed it in your paper, did you look at pension cost and retirement costs to districts in your collection of cost savings? >> yes. both. but i think mike has much more to say about that than i do. >> i want to know from you in the hypothetical district of belleview did you calculate what it could save? >> this is one of the proposals. >> so mike this smoking gun of pension other retirement benefit cost, how much is that amenable to cost savings in the present day? or could be made amenable? >> by the way, the chart i put up there isn't include retiree benefits which are a second smoking gun, i think. how much are they amenable? we're going to find out. you know, the point is the

question of the legal status of all these promises is going to get tested, i think, in the next few years. you know, one view is that the only thing sort of one position over here is that the only groups who can -- for whom you can change that benefit are new hires. fend you take that position, then you're not going to save much in terms -- in the short term. you know, you can't have much cost savings. other views are -- and that's much far, far more stringent in the private sector where you are protected on the erisa standard up until now, but doing forward the good thing is the other position. then you can change the rules. and where things are going to fall down i think will get tested in the courts.

>> will you say you can only change it for new hires, you mean under current structures and laws? >> under the current belief system. >> it strikes me that all of you, expect possibly michelle, you challenge the belief system by the existence of tfa, the rest of you are challenging an awful lot of major civilist to class sides to individualized destruction to the indispensability of face-to-face instruction to -- i could go on. but basically, almost everything in at least the -- certainly in john chubb's package and in many of steve wilson's recommendations seems to me to go against both current law and current concepts.

more currently, mike was implying a current belief structure on what's important or good or valuable and desirable in education? am i getting this right? >> you're asking us? >> both of you. >> absolutely. i think that whether or not the reforms can be successfully done within the regulatory and statutory environment is an open question. i think many more than one might thing can be done. but it does challenge the belief system. i think that for any of this to happen, we have to have -- and this was mentioned earlier. it all comes back to superintendent as leaders who are willing to challenge and take the heat for it and point out that overall, not just their district but american schools in general are extremely uncompetitive. and if we want to -- this may sound dramatic -- if we have to avert american decline in the next century, we have to be willing to take radical measures

and really challenge some of the conventional wisdom. if the answer when the superintendent proposes it is that it's impossible. then i think the leader has to ask, am i running an unemployment system, am i running a school system? if obstacles are thrown up everywhere to be able to implement the kinds of reforms that i'm talking about and john is talking about, then, of course, the next step should be to walk up to the legislature and say i want to create a district of charter schools where these roh rules don't apply. i think we're doing to be seeing more and more of that. we already have leaders like joel klein who see charter schools not as the enemy, but an irritant to the majority system. i hope we're going to see a lot more of that. >> if i may, i think the common point that steve and i were trying to make is that, you know, in the midst of this economic crisis, we need to recognize that the basic

practices, the structure of public education are not only expensive, relative to what the economy and the taxpayer can afford, but they are not in all cases or on average great for kids. and so as we looked at the crisis that we're facing, this is not just about trying to figure out how we can stretch dollars. but it's an opportunity to look at how we can do thing that is are doing to be better for kids. so i mean everything that's steven talked about can save money. but it also raises quality. and then when it comes to the technology side, what i'm trying to -- what i'm trying to make clear here is that the education -- public and private alike, have relied on one model forever. which is to place a teacher in a classroom with a group of kids. and that was necessary arguably a century ago and even maybe more recently. but today there are lots of ways

for kids and everybody else to learn that involves technology. every other industry on the planet has over time substituted technology to make the people in the industry more productive. jim mentioned farming. but it's across the board. so the time has come where that is going to happen in public education. you know? if not full-time, online schools, that will work for some kids. but some mixture of technology and teachers will change over time. and will take the schools not only better for taxpayers, a subject of today's conference, but also better for kids. it's inevitable. >> michelle? >> i guess the one thing. i'm going to take my tfa hat and put my mom hat. i wonder about the cost savings for the online piece. it does seem like you are just pushing the cost back on the parents. i would love to hear more about

beyond the 10% of the student population that you think this works for, potentially, what happens to other kids, especially with the sort ofic -- sort of equity lens on it. as somebody in the day care, it's kind of expensive. >> john should distinguish between the full-time and hybrid of. >> right now there's 100,000 kids nationwide out of 55 million that are doing online education full time. there are another several million that are home schooled. as i say, only a fraction of getting home school environment supported by full-time online instruction. and i think most people believe that both for the needs and wishes of parents and perhaps for the arguably for the betterment of society, kids are better off and will in the future largely congregate in places called schools. the argument then for the vast, vast maj