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 achien 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 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 foz@ú

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 mics ofhe took his. 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 buck. 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 northwest, 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 just that it's going to be 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 smaller class sizes are better 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 insteadrybody knows the 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 a 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, an 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. @ @ @ @ @

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 short supply. 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 bon'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 private-sector standard that 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 of savings 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. than by 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 professionals. and he 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 professionals and managers and 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. i) ái ogy 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 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 majority of kids is what will those schools look like? and the modest observation in the paper is that the schools will evolve. so that some of the instruction will look like it does today. but much of the instruction will involve some combination of using technology and online instruction and distance learning and so forth. that will be good for kids as though they'll have a chance to learn and whatever works most effectively for them. and will probably also end up costing a little bit less overall. >> so i'm going to ask one more. then the roaming mic should get ready to roam. i have to ask a federal role question, in washington. some people are taking away from the current race to the top competition the belief that if

the secretary of education armed with dollars goes rocketing around the country telling states to change their laws, they will change their laws. is there a potential here for some of the changes that are needed in the cost-saving area as well as some of the changes that secretary duncan is currently trying to advance? in other words, could a properly targeted federal program or policy of some sort help to bring about many of the things that y'all are recommending? >> one -- i mean, i think, the obviously one that comes to mind is that the administration has been very tough on the data front with the emphasis on the need for building comprehensive data systems, information systems about students and teachers. and most importantly, in eliminating the wall between student data and teacher data. which is to say we needed the data systems to identify who taught the kids. so we can help schools and

teachers understand who's been successful and who's not. that's only part of how you evaluate teachers. the point is the more information that we have about what is working in the schools, the better able the districts will be to make wise decisions about how to spend money on professional development, about which teachers to promote, which teachers to provide bonuses and additional compensation, and in the end, which teachers to remove. >> okay -- >> i would just add. i agree with that. the bully-pulpit, the beliefs so much what happens with spending, were president obama and some of the other leaders to step forward and chance some of the conventional wisdom to say it may feel like to you as a parent or a teacher or as a school board member that small classes

are the solution. we need to really step back and look at what the data show and see that this isn't the case. and we need to hear some other things we should be doing. it will be absolutely gal gal galvonizing. >> i think there is a huge potential roll there for the federal program. i guess i sort of think that people -- hearts and minds would be changed more on the quality of the instruction piece as opposed to the cost piece. i could be wrong. >> okay. mike? >> well, we -- you have to keep in mind when you get into the area of compensation that a lot of this is driven by court decisions and, you know, you can get on the bully pulpit and talk

to the legislature, but there's some judges out there that a history of litigation that can be a challenge sometimes. >> okay. we have time for a few audience questions. as rick said to the previous session, you must identify yourself, you must be brief, and it must be a question. go ahead. you with the mic? >> hi, ms. allen. it sounds a lot like the model you're describing is school of one. chancellor joel klein's new proposed individual learning assessment plan. is that a viable model? do you guys agree? can you comment on that? >> well, just to start, i love the school of one initiative. i think it has a lot of promise. and just for those that aren't familiar with it, the ideas that students spend some part of their time in this kind of lab. and there's a playlist of activities that they follow. and the playlist scribes --

)gkág@

captured the imagination, partly in its labeling, partly because it is in new york city close to where the media is located. at the "time" magazine picked it as one of the best education ideas of the year or decade. at any rate it is publicizing this concept. i think it is very important. there are lots of those around the country, not in media markets that you don't hear about, but that is the kind of thing that we are talking about for the future. >> are there cost savings built into it? >> it is set up to be cost-neutral. that was part of the idea of getting this approved. new york city is a very political place. they had to use exactly the number of teachers, exactly the same cost and so forth.

>> hi. anna thompson. this is a question for john chubb. we have heard mention of open source. you mentioned playlists. can you talk about the role and the enlightened self-interest of the textbook companies? what they're doing to move this foward and what they might be during to hinder it? >> are you sure it is enlightened? i don't work for a textbook company. i compete with them. this is -- i am speaking from the position that i am looking at this. the textbook companies are, i think it is fair to say the textbook companies are concerned about the evolution of this model. textbook companies have always supplemented their textbooks with instructional software, dvds and so forth that, frankly,

anybody in education will tell you generally do not get used. but these are very big, very successful companies that are trying to figure out how to do with it. i would not say that they are, i would now say that they are impediments, but i would say that if you look at the online offerings they are largely by a small startup companies that are not as burdened by the history of the past investments and the business practices. so right now most of the innovation in online instruction is occurring outside of those companies. if you read clay christian's book "disrupting class". clay has written about destructive technologies and a host of industries and how that happened. more often than not the existing dominant players in an industry are not the ones that introduced the innovations. the innovations come from small players to inject these new

approaches around the edges. in public education if you're a regular kid you're likely not to see much technology. but if you have dropped out or you have a special education need or you have some other extraordinary need that is where it is being used. so i think that what you're likely to see is that the technology is not going to come to the big textbook companies but around the edges. >> okay. hi. book and marshall center trust. i have questions that are related with regard to the cost. is there a strategic plan with regard to if we are going to implement the it protocol that it is going to be rolled out in x number of years? and if you're going to do that why not take it the next step further where you do the webcasting? if you have a master teacher all of those high school students

could be subjected to that class, maybe 2-3 times a week and the other remainder is working on that instruction with the regular teacher in the classroom. i think that would be a much better way of saving costs. also introducing kids to what they can expect when they go out in the future us. >> just quickly, i love the idea. i think one of the things we need to do is look at teachers who are the most effective. an initiative called the 3 x initiative because of this idea that teachers who are in the top quintile a performance, we should take those teachers and greatly increase their audience in various kinds of synchronous and asynchronous ways. one of them is through broadcasting. it just makes sense. teachers that are exciting and engaging should reach more students. and fewer students should be subject to unengaging and

ineffective teaching. >> it is also possible the technology today for these great presentations to be more than lectures. that is, kids are passively watching a presentation. they can be interactive, and it can be in many environments so that kids can click in to answer a question. also every college lecture hall today there is clicker technology. to help keep the kids engaged professors ask questions. every kid has a clicker. they click the answer. the responses come up. if it is well-used it provides information. all of that can happen online. so if 100 kids are logged into a lesson as the teacher is presenting he or she can ask questions. kids can respond online. kids can use that as a point of discussion. this is so much more than, you know, in the old days where

mr. wizard was phenomenal, but imagine if mr. wizard actually interact with the kids as opposed to just be watched by them? >> you know, it is not as just a question of cost savings. you are a lawyer you make more money if you have more customers. if they are exposed to 300 kids that could be a foundation for differentiated pay. >> just want to add when we think about technology we think about technology very, very broadly. textbook is a great piece of technology and i think we have to think of it that way. what we need so desperately is to have an entrepreneurial sector that promotes the development of new intellectual property for schools so that teachers are availing themselves of transformative technology. that technology could be better assessments, better lesson

plans. these new organizations that are compiling great lessons so that every teacher has to kind of reinvent the lesson where they introduce subtraction. you're going to have a distribution of qualities of lessons, and most are going to be mediocre and some are going to be great. why not allow all teachers to avail themselves of that part of the bell curve. so i think that we need to think of it very, very broadly and not just instructional technology. >> technology based interactivity is going to takeover this archaic art form called the washington conference. i think we have time for one last question from back their somewhere. somebody, go ahead. >> hi. my name is christina whitter with the national youth employment coalition. i am hoping you could speak a little bit about how these hybrid models or this new way of

thinking about educating students relates to dropout prevention, recovery, and helping students who may be offtrack to graduate get back on track? it kind of relates to what someone mentioned earlier about moving away from time as a requirement for getting students credit and how that might interface with some of this technology that you're talking about. >> just very briefly there is probably more experience in that sector, actually, than any other sector with the new uses of instructional technology. when it comes to 95 when it comes to helping kids graduate from high school kids fail classes all the time for a host of reasons. districts are looking for ways for them to make them up. if they have to make them up the following semester or the following year than it cuts into

their -- to the time that they have to take the additional credit that they need. if they try to do it in summer school teachers are trying to cram a year or semester's worth of instruction into four weeks. long days. that doesn't work very well. with instructional technology let's assume that you have -- et's assume that there has been a failure of an algebra to class or something like that. let's assume that algebra to includes 180 days. instead of 180 lessons, perhaps, 75 lessons or whatever the number might be. once they master those lessons they have demonstrated they have mastered the course. it is not about to seat time. kids drop out of school for a host of reasons. some of which include, some of

which include just being uncomfortable or unsuccessful in the initial environment. if you can create an environment where kids can work and make mistakes in the privacy of an online environment, one-on-one tutoring from a teacher online you're giving them a second opportunity to succeed. it may or may not work, but it is a very different opportunity than they had previously. the early evidence is that it has promised. >> any closing comments from anybody on the panel? all right. am i correct that the next event is in the chinese room? the chinese are taking over everything. want to join me in thanking a terrific panel. [applauding] [inaudible conversations]

[inaudible conversations] c

dealing with school funding barriers. it's about an hour 45 minutes. okay. folks, grab your seats. we're going to go ahead and get started wihe last panel. once again, i'm ray hess, director of education policy studies at the american

enterprise institute. this is the fourth panel of a penny saved. how schools and districts can tighten their belts while serving students better. this is a panel when we are going to focus on overcoming the barriers to change. we will be hearing from all -- from the authors of two terrific papers that have been written, and a third paper by harvard's marty west that we had asked him to think about and reflect upon leading up to and during today, and that he is going to author upon reflection on the conference. we will also hear from two particularly energetic and thoughtful discussants. so i am confident we are going to have a heck of a final conversation here. the three papers will be presented. first up is a paper that could probably as readily have been presented last panel looking at

how some districts across the country are attempting to do this work, and are overcoming the barriers. it's written by june kronhoss, a washington, d.c. base writer who previously worked for the "wall street journal" as a foreign correspondent, as the bureau's bureau chief in boston and deputy bureau chief in washington and as a journal reporter in washington where she covered education issues for a decade. the second paper will be by stacy childress, a lecturer in the general management unit at the harvard business school and co-founder of the public education leadership program at harvard. she study the aunt pra tra newer education in the united states and her paper is entitled "investing in improvement strategy and resource education in public school districts." the third up will be marty west. marty's an assistant professor at the harvard graduate school of education. he also serves as an executive

editor of the journal "education next." as deputy director of the program on education policy and governance at harvard university. before joining the harvard faculty, marty taught at brown university, and was a research fellow at the brookings institution. we will then have two discussions. first up will be lily an elementary teacher from utah who serves as vice president of the nation's largest teachers union. the national education association. she is one of the highest ranking labor leaders in the nation and one of the nation's most influential hispanic educators. lily was president of the utah state retirement system and president of the children at risk foundation, and a member of the white house strategy session on improving hispanic education. and last, but not least, on a long day is dwight jones, colorado's commissioner of

education, since 2007. in that role dwight continues a career in public education, which he first started as an elementary school teacher in junction city, kansas. under his guidance, the colorado department of education is refocused its efforts on serving and supporting the field and striving to direct resources and intervention strategies to the districts with the most need. speakers are going to take about 10 to 12 minutes. we will have that timed up here. after that, we're going to open it up for a little bit of conversation with the panel, and then we're going to take it to the audience for what we hope will be a substantial conversation and question and answers. with that, june, would you please get us started? >> thank you, rick. my role in this book project was to call around to superintendents and cfos to learn how the people who are responsible for putting together and meeting a budget are dealing with the leaner times.

most school districts spending, i'm sure you all know, anywhere from 75% to 90% is on salaries and benefits and most of that is on salaries and benefits for teachers. that means to cut costs you either have to pay teachers less or to pay less teachers as the colorado finance analyst told me. grammatically that should be fewer teachers, i know that, but it didn't have quite the zing. rather than make that hard choice, though, or perhaps because union contracts or state class sized mandates don't allow administration to make that choice, i found that a lot of districts are pleerly drawing down reserves. they're relying on the federal stimulus dollars, or they're playing a game of chicken with their state legislature, and their city councils. threatening to end all the kindergarten or trim a couple of weeks of, out of the school year if they don't get the money they're asking for. but i also found some good ideas for saving or even raising

money, and they're listed dozens and dozens of them in my chapter. a lot of them are about right sizing schools, restructuring jobs that sort of thing. what i'd -- you can read all of those, for heavens sakes. what i'd like to talk to you today about is tell you a few of the ideas that come under the heading i'm calling "some non-obvious ideas that i like." note that the title isn't "some ideas that will work," or "some ideas that will save you money." a lot of the ideas that the cfos offered me resulting in savings of only thousands of dollar, not millions of dollars. so they're not going to close the budget gap, but some people are doing some creative thinking out there, and i wanted to tell you about some of these things opinion so in no particular ortd r order, here are some non-obvious ideas that i like. christopher birdnik is the cfo of the pittsburgh public school systems, and he's absolutely rolling in ideas. kwl when i called him this

summer he went on and on. let meful you just three he offered. in the mid90s, pittsburgh city government, its school district, city government, school district and the water authority packaged their outstanding tax liens and sold them to a tax debt collector. lots of cities do this. the three jurisdictions got cash for their liens, nothing happened to the properties. in 2006 the school district bought back its liens for $2 million, birdnik told me this was pennies on the dollar, and he began an aggressive tax collection. the district recouped its $2 million outlay in two years, which means that everything since then a gone into the district's bank account. just as importantly, the district has put properties back on the tax rolls, either through treasurer sales or more aggressive collection.

birdnik calls it the gift that keeps giving. birdnik also told me he step u7d efforts to reduce the district's workman's compensation claims approaching $20 million. the district more thoroughly investigated and litigated injury claims and it moved the processing of claims to the finance office from the personnel office. reasoning, that the finance people took it harder look at the numbers. at the same time, the district became more aggressive on safety. among other thing he told me, and i love this. the local's electricians union sponsored a week-long course on workers safety including a session on scaffolding training. one more from chris birdnik. in 2004, pittsburgh recentralized its printing operations, and outfit add new print shop with high-speed, high efficiency copiers. now teachers e-mail their printing jobs to the shop, and the shop sends back the finished copies on the district's food

distribution trucks. birdnik says he's undercut kinkos and he's cut the cost of the finished copy by more than half, and low-skilled workers do the job instead of higher paid teachers. david peterson is the cfo and associate superintendent of the scottsdale unify district in arizona, and he had one of the more, most interesting ideas i came across. last year peterson pushed through the state legislature a law that were allow arizona schools to sell up solar power plants on their roofs beginning this year. the idea is this -- peterson's district doesn't have the capital to build a solar power system, what district does, but the federal government is giving generous tax incentives to investors in alternative power. peterson also doesn't need the tax incentives, since he's not paying federal taxes. under peterson's plan, which

districts across arizona see as a template. they were all telling me they were looking forward to trying this. investors will build solar power on school roofs and covered parking lots. the systems will heat, cool and light the schools during the day and potentially feed into the grid on weekends and evenings. those systems will yield tax benefits equal to as much as 50% of their investment in the first year nap includes federal alternative energy tax credits and rapid depreciation. these are peterson's number, not mine. don't hold me to them. benefit to the district is equally great. it's a steady energy price. peterson said she locked in a rate of 11 cents per kilowatt for the next 20 years to the companies that will own the solar plants compared to 12 cents an hour he's paying now to the local utility peak hours. there's another bonus. he plans to charge students and staff $400 a year to park in the new covered lots.

that's up from $100 that they pay for an uncovered parking spot. and if you think only some belt states can do solar power, milwaukee has one school that's running on solar power, and they're starting a second, they'll be powering a second high school starting this -- this fall. milwaukee? i also liked an idea from colorado springs district 11. the district used $6 million of a $150 million bond issue passed by voters in 2006 to build a fiber optic ring around the district. that means they get rid of the cable guy and they're saving $550,000 a year in cable fees. i found a lot of districts -- not a lot. a few districts focusing on attendance, and this increases their per pupil funding but more to the point to me, at least it goes to the heart of what schools are supposed to be doing. in california, districts

received state funding based on how many days each student actually attended school the year before. that comes to $40 a day when a student attends and nothing when he doesn't. so long beach unified school district, just one example, shifted ten of its social workers and counselors into a new truancy strike force that will identify and work with frequent truants. a 2% increase in attendance this year should relate, translate into an additional $3 million in state support next year. although california's problems are so deep, who knows. but if it also results in 2% greater graduation rate, i mean, that's a win-win situation. isn't it? milwaukee also has a particularly innovative cfo whose name is michelle nate and she gave me this idea -- in 2007, milwaukee began a pilot project to give $400 laptop computers to its sixth graders. the district is paying for the

computers with $24 million that class action plaintiffs in the federal antitrust case against microsoft failed to claim and that microsoft offered to the district in the form of vouchers. the computers will allow teachers to among other things use open source books and other online material instead of having to buy textbooks. i thought the fairfax county, virginia, school district had forged some interesting cooperative agreements with the county that are worth looking at. the county maintains the school district's buses as well as its own. the school district's cafeteria operations provide snacks for the counties, senior citizen and after-school programs. the county services the schools vending machines. the district and the county do joint fuel purchases. a few other districts told me they were also sharing purchasing and operations with their local governments. pittsburgh city, the district and the county are all meeting

every other week to share purchasing information, among other things, their bidding on rock salt together. other districts told me there's bad blood, if you will, between county and school district workers, and they that just can't possibly work together. my reaction as taxpayer is, get over it. if you have a spicier retort, pass it on up. i liked an idea that a group called the cooperating school districts which is a consortium of 65 missouri districts in the st. louis area had. the group compiled a report in 2009 on the effect the tax abatements and tax holidays to developers was having on school revenues. the consortium is using the study to lobby legislators to rethink month mop tax structure. i wish them well. huh? james lang wa is executive director of a new york school

cooperative called the putnam northern westchester board of cooperative education services. think of the size of that business card. he gave me a couple ideas about better using teacher time. higher technicians to run science labs freeing higher paid teachers to teach another period instead. paid apartment shares a stipend instead of giving them the one or two periods of release time they get next. schedule larger phys-ed, art and music classes and consider if there's anything the teachers are doing before or after school for extra pay that they could be doing during the day. and think about those one-on-one aides that are becoming increasingly common in special education. the reason most special education kids have aides to help them become more independent, but the opposite is happening. finally, i like the idea of asking people from outside a particular school district to take a look inside. last year mckenzie and company produced a massive study of

milwaukee's non-academic operations and identified $10 million in potential savings. some of them weren't good ideas. mckinsey suggested milwaukee use cheaper food. but it was great i thought to have fresh eyes on the situation. other districts have enlisted parents, taxpayers, union, teachers, school staffer, someone and so forth. we heard this on the previous panel, and asked them to help. colorado springs asked a budget committee to include, that includes parents and community members to help identify $4 million in cuts from a three-page possibilities compiled by the cfo. the group rejected some ideas, like eliminating a paper-based school directory that the district cut anyway, but it gave the administration its support for other unpopular cuts including eliminating $1 million in school performance bonuses. jefferson county, colorado, increased its technology purchases last year while cutting school jobs after getting the all-clear from the

citizens budget group. i found item of these@@@ rbrb rb between harvard's ed school, business school and a network of large urban school districts and their leadership teep teams and back

in 2003-2004, we collectively chose a set of problems. both the leaders from the districts and the professors from the two graduate schools at harvard, chose a set issues that we wanted to know more about and wanted to work on together. so the idea is that i'll share with you this afternoon that are in the paper that i produced for this conference. actually come out of that work, and in particular, based in cases that we examined in three cities around the country. san francisco, new york city and montgomery county, maryland, just our neighbor here today. the content that i'll share with you actually pulls up a little bit from much of what we've heard over the last couple of hour, from the individual superintendent's view of strategy and tact tiactics to a more general set of ideas that come from a number of superintendents and their activities, but also what rick asked me to do specifically,

was, is there anything in the management literature about resource allocation and strategy in complex, multipsych organizations that is actually relevant to what we've observed across a number -- about 20 urban school districts around the country we've worked with since 2003-2004. i'll try to share that with you as well and go quickly through all of it to get through the rest of this and to your questions. so the bake idea here is, gishen all that you've heard all day today and observed out in the field, are there ways of thinking about if you're in the superintendent's seat, if that's the point of view you have, pulling it all together so it's more than just about finding ways to reduce costs in particular areas. but it really is about driving improved performance in ways that actually make use of fewer resources than you currently have been using. so that's the point of view here. jim guthrie this morning said

near the end of this panel that it really is all about leadership and when we started our work, again, six or seven years ago, we hoped that wasn't true. because if that is true, we felt that the context that urban district leaders work in and the rapid turnover rates, particularly in the largest 100 districts, made it difficult to imagine we'd ever see very much progress. what we found was, it actually is sort of true, and that leadership, strong, strategic leadership at the top is certainly not sufficient, but it is absolutely necessary. and we found no examples of districts that were driving any sort of rapid improvement in any segment of student achievement that didn't have a strong leader, whether at the district level or at the principle level, but that that wasn't sufficient. there were lots of other things that needed to be in place and the things those leaders did actually mattered a great deal.

so that's what i wanted to talk to you about today. so are we ready on the -- here we go. you've heard this earlier today. i'm going to go quickly through this piece. the prior economic environment over the last 20 or 30 years has actually made it possible for superintendents to layer and bill talked about this in the last panel. clul think was easy to start new things without have be to cut old things because revenues were growing faster than inflation and any time new superintendent came in there were resources available. that's actually really rational behavior. we criticize superintendents a lot for that choice, but in the environments they're in, it actually allows them quickly to bin to do new things without alienating stakeholders that could kill them before they get traction and the problem is, they know and we know we've seen today, constrains long-term performance. this layering of activities not only as a resource drain but over the long term you find as many know, as you start to dig into the districts, some programs actually dilute others.

not just that we're spending due politictive resources on things that are maybe doing the same thing, but sometimes they end up in conflict with each other and aren't nearly as powerful as on their oh because of the layering happening year after year after year and the bad news in some ways, the good news, this is unsustainable in this economic environment. you've seen this data in general terms. the data from the particular districts that i discuss in the paper, san francisco, montgomery county and new york, and the time frame here is the time frame in which the superintendent strategies that i describe in the paper were in effect, and what we see here is how district per pupil spending was growing relative to inflation over that same time period, just to give awe sense. if you saw this year-by-year you'd seen in the early years it was growing faster. later years it was growing slower. in california it actually began to slow down much more quickly than in the other districts.

i wanted to give awe sense of that. so current challenge, and this is actually where june's paper leaves off, is that it's not just about cost cutting at this point. there are increasing performance pressures on districts, and so it's about more performance, more impact with fewer resources. the problem is, as we heard from the very first panel this morning, there's not a habit in the sector and among the leadership capacity in the secretary every of reighing relative options against each other or against an overall strategy. a lot of what i'll talk about. one of the things we found to get in this joint project that was a collaboration between ten faculty member ace cross the two dwrad witt graduate schools of education and business, in neither body of work was there much knowledge about in a sector like education what are the particular challenges of running a large multisite organization as an integrated system versus a set of independent individual units or a strongly centralized

organization? and so that's some of the work that we set out to do together. so when i say there's kind of a weak knowledge base, one example of what i mean. i think this is something many of you will be familiar with. there's this decentralization dogma, nate referred to it late in an answer to a question. where if we could just get all of, as much as possible, the spending and decisions in the hands of people closest to students. by the way, when advocates for that position say that what they really mean is principles. they're not talking about teachers or parents. but people closest to the action if they were making the vast majority of decisions, then we'd get better decisions. the assumption there is everybody else would make really bad decisions. right? these folks would make the best decisions. that is both true and not true. so one of the things we've been working on is, what's an alternative to this? the problem with this theory is that large multisite organizations that are expected

to act as an integrated organizations are actually much more complex than putting resource decisions in hands of front line people. they're integrated systems that actually have a gel accountability. people are expecting districts to produce some level of performance and while i personally am inclined and convinceed by some of the data having lots of resource decisions in the hands of schools is a good thing, it's also true that there are even when you do that, there's still significant resources in the hands of central administrators and mid-level kind of network level or regional level administrators. so the question becomes what do we do about those? even in new york city which is touted by bill oochy, the scholar who has written most about the decentralization idea, new york, he ranks them at the top, and 85% of school level resources are in the prol of principals. basically that means they hire teachers, and so because most of the money is tied up in salaries and principals have autonomy

which teachers they hire, they have a lot of control over resources and that's true. 85% of school level resources. the trick is only half of the money in new york city is in schools. so the other half of it is in the hands of other people and so what do we do about that? turns out this is a question that management literature has been addressing pretty robustly over about 30 years, in all kinds of organizations. for-profit, nonprofit, public sector, not in schools, by the way. integrated product firms vertically integrated service firms, lots of studies about this and joe bower was the initial scholar that kicked it off 30 years ago and in his review looking back, literally on 30 years of work by other scholars that he kicked off, his observation was, this problem of having some top-down direction and accountability for performance and shaping

bottom-up resource practices at the unit level to support that is actually very difficult, and it's not necessarily a unique problem to public education. so kind of thinking through what the implications of that can be really important for the sector. so one observation is that this is not a problem that can either be solved at the unit level or the central office or headquarters level, but it's something that has to be thought of in a more nuanced way than that, and there are actually three instances in this body of literature in which it actually makes a lot of sense to have the spending decision centralized. even if you have a dramatically decentralized approach to resources and other ways. one of those is, if there's an opportunity that will benefit the entire system and the cost of that opportunity is actually beyond the spending limits and control or budget size of any one or small collection of units it actually makes a lot of sense to think about that centrally.

it's not decentralized or centralized, some decisions might be made better at a more centralized level. another time is when current investors and customers actually like things as they are. and have few incentives to make different kinds ofbout that today as we've moved through lots of the district example. another one is when cuts or let's stop doing some things is necessary and there are really powerful incentives for decentralized decision-makers to do them. these are things, again that have been gleaned from about 30 that see even in a system highly decentralized like new york city, there's a way to think about the kinds of centralized decision-making that will produce some results that actually make the decentralized spending that goes on in the multiple units nor powerful. i mentioned these three case examples. read details in the paper, one

is about the stark school initiative in san francisco. ed autonomy accountability exchange in new york city. they have common features. all three of these were about reallocated resources differently based on the needs of students. new york and san francisco did that by allocating resources by a weightsed student formula atamped to students and montgomery county it by growing spending more rapidly in underperforming schools that had most of the low income and minority students in montgomery county while holding constant in the other. basically funding investments in some schools while holding or cutting investments in others. so way to think about this, and then i'll wrap up, is that, any of these resource decisions and any of the ones we've been hearing about today in terms of cuts need some frame that's based on cause and effect theory about what's going to produce

results. whether it's different kinds of students with different learning needs, need different levels of resource, that's one theory. whether or not it's john chubb's presentation this morning that what we really need is to think differently about using technology in classrooms, having a theory about why those choices will actually lead to results, and then basing all of the other decisions that get made in the district, i know this sounds like common sense, but our observation, and i think the panel's throughout the day today, would indicate that it's actually not common practice. to think about resource allocation or any of these other organizational decisions in that way. so very quickly, if you don't have, if you have a resource plan without a strategy you're probably not going to produce, might costs but plight not produce much in the way of results. if you have a strategy without a resource plan you don't really have a strategy. i think we saw that over and over today. and then the other is beware of

these either/or kinds of dogmas that get promoted out there. it's decentralization or centralization. then final plug, just you know, from my own work over the years is, even in the paper that you'll read, the examples, district did terrific things. some of them worked, some did not. all of them produced some level of results that the superintendents were targeting. none of those things challenged the existen arrangements. very strongly. and so while those are all worthy things an with the existing arrangements, there are better ways to think about strategy and resource allocation than others, the keends of things that we talked about on the panel just before lunch, about how do we really rearrange the way we think about schooling in the existing arrangements are the things that are going to really get us to leapfrog over the current performance to something much more, much more impactful. >> thank you, stacy. and next up is marty.

>> are ,@árbrb #rbrbicrbrb presentation overcoming the barriers to change isn't quite

right. in fact, there are very few barriers to change. the question isn't whether change will occur, it's what that change isoi the fiscal pressures facing school districts already intense are poised to increase. and june's paper provides a wonderfully colorful overview of districts ongoing efforts to respond to the decline in the economy in the past year, but clearly, there's going to be a need for increasingly tough decisions and perhaps more importantly for a good deal of innovation as we go forward. so what are the barriers to doing the type of rethinking of existing practices that stacy just referred to in her concluding remarks? what are the barriers to really experiment experimenting to figure what will work and what won't work in order to cut costs and allow us to maintain and even improve levels of achievement? we need to get that diagnosis

correct if we want to come up with the right solutions. and i want to argue that, that there have been many potential barriers we've discussed today but i want to make the case to you that the barrier, the fundamental barrier, political, and in particular the political incentives facing the roughly 14,000 elected school boards charged with day-to-day management of american school districts are not to seek productivity or efficiency. rather, teachers unions and other organized interests with the stake encurrent arrangements dominate school board elections. the general public has a very poor understanding of education finance, and is reluctant to support policies that may lead to conflict with their school districts and state and federal policy which could be part of the solution actually more often tend to aggravate the problem. well, to the extent that that diagnosis is correct, it should shape how we think about the policies that would help overcome the barriers to change.

in particular, we need to think about measures that will change the political incentives facing district leaders, and free them to seek efficiencies in the interests of both kids and the general public. so hopefully i'll g to tell what you that would look like. let me start by try trog provide you with data to support each of these points. first, on the need for change, new evidence on this point actually comes from an annual survey of the, of american's public views on education, conducted by the general education next and har verdict's program on education policy and governance. i'm one of the principle investigators on this annual survey and i'll draw on our data in several places throughout the presentation. one thing that jumped out at me as i looked at what we've learned about americans views understanding of in support for school finance over the past three years we've done this poll is that we saw a marketed dedplin support from increase spending on education. along with the decline in the

economy between the spring of 2008 and it's spring of 2009. spring of 2008 the dow jones industrial had declined 10% from its peak. but really there was no sense of crisis or urgency. a year later, when the dow jones was at its bottom, we in the field fortunately and were able to see that americans support for increased school spending fell by 15 percentage points, quite a sizable change. you need to take the levels that you see there with a grain of salt. americans public researchers point out in favor of spending more on everything as well as in favor of lower taxes, but the change is something that i think we can learn from. we also saw at the same time a sharp dedplin support for increased teacher salaries. we saw that confidence that more spending would improve student learning also dropped from over 60% to one-half and

interestingly, the grades that americans assigned their public schools dropped to the lowest levels on record. not just in the three years we've been doing our survey but going back as far, back as 21 -- all the way back to 1981, rather, which is how long the phi delta and kappa will been doing their annual survey. so it's quite possible that support for education and spending in confidence in our schools may recover in the future, but i don't think it's obvious that's going to be the case. and other signs beyond public opinion point in the direction of continued fiscal pressure. so rick mentioned this morning that the ongoing demographic trn igs in the u.s. towards a more elderly population is going to make things difficult for schools. here are projections from the b. by 20025, those over 65 will outrank the school-aged population for the very first

time in american history. by 2050, the census bureau predictses a 120% increase in the senior citizen population and only about a 70% increase in the school-aged population. now, what i'm not suggesting a a standard greedy geezer, argument by which senior citizens are not willing to support spending on public services in particular education. best evidence we have suggests that line of argument is actually overblown. but the real issue here is one of competing entitlements, and pressures that result on federal, state and local budgets. a similar argument could be made about the expected or at least hoped for growth in enrollment and graduation from higher education to the ex-thaent we succeed in meeting the obama add palestinian strags's goal of making the united states first in the world in terms of percentage of its students that graduates from college. that's going to require a dramatic increase in enrollment

and heavily subsidized public universities. so for me at least the bottom shrine that absent productivity improvement the ute look for u.s. schools is grim and this is true even if the nation returns to more rapid education growth and sees somewhat of a recovery in its education revenues. so what are the barriers to efficiency enhancing changes? we've seen a lot of possibilities discussed today. one that came up earliest in the day, in the first session, really deals with just a lack of information. and you saw both marguerite rosen and mike's analyses intended to provide decision-makers with school districts with more useful information that they could have to make tough decisions that they'll be called to make. note that i don't say a lack of raw data. in fact, districts right now are a wash in data but there's a dramatic scarcity of information. that's what we've learned with work that i'm doing with lar

vard's center of art for education policy research, something called the strategic data project. we go in and provide a couple fellows to partner school districts to go in and increase their analytic capacity. we see that they have plenty of information -- sorry. plenty of data. they clully have a good deal of capacity. what they don't have is free analytic capacity. i think the annan sease mike and marguerite and the consulting firms that you saw present today that are trying to address these concerns can be really vital to degrees that problem. but i don't think that's the only story nor do i even think it's really the root cause of the barriers to change. second possibility is just a lack of know-how. if we're honest with ourselves we all would agree we really don't know how best to transform our schools to be more productive. if there even is a one best way

to accomplish that task. the lack of know-how can explain what we see right now, which is a lack of experimentation, and a failure to address or get rid of clearly failed programs or policies. so one good example of that is the masters degree premium that we pay an increment in salary for teachers holding master, degrees. there's an enormous amount of evidence that there's very little relationship, if any, between holding a masters degree and effectiveness in the classroom. everyone in the research communities agrees on this. everyone in districts and states understands this, yet when i and some colleagues propose this to the florida state board of education as they thought how to free up resources to deal with the downturn in revenue they're experiencing in the state of florida, we were laughed out of the room, because that benefit is taken for granted.

a third possible factor, cultural norms and bureaucratic inertia, a tendency to add without subtracting. i think these are important characteristics. there's definitely a culture with school districts that paint should are shared equally nap leads us to rely on across the board paying cuts, across the board cuts, in order to share that pain equally. the notion deeply held among many educators all teachers need to be paid the same. paying math science or special education teachers more in view of their scarcity would be somehow unfair. those factors are all important, but i really think that all of these first three factors are secondary and they stem from the underlying politics. we need to ask not what information is needed, but why doesn't the information already exist? and that's important, because if you provide the information

without changing the fundamental political incentives, then why would you expect the actual decisions to change? so providing the information on its own without addressing the incentives that people have to use the information isn't going to accomplish much. similarly, trying to change the culture without asking why the culture has been allowed to persist for so long won't accomplish much. so i only have a few minutes, but on the political front, what seems to be important. i think there are three ways to think about it. first of all, interest group pressures with school districts. public information and opinion, and then state and federal policy constraints. rick hess has done a study of school board members that reporting the groups that are active in school board elections and as you see, there's a wide range of groups that are very active. in school board elections. but more often than not the most active group by far are, in

fact, employees of school districts as teachers unions, why are interest groups able to be influential in the context of school bort elections? they're held at different times than regular or primary elections, very low turnout, often in the single digits as a result of that. very little information. so it's not surprising that superintendents report in surveys their boords are quite sensitive to group pressures. how are groups influential in school board elections? well, these are low spending affairs. it's not really through campaign contributions, rather by getting their members to turn out and vote. terry moe has done the best study. turnout, a limited sample of districts in california, but what he finds is that teachers who both lived and work in the district by which they're employed giving themselves a stake in the outcome or more than five times as likely to dern occupant to vote than are registered voters more generally. the same applies to a lesser

extent to other school district employees. he also finds not surprisingly then that union endorsements have a large effect on the outcome's elections. if you're endorsed incumbent you're essentially undefeatable in the context of a school board election. we see the same pattern in national data when we ask about self-reported turnout. you see three times as many americans say they voted as did vote but the differences are just the same. so it's not surprising that collective bargaining agreements tend to reflect union interests. in terms ever public knowledge, we've done a lot of work looking at what americans understand. and we find that americans are very uninformed about school spending. they under estimate spending by more than $5,000 and the median response when you ask what expenses are is exactly $2,000.

they under estimate teacher salaries by $14,000 or roughly 30% and if you provide them with information on the matters, it redues support for spending and salary dramatically. interestingly, americans are better informed about student outcomes. they provide accurate information about national ranking on international tests and graduation rates and the grade they reflect data on school quality. finally on the barriers and i promise i will stop, the 3rd set, state and federalolicy should be part of the solution more often than not, it's part of the problem. there two areas you need to pay attention to. many at the state and the

federal level is title one. it is based in part as a percentage of what states are spending. that is designed to encourage states to spend morenb@ @ rbrb them there. the solutions i think really have to do with changing the political incentives and changing the way elections are

conducted. educating and informing and mobilizing the public and the state and federal policy makers getting out of the way and finding a way to continue to put pressure on school districts to improve their performance so that we can take an experimental approach to figure out what to do next. >> thanks, marty. that's a lot of food for thought. i'm confident that in the next hour, we will generate a lot of suggests and feedback. lily, i'm sure you have a couple of thoughts. >> i'm not sure whether i was invited to serve on the panel because i'm vice president or because i'm a 6th grade teacher from utah and we can stretch a dollar until you can see through it. i saved a lot of pennies in my

utah classroom and witnessed firsthand a lot of decisions that were penny-wise and pound-foolish. good lord, we had better be smart enough to know the difference. there is too much at stake to get this wrong. i just want to say how much i appreciate that you considered this important enough to hold this forum and all of you who think it's important enough to attend. i am sick and tired of failing to make things better. at any rate, we are really, really good at fighting what we consider to be the bad things. when you defeat a bad thing, the victory is that you get to keep what you already had. how is that a victory when what you had is not good enough. i don't want a win to be we can keep what we have got. what we have gets better. it is not going to get better

unless educators reach towards people we are not used to working and playing well with. the business community and the policy wants and the taxpayer associations and the paraphernalias and grandparents. we thought we didn't need many of you in this room. we thought we would get someone election and get a law pass and get more of what we neated and everything would just work out fine. everything doesn't work out fine for every one of the kids. a lot of the kids are doing just great and god bless them. too many of the ones that need us the most aren't just fine.

we have to do things a lot smarter. the two papers we looked at, we were asked to respond to those and i did my homework. i liked the first paper. she goes back to the studies in the 1960s and what we learned from those business models that are still relevant to us, analyze the cost of getting what you want and commit the resources to pursue the best opportunities that lead you towards what you want. then decide what gets more resources, less resources and what gets abandoned and of course that was in the 60s. i will say wouldn't that be groovy if that was highway it worked? you and i know that's note how it works. not in business and not in government and not in education. every step along that seemingly simple continuum is debatable.

but it's the foundation debate we never had and the primary debatable item that is never put on the table before we get into these kinds of discussions. the 1st item that we as a community have to come to true clarity on is not how to save a penny. not how to spend a penny. what is the purpose of the enterprise we call a public school. the purpose of a business enterprise is to make money. i have a 401(k) and it's invested in businesses and i hope they are making money. that's what they are supposed to do. running a business is very complicated, but pretty much you have to make money or you don't get to keep your business. strategies for success in the business world are naturally going to focus on profits, return on investments and they should. in education then, what is the return on investment?

a taxpayer would consider profitable. that definition might be a little different if you are a taxpayer with a disabled child. or a taxpayer with a gifted child. or an employer looking for engineers or an employer looking for a cleaning crew. we are dealing with important issues in these presentations today. we heard of a paper that deals with the theories of action, authority, allocation, do you have a plan for decision-making and do you have a resource plan and do you have a plan to avoid alienating the people you need to make that plan work? i loved that paper. it was a thorough analysis of what's already happening in states to save money. they are being very creative. i made a list of all of the pieces of considers to all of the pieces of questions. turning down the thermostats and the tax credits on solar panels.

cutting positions and pay and benefits and offering early retirement incentive packages and rescinding early retirement incentive packages depending on the structure. you get different results and it went on page after page after pamg and we have a list of cost-saving measures that are already happening in states. i have a list of strategies to go in with leadership, empowerment and accountability. but to what purpose? by the way, and i cannot emphasize this enough, i am a fabulous teacher. i am truly incredible. i give myself goose bumps. i love teaching. the purpose of a public school is not to give me a job that i love. the purpose of a public school, if you were wondering and you want to write this down, it's to

prepare each and every individual blessed child with the skills, the attitude, the knowledge, the confidence that they are going to need to succeed in the lives they choose to live after they leave that public school system. their career lives and personal lives and lives as participating members of society. there is a huge debate on whether or not the definition i know is the purpose is correct or not. there some people who agree with me. there other people who are wrong. some say it's to raise the rates or grades and those are not purposes. those are measurements.

whether a kid chooses to be a brick layer or stay at home mom. is he dependable and does she have a work ethic. can she communicate. can he work on a team. can she organize a project and can they tell whether or not they can trust the information they are getting? i want all of my children to learn all of those things and i will not consider myself a successful teacher unless they do. if we can come to an agreement on the purpose of a public school, then we can analyze the lists and the strategies and the reports on politics and how we move forward with the 1001 fabulous or idiotic ideas floating around 1001 rooms like this and find a smarter path. that path has got to lead to a

destination worthy of the children you have sent us. let me repeat, the important lesson on the power point, don't get stuck in dogma. that's as important as anyone else's organization. it has to be centralize. it has to be decentralize and must have this and can't have that. the path that's going to lead us towards our purpose may be paved by something or some combination of things that no one has thought of yet. [speaking foreign language] that's a piece of a poem. there is no path. you make the path by walking. we are going to have to walk with an open mind. we are going to have to invent better systems that make actual sense to the diversity of the students and their communities

and the needs that we face. no more one-size fits all cookie cutters. how many of you in this room are not educators? that's a lot of people. my point, and i do have one, i want to leave you with those of you who are not educators with this. be smart. make me your partner. make my organization, my teachers, my support staff your partners and not because you feel all warm and fuzzy and trust me. i don't trust you. i don't know you. you never call, you never write. we don't know each other, but i'm really smart. i will buy you a beer and argue with you.

i will 11 to your ideas and maybe you will listen to mine. i will work with you. i have to. i have to make this work more than you do. my colleagues and i are talking about decisions to cut or enhance or ador eliminate that means the success or failure of an enterprise that has for many of us been much more than our careers. it has been the love of our lives. i will make an offer to you. those of you who are not in education. in the next three months i will be traveling around the country and i have a series of conferences and i will be speaking to thousands and thousands of any leaders from literally every single state and even our department of defense schools overseas and i promise

you i will not be saying anything to them that i am not saying to you. today. the status quo is not good enough. there smarter ways to serve our students. it is our responsibility to say more than no, this is why this won't work. we have to take responsibility to be the honest partners in finding what does work and engage new and surprising partners in ways we never have before. i have an ask. i ask each of you to spend five minutes, half an hour, whatever it takes. answering for yourself in your heart, the question, what is the purpose that we are trying to achieve for 52 million public

school students? what would success look like for them? what is the promise we are willing to make to them and how many pennies would it take to fulfill that promise? it's a simple homework assignment and if we do it, we find a better path than we will succeed. on behalf of myself and 3.2 million educators that i represent, we, like you, have no intention of failing. >> thank you, lily. that was groovy. asommissioner with all of these questions, i love to hear your thoughts. >> thank you, rick and i have to first say i know my response is

not to be my colleague to the right, but i had a conversation with tony salazar and i said i will be doing this response wit) things. in some cases we are very guilty. rick, i appreciate you putting

this conference together with support. it is necessary we have these conversations. i agree with lily that they were informative and helpful. it was a good outline what the issue is and good suggestions on how to solve it. i typically find when i'm dealing with educators and we respond in a lynn rar way and respond based on what we know. i found that the responses were the same and figured out a better way to do it and sometimes it's based on that we call it something different. i would like to start out like i did in colorado.

i have found that if i start most sentences with all due respect, i already achieved permission for things i might say that they may not agree with. to this group with all due respect, i think there some elephants in the room that we have addressed on a small scale and haven't jumped with both feet in. some of those have been mentioned certainly and in some cases suggestions on how we might respond. there has been just a small response to leadership and certainly we talked a lot about funding and we haven't talked a lot about bargaining agreements and the impact that bargaining agreements will have on the system. we spent a brief time on choice and the benefits of choice. i appreciate what john spoke to

earlier and certainly we know there is a lot more choice options out there. no one spoke to outside of just very, very briefly on state departments or the u.s. department of education and how sometimes we are more of the problem than we are a solution. what i would like to do is very briefly and my 10 minutes to certainly highlight things that were in the papers that i think brought the things to light. certainly to put the conversation out and i hope we have a conversation with you and you will push us further on some of those things that i think are elephants in the room that we haven't addressed as much as we should. let's start with leadership. we know that sustained leadership matters and we know especially in the urban districts sustaining that leadership is difficult. superintendents's tenure is to five years and maybe less in

kansas city where they have had more superintendents than they had years. leadership matters and we pushed superintendents and i heard the panelists and they need to be courageous and take the bulls by the horns. hard to do with the current structure. they are moved for being or removed for being courageous and in many cases it's difficult for them to do. we have not spent enough time focusing on teacher leaders. it has been a mention that teacher leaders, not that teachers will be principals. actually developing teacher leaders help you sustain a school especially in this time of leadership turn over. so those teachers typically will be there when that new and young principal comes in with all the ideas of how they will change the school. most of the teachers know they will be there after that person leaves as well.

the focus and development on teacher leaders can have a big impact and think it is not trying to prepare teachers to be principals. most do want an opportunity to stay engaged. you heard my teacher friend talk about the power of being a teacher and loves being a teacher and you heard her say herself that she is say darn good one. give her an opportunity to be a leader and i think the union is doing that and i wonder how often we are doing that in schools. keeping stakeholders in mind, we have to have the courage, but i attest that strong courage and leadership by superintendents is an election away from substantial change and that will go to the next district. i do think there is an opportunity for states to provide leadership and in a moment, i want to speak to that funding. the easy part, stacy certainly

outlined it in her paper, the easy parts have been done. june talked to a lot of business managers and some superintendents and it's amazing how in some cases we haven't had to make near as large of cuts as other states, but we made cuts around the edges and it is nice to have a conference like this to talk about how we start to make some of the difficult cuts that are yet to come in our state. i can tell you that the 6% decrease in funding that most districts are going to get or cuts per se they are going to have to embrace will be small compared to 2011 and 2012. when you cut everything and we heard certainly that personnel takes up a large part of the budget. when you cut around the edges and have done all those things, how are you going to effectively address personnel?

it's nice to have this conference to be helpful and the papers that they put out gives us suggestions and ideas. let's focus on a moment on the adults. there has been a mention as to whether running school systems are really about maintaining employment for adults. or is it really about increasing student learning and it doesn't matter how whether or not you say student learn suggest not measured in an assessment for the bottom line. can kids read, write, do math and do it at great level or above? lots of ways to measure that and sometimes we want to attack the measurement systems. i believe that's a waist of time and effort. the bottom line is do kids have the skills that they are going to need. in one of the papers they highlighted the bargaining agreement or contract in milwaukee. i don't know if you are familiar with that or not. i recently became familiar with

it. it was unbelievable to me the things that have been bargained away and what typically happens. i have been a superintendent and i also have been at the bargaining or the negotiations table. certainly did my best work in all good faith. that typically becomes a lingo. we are doing things in good faith. i just wonder whose faith. typically what happened overtime is we bargained away things that really matter. if you think about in milwaukee they have to fund for part-time employees and medical cost and retirement, no way a system can sustain that overtime. it's difficult to do. we have to come back to the table and take my person up on saying we have to be a partner in this and have conversations about how we readdress the things that have been put into contracts when there was not money. typically that's what happens overtime certain things erode

when there not resources or dollars to put on the table. now that there not a lot of dollars, i wonder what will be bargained away and what will take place now. in our state it has been a difficult process. i do consider the union and our state to be an excellent partner. we have come together on very, very tough conversations, especially as it relates to the race to the top that we believe colorado will be a winner. i haven't got to the solutions and i'm down to one minute. let me run through that. i want to mention that i think that's an elephant in the room that has to be addressed especially in the downturn. i think it will take a partnership. teacher are not to blachlt too many of our systems want to blame the teachers and they are not to blame. they operate in very, very poor systems.

in our renegotiations, we have got to take a look at the system. in our state we do what's called a tell survey that allows teachers in an anonymous ways to talk about the working conditions in some of the schools and districts that are not fit and require teachers to have protection. i think the state has a roll to play to improve the working conditions and one way is you have to publish exactly what folks that are in doing the work say. i will wrap up. the 2nd thing i think you have to be able to do is to work with your teachers on as my colleague talks about, identifying what the purpose is. the purpose for me when i was a student or purpose for the 800,000 plus students i support as commissioner of education is that kids actually achieve better. at the end of the day, i just don't get very far from if you are able to read, write, do math

and do it well and what a difference that can make. in our state we put approaches together. if an opportunity exists in conversation, i would like to go through those. we built a road map that starts to deal with -- go ahead. you want me to make it? great. i will do that. thank you for the extra time. one is senate bill 212. it deals with standards and assessments. you have to be clear about what you want students to know and be able to do. you have to build a system that is a fair accountability around whether or not they are able to do it. senate bill 212 we vamped our assessment system. standards are benchmarked internationally with which we know our youngsters will have to compete in other places. pretty happy about that.

in assessment, it's more than filling in a bubble. there is room for simulation. technology has come a long way and you can do assessments in a way that is a lot more fair. that's what we are trying to build. senate bill 163, accountability and support. you noticed i said accountability and support. typically the old system was just on accountability and most that was was on the back was teachers. they in many cases did not have the autonomy based on certain conditions. you have to have a strong accountability system, but you also have to build a system of support. that's where i think states come in. we work on create creating resources and technical support and what works under what conditions with what groups at what cost? think if we can take back to the legislature clearer data that supports what really does work. under what conditions with what

groups of youngsters and at what cost? i asked the legislators and colorado to give us no more money until we can answer those questions. they should place very scarce resores on things that actually work. the growth model, some of you are familiar with the growth model. we did it in open sources so states would have the student to buy into the growth model. it's a fair measurement because it takes into account where students start. teachers were saying it's not fair if i'm not lucky. it was whether you were in schools and whether students were white and wealthy. if you were in schools where the kids came with a different skin tone and were not wealthy, you got held to the same data point just based on not where the kids started, but how they were able to demonstrate efficiency.

really identifying where a kid starts and taking them forward so you are accountable for the growth. teachers think that's more fair. we have to involve parents. there parents in the room here. we publish that data. make it available so that anyone can click on the website in any school and doa an apples to apples comparison, the same make up of one school and same demographic of another school even across the state. how do they compare based on growth? parents will actually start to drive the change. that's where it should be. we have to give parents information. parents can look at schools across the state, but more importantly in the parent portal, we say when you go to a parent-teacher conference, here's suggested questions you should ask about the growth of your youngster and potential answers you should look for in responses. empower parents to change

conversations in colorado. we think parents will change that. finally the last is senate bill 130, innovation zones. giving districts the opportunity to wave many of the )rb audience in a moment. i like to give folks a couple of opportunities to clarify. a couple of things that struck me that i would like to push on. stacy, one of the things that you discussed in your paper and that you briefly mentioned is

that even some of these really acclaimed initiatives and the terrific work that jerry and his team have done in montgomery county, it tends not to involve rethinking the call structure. it strikes me and perhaps just it's my impression that we keep saying it's not just about cutting cost, but has to be about excellence too. when we talk about the programs, we talk about cost cutting and talk about new initiatives. >> that's exactly right. in fact the three examples in the paper not only do they not rethink the structure at the school level of delivering instruction, and the animating feature is to increase the cost structure in certain schools and not others in order to accelerate the progress in some

and hold constant of our incrementally improved in others. that is absolutely the case. >> what would it take for us to shift and talk about excellence and rethinking cost structure? one big piece of advice you can throw out there. >> this has come up a number of times today. without a forcing function like the inability to behave that way anymore are in place. to not continue to layer on new costs in order to not disrupt political arrangements and very flaj il stakehold hoestakeholde. the larger point, the behaviors that led to results that were grounded in some good thinking about which behaviors would lead

to increased outcomes is transferrable. it becomes even more important when you have to add in the task of not just producing results and doing it with fewer resources. did this strike you as to why more of their peers wouldn't do this work and act on the ideas that they had? >> i think the ideas were so small that there was no big idea that they could take and save one large hunk of money. they were dealing with so many different little issues. they were hoping that all of

these little things would add up to something substantial. there was no impediment that prevented them from doing any of these things except the lack of ideas. i think perhaps a book like this will help exchange those ideas. i don't think anyone was standing in the way of them right sizing schools. politically. again, it was such an a mall gam of small ideas. malgam of small ideas. >> why was it small? >> they were trying to cut around the edges. the union contract that defined salaries and that takes up 75 to 90% of the budgets. that leaves them with very little money. i use the example of in arizona

they have after subtracting energy cost, they have 4% left to play with. that doesn't give you a lot of room to come up with big ideas. if the big ideas, staffing and benefits are off the table, you are left with a lot. the federal language related to the maintenance of effort featured prominently. federal language regarding supplement not to plan. these are actually potentially bad ideas in terms of running cost-effective schools going forward. did i hear you right? >> i think you did and maybe i

didn't know how incendiary of a suggestion that might be. for example, i know this is playing a big role and the question of how seriously maintenance of effort requirements will be enforced in order for states to be competitive for racing to the top is an open one. i would like to suggest that it's not necessarily the case that these provisions are a good idea. we had a lot of evidence presented today that there may well be efficient ways of doing things. the folks at bcg as well as steven wilson. if that's the case then why do we want to keep a set of policies in place that penalizes people that actually try to achieve that goal.

# we should seriously revisit those policies. >> in light of that, is your sense in terms of changing the policy environment so that it becomes more possible to make the decisions that it might start to change cost structures. is race to the top helping on this count? is it having no effect or might it be hurting? >> i'm a cautious optimist on

race to the top. i guess i don't see a relation to the prior question. >> let me throw two thoughts that are murmured. not said about race to the top in light of this. one is that most of the 19 priorities around race to the top are about encouraging states to launch or expand program offerings. whether it comes to stem or teacher preparation or low performing schools on a variety of fronts. the 2nd is in the midst of a window or state legislatures are downsizing with the likely k-12 spending going forward, we see enormous energy invested at state departments of education, not in trying to leverage the downsizing opportunity and putting together grant proposals

to try to fill part of that gap for a 12-month window. >> those are both perfectly valid concerns. what the federal government is trying to do is stimulate innovation. we don't have the right idea of how to do these things. so it's trying to come up with a set of priorities and encourage innovation within that space. state governments try to do the same all the time and mandating and doing something different not knowing the right way to do it. the federal government here is trying to do that same thing. i think there is a lot to be said for that approach. when you put it into context of the economic downturn. you are exactly right. this becomes a concern and they are not investing in the right priorities if the need is downsizi

downsizing. my hope would be the proposals that states will come up with will take the fiscal situation going forward seriously and the department will take that into account, the extend to which is this is a viable plan going forward. they should be looking for evidence of a fiscal plan and i don't know the extent to which that will be the case. >> as a man who has been in the midst of this conversation, what are your thoughts between race to the top and these questions of cost structures? >> i do agree with martin that i do think the administration is trying to push innovation. states that can use innovation not to mess up the conference. i know this is a penny saved, but to chase a shiny penny, i do think state his actually used that to actually expedite their own reform structure. in colorado, we believe that we have a lot of the right reforms

in place and so race to the top potentially gives us an opportunity to in some cases fund the reforms that i think like a lot of districts as shared in the papers today that you start good initiatives, but can you scale them. it's an opportunity i think to figure out in the short-term how you might scale or sustain good reform initiatives while you, either the economy recover or figure out a better way going forward. i think the department is pushing us around teacher effectiveness. the most points that you can get in the application is around teacher effectiveness and we look at the evaluation systems across this country, they are horrid. no wonder teachers are upset. how do you talk about dismissal and tenure when you have a system that is really not fair. in our state, we have satisfactory or unsatisfactory.

guess how many of the teachers in our state are listed as satisfactory. the 99.99%. the difference is just an unsatisfactory category. we have to deal with the evaluations and administration is pushing states to do that. we deal with dismissal and certainly placement as well as development of teachers. i have been very, very supportive of their push around teacher effectiveness and pushing states to get outside of their comfort zone in this area. >> from where you stand, what's the one thing that the federal government is doing or could be doing or shouldn't be doing that might be most constructively in terms of helping us address the cost with the purposes. >> the race to the top is not about saving money, but getting money. that's the only reason i'm guessing in colorado and states like mine are racing to put together a plan so they can't

get more money. because we need it. if i was to look at -- i don't know where it's going to end up. i don't know if we will end up funding good ideas and things that were just not good ideas, but what race to the top has in it that i think is something that we can latch on to t really does have this model that says we expect to see evidence that you have put the teacher's voice in here, the parent's voice in here and the researcher's voice in here. that you have community buying into this. it has a model we talked a lot about. collective bargaining. this has a collective ownership of stating the purpose of what you are trying to achieve with this race to the top. a collective ownership of the design. a collective ownership of the

implementation and coming up with how are you going to measure it? the proper measurements. what evidence are you going to show that this is making a difference in the lives of children. that's the model you are going to need in the tough times we do live in. nobody is being an ostrich here and saying let's pretend like we have the money we wanted. we don't. it's going to be like this for a long time. if we're going to make the smart decisions about what gets more and what gets less. it can't be just a school board or just the superintendent or just the administrators saying okay, we make those tough decisions and we tell our staff and we tell the parents and we tell what we are cutting and not doing. that's a recipe for disaster. you have to bring the right people in and it has to be a collective ownership of what the

best move forward could possibly be. that's the way we need to get things done. >> let's open it up to the audience. we will give you the first )rbr) if you invested according to needs of kids.

my question is, do you have evidence that maintenance of effort and supplements that undermine efficiency or are you depositing that or i don't know if your paper gets into this or not. >> i understand the history of these provisions. i understand their importance. i think that we need to find other ways to try to accomplish those same goals that allowed districts to document their success in serving students. and to use that as a way to be able to adjust their spending without being harmed for doing so. i think this is an area that we need to try new approaches and particularly concerned with the basic structure of title one funding which is a different

issue than the issue of maintenance of effort and supplement not to plan. here i think it's more clear that having your title one funding with a percentage of what you are spending actually has overtime not done well by the states that need the most assistance from title one. i actually think that's an area where there is a clear answer and policy needs to be addressed. the other where we need to start thinking about ways to bring in information about the performance of students in order to allow districts to go in a direction that would be from the last four. >> okay. right here. >> i want to keep going to the

discussion about title one maintenance of effort and many other things today, the word equity is not mentioned. we talk about purposes of education. the well-rounded liberal arts stay tuned is an important purpose, but one of the national purposes according to state standards reform is overcoming achievement gap and bringing the kids who are not doing well up. none of that has been discussed. you talked about can we have excellence and cost sharing. i'm not saying that anymore. that's my big concern. we have been tracking the spending and that that is doing recently and what we are finding is that there is a severe trend towards cutting funding for equity. maybe there other mechanisms that are better than the supplementing, but nobody is

talking about them. until you mention that as a side comment, nobody talked about those things today. the only pitch i can make is i'm all for cost cutting. we have to do it intelligently and sensitively for the kids who are most disserved by the systems today. >> you want to say a word about that. >> one thing i didn't take the time to talk about was the bulk of my paper and the discussion of the district strategies who are specifically aimed at closing the achievement gaps as they looked in the school districts. at the heart of those strategies which is why it's interesting to include in this paper was a different way of thinking about resource allocation and the recognition not only that kids with learning needs might cost more they were getting less in

other parts of towns. they look different than when budgets were still growing and you could use a robin hood-type of growth that show or stop in some schools and agreeing in others and using a couple of different mechanisms. some in the paper were better than others at preserving the fragile coalition is takes politically to make that happen that positions them well during times in which they have to cut budgets and those pain points are going to begin to touch the more affluent parts of the county or district that were willing as long as their

services weren't getting cut to fund increases in other places. in district where is they offended the pocks they were picking to fund the other part. it's a much more difficult task to preserve a strategy in which they think was working in the formally underresourced schools and make cuts in schools that have stakeholders without sized voices. jose mentioned that when you matchup early childhood versus extra curricular, the parents so up and even though he knows that the pay off on investments in early childhood with a very difficult choice to make. if the politics are set up in a way that this is now going to be a more difficult fight as the budget cuts have the resources

in more affluent parts that, becomes more difficult. >> did you want us to jump in? >> it was a point well taken. that's an important part of the goal that we need to make sure are prioritized. >> i would add that stacy is right. in her paper she gave good examples of through leadership with the administration where they pushed really giving more significant resources to try to affect the achievement gab folks have been struggling for a while. i thought the montgomery county example was a good example of the red and green zones even though they didn't cut funning or it doesn't appear. they didn't appear to give the same increases to the green zones and they didn't cut it. the red zones got more.

it was nice that that was also done in partnership with the teacher's union. when it came time that resources actually decreased, the teachers actually forego an increase to sustain the initiatives going on in the red zone. i do think some of the papers really to that and it's a good example. the superintendent was here and talked about the partnership that they have in their district that really allowed them to make difficult decisions. now they have to make more difficult decisions and it's going to even be tougher. >> while we are talking about equity, i can't let that go by without talking about adequacy as well. we are talking about saving pennies and dollars and all the rest. there is an assumption and i said it before, we are in tough times and we acknowledge that. we also know that what needs to

be analyzed are a lot of the development giveaways that many of our communities have experienced. in the name of economic development, you give huge tax breaks to folks and you disrupt the foundation of your funding sources in a school district. so i think that's the other thing people need to be looking at. we have tight budgets, but some of them are tighter than they should be. some folks have been given breaks on their taxes that are not producing the same kind of economic development pay off that a fabulous public school will produce. >> okay. i think with that rush and a call, eric back up here. i like to say i think it has been a terrific session and a terrific day. it has been a delight doing this in partnership and i will turn it over to you. >> thank you.

really just want to say thank you for this and all the panelists deserve a rouge round of applause. >> a couple of quick announcements. a lot of staff that deserve to be named. i won't name them all, but a couple have worked really, really hard. amy fagan and janice from aei have been putting in long hours. thank you all very much. thank you to the trust who made this project possible. don't forget that there copies from the papers in the hall way and on aei's website. while on the website, consider signing up for their next event on january 27th entitled education reform reviewing obama's first year.

go to excellence.net and sign up for our event entitled school turn arounds. i hope to see you there. in the meantime, last and most