that campaign was centered around three things. improved comprehensive professional development for all school staff, parents and resource coordinators and every school that needs one and community schools. schools that stay open longer in the evening, offer more comprehensive services, not just students, the students and their families. not just to school families, but to neighborhoods and communities. sñsñ

[applause] and if marty comes, if you could just give a round of applause to the folks who put these flyers together and helped facilitate these community meetings. [applause] thank you. and so, i want to bring forth, marty blank, who actually is a director of iel and the coalition for community schools.

if i can make sure we remind folks around that three point campaign we've been organizing city wide call-ins, city-wide reform campaign action briefings by phone. so there's these as well to give you the webinar. we're going to have another one this thursday. marty is best positioned, i think, to talk about how this book, which has a forward by arnie duncan and how the chief of staff relates to some of the things we've been working on together and some of the things marty here has been working on for more than a decade. thanks. [applause] >> thank you, jeff. it's always a treat to be in a local setting where people are thinking about ideas you have and you're with friends with whom you've tried to make change in the city on behalf of the children and the families of this community, and connect that

to the national work that we do at the institute for educational leadership and at the coalition for community schools. secretary duncan has been a terrific advocate for the simple proposition that our communities have a real responsibility for the education of our children. if you listen to the education rhetoric today, you would think that the only thing that matters in kid's lives is what happens inside a classroom. well, of course that matters. but what happens in their lives, what happens in their families and how their communities are connected to our schools, it's also absolutely crucial. and the secretary has been a terrific advocate for that work in creating not only neddle horse, with whom you've hear of in the next few minutes, but also 150 other community schools in the city of chicago. schools that are really rooted in their neighborhoods and are trying to turn around not on the lives of children, but support their families and support their communities as well. we have many places in the country that are doing this kind

of work and hearing jaqueline is an opportunity to hear how parents, together with school leaderses, together with organizations, can really turn around not only this school, but many schools and contribute to the education of all of america's children. so, it's a delight to have you with us here in washington and we look forward to listening to you this evening. thanks very much. [applause] >> hey, thank you so much for inviting me. it's so nice to be here. it's wonderful to be in this neighborhood, that feels very much like my neighborhood of east lake view in chicago. so, thank you to erica and dorothy and jeff and marty and all the fine people who help sponsor this event. so, what i thought i would do is talk to you a little bit about how we did what we did at

neddlehurst in chicago. then i'm gonna show you a very short video about what we did. which will make some other things clear. then we'll have time for forth right and robust question and answer period. so here's the short story. my husband was supposed to do all of the research on schools. and if you live in chicago, that is a really, really big project. so then he told me he was too busy at work and i was gonna have to do that. and it was like you can't just do this to me, you cannot drop this project in my lap. this is a really big project. and i had a 2 1/2-year-old at the time. and he said, well, you're not working right now, go make yourself useful, go figure it out. i said well that's great, thank you very much. so my girlfriend and i in the park decided we should check out

neddlehurst, which was our neighborhood school and see just how terrible this place was before we panicked, before we set down that magnitude path or private school path. seriously, who wants to spend the rest of their life eating at an olive garden? like, not me. so we met with the principal at the time, susan curlland. she walked us around for three hours. she said what do i have to do to get your kids to come to school here? at that point nobody in the neighborhood went to school there. the school was bussed in from overcrowded schools. not to satisfy any racial mandate, it's simply that the neighborhood refused to go. and we said, hmm, well that's very interesting. we will come back tomorrow and we'll let you know. so we came back the next day with this five-page type-written list of all the things that we thought would have to be in place in order to make a

neighborhood walk back en mass. susan read our list and she said, well, let's get going, girls. it's going to be a very busy year. so we organized. and we organized all of these mommys in the park. and you'd say to mommys, what did you do before you were a nothing? they'd say, oh, i was the ad executive from gatorade, i was a partner at skadmen arp. we say instead of talking about what's on sale at the gap, as intriguing as that is, so long as we're sitting around this sand box for the next six hours, maybe if we put our heads together, we could figure out how to fix this place so we would all be able to stay in the neighborhood that we adored and continue on with the silly conversations we were having in the park for the next eight years. so we put all of these mommys on to teams and we had infrastructure and pr and

curriculum and marketing and enrichment and special events team. and all of those teams had to succeed concurrently. you couldn't fix the library one year and say three years from now we're going to deal with the enrichment piece. maybe after that we'll hit curriculum. everybody had to fix whatever their team was, and by our life, we figure we had nine months to pull it off. we came up with the idea of nine months because we knew that if neddlehurst was not on the table at the moment when everyone got rejected from a magnet school, which was inevitable, that everybody was going to be rejected from everywhere, if neddlehurst wasn't supersloppy seconds in that moment, all of that energy in the park, everybody with a 4-year-old would go somewhere else. let me give you a little snap shot of what neddlehurst looked like.

susan curlaln the principal, had taken the school on two years before we had talked in the door. when susan took the school on, the decade before susan got there, there had been ten different administrators -- i mean eight different administrators in the course of a decade. right before she got on, in fact, they had hired two principals to get the school under control. it really was one of those morgan freeman kind of places. susan had done a tremendous amount of work to get this school really on the up and up and create order and really do a great job. however, even though the school was sort of on the upswing, she was not able to convince the neighborhood to go to school there. and that's a very complicated proposition. how do you do that, right? can't just put a sign out and say, neddlehurst, really junky, look again. so that's complicated. when we walked in the door, i think by most people's

standards, it was a fairly well-run decent chicago public school. this was not a train wreck. it really wasn't. most people would say it was okay. but it certainly was not at the caliber where parents in the neighborhood who would have other options would choose it, so much so, in fact, that no one who had other options in the neighborhood chose it. when susan got to the school of the 300 kids in my neighborhood who chose chicago public schools, not one of them chose neddlehurst. not one. when we walked in the door two years into her reign, less than 10 students in the neighborhood chose neddlehurst. that's how bad the situation was. it had some real problems and it had some perception problems. real problems are actually really easy to solve. paint goes a really, really long

way. there are ways to get books. there are ways to get supplies. the perception problems took 70% of our efforts, and it was by far the biggest thing we had to tackle. so what i thought i'd do is just go through the basic teams and kind of give you an overview of what each team did. the first team was the infrastructure team. and the question was, how do you develop chemistry? how do you suddenly get a neighborhood to give a school a second look? how do you change that? from the outside, neddlehurst is 120-year-old beautiful red brick building that looks kind of like a penitentiary. it really did look like bleak house. and all of the signage said, you know, get lost, no ball playing. there wasn't anything about it that was terrificically

welcoming to anyone. so one of the things we did is we had every single artist, painter, electrician, plummer in east lake view come in and start work on this school. and we fixed this school, physically, with a budget of nothing. within the first two years we had over half a million dollars of donated goods and services. and it was all donated by gallon of paint at a time. and, really, at this point there is not an inch of this school that has not been licked by a neighborhood artist. and i promise you, it is love on a plate and it is totally delicious. so when i'm done talking, we'll -- i'll show you a short little video about the school so that you can see it otherwise. i could talk forever and it won't mean anything. the next team was the enrichment team. and what they needed to do was

contract services. they needed to create partnerships for the school. so we did a lot of things. we started a lot of really serious outreach. the first thing we did, we partnered with the local chamber of commerce. and now all the events in the neighborhood take place at the school. so we have halloween hooplas and easter egg things and pest fest days. all of those things take place in the front play lot of the school. we also have -- we started a farmer's market in the front play lot. even though the school doesn't make any money it from, we contracted it out to a third party who runs all the markets. we brought the market there so that people would put going to and neddlehurst in the same sentence, which hadn't happened in 5 years. it brought all of this energy every single week into the front

play lot. but the most important thing of all the partnerships we made, the enrichment team had a real pickle. how do you bring arts and culture and sports and stuff like that into a school when you don't have any resources? right? that's a pickle. so what we did, we went around to all the people who were the best at what they did. these names won't mean anything. mill street, fairy tale ballet, whoever they were. the partners, our families were already utilizing. we said, look, you can partner with us, charge your normal rates, stay here rent freeshg electricity free, marketing freesh and all we ask in exchange were two things. one, everybody had to offer scholarships, which they did anyhow, because they were decent, do-gooding people. the second thing they had to do was to contribute to the regular curriculum days. some nominal amount.

so here where you had minimal art, theater, dance, music, suddenly we had more than we ever could have dreamed of. it was at no cost to the taxpayer, virtually no cost to cps. we subsequently heard of this grant called the community schools grant. we thought, hey, we've got a community school that's handling this, if people would just take a risk on our school, we promise that we would be able to deliver, that this community school grant would transform our neighborhood. our fee for service communities school that we developed, brought in so much energy, not only the neighborhood, but into our school. it really was the thingle most important thing in transforming the school. it gave the school a way to absorb the goodness that a

community had to offer. so it wasn't just susan's kinky inclination that the neighborhood should come in, it really was the mandate of the school. so, our not for profit partner was jane adams hallhouse. our after care provider was the jewish community center. and so kids could hang out, have snacks, stay there all afternoon from 3 to 6 doing homework, whatever. can still take advantage of all the james place activities all afternoon. it's simply criminal to throw 600 students out into the universe at 3:00 in the afternoon when you can just invite 30 into the school. keep all of that energy into the school. what we were trying to do was free the soccer mom and free us from having our weekends cluttered up with all of this junk. right, moms? not junk. but who wants to spend their

weekends schlepping kids all over the city? certainly not me. this was a way to bring it all in. the next thing, which was a real pickle was for the academic team. no one was going to come in just for ballet or sports. we really had to raise the academic bar. i should say i don't know anything about early childhood education. i don't have a background in it. i know happy when i see it and sad when i see it, and that's about it. i did know a lot of mommies who did know. they went to all the private parochial and public schools we would have considered. they sat in on all the classes. they videotaped all the teachers. they went over the budgets. after four and a half months of doing research, they came back basically happy, which was really good news because had they come back and said, do you know what, guys, this school is fundamentally broken, we likely would have said i hope your new library works for youshg but

this is not gonna work for us. the changes that they wanted to see the school was going to do, but the most important thing that they wanted, which susan was totally cool about, is they wanted access. they wanted to be in the classrooms. and susan granted them access, which was almost -- we discovered later, almost unheard of in any school, public or private. and susan said, great. you want to be there every day helping out? super. maybe you won't be in your kid's classroom, but you could be in another kid's classroom. great. whatever. but the promise of that access, the promise of oversight really went a long way into raising the academic bar and also went a long way into bringing in a very skittish population. we walked in to an extraordinarily toxic teaching climate. this was not a story that is full of, you know, un corns and rainbows and happy daffodils.

it really was tough. we had one teacher who had a restraining order against her for hitting students, still in the classroom. i know. we had some teachers who muttered obscenities. there was some crazy stuff going on. but most of the teaching was actually pretty okay, and some of it was quite exceptional. it doesn't take many subpar teachers to really contaminate a staff. i think the piecy way to put it is the teachers that did not share our educational vision have since found suitable accommodation elsewhere. but the way that happened is really quite remarkable. and it happened faster than any of us could have anticipated. even faster than susan could have anticipated. wub of the by products of all the community buy-in and all of the parents there in the school

every day meant translated into the fact that every single subpar teacher at the school, almost every single one of them, fled ship within two years of this movement, voluntarily. that's extraordinary. and the reason i say that is just that there were so many external pressures that suddenly showed up that it became very hard to go on with the status quo. but i think one of the other reasons why our movement succeeded is because we believed that susan was a great educator and she was. we said, susan, run a school, run it well. you don't have to be a community organizer. you don't have to be a party planner. you don't have to be a fund-raiser. you don't have to be a marketing whiz. you don't have to be any of those things. just be a great educator. and susan promised us, if we invested with our kids and took this tremendous leap of faith, she promised her school would

deliver. cln:: us through. this schoe school delivered in . became more than the sum of its parts. the fourth team was the marketing team. it is really interesting. apparently, you can reposition and read brand a school as easy as serial. who knew? one of the great joys is your not just doing ho hos or

twinkies or something. this is something everybody desp it's a real thing. we were able to talk to people who were leaders in advertising in chicago and say how do we free-market this place because, you know, you can't say look again, to need something more clever than that. so yes, in their early days it was a lot of smoke and mirrors but very soon, that smoke and mirror campaign gave way to reality, and i think i set that up i hope in the book so that anybody would be able to follow our blueprint on that. the last team was the fund-raising team. we learned very, very quickly that no one wants to give money to a failing public school. and none of them who were working like maniacs and the parts wanted to dish out money when they were investing so much sweat equity into a school. so the question is how did you

do this project with nothing, was one part. the other thing is, you know, i'm not saying no to money. money is great. teachers need more money, schools need more money. money would be super. but all the money in the world is not going to improve a school until schools are able to radically transform the way they do business. schools have to be receptive to changing the way their model works so that everyone can benefit. so we did not start fund-raising in earnest until four years into the movement. and felmy, when the neighborhood came in, there were so many really, really smart people who walked in the door who knew about fund-raising and development, whereas i was walking around like we can overturn hat seeing did you need your shoes because we could use

your shoes. now there's a fund-raising apparatus in place that has a handoff r. dee proposal with your interest in nutrition there's a 20 page shul sold ready line item powerpoint. there isn't anything anybody could be interested in a million years that this development team wouldn't have a program ready to go for you. radical change than what we've walked in. and the reason why i say that is because now in retrospect seven years later i think some people might say money power word the middle hearst revolution. money did not power the revolution. people powered the revolution, and we did it with nothing, and i mean nothing. so money is not necessarily the answer. the only thing we really need money for and continue to meet

money for is authority thousand dollar position for the resource courtenay because nomani cannot run the community center as a volunteer. so authority thousand dollar position transformed an entire neighborhood. now that's a pretty good return for your investment. so, you know, what we did -- the reason i wrote the book is so i could leave this experience and would be a one-off concept and people might see isn't that great like ballroom dancing is in that lovely, and i guess that would be okay. but we were not rocket scientists. we were not physicist's building a reactor. this is doable. we were eight moms and he donner so if we could do what we did in nomani very diverse neighborhood with a freely skittish thing with all of the garden variety

garbage every school has to work with, if we could do it in my neighborhood, i know that this could be done in almost every neighborhood in america. and let's pretend the mommies got together all over this country, and let's say everybody just fixed what was in their own backyard. if that happened, i really think that 70% of america's problems would be solved dramatically overnight in just one fell swoop. it would be that simple. and let's pretend -- maybe that's really in vicious. let's say it was just 20% of the schools that got fixed. it would be incredible systemic change. it would be extraordinary. i was just in hog d.c. a few months ago and i was at this thing and there were all these policy wonks, you know, and

education specialists and they were like change takes decades, change is incremental. change does not take decades. a change is not incremental. we don't have time for that anymore. ask any mom who has a 4-year-old and she will tell you she does not have seven years for her neighborhood school to turnaround. she does not have the stomach to please a lottery. she does not have the money to pay for private school, assuming she can get in and ever eat out again, right? we don't have time for that. but i do know that the time is right for this. when i was in d.c. i met with valvista eckert it centers on the education committee. when they are done with health care which is what, like two more weeks? then there's going to be climate change and hope we just a little

bit more stuff and when that happens, education is next on the docket, and when that happens, the whole country is going to be talking about education for two months, right? so we have this amazing window. right now it seems to me that everybody thinks education so messed up that there isn't anything they possibly could do to fix it and we have to wait for somebody else to come together and come up with a plan for how we can fix this. the neighborhood schools work in this country for 100 years. the entire country, every single urban area in america is based on the neighborhood school model. so the whole idea that model this fundamentally broken i have a hard time wrapping my mind around that. so, it's -- it seems to me that if we can get this very simple

idea inserted into the national debate at the beginning when everybody says, when obama says what could you do to make this country better? fight? well, i could plant a victory garden. i could recycle, i could buy epirus, like a volunteer in a soup kitchen. in that list of all this stuff that normal people could do, my biggest dream of dreams is that the very top of that list people say i could fix my neighborhood school. i could gather six of my friends and walking two principals office and say hi, we are here to help the and we will mobilize the people in your neighborhood to make whatever your dreams were come true. and if we could to that, it would be really, really extraordinary. we are ready to unique crossroads in history where people are talking about the educational reform in a way that is far more serious, i think, than people have done in a long,

long time. and if this opportunity passes us by, that would be, you know, there would be a shame. but i'm telling you, we were not geniuses, and if we could do it, then everybody could do it. so i will show you this little video. before i do that because this marketing order, if you leave this evening and decide there's only one thing you want to do to help public education, right, if there is just one thing that leads this evening, by five books and put them in the hands of someone you know who cares about the education. give it to a mom who cares about education. give it to the people that have younger children. give it to a principle. give it to your elder men. but if enough people start thinking this is something that is doable, if it can happen.

so i am going to show you this video. know that everything you see has been donated. the stuff that looks like a little pictures they are full-size floor to ceiling murals, and i can tell you what we are watching as we go. this is really fancy, this thing. isn't it in press if? can we dim the lights a little? khanna we need the lights darker while we are doing that -- okay.

i'm so glad i have no responsibility for this working. is this microphone working? ♪ that's my daughter, mya. and that is ted, when you get to the fund raising chapter, that's ted. ♪ so these are our front doors. we did all the doors. that's susan with the rockettes. this is our farmers' market. that's mya and zach, my kids. unabridged bookstore. this is the easter egg hunt.

this is terri who made this amazing solar needle for the school. ♪ there is arne duncan, who has been with us from the beginning. the school has text bouck diversity, it is 40% white, 20% black, 20% hispanic, 10% asian and 10% other, 45% free and reduced lunch. these are outside doors. these are the side doors. ♪ more of the doors. ♪ ♪ with our very first fund-raiser, the winetasting we built two new playgrounds for the kids, like

these are telephone poles. here is a brick wall we turned it into the sky. these are the back doors to the auditorium. we have a lot of recycled art. it's a city school, so all the windows are greeted but we turn them into light boxes. here is my kids at the chest wizards in the afternoon. ♪ ♪ ♪ we are now a site for the chicago marathon so we have all of the elite runners, and i live

in boies council we are michael eight and also extra festive in my neighborhood. ♪ i love my neighborhood. here is the gem. we signed a $210,000 partnership with the chicago black hawks. they built a fitness room and we started in the inaugural hockey date. we've built a dance room if we are a fine performing art school so now there's a dance room for the kids. this is the world music cafe were the upper grade students hang out. we also have to amazing year to become your roles that were there before we got there from the 30's. this is horses throughout literature and this is a mural but across we made a seating area because there has to be a place for people to sit down, right? we lined globes over the main hallway. this is the land is on the way to launch an all of the littlest

kids swim to lunch. ♪ this is the banking center. harris bank has a banking center and kids learn about checking and credit and in rahm and all the other things kids should learn about. here's the one chrome, we turned it into a bistro. we have a salad bar. we are one of the only elementary schools to have a guarantee to recess for every kid everyday. [applause] it is a gift from our teachers. they gave up a union planning period to supervise recess so there's a tremendous amount of buying in for it. but, like duh, ret? this is the earth and sky and space, this is earth. so that's earth. ♪ this is the space floor.

but if the teachers just layer the artwork and student artwork over the mural. here are the parents putting together the africa mural. these are all museum quality artifacts that came from a gallery. this is the india wing so keep in mind these are floor to ceiling murals, and the swing is for specialized kids so it's all tactile so there's stuff for the kids to touch and feel. now you're going up into latin america. the national museum for mexican fine arts give some of their time and we made this latin american wing which is really delicious. ♪

♪ this is the pop-up funkadelic wheen for the first and second graders. here is rahm emanuel, his very first act of congress was to come back and open our open house. he's been with us from the beginning. this is our sky floor where the dance room is. so we just painted right of the lockers. anything that was ugly we just painted. ♪ i am mostly an artist and this is the fabric project i've been with the kids the past five years. the tide their attentions on to

the fence at the end of the year. but we are on the date right route. i told you we are in boies tons of this year we made it more explicit and we were the first school to walk in chicagos gay pride parade. we are now on every heat blog in the country. we even had the crazy plan from kansas protesting which was a treat. ♪ so that is my little world. [applause]

[inaudible] >> let's give jacqueline another round of applause. i think it is safe to say more of us knows something about community schools than we did that out 35 minutes ago. so they see one of the golden rules of the meeting is never give up the microphone. but c-span has made that kind of hard. why don't we go ahead and if you have a question and would like to come up to the microphone. agreed. i will stand up here to bodyguard the microphone. [laughter] >> we don't want to have have to invoke cloture on people who want to speak rather than ask. you said the neighborhood school worked for 100 years and was just a call trey of eight of these mommies who made it all happened but for most of those 100 years, we had the model of the two-parent one income household and that's not the

case anymore. so, how many hours of work or personal hours did this take? >> thousands. the answer as it took thousands of hours but you know what, we didn't do it all by ourselves. we were eight women who fled but there were thousands of people involved with this project of all different -- of all different situations. so it wasn't just us. and i don't claim that we did it all by ourselves because we didn't. but you have to be able to ask. one of the things we've learned is how to ask. we need help. whatever it was. one of the great joy of eating everything is anything you get is perfect. >> on in the d.c. public school teacher and came here because i thought this was a really

intriguing topic and if you can summon all of into one book where to go but one of the questions i had was you mentioned that the 300 students in your neighborhood who are eligible to attend this public school chose to go somewhere else so you're saying this neighborhood at least the parents themselves had the capacity and resources to choose other options and the school was mostly housing students who were overcrowding and other communities. when this revitalization took place what happened to those children? were they able to stay and enjoy that or were they? i'm assuming there was a whole influx of students from your community who saw this as a very good free option. >> we did not displace anybody. the school had decided to stop busing before we walked in the door but every student who was at the school, the 300 students there from of their overcrowded

schools, primarily african-american and latino, almost 100% free and reduced lunch, every single one of those kids who decided to stay state and is still there through eighth grade. as the demographics do shift dramatically in the seventh and eighth grade of the kids who came through. and that will be a criticism that we get, that we have gotten which is sort of says you can't get enough sort of like middle class caucasian people in a room without having a good school so great that you are patting yourself on the back for doing so well when in fact you have this huge influx of the middle stable base. one, that's not true. all of these kids stayed there. we just had a slow trickle of neighborhood people come. but the thing that is really remarkable list the benefits we are seeing across the board by

everyone almost immediately. so, and third grade the incoming kids from the tuition preschool from the neighborhood, when they got to a fair degree day and were tested for the first time the head the highest test scores in the city. the work 100% for math and 91% for reading which is pretty great. of the seventh and eighth graders for the past two years entirely still from an overcrowded school, every single one of them score high enough to get into a selective school in chicago, and they are 98% of free and reduced lunch. their test scores i believe are now in the 75th percentile or something like that. those are extraordinary statistics. so, one of the benefits of bringing in resources and energy and all that stuff is that it does benefit everybody.

everybody wins and it's not a question of the haves taking over for have-nots or anything. it's about creating a school that's best for everyone. it is that the answer your question? >> thank you, jacqueline. i am erica land bird and i work for d.c. schools and i got the call to invite you to do this and i'm glad we did. what some of you may not know is 35 years ago i did what you did, and i have to comments for you read it all i have worried about this because when i did i was working part time, and i was in a two-parent household. so i don't think it is a comment that can be negligible, can communities do it, where there's a low single parents and for everybody working full-time. it's a different world in 35 years ago so that is one comment but the other thing i wanted to

commend you on is what we did, we formed ten committees and they work -- the same six committees you had plus and after school one and before school and art and that was another way to spread the word and that we made sure we met at different times to meet people's work schedules and by having ten committees and then the goal of ten people on each one that meant 100 people were on the committees to make this happen. we did turnaround schools but i would like to hear more about this how you do it when the apparent population doesn't have the time or doesn't seem to and anything else about your committee structure. >> first of all, we were not all stay at home latte moms. some of us had full-time jobs, some of us had part-time jobs. we had this model that said we do more during nap time than most people do all day. we did this at 3:00 in the morning and at lunch and

everywhere in between. i would say that the first of all the same thing happened at my little school in the 70's, too which was remarkable. maryland who started the chicago children's museum, she and a group of people just like yours banded together and fixed nettlehurst in the 70's and everything fell apart during the teacher strikes in the 70's and a lot of other competing forces. so the spirit that you had when you did your finger into the spirit maryland had when she did her things in the 70's and the spirit my mom's had we did it now i would argue is no different than streams you guys had. every age has their own problems and hang ups and constraints but the spirit that said these are our kids and this is our neighborhood and we can to this,

that is universal and the heat to say that it's going to be the women but it's going to be women. the women change the world every day. >> this is a little bit connecting to erica's question but the deal also -- thinking also, i only got a couple of years, but the social capital that you guys brought and how that is different from other parents and also your thoughts about i guess i feel about a lot of parents who have had successful or positive experiences with school systems so some may not be as comfortable as you were walking into their school and approaching the principal and do you have any thoughts on that and also, do you guys partner or connect with other local schools to try to help them build this

kind of capacity? >> sure. i'm trying to think of where to go back. we hope lots of schools. it's happening independent with and without our help through chicago. so it is a movement that is happening. this is one of the great shlaes of the community schools movement is that it's not a one-size-fits-all model. we have a fee-for-service model. i think our model that we developed can work in any stable middle class neighborhood in this country. our version of it. and i talk about this in the book of the kids are in danger of getting shot on the way to school no one is hanging out at 5:00 for a quilting bee. there's a range of other problems. it's a neighborhood is severely underserved and severely underprivileged, they will have different needs than my community has. right? that's one of the great things about community schools, right?

what every neighborhood means the school is supposed to deliver. soa fee-for-service model worked in my neighborhood. all too easily that isn't going to work in a lot of neighborhoods in chicago with the community school movement was originally intended for those neighborhoods for a range of social services and a range of support networks that are different than the networks that we need. the idea is if this lucinda is the one who teaches irish step dance in your neighborhood for negative six in fifer into the school. that's when your neighborhood needs. if your school needs more dental, more family services, whatever it is, if that's what your neighborhood needs, then that's what should be delivered. so it's not just something that works in a certain kind of neighborhood. it's not a top-down thing. it really is a locally based old

school notion of delivering what people need. any other questions? >> i'm wondering -- working with groups here in the city outreach to other parents and getting them on board can often be a challenge. so i would like to talk about some of the strategies that you have used in reaching out to other parents be on your core group, some of the successes or challenges you had with that and particularly with the group of students that came from outside of your neighborhood and any successful outreach to the parents of those students. >> that was a really complex thing. the way our -- our experience was very different. the reformers at other schools had advised us not to have great big town hall meetings.

we walked into a really toxic environment. so what they said is you create constituencies where there are none and factions where there are none. so our movement deferred tremendously in that we didn't work so hard and organizing of the parents who were already at the school who were already every disenfranchised group. now, i will try to channel susan in a moment because she has her own take on that. we, as the roscoe park eight did not work on that. we worked very hard on organizing neighborhood parents who were not at the school already. we were trying to leverage resources and create networks and create connections from outside what existed in the school and frankly one of the problems the schools had is their heads or down so far to the grindstone they don't look up and say what's outside of these walls, what could we bring in from outside because they're so busy trying to get people to come to public dinners or

whatever it is. now i will try to channel susan for a moment. susan and the schools coalition consultants and house were far more interested than we were in mobilizing the parents who were at the school, and they worked very, very hard to do that and it was a point of contention because we only have so many hours in the day to do this and we are trying to do this big project. once the rubric was set up the we had a plethora of stuff the reformers said build it with your principal. padilla missile fer plater. people will either eat, eat less, ask for an appetizer in which case you'll be delighted to provide it or they will walk away from the table but at the end of the day you will have a platter of food that everybody can eat and that was always sort of guiding principle that we were going to be a silver

platter of food and we were not going to, you know, straight far from the path. now as soon as something got in place within less than two years there was far more opportunity of parents at the school from all different levels and skill levels and times and interest to get their faces and held in various ways but until there was something to add it was very hard to engage. it was contentious and difficult. i try to address it because these are all real issues and most reform the rail because the incoming population is not sensitive to the socio-economic and racial situation that's on the ground. we were very sensitive to read and a very strategic in the way we went about things and these were just reality is that we were trying to make a school

best for everyone and navigate very complex waters. >> let's take these two. if you could state yours and then she can answer together and those will be the last two questions. >> thank you for being here. my name is thomas with the d.c. parent information resource center and on a daily basis and work with parents trying to enlighten and in power than to do some of the things that your group is doing and i first want to say i commend you for your efforts. my question is really brief. in your case you had a very cooperative principal and a school willing to make -- work with you to meet you -- me to have we. >> thank god. >> had that not been the case, had you not had a willing principle that was willing to work with you and to indicate to

joining your vision what we have done in that case. >> we would have walked out the door. it takes to, right? parents have to show up in the principle has to open the door. and you can't do it without the principles saying yes. susan was agreed educator, right? but had she said no her greatest gift personally i think is that she said yes. you want to put a bathtub in the library? super. yufang you can renovate six weeks for free? fine. keep me posted. you think you can come up with an ad campaign? great. she was very receptive and most reform movements the real because a whole bunch of people walk into the principal's office and say we are here to help and the principal says i don't think the school was right for you if you don't think -- in fact, i

think there are four schools down the block better. so you've got to have a principle, you've got to have parents and you need one more thing and that is a building engineer. >> there's 150 of these in chicago said their must be other principals responsive and supportive but i wanted to ask you to talk about this resource coordinator proposition. how did that happen and how does that get funded and what is your relationship? can you clarify that quickly? >> the community school in chicago is a partnership between private resources and chicago public schools. so they sort of split the funding for this one paid position. so jane addams manages this cultural medusa so let's say you are signing up for a theater class and you're going to give your money to jane and she's in charge of programming and all the rest of it. so they are in charge of it and

then you can do all that stuff that money gets filtered right back into the provider. so that's the key. how do you find that one position. and that is a constant source of anxiety for my little school even now with all the great things we've been able to do which is where is that $40,000 going to come from? my school does not have money for pencils. my school is so well off at 45% basically free and reduced lunch that our building works at a quarter of the budget of a similar skies size school and underprivileged school, so we work on a really bear bones limited budget. so where is that $40,000 going to come from? and in all of the crazy schemes floating around in fancy schemes floating around d.c. these days

think about what return is on your investment. authority thousand dollar position to transform an entire community and service launched the kids at nettlehurst, anybody that lives in the neighborhood can take ballet class. just sign up. we take the kids first, but we will take anybody in the neighborhood who wants to come. so authority thousand dollar position is really all it takes to pull this off and that is pretty close to free in my book compared to how much as a bomber cost? how much are we spending in afghanistan? it's nothing, right? it is a question of lobbying and explaining to people. and one of the problems -- what problems of this but one of the challenges of the community school movement is in some ways people won't know what that is. when somebody says what is a community school they think it

is some kind of crazy top-down doomed to fail educational initiatives like what is that? is a halfway house? what is it? it's just your normal neighborhood school that you have to invent a warm and yummy sweater around and as a community we are going to knit together and my sweater is going to look different than yours which is going to look different than yours but somebody doesn't have to buy all the yarn but you do need money for needles so not much. >> thank you. [applause] >> we are inviting you to join us in formulating our own movement here in d.c. on which we think we have the good ground making four. i want to bring forth a board member reverend coleman from the board of directors to close this

out this evening, and as he comes up i was just reflecting on this series of book talks we've had in this room all of which my daughter has attended. and our last one was with bill errors, that is the only one, and the one before that was ann buy. and norma, the author of community public schools public will. and the last thing he said to us here in this room which caused some people to do at him, really good guy, he said communities get the schools they deserve. communities get the schools they

deserve. and in that he was saying if you want good schools, get off your butt and go get them. they are not going to find you in your living room or showed that our work and say here we are caught the best school you want in your neighborhood. we wish it was that ec. we wish that all of our communities, all of our neighborhoods, whether they have added the kids or not and whether people have the time to do what jacqueline did or not, whether they have an organized constituency or not would have the best world-class facilities and learning centers for children in the neighborhoods but they do not and they will not and unless those of you in this room and in the community do something about it and we have to work together. we can't do it individually. we have to do it collectively and that is what d.c. twice dustin but we have pledge cards we would like you to fill out so we can tell you what we are doing to build a movement for quality education here in our

community. with that i will let reverend coleman close. [applause] >> thank you jacqueline, i am a native chicagoan, so i know what you're talking about. i bring that up but as clergy and member of the board i feel a new spirit in the air. i was sitting there and watching the waiting, watching and the training. so what we come to do is challenge u.s. a board member, challenge you. don't wait, don't watch, and dreaming will keep you in a nightmare. it is a new day. parents, principals, educators and administrators, clergy, congresspersons, mayors, somehow we've got to make that which we imagined for a long time become reality. it's not -- i appreciate what you said. it's not putting off tomorrow, it is now, it is right now and

the time we decide to do what we can do it so i challenge you sign up. there is a table. i want to recruit you to get on board with the d.c. police. they're doing tremendous work for the community. i came on some time ago and i watched the level of town hall meetings and how parents and others get involved. sometimes parents just need you to ask. just ask. will you ask and synnott? come on, get on board with us and let's get going. thank you. [applause] >> have a good night. >> jacqueline edelberg is the mother who walked into the struggling school and presented a wish list for the transformation. the story's been featured on the national news programs. for more information, visit

twitter.com/walktoschool. >> oh johnny is jim lehrer's most recent novel. how many recent novels have you written now? >> oh johnny is the 19th novel. the 20 this coming out next april. it's already done and that is going to be a magic mark for me. but who's counting >> when do you find the time and where do you write? >> i discovered years ago if i really wanted to do something that meant a lot to me i could find the time to do it and writing these novels is extremely important to me. it's part of the volume. it's part of what i do so when i wake of the morning i no longer think am i going to write today? i think about what i'm going to write and its daily -- i do a little bit every day. usually early in the morning and i work on the weekends when i

travel just kind of woman working on a novel it's like having a low-grade fever it's with me all the time. and it's as i say it is crucial to lie and and what i do. and i get itchy when i'm not writing. >> laptop, longhand? >> always laptop. i was a newspaperman, i've been in journalism for 50 years in hiding with my fingers. people television, you'll probably notice that colliding with my fingers instead of my mind sometimes but i do everything on a laptop or a computer and i take notes and stuff of the ghastly like real people but i really do think with my fingers now. >> when you're writing does your professional life come into your characters? >> yes, it does put in a subtle ways. hemingway said years ago if you want to be a writer get a job on a newspaper because it will force you to deal with the english language and some semi

coherent way every day but more importantly it will expose you to all kind of people in all kind of situations you can't leader use in your fiction writing at that is what has happened to me. there's no kind of person i haven't met and interviewed and gotten to know. as a consequence when i sit down to write a novel i have a wealth of material to use and i pick and choose. i don't consciously say i'm going to base the story of a piece of journalism that i have done or whatever. but it just happens. it's also sits. it is part of my experience as a journalist and it comes out of me as i am developing a character or story. >> very quickly, the plot of "oh, johnny." >> "oh, johnny" is about a kid who grew up in a little town in western maryland, a great baseball player, has a great future to be a baseball player, major league. he goes to world war ii, joins

the marines, becomes an operator and goes through hell. the battle of okinawa. he comes back still ready to play baseball. he survives comes back ready to play baseball and his dream to be a major league baseball player kind of goes up and smoke of world war ii is what it boils down to. but the kid always has a dream and he still has it and still hasn't. doesn't quite work of for him because he had a rough time in the war. but he's a good kid and he tries very hard and just doesn't quite make it. but the fact that he's still trying to live out his dream is what it's about. >> jim lehrer and his 19th novel, "oh, johnny."

we are at this year's cpac conference talking with james hampton cook about her book. please phyllis "battlefield" is about. sprick it is faith and courage from the war in iraq and afghanistan and michael authors and i interviewed 60 or so men and women from the military to get the first hand accounts of their experiences in iraq and afghanistan and the book is formated and to 365 stories so you can read them one everyday if you want and get a really good glimpse people have lived of loudly for liberty on our behalf in iraq and afghanistan. >> i'm sorry, have you been to cpac before? >> yes, i have been to cpac before. it's a great place to talk about the founding of the nation and also talk about what people are doing today for the cause of

liberty and freedom. >> it seems like your books run a series or do they follow a pattern? >> yes, the series is called "battlefields and blessings," and others for in the series. there's one of the revolution which is one of my titles, there is one of the civil war, world war ii, iraq and afghanistan and in vietnam i think is in the process and others. so it is very much a rich ceres to gather people stood firm for freedom and displayed courage throughout the generations and there's so many similarities. the times change but a lot of things don't change, and courage is one of those things and faith owls well. >> how did you get started doing the series? >> my publisher wanted to do the series and i wanted to get started on the founding of the country and the revolution command that we had to do iraq and afghanistan, so it was

something that came to me and i could put a lot of passion and energy into. for this book we've interviewed so many people and just to get a variety of ranks of men and women, to get a good and deep perspective and a far reaching perspective on some of those raw experiences people have had in iraq and a chemist and and how they have triumphed in the face of tremendous adversity. >> do you write for other venues or do you have a blog? >> i have a web site, janecook.com and others informational me and my other books. i have books on the first ladies and so a good mixture of good american folks down through the generations. >> thank you very much.

jonathan cole former provost of columbia university presents the history of the american university system. columbia university in new york city hosts this two hour and 15 minute event. >> well we can begin. i want to welcome everyone to this evening's discussion of higher education that is occasioned by the publication of jonathan cole's book, the great

american university and its rise to pre-eminence, indispensable national polls and why it must be protected. my name is claude steele and loveless to be the host and moderator and mc and after the remarks have been made by will probably moderate discussion all but. it should be a very interesting discussion this evening. it is all too rare the topic of what makes the research universities so valuable to society gets talked about. even in those universities. a real hope of negative jonathan's new book which magnificently enters these questions will help change that, that it will help us take a step back and get a better understanding of these institutions. institutions that have been so central in many of our lives and will help society get a better sense of the value that these institutions