you don't see -- this is in appreciation of view for being here tonight. very informative and thank you very much. [applause] >> you can view this and other booktv programs online at booktv.org. is there a nonfiction offer or book you like to see featured on booktv? send us an e-mail to at booktv@c-span.org or send an e-mail to booktv.com. wendy cox is founder of teach for america. she recounts the creation of the organization in 1990 and it goes through the inequality. this report on 25,000 teachers who were in low-income areas. and present her thoughts on a current state of education policy in the united states. shea discusses her book with new york staff writer malcolm gladwell at the new york public

library. this is about an hour-and-a-half. ..paul. >> right. [laughter] >> so to get that out of the way. i wanted to start -- you know, you're a very -- in a very unusual position. you know, you're going to have this big conference in washington this coming weekend where there will be, what, how many people? 10,000 people? >> 10,000 people >> you have this enormous

following. is there any recent historical figure that you think are analogous to? people throw off the restraints of modity. >> people are coming together and they are drawn to the same to who are and they want to spend a day thinking about and reflecting on the incredible progress we've made in the last 20 years against what is a true crisis in our country, this issue of educational inequity and what each of us needs to do individual and collectively to solve the problem. >> so you will be treated as a kind of rock star. >> you know what, the sad reality is maybe we would all wish but there will be my critics and my friends. and it will be fun. but, you know, it's not all a lovefest. >> the closest analogy i could come up with was the marine corps, tough to get in and then

they send to you really nasty places, right? [laughter] >> and i was wondering, you know, how in the movies there's always that moment in that kind of movie where the one tough guy meets the other tough guy and they are staring each other down and about to get in a fight and were you in nan, were you in marine corps. i was in the 29th infancy siempre pi. where you get to alum where they show each other teach for america tattoos. i'm joking but -- you are creating a kind of movement. i mean, the marine corps alumni represents a kind of movement representing a certain attitude towards the world, you know? >> this is exactly the idea. i mean, this is the big idea,

you know? and teach for america really isn't -- we are about -- teachers are critical but teach for america is about building a movement among our country's future leaders to say we got to change the way our education system is, fundamentally. and i think in your article in the new yorker about the formation of movements just captured the whole theory of change of teach for america. i mean, this is about the foundational experience of teaching successfully in ways that, you know, i think we're creating a corps of people who are absolutely determined to expand the opportunities facing kids in the most absolutely, you know, economically disadvantaged communities, you know, who are pouring themselves into their work and trying to put their kids on a different trajectory and, you know, having varying levels of success and taking from that experience, incredible

lessons, you know, they realize through their firsthand experience the challenges their kids face, the potential they have. they realize that it's ultimately possible to solve the problem and that experience is not only important for their kids but it's completely transformational for them. and i think, of course, they're all going through this together and i think with a common set of convictions and insights and just a common level of commitment to ultimately go out and affect the fundamental changes we really need to see to affect the problems. >> you've got how many alumni now? >> we have 20,000 alums. >> so you consider your alumni to be as important as your active teachers if you're thinking of it in movement terms? >> yep. >> how many alumni do you need before you think you have a kind of critical isn't that so >> well, you know, i guess you never know, you know, what will lead us to the tipping point.

[laughter] >> you just bought yourself a good five more softball questions for that. [laughter] >> i don't know. this is growing at this point. a mere -- you know, 5 years ago we had 8800 alottery numbers and today we have 20,000 and if we can continue the growth trajectory we're on, we'll have more than 40,000 by a mere five years from now and i guess i look at what's happening in some communities where we have a critical mass for teach of america alottery numbers, communities where we've been placing people for where, you know, in some cases in new orleans, in washington, d.c., and oakland, california, in houston, texas, in any other number of places, in newark, new jersey. where very different things are happening today. for many images but if you took all the teach of america alottery numbers out of the picture i think you would take away a lot of the energy and leadership in those mkts >> does the teach for america movement have an ideological personality?

people can -- people come out of this and we have a diverse community and people come into it viewing the issue we're taking on different ways and from different sides of the political spectrum. i think people come out of it sharing -- largely sharing a few views. one, i think people come out of it knowing, we can solve the problem. it's not that the kids don't have the potential and the parents don't care. i mean, if you look at gallup polls and i'd be interested in seeing another one now that the prevailing ideology is starting to shift a bit, but as of about three or four years ago, most people in our country thought that the reason we had low educational outcomes was because kids weren't motivated in low-incomed communities and parents don't care. our corps members know for a fact that's not true. they see their kids working harder than any kids work and

they see their parents do care when they're, you know, brought into the process. so they come out of it thinking, when the kids are met with high expectations, given extra supports they do well and they come out of it realizing that there's no silver bullet in this. >> we're going to get to that. >> yeah. >> but i still want you to answer the question. whenever i see teach of america spoken of in a derogatory manner, it's invariably by someone on the right, which confuses me because i would have thought it was almost -- i would almost thought it was the other way around. do you have a sense of this? am i wrong in thinking this? >> i doubt it. are you saying our folks are largely from the left. we have a diverse set of people. >> teach for america alum eye voted for in the last election? [laughter]

>> it's maybe not that high a percentage. [laughter] >> but i'm not sure. >> quite apart from the comic value of that observation, isn't that weird to you? why would have it an ideological dimension? why wouldn't it be -- why wouldn't you expect as many kids to be signing up for this who are diehard right wingers as -- it's everything is consistent surely -- with all? >> i mean, what is the profile out there of graduating college seniors today in terms of their ideological perspective? i mean, what percentage of them vote republican? i don't know. and it would be interesting to look. i don't want to say i mean, we get republican folks, too. i wonder what college students -- what's their -- i mean, i'm not sure -- i don't know if we're out of line with that or not. >> yeah, yeah. okay. >> i'm sort of living maybe in a bubble. but, you know, college -- i don't know. i think we're drawing people --

it would be interesting to look at that, i guess. >> let's go back 20 -- this is your 20th anniversary. >> yep. >> so when you reflect on the differences between -- let's reflect on your differences between 1990 and now. when we were chatting earlier, you mentioned how the movie "lean on me" could never be made today. "lean on me" -- >> that was one of the hit movies my senior year, so '89 or so. >> what is it about "lean on me" that would be unmakable today? >> we put that -- or that school -- the school in "lean on me" up in lights as a success story. the principal, you know, was kind of a superhero at some level. i mean, that was the point of the movie. and he really changed the culture of the school. but that school is no. 317 out of 326 in terms of educational outcomes in the state of new

jersey. its kids are on a path -- we're not giving the kids in that school real life options. and we couldn't make that movie today. we certainly couldn't hold that school up as a success because today we know what's possible. we know it's possible give kids who face all the challenges that are facing the kids going to that school in patterson, new jersey, a school that actually sets them up to graduate from college, you know, not just a few kids to beat the odds. but a whole building full of kids, you know, to actually get on the same trajectory as kids in much more privileged communities. today we know that's possible. we have hundreds of schools that do that. and i just think it shows -- i mean -- >> that movie was about simply someone who imposed order on a school, right? it was a movie about discipline? >> yeah. >> right? >> but it was also holding up that school as a success story. and i just think we would never do that today. i mean, hollywood would never

hear the end of it. that is not a success. this is a success. it's just an image that tells me how far -- how far we've come >> bar was low enough in 1990 that you could describe it as a success in school where kids were not getting killed is essentially -- so in that sense we've made progress, right. >> it's huge and dramatic. not to underestimate how significant that is. i mean, i don't think -- we didn't know that it was possible to provide kids with a truly transformational education, like kids growing up in poverty, the assumption was and all the research, you know, backed up the fact that socioeconomic background determine educational outcomes and we knew of a few kids who were beating the odds and a few charismatic teachers and another movie "stand in deliver" who could do extraordinary things but we

viewed them as outliars. >> you just bought yourself -- [laughter] >> go on, sorry. [laughter] >> but today -- we don't just have a few -- first of all, i think it's fascinating to think about, you know, not only "lean on me" but "stand and deliver" but i thought a lot about the fact, you know, why didn't i go out and think, let me find out exactly how jaime escalante to teach our corps members to teach the way we did. it took time to spend time with our teachers who are putting kids on a different trajectory. it turned out the same things high my did. why a teacher was not successful in low-incomed communities producing incredible results

with their kids. we know so much at the classroom level but, you know, at the school level, i think, one thing you realize is, it takes a total superhero to do that classroom by classroom but it's possible to create whole schools that foster good teaching and enable, you know, teachers to sustain that kind of work. and to think -- i mean, it's dramatic progress. the question is different. you know, it used to be can we overpoverty. how can we create whole systems full of transformational schools? >> you're implying something really interesting which is that you think that the task of providing a quality education can be decoupled from the broader kind of macroconditions of the society? in other words, in 20 years ago we would have said, oh, you've got poverty and dysfunction and

poverty that the education statistic is impossible. what you're saying is no. >> i think what we've learned it's not. we can -- i mean, we should solve poverty. it's just that while we try to do that we don't need to wait. in the meantime we can provide kids with the kind of education that breaks the cycle of poverty and maybe we'll realize that's the answer to poverty actually. >> it's interesting 'cause this is exactly the same transformation that took place in our thinking about crime. 25 years ago, if you asked people what would it take to bring down the crime rate in new york, they would have said, well, you'd have to solve poverty, drug abuse, discrimination. we solved none of those problems, right? but the crime rate came down by 35%. which is both very good news and also kind of disturbing in a weird kind of -- not weird sense, disturbing sense that it

says you can actually break off these pieces of the pathological puzzle and solve them without ever getting at the core problem. do you ever think about that paradox? >> i just -- i wonder -- i guess i believe that education is different. >> yeah. >> i mean, how many people -- i mean, i feel like i meet in my work every day people who -- and honestly, i meet them because some of them are joining teach for america today. you know, people who were not on a path to graduating from high school, let alone college, who end up going to college and graduating from college and being able to choose. what do they want to do? >> uh-huh. >> do they want to teach? do they want to go work for a big company and go into law and that's how you break the seibel of poverty. >> let's just for a moment dwell on this point which is just an important one. that for the longest time, a

central tenant in liberal ideology was that the reason why we need to solve fundamental questions of social and economic injustice is that without doing that, problems like educational inequity and crime will be beyond our reach. the experience of the cause that you've been a part of and the experience of crime fighting over the last 15 years has been that that ideology -- that fundamental tenant is total false? so economic and social inequality in this country has soared in the last 15 years. and simultaneously, we had made extraordinary inroads against crime and the beginning of extraordinary inroads against education. what does that mean for the liberal ideology? was it wrong? should we throw it out? is there no reason -- >> we should throw out all of our ideology but i would hate to conclude that there's no reason

to solve the fundamental challenges of poverty. i mean, one of the quickest ways to make the job of our -- i mean, as we will discover as we get into this discussion, it is possible. it is an enormous amount of hard work and we can make it easier by taking the pressure off of schools. >> yeah. >> and absolutely we should take on the fundamentals improve our rural areas and social services and health services and do all of that. it's just that we don't need to wait and maybe we will discover that, you know, breaking the cycle of poverty for kids some of whom will come back and improve their own communities, you know, is one of the answers. >> yeah. let's pretend that you were education czar. [laughter] >> and i gave you more powers than we normal give czars. very often we give people that title "czar" but, in fact, they're not czars.

not real classic czars, right? it's just a word we use to pin on someone in washington who's got a large office? steve ratner was the auto czar. he wasn't a czar. he didn't have -- [laughter] >> but suppose you're a real czar, and you got to start over, can you describe your perfect educational system, that wendy kopp czar can build? >> i think we would, first of all, very clear about the standards that we're trying to reach. like we would start with a very clear understanding of here's what we think at any given level. kids should be able to master. and we'd have to develop great assessments so that we can understand whether or not kids have mastered it. and then we would put an enormous amount into attracting,

developing, tremendous teachers, tremendous school leaders, educators in general and then we would free them up to attain those results. >> would you have unions? >> i think if you had really well managed school systems and schools, you might not need them, right? isn't what they found in organizations and sectors where management does its job? >> i don't know. are you asking me. >> i thought you would bring a crime analogy or something. >> you wouldn't have unions in a perfect world? >> you wouldn't need them because you would have school principals and school district superintendents and everyone else who would know that their most valuable asset are their teachers and their people and they would be making them happy and the teachers -- and they'd be listened to, et cetera. >> we sort of had an example of

this -- and you talk about this in your book in new orleans. right? new orleans was kind of -- after katrina, they sort of blow up the school system and start over. >> uh-huh. uh-huh. >> can you talk about what happened from there and learned about that example. i thought that was one of the most fascinating parts of the book. >> so teach for america started placing teachers in new orleans 20 years ago. and you know i personally spent a lot of time walking around the new orleans public schools and you could call it a crime scene at? -- crime scene level pre-katrina. it was tragic what was happening to our kids. after the hurricane, you know, you may remember many of the kids were displaced to houston. they were living in the astrodome with their parents and some of our folks ended up recruiting the kids and basically running a school for them in houston. they did the diagnostics and discovered that the eighth

graders were basically on the second grade level. and that was pretty much what we knew to be the case in new orleans. and, you know, so -- and, of course, post-hurricane katrina, talk about a place where we can see the incredible burdens of poverty. but the storm, you know, basically, created a window of opportunity for some people who had been working for a long time to try to improve the schools without gaining much traction. to actually just blow up the system. you know, i think after the school board announced they weren't going to open schools for a year they decided, no more. and they basically created a new system -- >> when you say "they," who do you mean in this instance? >> well, when i'm saying they, i'm thinking about a real advocate for change, sort of from the business community named leslie jacobs, paul who ended up being the school

superintendent at the state level and there was state legislative change but basically they created a system of charters. this is a slight oversimplification but they create a world where they slowly shut down the schools that were still under the management of the central ed department. and anyone could apply to run a charter school. they created a very rigorous accountability system so that very few of those applications to run chatter schools were approved and if they didn't work, they would be shut down. but the people in that puzzle knew that it wasn't as easy as that. they knew that, you know, charter laws don't create transformational schools that put kids who are starting way behind and facing lots of different challenges on a different trajectory in order to do that we would need extraordinary leadership. and they went about finding it, you know? they went outside of new orleans and they looked inside of new

orleans. and, you know, they hugely scaled up teach for america. they brought in the new teaching program to help people from the local community -- >> how many teach for america people did they bring in post-katrina? do you remember? >> we scaled up -- you know, we have about 600 people there now from -- we were placing about 120 probably total at any given time. >> and that's -- is that as many as you have in any city? >> it's new orleans, one of our biggest sites. our corps members in our first and second years are reaching every one out of three students in new orleans right now. >> when you say -- and they started looking for -- when you say looking for -- are you talking about looking for principals? >> they did everything. they went about all the various people pipelines. so they scaled up teach for america. they brought in a group that sets up local teacher recruitment initiatives. so they went out and tried to recruit people, you know, who didn't have teaching backgrounds like the new york city teaching

fellows, you know, in new orleans. new orleans teach new orleans or whatever it's called. and then they brought in new leaders to recruit nontraditional folks to become school principals and they went out and they recruited the operators of many of the high performing charter schools and said come to new orleans. like we're going to create the modern urban school district. they set up a support organization for the purpose of recruiting people to run charter schools, making it easier to find buildings and et cetera, et cetera. and, you know, as i write about in "a chance to make history," i spent two days in new orleans last spring and i was just -- i was shocked by what i saw. i mean, i had heard what i was going to see and talk to everyone and assumed it would be great but it was shocking given the comparison that i had from all the previous -- >> what do we know -- what kind of statistical measures of improved performance do we have? how big is the jump? >> the jumps are completely

dramatic. i mean, they're making in some cases, depending on the grade levels, between 6 and 10 times the kind of improvement over 1 or 2 years that the other schools in the state of louisiana are making. you know, i think about -- so what was so shocking when i was there was that i didn't go visit just one school that was making great things happen. i spent two days going from school to school to school. and meeting these very entrepreneurial school leaders who were on a mission to put their kids on a trajectory to graduate from college. who had -- who were obsessing over the teams they were building who, you know -- you walk into these schools and i just kept thinking, i would send my kid to this school. that was a shocking thought from, you know, a mere three or four years ago. one of these schools is run by a guy named todd pervis. and when he recruited his fifth

graders, about 8% of the kids were proficient in reading and 8% were proficient in math. 8%. now his kids last year -- his seventh graders were three-quarters of a year above grade level. so he has his kids on a trajectory, you know, by the time they finished eighth grade he wants them to be able to get into, you know, any good high school anywhere in new orleans or otherwise. >> so katrina is the best thing that ever happened to -- [laughter] >> that's not a joke. >> you know what's fascinating -- the conversation all the time, people say you know what? this could never happen anywhere but new orleans because of the hurricane, and i think you know what? we had a crisis in new orleans that was as bad before the hurricane. we have a crisis in detroit and in philadelphia and in any number of places right now that should merit the kind of action that was taken when that school board decided not to open the

schools. and we're not -- we're not acting. but we could. >> yeah. but it really -- i mean, it could make the case. >> given the single important measure of a city's health, long-term health, with it's ability to properly educate its children, if new orleans was utterly failing before and now has some signs of succeeding beyond other schools in the state of louisiana, the city is better off for having hurricane katrina? >> it's sort of to your point before, though. i mean, you know, i'm not going to say that -- it's not. there's so many people who are in the worst condition because of the hurricane. you know what? here's the other interesting thing about this, it's not quite -- you know, it's convenient to look at it, but -- >> you can't get away with saying that. >> yes, i can. >> no, you're wrong. >> it might have happened without the hurricane. it might have. i mean, that was the interesting thing. >> you just said it's not happening in detroit and all

these other places. >> but it could. and do you know what's different and here i swear this is the difference and this is the whole point, right? actually, in new orleans there was a group of leaders who are absolutely bound and determined to fix this problem for kids. they existed and were working before the hurricane. in fact, i remember when the hurricane happened, my first thought was oh, no, like all the progress that these people had made, which we thought was going to be revolutionary went down the trains because everyone was dealing with a huge natural disaster. but those -- they revived and made dramatic change. but what i think what's interesting in most communities, you know, in most communities we would have had a hurricane and we wouldn't have taken advantage of it, of the circumstances of the day to actually revolutionize the schools. we probably would not have thought, you know what? let's actually create a system

of charters and most certainly because this is the problem and why we haven't moved the needle against this issue in an aggregate sense, we wouldn't have realized you know what? this isn't enough. changing those laws is not going to do it. we better go out and find the leadership necessary and cultivate over time the leadership necessary to actually run transformational schools. >> but the lesson of new orleans is surely that one of the best strategies, for turning this around is blowing it up? >> you could take that. [laughter] >> why are you so reluctant to kind of -- why won't you -- >> i'm thinking, i'm thinking and making sure -- >> why can't you be a little counter-revolutionary here? [laughter] >> it distresses me sometimes that our revolutionaries have lost their revolutionariness, right. [applause] >> you know what? i have not lost my

revolutionariness. >> i wasn't accusing you. i'm in malcolm mode. i'm not in paul mode. [laughter] >> do you know what concerns me is when -- honestly in order to create true, sustained, dramatic change, we need -- the reason i'm so careful is -- it isn't about one simple thing, right? it's about doing a lot of different things right. and i fear -- i really believe that a lot of the problem right now is that we like to play like the blame game and the silver bullet lurching and honestly, when you say, so the answer is to blow up the system, right? i have to think am i sure because i think the solution -- i guess i think it depends. but i think the real key in new orleans actually wasn't the hurricane. the real key was leslie jacobs, paul pasterak and a whole

generation of other people in new orleans, most of whom, many of whom were teach for america alums who were deeply determined to address what they viewed is the single most unconscionable crisis in our country and who understood what you understand especially after you've taught successfully in this context which is there isn't a silver bullet to this. >> yeah. >> you change a governance law, that's not going to fix the problem for our kids. >> so you had -- you had a nuke leas in place, poised to take advantage of an opportunity. the opportunity was katrina. and that allowed an awful lot of change to happen in a very short period of time? >> yes. >> i have no argument with that. do you have an argument of that version of events? good. [laughter] >> but that's what we're talking about. we have these nucleuses in place or we could put them in place in lots of different cities but it doesn't change the fact that you can do an awful lot of good sometimes by blowing it up. >> you know what?

if we had real leadership right now in a lot of other places, determined to solve this problem -- if we viewed it as the crisis that it is, and we have the right leadership in place, we would -- we would blow it up, to use your terminology, in lots of other context. >> uh-huh. i'm reminded, whether i'm going to come back to ask you what you mean in other context 'cause it's intriguing. [laughter] >> absolutely. >> in other context. we're in a situation in a number of different areas in our society where objectively what we look at the institutional structures we have, we realize that if we were starting from scratch, we would never, ever have anything even remotely resembling what we have now, right. health care, everyone in the health system would agree if we were starting from scratch, we would build a system that bore zero resemblance to what we have now? [laughter] >> but yet somehow we sail along year after year tweaking it at

the edges even though, you know, if we had a katrina that just systematically wiped out the culture of health care in this country and allowed it to start over again, we'd be better off. >> you know what? i mean, i think -- let me say one other thing in reaction to this, which is is really the thought that occurs. i think what you're saying is absolutely basically what needs to happen. we have a very systemic problem right now. most people, i think, misunderstand what's going on. like why do we have low outcomes, low educational outcomes in our lowest-incomed communities? why do you think? teachers are pathetic? i mean, that's probably what you'd think if you read all the headlines right now, you know? lots of people aren't very committed to kids. you know what? the real reason we have this issue we've got kids who face absolutely unimaginable challenges that kids in other communities don't face. they show up at schools that don't have the extra capacity to meet their extra needs. and it becomes one big vicious

cycle. so, you know, we can blame the kids, the parents, the teachers, the school principals. we could blame anyone in the picture but what we've seen over time is that we could also just change the picture. we could decide -- i mean, so right now, our public schools -- i grew up in dallas, texas, in a very privileged community and went to one of those public schools that's always on the top 10 ten list of public schools in america. that was not a transformational school and we showed up at that school on a trajectory to go to college and came out in trajectory had perfectly nice hard-working teachers. some of them made a great impact but it did not change our trajectories. if you took that school and put it in the bronx, it would crash and burn. i think it might take a year, maybe it would take two years but its results would be no better than most of our schools unless it completely changed the way it operated. and i think what we've discovered over the last 20 years is, we can change the way we operate.

we can embrace a completely different mandate for schools in low-incomed communities and when we do, it actually works. and so that's -- and in that sense i think we completely do need to start over. >> yeah. one -- i want to make one last point about new orleans before we move on and that is that in your book you talk about the amount of autonomy that is given these individual schools. that is to say so long as they do their job they get maximum freedom and when they fall down, they lose their freedom, right? just to sort of -- >> yep. >> and it struck me as being incredibly convincing as a kind of philosophy. but my first thought was, are we prepared for the kind of socialial institutional anxiety that that kind of process creates? in other words, a system where you have that kind of -- as long as you perform you're on your own.

when you don't we're going to step in. in a system with a lot of turmoil, right? it's sort of -- in a good way it's messy. if things go up and down, it means that some schools are going to do great and others very visibly are going to be crashing and burning. >> uh-huh. >> do we need to prepare. if you're going to institute that kind of culture, which i think is totally the way to go, do we need a conversation with parents and the public about what it means, the kind of -- >> i think that parents want a great education for their kids and i think what they're doing in new orleans is exposing parents to what is possible. i mean, truly there are more and more schools in new orleans that are actually -- the parents are thrilled -- like they see the potential. like they see, this is going to change my kids' trajectory. and if you're in a school not like that and your neighbor is in a school like that, you know,

i think ultimately this is how to kind of, you know -- it creates the can his that will be conducive. >> uh-huh. uh-huh. i'm going to move on to your silver bullets and scapegoats. it is one of the most interesting parts of the book is where you run down the list of the usual suspects and kind of go, you know -- you're not crazy about the argument that this is about funding and you tell this wonderful story -- not wonderful. depressing story about the school of the future in philadelphia. can you -- >> yeah. so there's a very big corporation -- maybe these people remember this about six or seven years ago there was a lot of talk about this big

technology company that was going to design the school of the future. and, you know, they spent $62 million designing the school in philadelphia. it's a beautiful building. i remember meeting an executive at this company and asking him actually, do you think the people who are designing the school have spent time in the still small number but growing number of very high performing schools in low-incomed communities so that they know what accounts for success? and i just remember sitting there thinking, i can tell that they haven't so chances are not good. i went to visit that school a year ago. >> it is this big gleaming -- >> it is a big, beautiful facility. this school has managed to underperform the average philadelphia public school. some of their proficiency rates, depending on the subject are in the single digits. okay. this was a school that parents

fought to get their kids in, okay. i went and visited the only classroom that they will open to the public. there is one. it's led by a teacher who's been there since the beginning. and i stood in the back of the room and i made sure i had my facts right 'cause i was in the process of writing this book. but i watched every single kid in that class engage in one of the following activities. they all had laptops. that's part one of the key features of the school. they were either trying to fix the computer, taking the battery out, sticking it back in. their friends were searching on the internet while the teacher was talking as loudly as he could trying to get them to listen to his lecture and honestly it would have been -- it might have been funny if you didn't stop to realize that literally this school is shutting off these kids' prospects. like they will have no prospects. if you know anything about philadelphia and the communities where this kids are living

in -- i mean, this is like life-threatening. and honestly it's right down the street. and i could have said this seven years ago but today there is a growing number of schools in philadelphia that are serving the exact same student population, three or four blocks away and putting them on a trajectory to graduate from college at much the same pace as kids in more privileged communities. and you know what? they don't have any technology. they might -- maybe they've gotten some whiteboards. but it's definitely not the core of that school. the core of the school is a school leader who's determined to put the kids on a different trajectory is obsessed with everything a great teacher is obsessed with, right? building an incredible team. like they obsess over attracting and developing teachers. they built this incredibly powerful culture where they get the kids, the parents, the teachers all aligned on the same mission. and they manage well and then they do whatever it takes which is a big -- a big thing. right? like they know their kids face

extra challenges. they know they are coming in behind. they lenient the school services, bring in social services, et cetera, et cetera. they are completely redefining school and they're getting very different outcomes. >> but are you suggesting that having constant unimpeded access to the internet is not going to solve every social problem? [laughter] >> that's so -- wow! that's an eye-opener given everything that's happening in the world right now from egypt to tunisia is simply a function of social media. i would have thought this was all -- >> 8% of the kids in this school are proficient in reading. so access to the internet doesn't help that much. >> charters? >> you know, i think one thing that's -- [laughter] >> one thing on the side of charters and then i'll go after them as a silver bullet. this growing number of schools that i keep talking about.

many, many more of them are charters than traditional schools. there are traditional public schools in the regular system that are getting these kind of results but they are few and far between. and i think that's for a reason, you know, i think the charter laws provide talented, committed educators with an incredible opportunity to say, okay, i'm going to excuse me responsibility for results and getting complete freedom in my input, who i hire, how i spend my budget so it's an incredible enabler. but, unfortunately, if you look on average at the charter school results and the public school results, they're no better. and, in fact, i've seen charter schools -- because teach for america places in some of them where you really wonder if we should be putting some of these people in jail. they're so much worse than even the dysfunction that we see in the regular system. and i think it's just another example of we thought -- you know what? it is the best of intentions. it's people wanting to solve the problem tomorrow. change the laws, hopefully

everything will be better, you know, very soon. but, unfortunately, it's not that easy. like we still need to then cultivate the leadership necessary to take advantage of the charter laws and that is the most precious resource in all this. because it's hard to find those school leaders who have the kind of foundational experience necessary to actually run a transformational school. >> is the experience of new york city with charters different from the rest of the country? and if so, why? >> yeah. well, i think because there are such -- there are probably many reasons why. yes, it's definitely different from -- i mean, i'm not the charters expert but, you know, we have lots of very high performing charters here and i think it's because first of all there's a charter cap. i mean, you can only open so many, not necessarily a good thing. but they have very rigorous standards for who opens them sort of like new orleans and they shut them down when they don't work. and probably even more so, you

know, joel klein and others made an extraordinary effort to recruit people in to run charters so that we've done a lot to recruit lots of good folks in. >> but, wait, aren't those things -- is it possible those things are -- good experience with charters and that kind of selectivity and high standards for them is in part a function of the existence of the charter cap? doesn't the cap make -- doesn't the restriction on a resource make you use it more wisely? >> you could argue that. but -- i mean, i think -- >> would you argue that? >> no. [laughter] >> well, it all -- i think that it's a very -- i think it's a fact that it is very hard to find and develop the leadership necessary to run a high performing school of any sort and including a charter school. but i think that we could find a lot more than the cap. >> oh, i see. what's the cap now? do you know offhand what the cap is? in new york state? >> who knows, 100 -- they raised the cap last year, so --

>> 460. >> 460. >> you don't have -- 200. do you have a figure -- do you have a kind of a czar cop have an optimal figure for -- >> i would bring the principals of charters into the system. so i think -- but i would -- i would do that and i would also do something else. so, you know, and joel klein has really worked very hard to do exactly this. and this is exactly what they've done in new orleans. but, you know, the bottom line is, wherever you see one of these transformational schools i'm talking about, always, always, always -- they're run by someone who feels such deep passionate commitment and full ownership over ensuring they're kids get on a different path. and if they don't have the freedom, they take the freedom to do whatever it takes to get

to that end result and i think we really need to ground our policies in an understanding of that dynamic and i think the implication is that our central system should spend an immense amount of energy attracting and developing real leadership which is a process, right? we can't snap our fingers and have great leaders like we need to recruit them in the classroom and ensure they're highly successful and keep some of them in the classroom and move others into other leadership roles and whatnot. like we need to obsess in talent development in the way any high performing organization does. but at the same time we then need to empower our leaders to get results. and so i think that kind of restructuring is probably the answer overall. >> yeah, unions? >> i think that unions need to change just like i think districts need to change. and lots of other things need to change. but i think the idea that we fix

the unions or just wipe them off the face of the earth -- >> you were the one earlier who said you wouldn't have them in your perfect universe. >> right. it just we don't live in a perfect universe. and i think we have -- i think it's not totally -- i think the assumption that if we lifted -- let's assume we removed them all tomorrow, anyone who works in and around schools, just imagine what do you think will be different the next day? like, we have so much further to go in states where there is very low unionization and collective bargaining is sort of a nonissue, we have 1% teacher dismissal rates. we have 1% teacher dismissal rates whether there are strong unions and unions or not. and why is that? that's because there's no culture of discipline in our school districts. i mean, literally when you think about how a high performing organization operates or how these very high performing schools operate and compare that

to how most of our public schools and school districts -- and even probably private schools for that matter operate, there's no -- you know, we don't do what we know it takes to run a high performing organizations. and so i think we need to, you know, unions to change but we need our districts and our schools to change as well. >> does all of this become -- does dealing with -- does making -- what you're saying in all of these cases, funding charters, unionization, these are all variables that can make a difference provided you have in place first an organization and culture that makes effective learning possible? it's cart and horse here? >> right, exactly. i mean, i think anything short of that gets us incremental progress in a world where incremental progress is not

affordable, you know? i mean, we haven't really grounded ourselves in the magnitude of the issue here and it's so easy to not recognize what's going on in our country, but we live in a country where the 15 million kids who grow up below the poverty line, half of them will not graduate from high school. if you don't graduate from high school today, you know, your options are lots of -- i mean, you know, we have communities that are putting more kids into the prison system than into college. the kids who do graduate from high school, who we applaud for walking across the stage have on average an eighth grade school level. a few percentage points on standardized tests doesn't meanfully change the kids' lives in that context. and that's what any of these interventions at their best will get you. and what we've learned in the last 20 years is we can have something different. we can have meaningful change for kids. we could actually put whole buildings of kids on a different

trajectory and to me that creates the moral imperative. now that we know that and we know how to replicate that, it's on us to figure out, okay, so we need to treat this like the crisis that it is. given that now we know we can solve it. and go after it. and any time any of us have a true crisis in our lives or in our midst, you know, and truly view it as that, we view it in all of its complexity and go at it with an equally complex solution. like it is no one thing. and there's no way around the hard work of building high performing organizations essentially. >> yeah. let's talk about the practical impact of importing what teach for america does essentially is import large numbers of motivated college graduates into the teaching profession. so let's talk about what that means on a practical level.

first of all, do teach for america teachers -- are they -- how do they compare on average to the kind of median teacher? are they better teachers? what do we know? >> the kind of growing body of research out there would show that they're more effective than other beginning teachers. and in some subjects and grade levels they're more effective than the experienced teachers. but not by the impact levels that i just just described that we need, you know? like if you look at the studies, researchers think statistically significant positive results and we think this isn't changing kids' lives. some of our people are changing kids' lives. but on average. and honestly, this experience is kind of part of what -- i think teach for america is an enormously good thing. you're better off as a kid in school if you have a teach for america corps member than not. and our people are obviously than going off and, you know, staying in teaching for an

average of eight years but also moving into other positions and taking that experience with them and affecting broader changes and whatnot. but this experience is why i say that, you know, teaching is the latest silver bullet because i think we somehow think that we can re-engineer the way 3.7 million teachers are recruited and trained and whatnot. and i think our own experience where we've poured immense amount of energy in the smartest people i could possibly find and millions and millions of dollars -- literally, we've got a continuous learning loop in our organization that is kind of mind-boggling. we can do tons of studies to understand what are the most effective of our people? i mean, what differentiates them? what are they doing differently? how does that influence our training, our professional development every year? and you know, still where we are and i guess all of that led has immediate to think, you know what? we need to take this on at a school level. this is an organization problem.

it's like if you run a big organization or company, you don't fix your problems by, you know, sending brain waves directly to all of the people in your organization. you think, okay, who are my managers. let me work with them. they need to manage their teams effectively. and when you go up here to kip infinity and they have incredibly results and what made you successful, it's the teachers. he's attracted, developed and retained and you talk to the teachers, it's a team i want to be part of. i feel supported. ultimately we just need to come at the teaching question differently. >> does this represent an evolution in your thinking. you would not have said if you just said 20 years ago, am i right? >> i probably didn't know what i -- you know, 20 years ago i was saying, why aren't we being recruited as aggressively to commit two years in high poverty areas as we were to work in wall street?

>> yeah. >> but i think once i got into this, i don't know when i started -- i thought this way for some time i have to admit. >> and i sort of see it is my one mild -- it's not a criticism, it's an observation of your book. there's these two strands that are in some sense complementary and some sense contradictory that run through the book and that i suspect legitimately run through your thinking. >> yeah. >> but one is this notion that we have to find new sources of talent and bring them into the system. and the other is that, well, that's not really what it's about. what it's about is building a system that allows people to flourish. now, they overlap, you know, in the then-diagram like this. but they're kind of -- you know, there's the same kind of -- you know, you also run into the --

not entirely fair observation when one reads your book that you're saying that virtually all students can thrive given the appropriate culture and environment. right? but then is the same true of teachers. can virtually all teachers thrive given the appropriate culture and environment? in other words, if we can -- if we can help virtually any kid, why can't we help virtually any -- or is there -- is this apples and oranges? . >> yeah, this is a very complex set of thoughts. but i do -- so first of all we can't understand teach for america as a teaching organization. and i think this is the biggest thing we fight in the world. we are a leadership development organization. there's no other way to look at it. we are going out and saying we need our future leaders to channel our energy against our country's most funnel injustice and we're going to get them to commit two years to teach in high poverty communities. we're going to make sure they

have the leadership characteristics that we've seen to differentiate the most effective teachers. we're going to invest massive amounts in their training and support in pursuit of ensuring that they're highly successful with their kids. and we know that experience is going to be important for kids and important for them in every single decision they make thereafter. and it proves out to be and we need them to go out and engineer the changes. we need them to go start great schools and, in fact, they have. we wouldn't have the school model that we have had everyone is out there trying to replicate if it weren't for a few teach for america alums. we wouldn't have the energy we have and the effort to replicate it without a bunch of teach for america alums. we wouldn't have the revolutionary in d.c. and whatnot. and we need some of them to go on to take on the challenge of poverty to make the whole thing easier. so i think we need that. at the same time, what many, many of our people come out of this thinking is, wait, we need to change the way these systems attract and develop talent.

and there's no doubt. i mean, i concluded the same thing, right. so what are the systemic changes that we need? that is one big central issue. and i think what we've seen is, we can do that, too. i mean, it's -- you know, you go to new orleans, and i think, you know, one of the most interesting things about my time there was talking with some of our teachers who we placed there over time who said, you know, i came here for two years and i wasn't -- i was just going to teach for two years and then leave. he said i just bought a house seven years later. and i said why did you buy a house because i'm the hot commodity in new orleans. i can pick whatever school i can be a part of. they even pay me a lot because they can control what they pay their teachers in new orleans. and because, to your other part of the question, this whole conversation then went on in new orleans and they said don't think it's just the outsiders coming in. the good people came out of the system. and, you know, that could take us down a whole other path but it speaks to your point. i think most people who come in

to education are coming into it because they want to do good things for kids. but they come into a system that -- i think about the people we hired, the best of the best. we take 4500 of 47,000 applicants this year. if we brought them into a completely nonrigorous, undisciplined culture and just let them go, no management, honestly, lots of good things would not happen. some good things would happen. lots of not great things would happen. and over time -- i mean, people have to operate in strong rigorous cultures. and so i do think that there are tons of people out there who would operate in a very different way if the culture and the overall structure was different. >> uh-huh. >> but to go back to my point, this does represent an evolution in -- >> it may well. it's hard to track with my various evolutions but which part. we've always viewed ourselves as a leadership program. >> but the part -- i mean, 20

years -- let's imagine we're having this conversation 20 years ago. >> uh-huh. >> i would never have known what i was doing. >> you wouldn't have spent as much time talking about the importance of culture, i'm guessing? >> i'm sure i would not. i mean, we placed our first