i know. it's been a hard two years for me, but i want to make the orld a better place. more than ever, thank you. >> thank you. thank you, everybody. >> thank you. thank you. thank you very much. >> thank you. [captioning performed by national captioning institute] [captions copyright national cable satellite corp. 2013] >> the public fascination with frances cleveland really extended to her clothes, and she was a real fashion icon. women emulated her hairstyle, her clothing. she popularized everything she had and did. this is a dress from the second

administration, and in a way, this is the most prized piece of all, because this is the inaugural gown. this was her inaugural gown from 1893, and it stayed in her family and became the family wedding dress. and this was used by her grand daughters. even frances cleveland's everyday clothes were very stylish. a lot of them looked like omething you could wear now. this is a jacket, wonderful bolero jacket, black with beautiful purple-blue velvet. this is a more evening-appropriate piece. this is a bodice with a matching skirt. you can see the beautiful sequins, netting, beading, slightly more ornate daytime set. this would have a matching color. again, you can wear this with a shirt waist and skirt. >> our conversation on frances cleveland is now available on our website,

c-span.org/firstladies. tune in monday for our next program on first lady caroline arrison. >> now innovation, technology and education, panel iths include education secretary arne duncan and education advocate chris paul, a professional basketball player with the los angeles clippers. this is a little less than an hour. >> chris and are you thrilled to be able to ask some questions. usually we have to answer all the hard ones. we'll do it quite happily. i'll start, and we'd love to begin -- hope you guys had the three amazing teachers, all of whom i've worked with in different capacities, whether here or back home in chicago, and let's just start big picture, if we could step back, think big, if you could redesign schools from scratch. i know your team is thinking

about designs. if we could redesign schools from scratch, what would they look like today? anybody feel free to jump in and happily engage kids very different until their own mind. >> well, i think we start by look agent things very differently. what we heard earlier today is a good example. i think we as teachers need to simply get out of kids' way, to give them the space to play, and my school, mrs. cook's pre-k class, the kids already have all of the elements that one of the speakers earlier was talking about, and they're as curious about learning, and they're engaged. they ask a lot of questions. but as you get older, it's true what jim said earlier. by the time they get to high school, they're bored. something about what happens at pre-k and kinder and first is something we have to try to harness and move forward as they get older.

>> i agree, and it's important to get teachers as well. i think we focus on what practices look like for our kids, and sometimes we forget we need to treat teachers the same way and give them a chance to explore and reconnect with the excitement that made them go into the profession in the first place. as we're looking at teachers, we need to give them the tools they need to be inspired themselves. >> i agree with what both of them say. i also feel like one of the best things for kids, especially high school kids, is to get messy and actually get involved in these career-oriented, project-based learning skills and even get out of the school building. we send our kids out. when they're seniors, they get hands-on internships and work with people that are really doing these careers that, you know, that they're solving problems and working on the robotics, but let's send them to engineering companies for internships and let them

actually see what it looks like. and i think one of the speakers was talking earlier, i think adults out in the real world will get almost as much, if not more, from getting the experience of teenagers kind of into their daily lives, and it would be a mutually beneficial relationship. >> what prevents us from doing those things? it all makes a lot of sense, more great, more exciting, i agree, most drop out, not because high school is too hard, they're bored, not engaged. why aren't these kinds of opportunities more the norm rather than the exception? what's stopping us collectively for giving depraush giving kids what they need? >> i think the teaching model is perhaps outdated, the industrial factory model. it's easy to control and influence and improve work when it's simple work. but teaching is a complex activity.

a single teacher has an incredible amount of progression and skill, and we may need to move our skills into the professional model. we strive to be professional, but i think our society needs to reflect a little deep other what teaching is, more like a medical model or a law model to be professional, so that then we have the discretion to play with our students so that we redesign the way we spend our instructional time. i think that's something in that area is what i'm thinking. >> we talk about the model you guys are creating. app yeah, so in chicago, i'm part of a network called the academy for urban school leadership, and we're actually -- it's funny you said medical, because we have a residency program that's modeled after the medical residency, where student teachers can go through a full year of training under a master-mentor teacher. they get to feel what it feels like to be a teacher, from putting up the bulletin board

to taking it down. that's really exciting. i think something that we're working with a lot is rethinking time and space, too. what does it mean to -- where is your classroom both as a preservice teacher and as a practicing teacher or student? and learning can happen any time and anywhere, and it should be collaborative. i'm not just learning from my teacher, but from each other, people that aren't with me, using technology to access all points, and then to scaffold it so that it's digestible. we think about informative practices, and unless you're x awesome high school from x amazing place and you have the funds and freedom sod something, sometimes they're like, oh, i can't do that. but how can we modularize transportation so that even the most difficult pieces can get a piece of it and grow towards the goal? >> my biggest thing that i've learned becoming more of a teacher voice and a teacher leader is just that there

really are so many incredible ideas and innovations and teachers that even if we don't like necessarily what we're getting in the district or don't feel like we have enough time to learn, we have to find that time kind of outside the 8:00 to 8:30 time block and learn from other fascinating teachers that have great ideas. it means so much more coming from a teacher who says to me, well, here's how i used these ipads in my classroom and here's how you could actually use them, not, you know, a sophomore company trying to sell me this, oh, you can definitely use this in your classroom. no, i want to hear it from a teacher that can tell me this is exactly how you can use it. they would totalling help and you see it visualizing happening in your own classroom with your own high-needs students. >> i think for me personally, i've been blessed and fortunate enough to, although now i live in l.a., i lived in new orleans for six years.

one of the biggest issues or maybe not an issue, but one of the hardest things for kids in new orleans is attendance. attendance, kids getting to school, getting home from school. so along with my family and my parents and my wife, my brother, we started -- well, i have a foundation, and we have the after-school program in new orleans. what we found was attendance increased because of the after-school program in which kids have an opportunity to -- i used to go visit the school after practice on days, and it was so exciting to me, and it made me wish i was back in grade school, because the kids were doing karate. they were doing cooking classes. i went to the school one day, and the kids made me sushi. i had never had sushi before in my life until i had it from the kids. they were doing film projects, where i went into the school,

and some of the kids, 5, 6 years old, interviewed me. they were learning things and they were being so interactive and doing things that we would have never thought to do as kids, but as we saw them having more fun and incorporating this into a daily live, it started increasing attendance. with the things we did the kids are with parents. i think once you start incorporating the parents into some of these things with the kids, because at times you'll find that my son may be able to use that ipad better than i can. we also have to teach the parents so that they can be there with their kids. >> technology, what are you guys doing with technology? what do you want to do? where are you at? how is it changing? how do you teach every day? how do you work? how do you learn yourself? >> we used, in our district in austin, we use technology, but

we don't have enough technology, computers for every kid. we share a lot of this equipment. our students are becoming very sophisticated using software and hardware to create products, i-movies, earlier somebody was talking about garage bands making music. these are things that didn't exist 20 years ago when i started teaching. as the kids find out about them, currently my fifth graders are using avatars to make a summary of some of the research they're doing, creating their own avatar. these are things that they're so new that you're right, they're teaching us how to use it. but some of the kids who don't have access to computers or book readers at home, they really struggle and fall

behind. the kids that do have access to smartphones, computers, internet at home, they keep -- they seem to keep up and then excel beyond that. the concern we've talked about this earlier, is that those kids who don't have technology, that's probably our biggest challenge. >> and agree completely, and i think that makes it so much more important for us to bridge the digital divide with schools. so, you know, public education is the great equalizer, right? we want every american child to have access to an amazing education in their neighborhood, and so instead of staring at the chasm that is the digital divide and saying let's scary, let's hang-glide over it, come one creative ways to get across, and what's really important for white house we look at technology in chicago and not just bringing the technology devices into the classroom, because that's not even half the battle. that's a fraction of the battle. and throwing technology at problems isn't going to solve

anything. it's starting with great teaching and understanding that technology is a tool to an end. it's making for more effective and efficient ways to meet our kids' needs. we try to be device agnostic. we don't go with the coolest, hip new device, although oftentimes that is the right choice for us. but we think about our kids. we want them to be creators, mathematicians, writers, invendors, problem solvers. we think about how we want to streamline assessment and create more differentiation opportunities for all of our kids. when we start with the problem of practice and think about what are we really trying to do in our classroom and learning spaces, then we can bring in the technology and make more effective use of it through a podcast, blogs, avatar, all those sorts of things, but it's really important not to lose sight of what's important when you bring technology into your classroom. >> right. my school is mckinley technology high school, so we do have a lot of technology, a

lot focused in a lot of our strands. we're a stem school, so we have a lot of media equipment, biotech n. my classroom, i teach math. i have a smart board, and i thought i was so with it, and then these guys are so, you are so outdated already. but it is true. i'm always -- you know, it's really hard to keep up with how fast things are changing in the land of technology, and then, you know, die firmly believe that the most important thing is that you have a really strong teacher in every classroom, and then, yes, technology will absolutely -- can absolutely help, but when the strong teacher then gets that great professional development, if someone offered me, you know, 30 ipads right now for my classroom, that would be great. i would certainly not turn it down, but i would need, before i even handed an ipad to a student, i would need a really good plan of, ok, what am i going to do with this? is this going to be a fancier way to get their attention? then there's no point. but i want it to be something that's going to make my classroom a better place and

give them more opportunities to create and learn. >> i would just add that as teachers, we need to become more comfortable letting go to allow these things to happen. we do need a good plan to implement technology, software, hardware, combining those things, but we also need to give that space. i think it's a big challenge for us in the profession, because this is going in a totally different direction, and we need to be a part of that and not be the obstacle to that. that's amazing that the smart board is outdated. it was probably about a month ago or two months ago, the week before our last game, we were playing new orleans, and i went to go visit my kids, and i went nto the third grade math class and the kids had just finished their test, so i surprised them all and got them snow cones.

while i was in the class inch the kids said do a math problem for us. i play a lot of basketball, don't do a lot of math at home, but they were just so -- they just so happened to be doing division, and one of the students went up, and i'm 28, i'm sure y'all can tell me stories a little bit further back than me, but i remember the dry erase board or chalk board, and the kids walked up to this screen and picked what color he wanted to use and wrote it on the screen, and you just use your finger. i was surprised. that is amazing. what really made it amazing was the kids saw me do the math problem, and i got the answer right, just so you know. i got the answer right, and at the end, the teacher asked if i would sign, so it was a smart board, as you said, i signed

it, and somehow the teacher printed it off for every student in the class. and i was blown away. that was a lot for me. and that's ameasing that that is outdated. >> that's old school now. >> yeah, that was pretty cool to me. >> let me push out digital divide. you guys aren't just all educators. all of you devoted your lives to working with kids who don't come with a silver spoon in their mouth. you guys have a real sense of social justice and mission here and education really being the equalizer. it's great to say i love the metaphor, zip line over. that's easier said than done. the reality is, the wealthiest kids in our country often get the best, and the kids that come from the wrong side of the tracks, more disadvantaged background, have access. and this is amazing. we all agree if we're not creative, we're going to exacerbate the gap, not close the gaps, come to work every single day. so how concretely can we avoid

exacerbating the challenges and actually use technology to be part of the great equalizer that you talked about? >> i just met jose an hour ago, and i've already learned a dozen things. i've been taking it down to go back to chicago, because i've learned from you two already. what's really amazing, by working in a big diversity like chicago, but any district, is to make connections with colleagues who are in diverse and maybe unlike settings from the ones you teach in and to learn with and from them. the school that i used to teach at, we worked with a school on the north side on think, very different demographic. we were 99% free and reduced lunch, at-risk kids, and much more diversified population on the north side, and with different access to opportunities at home, so it's really powerful. we compare and contrast what we're doing, the types of

opportunities we're offering our kids and pushing each other. so i feel like if i had a kid transfer from my fifth grade math classroom to the north side, they're getting a really similar education. we don't make excuses, ever. i don't say, well, but i can't do that because my kids don't have internet at home, or he doesn't say that my kids already know because they've had ipads since forever. we really feel like work together and push our kids on the same trajectory, but we need different scaffolding. the p.d. that my teachers might get look different from the other teachers. >> i would totally agree with that, and agree with the idea that education is the great equalizer. i've shared with a few folks earlier, my mom, 72 years old, she's getting her g.e.d. in a couple of weeks, she's going to have a cap and gown and the whole thing, and she was a nondocumented kid back in the

1950's and got deported many times. but eventually she was determined to get her education. i think not only that the great equalizer in this country, but we may have to do things differently, and we may need to take education outside the building to some extent. as a migrant teacher in rural montana a few years ago back in 2000, we had a technology mobile that would go out into the field where these kids were working as migrant workers, and after they worked, they'd climb into the van that had computers , and they would work. i think those kinds of ideas, the innovative ideas that are occurring out on the fringes, we need to bring them to the forefront, because there are great teachers doing great things, and we need a place -- earlier today, somebody mentioned this, where people can share good ideas, because researchers, i don't know who

reads that stuff, but we as teachers have great ideas that we need to collaborate and just like we've been sharing ideas already, we only met each other an hour ago. >> right. i can go back to we need those great teachers in the classrooms of the kids that need them the absolute most. and, you know, it doesn't -- yes, it would help if there was internet at every single home and concerned parents that were reading to their kids every night, but we know that's not happening every single place. but we can control what's happening in the classroom and even outside. i mean, our kids in d.c., you would be amazed at how much they don't to want leave school. as much as they complain about it, it's 5:00, and there are kids still hanging out and do productive things with them in those hours that they're still in school, when you have a group of really passionate, really effective teachers in their classrooms all the time, and then kind of giving them

that settlement after school. and if we have the spre net after school in every school building, then whether those opportunities are necessarily there at home, they're there when we have them in our buildings for more than eight hours a day. >> let's fwalk the after-school stuff a bit. >> yeah, with the after-school program, it all started from a after-school program in new orleans. i have an older brother who's two years older than me. when we were in elementary school, there was actually a morning fun club and there was an after school fun club. and we basically had to go to both of them because our parents worked so much. my dad was always at work, and my mom was always at work. early in the morning, she would drop us off at school, and then we would have to stay late until they got out of school. that's where me and my brother learned a lot of different things, arts and crafts. we were in a dance group, the

temptations. we danced. you know, my dad still has it on videotape, too. it's where you get a chance to be a kid. to be a kid have, fun, interact with other kids and continue to learn, continue to learn. it's really been great in new orleans. we're trying to expand it as much as we can, but it's all about finding what the kids are interested in. me, i diagnosed myself, but i always said that i was a.d.d. i always wanted to -- i loved the days when my teacher would go outside and just -- if it was a beautiful day outside, we could still do the same lesson, but just get outside, just get outside, and just try to be as ctive as possible. i'll never forget how i learned all 50 states, how i learned it. if you walked into my elementary school, there was a

blacktop, and there was the united states. some days we would go outside and the teacher would pick this game, where i don't know if we had to throw a ball, but if you landed there, you had to run to the state, and it was a game. they sort of tricked us, but it helped us learn. it helped me learn. i have a 4-year-old son now, and it's the same thing with him. at times i have to trick him, but it helps him learn. it helps him learn. he's always on the ipad and learning different things. but i think back to how i was when he was a kid, my son has homework now when he comes home from school, and we'll start doing it, and he's ready to go do something else. and i get so mad, but i see myself in him. i know if i can figure out a way to make it more interactive or make it about basketball or some type of game that he loves to do, then he'll learn it. and i feel like those are the ideas that you guys have.

>> let me push a little bit. we talked a bit about engaging students differently. we also have to empower teachers in a very different way. we have to recruit the next generation, stop them the good teachers who get burnt out, reward excellence and make those great teachers heroes and keep them in the communities who need them the most. walking through what technology n or can't do to empower teachers, have them successful, that you have to do every single day. >> i think that teaching can be a really lonely profession sometimes. i think back to my first year of teaching, and i thought i was pretty prepared. i get in there, and i had someone come and watch me in the fall, and they pulled me aside and said, you look like you're scared of your fourth graders. and i'm like, yeah, i'm not scared. i'm not scared they're going to hurt me, but i'm afraid that i don't know what i'm doing. but someone's going to come in and say gotcha, you're terrible. what i really like about our

network, seeing great teacher development programs, is that the transparency is being able to be in another teacher's classroom. that's really hard to do physically. unless jose and i are in the same school and he's teaching math, when i'm on prep or lunch, i never get to see the magic that happens in his classroom. so leveraging technology can really break down literally and invite each other into our rooms. so we use google hang out, face time and skype, and put an ipad or whatever in the back of someone's classroom, and i can number your room from the next oom over or another country. i had a complying from singapore. he stayed up late to watch one of my teachers teach music with ipad and music, and he said hold on. he's writing chats with her. they're collaborating literally halfway across the world and learning from each other. and then he was able to debrief

with her when she was in her jammies on her couch later that night. that's just one example. but getting teachers to talk and to support each other and to collaborate, that's really powerful, all those relationships to learn from one another. >> i think another part to it is telling teachers, like, it's ok to make a mistake. it's ok to experiment with some new technology, and it might not actually work, but in this time right now, with the amount of stress that a lot of teachers are under, with the time of tests and being observed and knowing that at any point, what if my principal walks in and i'm trying this new thing with the smart response system, which they'll say is not inveaverb anymore, but if you are and trying it out, and then, you know, stuff always happens. but teachers kind of need to feel supported and feel like it's ok to try something new, and it might not work the very first time, but, you know, you're going to have the support with administrators,

with other teachers, to try these things out and what has the lasting impact on your students and classes. >> i know we're running out of time, but how do we engage parents? how does technology help? nothing more important than a great teacher, but if we can get this learning 24/7 at home, we can help parents with our own education, 72-year-old mom going back to getting a g.e.d., how can technology help bridge the divide between schools and home? >> jose, you have to tell your story about your students going -- or their parents leaving. >> well, in some instances, and this is very heartbreaking, but i work with latino kids, and a lot of the parents, some of their parents, i should say all of them, but some of them sometimes get deported in the middle of the school year. 50, pened to my mom, and 60 years still later it's still

happening. until we get our immigration rights. >> working on it. >> i know, and we're all grateful and sitcht. but when a partner gets deported, you can still have a teacher conference, because before the parents leaves, the first thing you get, is if you have a gmail, set one up. and then have the parents all seem to be smartphones. it's not the best way to go, but at least it's something. and you can say connected with parents, citizenship, smelling lists. i've worked with parents to teach on vocabulary and english, and sometimes the phone, as simple as a text, is a good way for them to become more welcome to the school system, where we can continue to reach out and show them how he children are progressing. >> all right, a big round of applause to chris and jose.

>> andrea, welcome to the stage. andrea is a anchor, reporter, and commentator for nbc, and she just rushed here from her msnbc show. andrea mitchell, welcome. i'll let you take it away. >> thank you very much. mr. secretary, great to see you just off the air, and now in the hot seat, thank you all so much. thanks for being here. what an exciting program.

i can't wait, as excited as i am about interviewing you, mr. secretary, chris paul and the students -- >> p better than me. >> much better than you. >> yeah. >> but congratulations, first of all, on this summit to all of you involved in reimagining high school. let me ask you, in a perfect world, from what you've seen, what would you as a policymaker want to see as the new form of high school? >> we're spending a lot of time thinking about this and talking about it, talking to high school students themselves, talking to teachers and schools. the president talked about it in the state of the union. he's asking congress for $3hundred million to invest in this. it's sort of cliche, but for me, it's how do you get students much more engaged in their own learning? we talked about it in an earlier panel. i'm convinced the vast majority of young people who drop out not because high school is too hard, but because it's too easy. they don't see the relevance of

what's going o. the more students are not in the classroom, but have internships, are doing job shadowing, are engaged within their real community, then they start to understand how important it is, what they're doing in class is to the rest of their lives. when that happens, young people don't drop out. our dropout rate is going down. it is still unacceptablely high, as you know, far too high and far too many of our disadvantaged communities. when you have people drop out today, they're basically condemned to poverty and failure. the stakes here are huge. i'll give you one counter example. there are many, many out there. i'll give you two actually. i went to the harbor school in new york, which is right on the river. you have young people who are going to college. you have young people, you don't know who's thinking about doing what. it's always got to be both-and. they talked about a huge number of jobs on the river, and historically 90% of those jobs went to people from overseas because they didn't have anyone in new york who had the skills. here you have the biggest

system in new york, just no access. the school's been traded to fill the gap. we had to take a ferry to get to the school, first time i've ever done that, and the young man who was piloting was a graduate of the school, also continuing his education, but has a great job there. also in new york, you have a i.b.m. is leading. those young people have a great opportunity to learn from the team at bill bell, but they'll graduate from high school with their associate's degree. those opportunities are great not just for kids who are very bright, but kids who think college isn't for them, actually get exposure, start to feel comfortable. those kinds of opportunities have to become the norm, and we're trying toing if out what is working across the country. >> with all of the advantages of technology, we still have so many schools right here in the district of columbia, where we're sitting today, that don't have the same access to

technology that middle class and upper middle class kids have in their systems at school and at home. how do you make up for that gap, the technology gap? >> well, the digital divide is real. it's an urgent challenge. it's one, again, we're really struggling with. i'll say a couple of things. first of all, in education, we're great at doing new things. we're not great at stopping doing things. there's not going to be a huge new pot to do this. there's not going to be recovery act, but the country, we spend -- i'm not sure the number is $up to $9 billion on tech schools. the question is, which are we going to stop buying textbooks nd put it into technology? but they did not make this transition because they had a huge influx of resources. they simply stopped spending on certain things, spent in a very different way, and i think we

have to continue to encourage schools and school districts and states to start to think about what are they doing now, what can they stop doing? as a nation, we're either going to lead the world or be a laggard. other countries are moving very, very aggressively. i worry about our children's chance to compete on a level playing field in a globally competitive economy if these opportunities don't start to become the norm for them. >> what about online education and various modifications of it? i've been very involved with it at the higher education level. but at the high school level, how can this kind of combined flipped classroom work for kids? >> it is very early on, but obviously there's just extraordinary potential here. we're just sort of the tip of the iceberg. but the idea, the idea of a great professor teaching not 100 or 150 students, but 10,000 or 100,000, think of the power of what that means. think of young people learning 24/7, not just sitting in their

large lecture halls in congress. i think the implications for not just high school, but middle school and even element hear school are huge. think about ifed with the top -- pick a number, 100 algebra teachers in this country, what if we had them have access to so many more students? we know specifically that students who fail in algebra have high dropout rates. it's almost like the gate keeping class for high school. so think if our kids, particularly in disadvantaged communities, had access to world-class teachers and tutors and those kind of things, so i think, again, we're very, very early on, but how students learn, who teaches them, how they engage in their own learning, radical, radical changes is happening now and everything we can do to accelerate the rate of change is important. >> is the message they should not be threatened by this? you could have the famous

algebra teacher online, and you can have the regular science or math teacher reinforcing it, doing the testing, doing the classroom work as the backup to the lecture. >> technology will never replace teachers, and i think for me the goal is learning, great teachers empower with great technology. and we put those two things together, i think really special things happen. when teachers feel isolated, when they don't have the support they need, when they can't learn from each other, you have to think about, you have many high schools, you have a physics teacher, and they go to p.d. for their high school, and it's about social studies and math and english and science, and not too much directly physics-related. if you're the one physics teacher in that high school, but they can learn from the best teachers from around the country and the globe, think how empowering that is. think how much better you can do. think about the students learning at home and coming to

you with questions. you're going kid by kid in an individualized way and really helping them with their strengths and weaknesses. this can be extraordinarily motivating and empowering thing for teachers, not something that teachers should be afraid of at all. >> the redesign initiative for high schools has been criticized in some quarters for being too focused on stem. can you address that? >> i think stem is important. it's not at the expense of everything else. i get in trouble with the teachers. any time i talk about p.e., ghit trouble. we have to do all these things, and we got stem and steam. the fact of the matter is there's jobs in the future, young people are going to need some skills in the stem area. having said that, by no means am i saying that financial literacy or foreign languages or art or dance or drama, i'm a big advocate for recess and p.e. by no means should those things be put to the side. what i think we have to get to

is what i call a well-rounded, world-class education, and that's the norm in wealthier communities. that's the norm in wealthier private schools. that has to be the norm in anacostia here in d.c. and the south side of chicago back home and compton and watts in l.a. when we do that, again, children can find out where they're gifted. it's not one or the other. i think the fact of the matter is, in the stem areas, we have huge deficits as a nation. i've talked a lot to c.e.o.'s and say, arne, we're definitely trying to keep jobs in this country, and we can't hire folks who have the skills here it's more the case going forward than even today. and so whatever we can do to engage students in the stem areas, helping teachers become comfortable and confident with that content, again, not just the a.p. level in high school, but in third and fourth and fifth grade and students start to tune out. give you one little example. my children go to a wonderful

public school in arlington. it has a science focus. the music teacher has the kids singing about the planet, singing about nutrition, about food. very different ways to teach, but ways to instill lesson that is will stay with kids for a life time >> two things come to mind, because i have said on my program, in education nation, past conversations with you, about arts and music education. it's the first thing that's hit the chopping block here with the cuts in the district of columbia. and i have parents calling me and asking me about public school education, which is now devoid of arts and music, which, in my own case, you know, a million years ago in public school in new york, was my entry into the world of classical music and opera, you know, opera in particular, but classical music and jazz, which hen changed my life. so what do we do about a whole

generation of kids who don't have the opportunity that i had when, in first grade, somebody put a violin in my hand, which was owned by the school district. >> these are great questions, and none have easy answers. i think, andrea, as a country, we are fighting a battle right now, and the battle is education and investment, or it's education and expense. there are folks who look at education as an expense, something when tough economic times we need to cut back on. i think education is the best investment we can make. i think if you think education is expensive, try ignorance. i never say we should invest in status quo. we have to invest in reform. but where you see art and dance and drama being eliminated, when you see p.e. and academic decathlon in your book and debate, when those opportunities don't exist, we're cutting off our nose to spite our face. we're hurting our kids, our country, our economic competitiveness long term. if you want to reduce dropout rates, you have to have the arts.

you have to have after school activities. for chris, it was basketball. but for lots of kids it is dance, drama, music, debate. you have to have that full menu of options so kids can figure out both during the school day and after school, what's going to keep them coming to school every single day? when we fail to make these investments as a country, i worry tremendously, and that's the battle right now of the country that we're fighting. >> what do you say to the people in the legislature in texas, governor perry, in other states that are turning their back on many of the initiatives coming out of washington. >> well, it's not that we have all the great ideas, but what i will say is whether it's texas or any place else, our young people are not competing for jobs in their neighborhoods or in their district or their states or in the country anymore. young people competing for jobs with young people in india and china and singapore and south korea. good jobs are going to go where the most knowledged workers

are. and as a country, we can keep those good jobs here or fight to bring more here, or we can see those jobs migrate other plays. for me, this is about so much more than education. we're really fighting for our country's future. we're fighting to keep great middle-class jobs here f. we don't do that, other countries are going to outcompete us and outinnovate us. if you look at the international metrics and data, we're 12th in the world in college graduation rates, usually some 25th to 30th in terms of math. we have to get better faster than ever before to go in the opposite direction. it's self-destructive for the country. >> how do you see the common core standards fitting into your plan to reimagine high school? >> having higher standards, internationally benchmarked college and career-ready standards, that is a huge step in the right direction. the goal here, andrea, is not

common. the goal is high. and many states under no child left behind dummy down standards, reduce them to make politicians look good. it's bad for kids, bad for education, bad ultimately for our country, but it made politicians look good. >> bad for the teachers ultimately. >> bad for everybody. so having higher standards is a huge step in the right direction. we're he is at that time that i can 46 states adopted higher standards. no one thought that was possible. none of the experts predicted we could move so fast. that's actually the easy part of the job. the hard part now is how do you implement those higher standards? how do you give teachers the support they need? how do you help kids thand they have to be learning at a much higher level, much more seriously? how do you educate parents in the business community? it's a great step in the right direction, but we are just getting into the ballgame. we have a lot of hard work ahead of us. but if we can persevere with higher standards and the next generation of assessments coming, and better teacher and

prance pal evaluation and support, it's going to be a hard three years. but if we can get to the other sirksde i'm convinced our country is going to be a wildly different place. >> how do you justify the waivers and the flexible that you are trying to show in so many different states with the projected goal of overall igher standards? >> i think it's broke son many levels. rather than sitting back and seeing students hurt and we decided to provide flexibility in addressing the states. that's gone extraordinarily well. again, we have states across the political spectrum working with us. you have other questions. and what we're seeing that i think a couple of moves that i think are so important, first of all, much less focus on just a single test score, which i think there's way too much in the country, much more focus on

long-term outcome, increasing graduation rates, reducing dropout race, higher college going rates, better perseverance in college, not taking remedial classes. it's more complex and complicated, but it's lot more important focusing on a third grade test score. the second thing i didn't fully understand, and i don't think anyone in the country did, is under no child left behind, this gets technical, but there were lots of kids, black and brown children, children are disabilities, my grant children, who are literally invisible. they weren't in the system because the end size was so small in their school. and we have literally today hundreds of thousands of the kids that we all care about who are now accountable for their learning when under no child left behind they were literally not on the radar. we're learning every single day, but in many significant ways, i think it moved the country in a different

direction. the final thing i'll say, and we didn't plan this, didn't begin to understand it, but when it and congress does decide to fix and authorize no child left behind, the worst thing is have folks in congress put their heads down and say do it themselves. what they need to do is take the best ideas from the best states. if you did that, that could be pretty exciting reauthorization of the elementary and secondary education act. >> we've got questions on twitter. this is also on education nation on the nbc news website and the education nation website. so we're excited about participating as actively as we are with you on this. from our twitter friends out in, what is the effect of testing on innovation? >> historically, a lot of testing has been somewhat stifled. i think this is an area where we have to get it right. i think we should be assessing kids on an ongoing basis, and we need to know how much they're learning and growing each year. there are many new assess ams

where students and teachers and parents are getting daily feedback on what they're actually learning, not what is a teacher teaching, but what they're learning. that didn't ever exist historically. and we've invested $350 million with two states who are working on the next generation of assessments. his will be much less tests. i think we have to be accountable for our students each year. there are other folks who think texas should be 100% of a child else grade or teacher east. those two extremes i think are both equally destructive. there's a common-sense middle ground in which ongoing evaluation is important for students to understand where they are, give teachers real-time feedback in terms of how they're doing and to empower parents. >> now, a question also from twitter, can we do more to

democratize the classroom with student input? we'll hear from students momentary, but how do you democratize the classroom and have the students more involved without losing other values? >> it's easy to say. it's harder in practice. you have to listen. i think our students today are so smart and so talented, and they can tell you what's working and what's not. one of the things i did in chicago when i led the chicago public schools, we had a student advisory council, who i met with on a monthly basis, and many of the policies we put in place didn't come from me, came from students saying, arne, this is what is really going on, this is what you need to be thinking about in very different ways. and it was extraordinarily powerful and helpful. it's hard as the national level to give real-time feedback, but whether it's high school, middle school, even elementary school, and another thing,

children tell you the truth. i visit schools, a couple of schools most weeks, and you get the dog and pony show, ok, what's really going? they'll tell you. they know what's happening. they know which teachers care, which teachers not as much. they know what parts of the building are safe, what's not safe, and watch this hallway, watch the corridor. they know passages to and from school. we have to, as adults, you have to let go. you have to listen. you have to empower. i'm a big believer in having students have pure juries. empower kids to figure those things out, hold each other accountable and build that kind of culture. and when students are invested there, students are helping to shape their schools, they're going take care of their schools in a very different way. >> you mentioned chicago. the mayor is trying to get his arms around it, but there's a huge partner and teacher uproar over closing schools that the district has decided are not needed, that are underutilized. union now going to court. how do you deal with that

evolution in a place like chicago? >> it's been very, very tough. obviously that's where my entire upbringing was there, and it's been from a distance, hard to watch. i have friends on all sides of the debate. what i will say, andrea, there's no educator i know that wakes up in the morning and wants to close schools. when you close schools, there's no upside. kids lose. communities kids. communities lose. teachers lose. what's the counterexample? where are they not closing schools? it's not chicago. it's right here in d.c. it's philly. it's other places. it's a really interesting counterexample. not that there's one simple solution, but denver's public schools are actually growing in population. schools that they closed five, six, seven years ago are actually reopening because there's greater demand. there's increased public confidence in public education. denver has done a lot of things in a very interesting way, union and management collaboration of rewarding

great teachers and building public confidence so that you don't have to close schools. there's an economic reality, you only have 400,000 seats, and you have a bunch of shortfall, you have to make some tough calls. the big thing is how do we increase public education and how do we get great teachers and principals to go to the most underserved communities? one thing i've challenged the country on, and again, not everyone agrees with me, but i always trying to be really, really straight, some teaching jobs by definition are much harder than others. and whether it's, again, anacostia here versus another community, or chicago, whether it's englewood or the coast, you're asking very different things from teachers and principals. as a country, we have 15,000 school districts. i've yet to find a district -- i keep hoping someone will prove me wrong, but i've yet to find one district that systematically identifies their hardest working, most committed teachers and principals and moves them to the most

disadvantaged communities. and if we did that, if that became the badge of honor, where all these centers were to go and not the place where everyone is trying to escape, that would build public confidence and public education in very different ways, and those communities where people are fleeing would find ways to stay there and keep going there, because every parent, every parent wants to send their child to great school with great teachers and great principal. so if we're serious about reversing this, we have to think very, very differently about what we create to get our talent to the kids in the communities who need it the most. >> another question from twitter is what should we stop doing because it is not working? >> buying text books, we talked about that. put that money into digital. the other big one that i've been addition none of this is new, not that we should stop it, but we need to think about it very differently. i think we do generally, generally a pretty horrendous job of supporting teachers.

we lose far too many great young teachers who come in with the best of intentions and want to make a difference, and they feel unsupported. they feel burnt out. they don't get the help they need. they're isolated. they're lonely. i ask, how much do you think we spend on professional development each year? teachers say $18 million, $38 million, whatever. across the country, we at the federal level spent about $2.5 billion each year on money for p.d. you put it to state and local spending, it's probably between $5 billion. when i talk to teachers, they usually laugh or cry. they are not feeling it. and we're trying to think about how you in a radically different way give teachers the support they need. i'm always fighting for new resources, new investment, but we have to make sure that our current investments are making a difference, and this is probably the worst money we spend so. beverage to stop spending money

in ways that are attempting to help teachers that are having no impact on their lives and using existing resources in a radically different way to empower and support the great talent we have, working hard across the country. >> well, you touched on this a bit earlier, but in what way can technology help? lping teachers reimagine and reinvigorate their own teaching skills, especially at the high school level? >> i think again, it's mazing it's something as hard and as complex and as difficult as teaching is, the teachers for decades have basically been isolated in their classrooms. this has been something that had to -- it's been alike a solo endeavor. that to me, it drives me crazy. everything you do in limbing the only way you get people, you have people help and you watch you and give you advice and support. we can do a much better job of that with peer review, teachers. but again, the idea of physician icks teachers now not being the one physics teacher in their building, but having

access to the best physics talent across the nation and the globe, i think that's an unbelievably empowering thing for teachers, to have teachers have students watching the content with a classroom at home the night before and coming with real questions, i think that's a very empowerly thing for teachers. i think for teachers to have a dated dashboard sandnd if u 30 kids in your class or 40 or 50, it's hard to keep track of each one in your head. but if you had that data dashboard on an ongoing basis of where each child is, i think that's very empowering. as much as i think technology is going to be hugely beneficial for children, particularly for disadvantaged children, i think another benefit is as important, if not more important, technology empowering teachers to learn from each other, to learn and to stay with a proflse for the long haul rather than being burnt out and losing them after three, four, five years.

again, it's very, very hopeful about what this can do to transform not just learning, but teaching. >> we only have a couple of minutes left of your time. before we go on to talk to students and, again, hear from chris paul, but what would you like to see in this reimagined high school environment by the time your tenure is up, assuming that you can serve these last couple of years? >> the biggest is we fight all the wrong fights in education. to me, there's one common enemy and that's academic failure. when young people drop out today, there's nothing out there for them. we lose about a million children from our schools to the streets each year, and in many of our community, we're destroying not just kids, but families and entire communities. so for me, the reimagined high school is a high school that personalizes learning in such a way that every child, whether going to anyy league school,

community college, wherever the next step is, they're starting to see the real connection between what they're doing in high school, with their community, and more important, with the rest of their lives. young people, 14, 15, 16, don't understand today that they drop out, how many doors close on hem in a very rapid fashion. if every child had a chance to pursue their interests, be engaged in their own learning, about excited about coming to school every day, i think we would see that dropout rate plummet. we've made some progress. graduation rates are three-decade highs, which is very encouraging. we have pretty significant decline in dropout factories, but we have a long, long way to go. getting the dropout rate down to zero, making sure every high school graduate was truly college and career ready, that, to me, is the goal we can all sort of unite behind. >> our thanks to you, secretary duncan, for all your time and what you're doing.

marine commandant is at the brookings institute this morning. you can see it live on spn span spad 3 at 10:00 a.m. -- you can see it live on c-span span3 at 10:00 a.m. eastern. in a few moments, a look at today's headlines, plus sandalls tweets live on "washington journal." at 10:00 a.m. eastern, the bipartisan policy center looks at immigration and border security. and the brookings institution hosts a discussion on attitudes about legalizing marijuana. that's at 2:00 p.m. eastern. and in about 45 minutes, we'll discuss poverty with the brookings institution. elizabeth kneebone fond a majority of america's poor lived in the suburbs and not the cities. we'll take ern, questions about the hacking of

u.s. weapons systems by the chinese. the 'll be joined by author of a mother jones article. ♪ host: members of congress are out of washington this week for a weeklong recess while president obama travels to chicago to do some fundraising for the democratic party. here in washington general ray odierno will discuss the challenges facing u.s. military as well as troop levels in afghanistan ever -- afghanistan and iraq. the bipartisan group looks at coverage. a new report that finds that four out of 10 mothers are the sole or