Duncan 4

Duncan 4

FOR RELEASE: June 22, 2009

		More Resources Press release

The secretary introduced his speech with an overview of his Listening and Learning Tour and a summary of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act. He occasionally deviated from this prepared text.

Today, I want to focus on the challenge of turning around our chronically low-achieving schools. These schools have failed to make progress year after year.

In some of these schools, the leadership has been replaced, but it hasn't made a difference. Many good teachers have left them and too few good teachers have replaced them. And many dedicated parents and ambitious students have also left and found other options.

The social and physical conditions around some of these schools are horrific.

They're often unsafe, underfunded, poorly run, crumbling, and challenged in so many ways that the situation can feel hopeless.

That is, until you meet the kids, talk to them, and listen to their dreams of the future. I went to Detroit where two out of three students drop out. However, the seniors I met are all going to college. They know what they want to be and they don't want to waste a minute.

I went to a high school on an Indian reservation in Montana where 80 percent of the adults are unemployed. They could name just one student from their school who had completed college in the past six years.

I talked to the ninth-graders and they begged to be challenged. They think everyone's given up on them. No one expects them to succeed. Yet, despite bleak conditions, they still believe in the redeeming power of education.

There are approximately 5,000 schools in this chronically underperforming category, roughly 5 percent of the total. About half are in big cities, maybe a third are in rural areas, and the rest are in suburbs and medium–sized towns. This is a national problem— urban, rural, and suburban.

I won't play the blame game, but I also won't make excuses for failure. I am much more interested in finding ways to fix these schools than in analyzing who's at fault.

States and districts have a legal obligation to hold administrators and teachers accountable, demand change and, where necessary, compel it. They have a moral obligation to do the right thing for those children—no matter how painful and unpleasant.

Yet, few districts in America have risen to the challenge. Too many administrators are unwilling to close failing schools and create better options for these children. There are some exceptions: Hartford, Pittsburgh, Denver, New York, Oakland, and D.C.

In a few isolated cases, failing schools were taken over by charter organizations, such as Green Dot in L.A. and Mastery Charters in Philadelphia. Some of these turnarounds are showing real promise.

Finally, in a number of cities and states—Alabama, Tennessee, New York, Chicago, Miami, and Baltimore—affiliates of the NEA (National Education Association) and AFT (American Federation of Teachers) have taken over failing schools

I closed about 60 schools in Chicago, some for low enrollment and some explicitly because they were failing academically. We reopened about a dozen of these schools with new leadership and staff. Some are run by the district, and some are run by the Academy for Urban School Leadership, a non–profit partner. All of them use union teachers.

Today, these schools are doing much better. Our first two turnarounds—Dodge and Williams—have more than tripled the percentage of kids meeting standards in five years.

Sherman Elementary saw a five-point jump in the percentage of students meeting standards in the first year. Harvard reduced absences by five days per student in the first year. And Orr High School saw a 15-point jump in attendance in its first year.

Turnarounds aren't easy. It requires you to build trust with parents. The way it plays in the media can polarize people. Some adults are still protesting me back in Chicago for closing schools, but it was the right thing to do.

The parents in these turnaround schools now talk about their kids “looking forward to school for the first time,” coming home and “talking about their teachers.” They say it's “a totally different atmosphere” even though it's the same schools with the same kids and the same socioeconomic conditions.

It gives you hope that anything is possible with enough effort and determination and the right people. That's what we need in schools all over America. The fact is there are still way too many schools that don't pass the “would we send our own kids there?” test.

And some of them, by the way, are charter schools. The charter movement is one of the most profound changes in American education, bringing new options to underserved communities and introducing competition and innovation into the education system.

All across America we see great charter schools, from Noble Street in Chicago to IDEA Academy in Texas, Inner–City Education Foundation and Partnerships to Uplift Communities in Los Angeles and Friendship Public Charter Schools in D.C.

What I like most about our best charters is that they think differently.

There are approximately 5,000 schools in this chronically underperforming category, roughly 5 percent of the total. About half are in big cities, maybe a third are in rural areas, and the rest are in suburbs and medium-sized towns. This is a national problem—urban, rural, and suburban.

The Denver School of Science and Technology serves grades six to 12 . They take the sixth–graders on college visits. Those children spend years choosing a college— instead of months—and 100 percent of their graduates go on to four–year colleges and universities.

North Lawndale College Prep is in one of Chicago's most violent neighborhoods, yet they cut security staff and hired social workers instead. That extra personalization is one reason that more than 90 percent of their graduates are going to college.

I was just at the North Star Academy Charter School in Newark (N.J.), where they have reversed the achievement gap. Their kids are outperforming others in the state and every single graduate was accepted into a four-year college. These results speak for themselves.

So, I'm a big supporter of these successful charter schools and so is the president. That's why one of our top priorities is a $52 million increase in charter school funding in the 2010 budget. We also want to change the law and allow federally funded charters to replicate.

But the CREDO (Center for Research on Education Outcomes at Stanford University) report last week was a wake–up call, even if you dispute some of its conclusions. The charter movement is putting itself at risk by allowing too many second–rate and thirdrate schools to exist. Your goal should be quality, not quantity. Charter authorizers need to do a better job of holding schools accountable—and the charter schools need to support them—loudly and sincerely.

I applaud the work that the Alliance is doing with the National Association of Charter School Authorizers to strengthen academic and operational quality. We need that, and we also need to be willing to hold lowperforming charters accountable.

I closed three charter schools in Chicago and turned away more than 100 proposals because they were not strong enough. There should be a high bar for charter approval, and in exchange for real and meaningful autonomy there must be absolute accountability.

In some states—and the CREDO report singles out Arizona, Florida, Minnesota, New Mexico, Ohio and Texas—accountability is minimal. That's unacceptable, and instead of hearing it from me or from CREDO, the education community should hear it from you. Just as the American Bar Association polices the legal community and the AMA (American Medical Association) does the same for the medical profession, you must get more serious about accountability.

I want to salute the California Charter Schools Association, which recently announced an accountability proposal that links charter renewal to student achievement and growth. We should watch this closely and see if it can become a model for other states.

We also need to work together to help people better understand charters. Many people equate charters with privatization and part of the problem is that charter schools overtly separate themselves from the surrounding district. This is why opponents often say that charters take money away from public schools, but that's misleading. Charters are public schools, serving our kids with our money. Instead of standing apart, charters should be partnering with districts, sharing lessons, and sharing credit. Charters are supposed to be laboratories of innovation that we can all learn from.

And charters are not inherently anti-union. Albert Shanker, the legendary head of the American Federation of Teachers, was an early advocate. Many charters today are unionized. What distinguishes great charters is not the absence of a labor agreement, but the presence of an education strategy built around common-sense ideas: More time on task, aligned curricula, high parent involvement, great teacher support, and strong leadership.

All of these qualities exist in good traditional schools as well. We know what success looks like. I see it the moment I enter a school. It's clean, orderly, the staff is positive and welcoming, and the kids and the classroom are the focus. I see award-winning school work on the walls. I see discipline and enthusiasm in the children. I see parents engaged and teachers collaborating on instruction.

The hard part is to replicate those conditions everywhere, and you need to challenge yourselves and challenge each other to turn one success into a hundred and a hundred into 200.

At the same time, when you see charter schools that are not measuring up don't defend them or make excuses for them. Admit that the adults in that building, for whatever reason, just can't get it right and something has to change.

Children have only one chance for an education. You're giving them that chance. That's an enormous duty and I am grateful for every one of you who willingly took on that responsibility. I'm especially grateful to those of you who are succeeding.

But I came here today to ask you to do even more. We need everyone who cares about public education to take on the toughest assignment of all and get in the business of turning around our lowest–performing schools. That includes states, districts, nonprofits, forprofits, universities, unions, and charter organizations.

I know your typical approach is to start new schools with a few grades and ramp up over time. I respect that approach. It's a smart, successful strategy and we don't want you to stop. The president and I have expended a great deal of political capital urging states to lift charter caps and allow more charters to open—and states are responding. Illinois raised its cap and Tennessee came back into session to pass a charter expansion proposal.

But over the coming years, America needs to find 5,000 high–energy, hero principals to take over these struggling schools—and they will need a quarter of a million great teachers who are willing to do the toughest work in public education. We will find them in the union ranks and the charter community, the business world and the nonprofit sectors. We won't find them overnight. I don't expect a thousand to show up next fall. We can start with one or two hundred in the fall of 2010, and steadily build until we are doing 1,000 per year.

We have great charter networks like Aspire, KIPP, Achievement First and Uncommon Schools. You're steadily getting to scale. Today, I am challenging you to adapt your educational model to turning around our lowest–performing schools. I need you to go outside your comfort zones and go to underserved rural communities and small cities. We are asking states and districts to think very differently about how they do business. Your knowledge and experience can help shape their thinking.

Just as the American Bar Association polices the legal community and the AMA (American Medical Association) does the same for the medical profession, you must get more serious about accountability.

We have a lot of money to support this work. Aside from the $5 billion in the Race to the Top and Invest in What Works and Innovation funds, we have $3.5 billion in Title I school improvement grants. We're seeking another billion and a half in 2010. That's $5 billion specifically targeting turnarounds, providing hundreds of thousands of dollars above normal funding levels for every turnaround school. And with the support of Congress, we will have even more money in subsequent years to support this work.

Leading foundations and the national education unions are both interested in turnarounds. Nonprofits like New School Venture Fund, Teach for America, the New Teacher Project and New Leaders for New Schools will also play a role. In the coming months, we will develop an application process that spells out exactly what we mean by turnarounds—but let me paint a rough picture for you.

At a minimum, for a turnaround to succeed you have to change the school culture. In most cases, simply replacing the principal is not enough. We want transformation, not tinkering.

We have four basic models in mind. Some will work better in big cities while others are more suited to smaller communities. And we're still working this through, so we welcome your ideas.

The first option is based on what we did in Chicago. We awarded planning grants in the fall so new principals and lead teachers could develop and adapt curriculum to better meet the needs of the students. During the spring, they begin recruiting teachers and they take over the school in June.

Under this model, the children stay and the staff leaves. Teachers can reapply for their jobs and some get rehired, but most go elsewhere. A few leave the profession, which is not all bad. Not everyone is cut out for teaching. Like every profession, people burn out. In our view, at least half of the staff and the leadership should be completely new if you really want a culture change, and that may very well be a requirement of the grants.

Our second option also involves replacing the staff and leadership and turning it over to a charter or for-profit management organization. As I mentioned, Green Dot, Mastery Charters and AUSL are doing this, but we need more of you to get in the game. I know this is tough work, but there is an upside. You start with a school full of kids so there is no student recruiting and you also get a building, which has been a big obstacle for many charter operators.

Obviously, you need to build a full staff more quickly, but that can be done. I am confident that many charter operators will figure this out and succeed brilliantly. I also recognize that you won't always succeed. I accept that, but what I won't accept is a nation that turns its back on millions of children in failing schools while successful models are flourishing in the next community or the next town.

Our third turnaround model keeps most of the existing staff but changes the culture in the following ways. Again, we are open to input on this, but at a minimum:

• They must establish a rigorous performance evaluation system along with more support, training, and mentoring.
• They must change and strengthen the curriculum and instructional program.
• They must increase learning time for kids during afternoons, weekends, and in the summer, and provide more time for teachers to collaborate, plan, and strategize.
• And principals and leadership teams must be given more flexibility around budgeting, staffing, and calendar.

They must use everything we know about how to create a successful school culture—but do it all at once—with enough resources to get the job done. This approach makes more sense in smaller communities where there isn't a ready supply of new teachers and leaders, and where the current staff won't have other job options. This model also gives unions an opportunity to take responsibility for fixing schools without replacing staff. We are beginning a conversation with the unions about flexibility with respect to our most underperforming schools. I expect they'll meet us more than halfway because they share our concern. They understand that no one can accept failure.

But we should also be crystal clear: This model cannot be a dodge to avoid difficult but necessary choices. This cannot be the easy way out. It has to work and show results—quickly—in real and measurable ways in terms of attendance, parent involvement, and student achievement.

All of these models assume a year or more of planning. We should be starting today to build teams that will take over schools in the fall of 2010. Schools and districts can use Title I funds right now to start the planning process.

The last of our four turnaround models is simply to close underperforming schools and reenroll the students in better schools. This may seem like surrender, but in some cases it's the only responsible thing to do. It instantly improves the learning conditions for those kids and brings a failing school to a swift and thorough conclusion.

Now let me also make something very clear: Closing underperforming schools is a state and local responsibility. It's up to state and district superintendents and the political leadership. If they won't make these choices, I can't force them to do it. My job is to support the work—provide funding, help define success, and drive the public consensus toward the desired outcome. But the people who run our schools, and the parents who depend on them, must demand change if they want it to happen.

I came to Washington because I believe in education. I know that change is possible. I know we have the talent and the ideas to succeed. The only question is whether we have the courage to do what's right for kids. We've seen what happens when caution trumps courage. Nothing changes and kids lose. But we've also seen the opposite—where bold leaders have fought the status quo.

And this only works with the full support of the community—the faith-based, the political, the social service agencies, the police, the boys and girls club—and all of the other institutions that serve children and families. A principal can't do this alone.

I came to Washington because I believe in education. I know that change is possible. I know we have the talent and the ideas to succeed. The only question is whether we have the courage to do what's right for kids. We've seen what happens when caution trumps courage. Nothing changes and kids lose. But we've also seen the opposite—where bold leaders have fought the status quo.

We've seen traditional public schools where creative and dedicated educators built strong teams, boosted parental involvement, and raised student achievement. We've seen it in charter schools where gutsy entrepreneurs abandoned lucrative careers, staked a claim in struggling communities, and now are producing miracles.

There is no shortage of courage in this room. You wouldn't be here if you weren't risk-takers. So I'm asking you once again to put your reputations on the line and take on this challenge. I'm asking for your help because I believe in you. I'm asking because I am hopeful. I'm asking, above all, because our children need you and America needs you.

We may never have an opportunity like this again—this president, this Congress, $100 billion, and a broad and growing consensus around the importance of education. So this is our time and this is our moment. This is our chance to transform the one thing in society with the power to transform lives. The path to success has never been clearer.

The education reform movement is not a table where we all sit around and talk. It's a train that is leaving the station, gaining speed, momentum and direction. It is time for everyone everywhere to get on board. Thank you.

Duncan 3

More from Duncan:

FOR RELEASE: June 8, 2009

		More Resources Excerpts from Secretary's remarks (video)

Good morning, and thank you, Stuart (Kerachsky of the Institute of Education Sciences [IES]), so much for that nice introduction.

I also want to say thank you to Sue Betka for her leadership at IES as well as to the entire career staff. Sue has been so helpful during this transition. I know that she'll continue to be a great, great resource for our new director, and let's give John Easton a big round of applause. Let's hear it for John.

As everyone knows, John Easton is a colleague for whom I have tremendous respect. I feel so fortunate that we're going to be able to continue to work together. The Chicago Consortium on School Research enjoys an independent relationship with the Chicago Public Schools similar to that of IES with the Department of Education.

John always told us the cold, hard truth without regard to ideology or politics. And so many of our most important reforms in Chicago were a direct result of work and data produced by the Consortium—the idea of ending social promotions, keeping our freshmen on track and trying to dramatically raise graduation rates, tracking college enrollment, developing growth models and thinking very differently about how we turn around underperforming schools.

The common denominator for all of these policy decisions was that they were informed by data. I am a deep believer in the power of data to drive our decisions. Data gives us the roadmap to reform. It tells us where we are, where we need to go, and who is most at risk.

There's a lot I don't like about No Child Left Behind (NCLB) , but I will always give it credit for exposing our nation's dreadful achievement gaps. It changed American education forever and forced us to take responsibility for every single child, regardless of race, background, or ability. And this is just one example of how data affects policy and there are many, many more.

I'm actually thrilled to have a leader like John working with us here in Washington and I'm absolutely committed to relying on high-quality, independent research funded by IES to inform our thinking.

So thank you, John, for coming to Washington and agreeing to serve, and thank you, Sue, as well as the entire career staff, for your extraordinary service.

I want to begin this morning by talking about the historic opportunity we have today. We will never have a chance like this again. We have a president who is passionate about public education. He and his wife were not born with silver spoons in their mouths. They are who they are because they worked so hard and because they got a great education.

We have absolute bipartisan leadership on the Hill that sees the need and the opportunity for us to get dramatically better. We have more proven strategies out in school districts around the country–rich, poor, rural, urban, suburban. We have had this flourishing of innovation and entrepreneurial ideas over the past 10, 15 years. We've never had so many examples of success before.

And thanks to the Recovery Act, we also have some money, and money does matter. Over $100 billion in new resources is coming to education. It would have been unimaginable just a few months ago to think about that.

And the Recovery Act focuses on four broad areas of reform. We're convinced that with unprecedented resources must come unprecedented reform. Just simply investing in the status quo isn't going to get us where we need to go.

We're focused on college– and career–ready internationally benchmarked standards. We have many states, as you know, voluntarily moving in that direction. We're thinking a lot about teacher quality–great talent matters tremendously, as does how we attract and attain the best and brightest teachers and principals in our business and how we get them to work in some of our toughest schools.

We're thinking about turning around schools. If we were to take–we have about 100,000 schools in our country–if we were to take the bottom 1 percent each year, the bottom thousand, and year after year turn them around, over the next four or five or six years, we could basically eliminate those drop–out factories from our nation.

And finally, we need robust data systems to track student achievement and teacher effectiveness.

Today's speech is the first in a series of policy speeches around those four assurances, leading up to the Race to the Top and the Invest in What Works and Innovation grants that will be coming soon.

Race to the Top and Invest in What Works and Innovation funding provides $5 billion in discretionary money. I was talking to Secretary Paige recently. I think he had $17 million. We have $5 billion. Think about the opportunity we have to make a difference.

The time frame now, the rough time frame is to have draft applications out in July, final applications out by October, and then to get grants out to states and districts by February.

Today, of course, I want to focus on data and I'm blessed to have an audience that knows what I mean when I use words like regression models and effect size indicators. While these words may have meaning for all of you, as you know, they have very little meaning to the general public. And one of our collective challenges is to talk about data and research in ways that people understand. That's one of John's tremendous gifts–to take complicated ideas and make them understandable. That is the only way that good ideas can lead to action and not just remain on a shelf somewhere.

People need to get it and they need to be part of the cause of public education. And that means they need to understand data.

When we did our first turnaround schools in Chicago, in which we closed and reopened the schools with the same children but with new adults, the saddest part of it was that so many parents had no idea how far behind their schools were. They didn't know that they were the worst schools in the city and, in fact, had been like that for years. They thought they were just like everyone else.

And part of the problem is that people don't know how to read data, how to sift through it or understand it and that's really a challenge for all of us. This is just an insider conversation, but it affects everyone outside of this club: parents, children, taxpayers, and employers. And the stakes have never been higher. We must tell the truth and we must tell it clearly. We cannot communicate an undecipherable code.

In the months and years ahead, we will ask thousands of communities across America to close and reopen schools based on data showing that they are underperforming. That has never happened before and it will be as difficult as it is important. It will change and improve the life chances of children from underserved communities forever.

We will ask millions of teachers to use student achievement and annual growth to drive instruction and evaluation. Parents need to understand that. We ask elected officials in states across America to embrace higher standards even though the initial data for their states may reflect badly on them and their schools. This will take real political courage with short–term pain leading to long–term gain.

Clearly, this is a lot to ask of people. It is our responsibility to make this experience as safe and comfortable for people as possible. People need to get it and they need to be part of the cause of public education. And that means they need to understand data.

Data may not tell us the whole truth, but it certainly doesn't lie. So what is the data telling us today? It tells us that something like 30 percent of our children, our students are not finishing high school. It tells us that many adults who do graduate go on to college but need remedial education. They're receiving high school diplomas, but they are not ready for college.

I saw a figure in the paper the other day that talked about a million students a year spending their Pell Grants on courses that don't give them college credit. This is why we need higher standards. When states lower standards, they are lying to children and they are lying to parents. Those standards don't prepare our students for the world of college or the world of work.

When we match NAEP (National Assessment of Educational Progress, also known as the Nation's Report Card) scores and state tests, we see the difference. Some states, like Massachusetts, compare very well. Unfortunately, the disparities between most state tests and NAEP results are staggeringly large.

This is one of the significant problems of NCLB. It let every state set its own bar and we now have 50 states, 50 different states all measuring success differently, and that's starting to change. We want to flip that. We want to set a high bar for the entire country against states' and districts' ability to create and hit that higher bar, give them the chance to innovate and hold them accountable for results.

Through the Council of Chief State School Officers, 46 states and three territories have agreed to work on a common core of internationally benchmarked standards. This is just a first step, but it is a huge step in the right direction.

We absolutely support that work because we know from the data that the Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS) and the Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) study that America has stagnated educationally as the rest of the world has progressed and in too many places passed us by.

We're competing with children from around the globe for jobs of the future. It's no longer the next state or the next region. It's India, China, South Korea, and Finland.

I was on Capitol Hill the other day and faced questions over how much recovery money was going to save jobs and how much was going to advance reform. I told them that in the long run reform is all about jobs. We have to educate our way to a better economy.

Yes, we have to keep teachers in the classroom and we have distributed enough money through recovery to save literally hundreds of thousands of teaching jobs around the country. But if that's all we do, then we'll miss an opportunity. The status quo today is simply not good enough. No one should be satisfied.

Now, we know the news isn't all bad, of course. We also know that children of all age groups across the country have improved their performance in reading and that younger students are posting strong gains in math. We know that achievement gaps are narrowing at the elementary school level.

We also know that college enrollment has increased for students at all income levels. And that the enrollment gap between students from low– and high–income families has shrunk by almost half. That means that more disadvantaged students have access to college, which is extremely encouraging as more and more of today's jobs in a competitive, global economy require postsecondary education.

With enrollment in our K–to–12 public schools rising to all–time highs, we know challenges remain in educating a population that is growing, as we all know, but becoming increasingly diverse. The results from the long–term NAEP show that we have a lot of work left to do, particularly in raising the achievement of our students at the secondary school level, whose test scores have barely moved over the past three decades.

This is what we mean by transparency and absolute commitment to exposing the good, the bad, and the ugly about our current state of education.

I need your collective help to drive a national conversation that is above partisan policy disputes, beyond wars on math and reading, and instead focuses on the facts. We need to reach some agreements. We can't keep studying things without arriving at some commonly accepted conclusions.

President Truman once lamented the fact that every economist he spoke to would always say, “On the one hand things might get better, and on the other hand, things might not.” Truman finally concluded that if he wanted to find definitive advice on the economy, he was going to have to start finding some one–handed economists.

To some extent, the education community suffers from that same dynamic. For every study showing the benefits of the policy, there's another one with a different conclusion. Quite often people draw different conclusions from the same study and that's where we need to separate ideology from analysis.

I recently spoke to education writers about the search for truth in education. I challenged them to go beyond the ideological statements and the surface conclusions and find out what is really happening for our children in our classrooms.

It's kind of like the debate around charter schools. Advocates say they outperform traditional schools. Opponents say they don't. The plain facts show that some charter schools do, and some of them don't. But rather than acknowledge the obvious, we devolve into an ideology debate and somehow forget that this is about children and learning. If something helps children, let's do it.

That's where all of you come in with the research and the facts. Education reform is not about sweeping mandates or grand gestures. It's about systematically examining and learning and building on what we're doing right and scrapping what hasn't worked for our children.

IES and its grantees are uniquely able to contribute to this effort. You are staffed with world–class researchers and skilled statisticians. You have high standards both for evaluating program effectiveness and for the publications you produce. I want to tell you what we're doing to support data–driven instruction and research.

In addition to $250 million in the Recovery Act for statewide data systems, we have requested nearly $690 million for IES' activities, an increase of more than $70 million from last year's budget.

Among other things, that money will pay for a longitudinal study of teachers and an international assessment of adult competencies. We will also launch a national survey to examine the participation of our youngest learners in preschool as well as the levels of parent and family involvement in education.

We will also focus on data in our Race to the Top and Invest in What Works and Innovation applications. While the applications are still under construction, we are developing questions around how teachers are using data to drive instruction. Many teachers are hungering for data to inform what they do.

Our best teachers today are using real–time data in ways that would have been unimaginable just five years ago.

They need to know how well their students are performing. They want to know exactly what they need to do to teach and how to teach. It makes their job easier and ultimately much more rewarding. They aren't guessing or talking in generalities anymore. They feel as if they're starting to crack the code.

We will also ask whether the data around student achievement is linked to teacher effectiveness. Believe it or not, several states, including New York, Wisconsin, and California, have laws that create a firewall between students and teacher data. Think about that: Laws that prohibit us from connecting children to the adults who teach them.

Usually, firewalls are set up for our protection. They prevent hackers from getting into our computers and they block our children from visiting inappropriate Web sites. But these state firewalls don't help us. They hurt all of us. They impede our ability to serve students and better understand how we can improve American education.

I brought this up in a meeting in California two weeks ago and a local union leader said the following: “Gather data so you can decide who the good teachers are? Wrong. We need more data, but not to use it as a basis for teachers' pay.”

Now I absolutely respect the concerns of teachers that test scores alone should never be used solely to determine salaries. I absolutely agree with that sentiment. I also appreciate that growth models as they exist today are far less than perfect. We have a lot of work still ahead of us.

But to somehow suggest that we should not link student achievement and teacher effectiveness is like suggesting we judge a sports team without looking at the box score.

It's like saying, since standardized tests are not perfect, eliminate testing until they are. I think that's simply ridiculous. We need to monitor progress. We need to know what is and is not working and why.

Hopefully, some day, we can track children from preschool to high school and from high school to college and college to career. We must track highgrowth children in classrooms to their great teachers and great teachers to their schools of education.

In California, they have 300,000 teachers. If you took the top 10 percent, they have 30,000 of the best teachers in the world. If you took the bottom 10 percent, they have 30,000 teachers that should probably find another profession, yet no one in California can tell you which teacher is in which category. Something is wrong with that picture.

I know that many forward-thinking educators share this view and I am confident that, with your help and your thoughtful work, we can overcome the legitimate concerns of teachers that they are being judged merely on test scores.

We began a pay-for-performance program in Chicago that was designed by 25 of our city's best teachers. It rewards not just individual teachers but entire schools and includes several factors well beyond test scores.

It's too early to see real results about pay-forperformance initiatives. There aren't a lot of studies showing it boosts student achievement, but there is plenty of evidence that it boosts worker productivity in other industries, so why shouldn't we try it? Over time, you collectively will tell us whether it's working.

We will also push states to make data available to researchers. Of course, we realize student privacy is a real concern. But there are solutions. We can assign student identifiers to connect databases in school systems. Universities, researchers and other nongovernmental third parties can strip out personally identifiable information from those databases.

And, hopefully, some day, we can track children from preschool to high school and from high school to college and college to career. We must track highgrowth children in classrooms to their great teachers and great teachers to their schools of education.

Which schools of education are producing the teachers that produce the students that improve the most year after year? We need to know that answer.

We can one day do a better job of understanding what makes great teachers tick, why they succeed, why they stay in the classroom and how others can be like them. Hopefully, we can track good programs to higher test scores to higher graduation rates. Hopefully, one day we can look a child in the eye at the age of eight or nine or 10 and say, “You are on track to be accepted and to succeed in a competitive university and, if you keep working hard, you will absolutely get there.”

Today, many states are well along the path to having good data systems. Today, nearly every district has an information system that stores data about students, and more teachers have access to these systems than ever before.

In Garden Grove, California, teachers administer quarterly assessments aligned with California state standards. Results are available the next day.

In Long Beach, teachers see benchmarked assessments, attendance and behavior. They meet regularly together to review data, monitor student progress, and plan strategies for at-risk students. In addition, the high school students monitor their own progress. How is that for motivation? We need more and more districts using this kind of technology to help them improve.

The Data Quality Campaign, DQC, lists 10 elements of a good data system. Six states, Alabama, Arizona, Delaware, Florida, Louisiana, and Utah, have all 10 elements. Other states are also making progress. For example, Arkansas has a data warehouse that integrates school fiscal information, teacher credentials, and student coursework, assessments, and even extracurricular activities.

The system has allowed for better student tracking to enable the state to identify double-count enrollments and is saving it more than $2 million in its first year.

We want to see more states build comprehensive systems that track students from pre-K through college and then link school data to workforce data. We want to know whether Johnny participated in an early learning program and completed college on time and whether those things have any bearing on his earnings as an adult.

Hopefully, one day we can look a child in the eye at the age of eight or nine or 10 and say, “You are on track to be accepted and to succeed in a competitive university and, if you keep working hard, you will absolutely get there.”

There's so much opportunity for growth and progress in this area. We have the money and we have the technology. The biggest barrier, the only remaining barrier in my mind is whether we have the courage. It takes courage to expose our weaknesses with a truly transparent data system. It takes courage to admit our flaws and take steps to address them.

It takes courage to always do the right thing by our children, but ultimately we all answer to the truth. You can dance around it for only so long. America's children need your help. America's educators need your help, and the president and I need your help. We don't have a minute to waste.

Reforming public education is not just a moral obligation. It is absolutely an economic imperative. It is the foundation for a strong future and a strong society. Education is the civil rights issue of our generation. The fight for quality education is about so much more than education. It's a fight for social justice. It is the only way to achieve the quality that inspired our democracy, that inspired women to stand up for their rights, and then inspired minorities to demand their fair share of the American promise, and it inspires every child to dream.

Those dreams are shaped in America's classrooms. They are nurtured by the dedicated teachers and principals all across America who do the hard work every single day of educating our children. And they are counting on all of you to help them get better, help them see how they can improve, and help them turn their students' dreams into reality.

So I thank you for all that you have done. I thank you in advance for all that you will do. And thank you, above all, for telling us the truth, for keeping us honest and for showing us the path forward. We may never have an opportunity like this again to transform the quality of education in our country. Together, let's make the most of it.

Thank you so much. Thanks so much.

U.S. Department of Education

Arne Duncan
Secretary

August 2009

Arne Duncan 2

More from Arne Duncan

FOR RELEASE: July 2, 2009

Speaker sometimes deviates from text.

		More Resources Press release

Good morning. Thank you for having me and thank you for hosting one of our Listening and Learning events. We embarked on this tour to hear from people in classrooms and schools—people who are facing educational challenges and finding solutions.

I've now been to 22 states and dozens of communities. I've met with hundreds of teachers and principals, education support staff, students, parents, superintendents, college professors, higher education administrators, and community leaders.

Everyone I spoke with understands that the status quo is not good enough. They want to get better—they need to get better—and they're willing to work even harder. They just want to be part of the process and they want their voices to be heard.

So I look forward today to hearing your voices—hearing what you have to say—hearing your ideas for improving American education. I encourage you to think boldly and courageously—to challenge me, challenge yourselves, and challenge each other.

But we must be willing to do more than talk. We all must be willing to change. As I said recently, education reform isn't a table around which we all talk. It's a moving train and we all need to get on board.

I have had some compelling conversations with the NEA (National Education Association) leadership and many of your members. I'm convinced that if everyone is on board this train, it will gain enough speed, momentum, and direction to take public education to a new and better place.

In recent weeks, I have given a series of speeches about the four core reforms embodied in the Recovery Act leading up to the release of $5 billion in competitive grants.

The first speech was about creating data systems that follow the progress of students from pre–K through college so teachers can better meet the needs of students and we can help identify teachers who are doing well or who are struggling.

The second speech was about adopting higher standards and creating high-quality assessments. I want to thank you for your support of higher standards. That's the kind of leadership we need on a whole range of issues.

The third speech was about turning around our most troubled schools. We proposed several models and invited everyone to be part of the solution: unions, charters, nonprofits, for–profits, universities, states, and districts.

I also challenged the audience of charter school operators and authorizers to get much more serious about accountability. They must not protect third–rate charters. Those schools need to close. Charter schools are public schools and they should be held to the same standards as everyone else.

Today is the last of my four speeches, and the focus today is on the quality of the education workforce— teachers, principals, and education support professionals. I want to acknowledge some of the good things that we have done and talk about some of the things we haven't done.

I came here today to challenge you to think differently about the role of unions in public education because, when thousands of schools are chronically failing and millions of children are dropping out each year, we all must think differently.

It's not enough to focus only on issues like job security, tenure, compensation, and evaluation. You must become full partners and leaders in education reform. You and I must be willing to change.

I know we won't all agree on everything—but I'm confident there will be more we agree with than not. It starts with our shared values.

We believe it is our moral obligation to give children the very best education possible. We believe every child can learn and every school can succeed. We believe teaching is a profession and good teachers and principals are essential to success.

Unlike many of you, my values and views on education were not shaped in the front of a classroom. In 1961, my mother began an after-school, inner-city tutoring program on the South Side of Chicago and raised my brother, sister, and me as a part of her program.

That daily experience was an absolutely formative one for all three of us and we all tried to follow in her footsteps in various ways. It was work filled both with great heartbreak and also amazing triumph.

We experienced our share of early, violent deaths because of the community's chaos, and those experiences shape you and frankly scar you in ways that to this day are difficult to talk about.

But from the group of friends I grew up studying with and playing ball with, from one street corner at 46th and Greenwood, emerged literally a brain surgeon, a Hollywood movie star, one of my top administrators at the Chicago Public Schools, and one of IBM's international corporate leaders.

How did this happen? Because these children, despite tremendous poverty, despite staggering neighborhood violence, despite challenges at home, had my mother and others in their lives who gave them real opportunities, real support and guidance over the years, and had the highest expectations for them. And because of that opportunity, their gifts and their talents, and their fierce desire to succeed, blossomed.

I came here today to challenge you to think differently about the role of unions in public education because, when thousands of schools are chronically failing and millions of children are dropping out each year, we all must think differently.

What I learned as a little boy, what continues to motivate my mother today 48 years after she began her work, are the same two values that motivate all of you.

It is a fundamental, unalterable belief that every child can learn, and a fundamental understanding of the tremendous urgency of our work. Simply put, we cannot wait because our children cannot wait.

I've met a thousand educators like my mother in schools all across America. I've seen them on an Indian reservation in Montana, in a West Virginia middle school, at a high school in Detroit, and a charter school in Newark.

All of us remember an educator or coach who changed our life. It stays with us forever. It sustains us, guides us, and inspires us. They're the ones who commit those everyday acts of kindness and love and never ask for anything in return. They counsel troubled teens, take phone calls at night, and reach into their pockets for lunch money for children who are too ashamed to ask.

I've seen how much these educators want to be valued for their work and honored for what they are: dedicated, professional, compassionate, serious, and responsible. These are the qualities of a great educator and we have millions of them all across America.

My next experience was with the I Have a Dream foundation, where we adopted a class of students and agreed to send them to college if they stayed in school. The previous class had a 67 percent dropout rate while we had an 87 percent graduation rate.

After that, I helped start a small new traditional neighborhood public school, the Ariel Academy. It wasn't a charter. It had union teachers and today it is one of the highest-performing public schools in Chicago— even though all of the kids come from poverty.

Finally, I spent seven years running the Chicago Public Schools, where I learned other important lessons. We set up 150 community schools open 12 hours a day and offering classes to adults and students.

We paid teachers to work extra hours and many of them took on that responsibility because they were committed to the school's success. Schools must support the social and emotional needs of students and engage the whole family.

We also increased the number of National Board Certified teachers in Chicago to about 1,200—from about a dozen when I started. We partnered with the union and with the Chicago Public Education Fund, which is a group of business leaders. Together we grew NBC teachers faster than anywhere else in the nation.

I am a big believer in this program, but let's also be honest: school systems pay teachers billions of dollars more each year for earning PD (professional development) credentials that do very little to improve the quality of teaching.

At the same time, many schools give nothing at all to the teachers who go the extra mile and make all the difference in students' lives. Excellence matters and we should honor it—fairly, transparently, and on terms teachers can embrace.

The president and I have both said repeatedly that we are not going to impose reform but rather work with teachers, principals, and unions to find what works. And that is what we did in Chicago. We enlisted the help of 24 of the best teachers in the system to design a pilot performance compensation system. We also sat down with the union and bargained it out.

It was based on classroom observation, whole school performance, and individual classroom performance, measured in part by growth in student learning. The rewards and incentives for good performance went to every adult in the school, including custodians and cafeteria workers, and not to just the individual teachers.

Where you see high–performing schools, it's the culture—every adult taking responsibility and creating a culture of high expectations.

We're asking Congress for more money to develop compensation programs “with” you and “for” you–not “to” you—programs that will put money in the pockets of your teachers and support personnel by recognizing and rewarding excellence.

So I begin our conversation today around some important areas of agreement: Excellence in teaching, good professional development, schools open longer hours, and a shared responsibility for student success among all the adults in the school building.

But the president and I want to go further. I want to describe some tough challenges and ask you how we can work together to meet them. Let's start by talking about underperforming schools.

We don't need a study to tell us that chronically underperforming schools do not have the best principals and teachers. Experience tells us that failing schools usually have poor leadership, and poor leadership usually drives away good teachers.

Now often we try replacing the leadership, and sometimes that works. We need to invest much more in principal leadership. We need to recruit and train the very best people possible because the job is hard and the cost of failure is too high.

Principals run multimillion dollar budgets, they hire, train, and manage scores of people, and the best of them are also instructional leaders who are trained in classroom observation. It's a lot to ask of anyone, and we need 95,000 of them in America.

Great principals lead talented instructional teams that drive student performance and close achievement gaps. They deserve to be recognized and rewarded. But if they're not up to the job, they need to go.

Similarly, in struggling schools we have tried boosting support for teaching staff and making other changes around curriculum, school day, etc., and sometimes it has worked. I always favor more support, collaboration, mentoring, and time on task.

But sometimes, despite our best efforts, these methods don't work. Today, America has about 5,000 schools that continue to underperform year after year, despite our best efforts.

Two thousand high schools produce half of the dropouts in the country. Their kids are years behind grade. They are perpetuating poverty and social failure. When it comes to these schools, we need to think differently. We need the courage to change.

We need to go into a room—states, districts, unions, administrators, foundations, think tanks, charters, nonprofits, parents, and elected officials—lock the door, throw out the rule books, and start with a clean slate.

We need to be open and honest about the challenges and the barriers. If we agree that children need more time, then we must give it to them. If we agree that teachers need more support, then we must give it to them.

But if we agree that the adults in these schools are failing these children, then we have to find the right people and we can't let our rules and regulations get in the way. Children have only one chance to get an education.

It's also not about charters or unions. Chicago has turnaround schools led by a businessman who uses union teachers and he's getting great results. So does Green Dot in Los Angeles.

But Mastery Charters in Philadelphia is a different turnaround model and we need that as well. There is so much urgency and so much need in underperforming schools that we can't impede successful models like these, regardless of governance structure.

The NEA has an honest and passionate leader in Dennis Van Roekel. He shares our sense of urgency. He has told me personally that he'll walk into any room with anyone to talk about how to turn schools around.

And that gives me hope. We're losing too many children today and incremental change won't save them. We need dramatic change.

And we can't continue to blame each other or blame the system. We are the system and it is up to us—you and me—to change it. So let's talk about that.

We created seniority rules that protect teachers from arbitrary and capricious management, and that's a good goal. But sometimes those rules place teachers in schools and communities where they won't succeed, and that's wrong.

We created tenure rules to make sure that a struggling teacher gets a fair opportunity to improve, and that's a good goal. But when an ineffective teacher gets a chance to improve and doesn't—and when the tenure system keeps that teacher in the classroom anyway—then the system is protecting jobs rather than children. That's not a good thing. We need to work together to change that.

I told the charter schools they need to police themselves or their progress will be stalled. I told the school boards that if they can't improve student achievement, they have a moral obligation to consider mayoral control.

And I'm telling you as well that, when inflexible seniority and rigid tenure rules that we designed put adults ahead of children, then we are not only putting kids at risk, we're also putting the entire education system at risk. We're inviting the attack of parents and the public, and that is not good for any of us.

I believe that teacher unions are at a crossroads. These policies were created over the past century to protect the rights of teachers, but they have produced an industrial factory model of education that treats all teachers like interchangeable widgets.

A recent report from the New Teacher Project found that almost all teachers are rated the same. Who in their right mind really believes that? We need to work together to change this.

Now, let's talk about data. I understand that word can make people nervous, but I see data first and foremost as a barometer. It tells us what is happening. Used properly, it can help teachers better understand the needs of their students. Too often, teachers don't have good data to inform instruction and help raise student achievement.

Data can also help identify and support teachers who are struggling. And it can help evaluate them. The problem is that some states prohibit linking student achievement and teacher effectiveness.

I understand that tests are far from perfect and that it is unfair to reduce the complex, nuanced work of teaching to a simple multiple choice exam. Test scores alone should never drive evaluation, compensation, or tenure decisions. That would never make sense. But to remove student achievement entirely from evaluation is illogical and indefensible.

Our challenge is to make sure every child in America is learning from an effective teacher—no matter what it takes. So today, I ask you to join President Obama and me in a new commitment to results that recognizes and rewards success in the classroom and is rooted in our common obligation to children.

It's time we all admit that just as our testing system is deeply flawed, so is our teacher evaluation system, and the losers are not just the children. When great teachers are unrecognized and unrewarded, when struggling teachers are unsupported, and when failing teachers are unaddressed the teaching profession is damaged.

We need to work together to fix this and I will meet you more than halfway. I will demand the same of every principal, administrator, school board member, elected official, and parent. I ask only the same of you that I ask of myself and others.

The NEA has long history of reform on issues of health care, child advocacy, civil rights, and disabilities rights. And I don't begin to suggest that all teachers and unions are standing in the way of reform. I know many of your members and affiliates have been working on these issues. In Illinois, for example, the IEA (Illinois Education Association) has led a 20-year effort to build labor–management partnerships around school improvement.

One of the leaders of that effort, Jo Anderson, has joined our team. He's here today and I thank him for his work.

I also want to acknowledge my general counsel Charlie Rose, who was our labor lawyer in Illinois. Charlie told me years ago that the key to making progress on education reform begins with respect for the labormanagement relationship.

I believe that and I salute union–management partnerships all across America that are working together to develop better hiring, compensation, evaluation, and turnaround strategies. But we need to move faster and we need to go further.

America's teachers are yearning to be partners in reform and change. They want teaching to be a respected profession that has high standards for performance, rewards excellence, provides opportunities for advancement, and promotes real collaboration.

They are tired of being demonized, blamed, and disrespected. They want to get on the train. Let me share a powerful quote from your former president, Mary Hatwood Futrell:

The education reform movement demands not only that we seize the opportunity, but that we embrace the responsibility that is ours. You and I must provide the leadership … and share this responsibility with every parent and citizen who is concerned about safeguarding the sanctity and purpose of public education for all.

Taking her words to heart, our challenge is to make sure every child in America is learning from an effective teacher—no matter what it takes. So today, I ask you to join President Obama and me in a new commitment to results that recognizes and rewards success in the classroom and is rooted in our common obligation to children.

You've heard my voice, and I appreciate that. Now I want to hear your voices. I began my remarks with a personal story. I just want to close with one more.

Dr. Martin Luther King came to the West Side of Chicago in 1966 to protest housing discrimination. His powerful and inspiring message brought billions of dollars into that community for housing, job-training, and community development.

But when I took over the public schools in Chicago 35 years later, the children of North Lawndale were still desperately poor. You have to ask yourself why, after so much money and time, nothing had changed.

It's because they forgot to invest in the one thing with the power to transform lives. They forgot education. They put all of that money into bricks and mortar and social programs, but they forgot to give the people the skills they need to help themselves.

President Obama learned that lesson and that's why the Recovery Act invests more than $100 billion in education. I want to thank NEA for your support. That money is going into our classrooms to keep teachers teaching and kids learning so we can educate our way to a better economy.

The president understands that the nation that outteaches us today will out–compete us tomorrow. He understands that education is the foundation of our economic strategy and the only sure path to long-term economic strength.

That's why he wants America to produce the highest percentage of college graduates by the end of the next decade. This is our moon shot. This is our call to action.

It is an economic imperative and a moral imperative. This is the civil rights issue of our generation. The fight for a quality education is about so much more than education. It's a fight for social justice. And he's counting on you to lead that fight.

There is simply no more important work in our society than education. The president understands that, parents understand that, America understands that. Now we—all of us together—must act on that understanding and move forward.

Thank you.

U.S. Department of Education
Arne Duncan
Secretary

Talk 1 from Arne Duncan

Talk 1 from Arne Duncan. FOR RELEASE: June 14, 2009

I am continually struck by the profound wisdom underlying the American political experiment. The genius of our system is that much of the power to shape our future has, wisely, been distributed to the states instead of being confined to Washington.

Our best ideas have always come from state and local governments, which are the real hothouses of innovation in America.

On so many issues—energy efficiency, mass transit, public safety, housing and economic development–it's the states that are often leading the way, sometimes with federal help and sometimes without.

Nowhere is this truer than in the field of education, where dedicated practitioners in schools and districts and states are constantly finding new and better ways to educate our children and prepare them for the world.

When I was running Chicago's schools I knew that the federal government's role was to support our work—not to direct it or micro–emanage it but to encourage, reward, and support the innovation and progress that were being made at the state and local levels.

Now that I am in Washington, it's even clearer to me that education reform starts locally—in classrooms, schools, districts, and states—and my job is to help you succeed.

The call for higher standards is a perfect example.

It started with governors like Jim Hunt and Roy Romer, who are both here tonight, as well as Richard Riley and Lamar Alexander, both of whom have been very helpful to me in these first few months.

So I am thrilled to be among the true education reformers who understand the stakes, want to see change, and are determined to lift American education to a new level.

I'd like to start by saluting Jim Hunt and Roy Romer for their vision and courage on the issue of education reform. They challenged all of us to make education more than a political talking point or an empty slogan.

Governor Hunt called for common national standards when it wasn't politically popular. His institute has done important work with the National Research Council that shows that there is the political will to accomplish this task today.

Likewise, Roy Romer led the call for higher standards as a governor and as a superintendent. Throughout the 2008 election, he kept this issue in the national dialogue, and we wouldn't have 46 states and three territories agreeing to adopt high common standards if it weren't for his hard work.

Again I want to thank you both for showing leadership on an issue that is critically important to our future.

Let me start by talking about the unique, historic, and powerful opportunity we have to transform public education.

We have a perfect storm for reform. We have:

• The Obama effect;
• Leadership on the Hill and in the unions;
• Proven strategies for success; and
• The Recovery Act providing $100 billion.

Let me give you an update on state fiscal stabilization:

• As of last week, 31 states had received $24 billion in stabilization funds and $11 billion more in Title I and IDEA funds.
• Several more states have their applications in and are close to being approved.
• We are urging governors to get their applications in by July 1.
• We promise to turn around applications quickly. This is currently taking about 10 calendar days.

We are working as fast as we can because we understand that states are hurting in the current economy. We know that you are struggling to balance budgets, and we appreciate that you are working hard to protect schoolchildren.

I also appreciate that the primary focus of the Recovery Act is to save and create jobs, and we're deeply grateful that states across America are helping save hundreds of thousands of teaching and other education–related jobs.

But if all we do is save jobs, we will miss this opportunity, which is why we are also using this recovery money to drive reform in four core areas. I'd like to talk about them.

It starts with robust data systems that track student achievement and teacher effectiveness, which I discussed in a speech to academic researchers last week.

We need to do a much better job of tracking students from pre–K through college. Teachers need this data to better target instruction to students. Principals need to know which teachers are producing the biggest gains and which may need more help.

We also need to track teachers back to their colleges of education so we can challenge teacher training programs to raise the bar.

This is where reform will play out. It will filter up from classrooms and schools, districts and localities, but then it will arrive on your desks. And when it does, I urge you to remember that the truest measure of a society's worth is whether it offers all of our children the opportunity to go where they want to go, do what they want to do, and fulfill their dreams.This is the promise of education. This is the American promise.

There's a lot of money available in the Recovery Act to help improve our data systems and I want to work with you to put the very best technology at the service of educators.

The second area of reform is teacher and principal quality, which I will discuss in a speech to the NEA (National Education Association) in July, but let me touch on it briefly.

Nothing is more important than getting great teachers into our classrooms and great principals into our schools. And there are millions of hard–working, dedicated teachers in schools all across America.

But there are many schools where the teaching staff has declined either because of poor leadership or simply professional burnout. And there are also some new teachers who simply don't belong in the classroom. That's not unique to teaching. It's true in every field.

But we can't allow that to continue, and we need to work with our education leadership to address this. We need to look much harder at recruiting, training, and supporting our teachers and principals.

We also have to fix our method of evaluating teachers, which is basically broken.

A recent report by the New Teacher Project shows that 99 percent of teachers are all rated the same, and most teacher rating systems don't factor in student achievement.

Some states actually have laws creating a firewall between teacher evaluation and student achievement. This isn't fair to kids or to teachers. Worse yet, it's not honest.

How can you possibly talk about teacher quality without factoring in student achievement?

We also need to have an open mind on issues like alternative certification and incentive and performance pay.

I understand that teachers are concerned about the fairness of performance pay. I share those concerns, but I am confident that if we sit down with the unions—instead of forcing it on them—we can find ways to reward excellence in the classroom.

The third area of reform is turning around our lowestperforming schools, which I will discuss at greater length in a speech to charter advocates next week.

Last year, there were about 5,000 schools in “restructuring” under NCLB (the No Child Left Behind Act). These schools have failed to make adequate yearly progress for at least five years in a row.

The children in these schools can't wait for incremental reform. They need radical change right now–new leadership, new staff, and a whole new educational approach.

We need to build more capacity to turn around these 5,000 schools. Everyone needs to get in the game: charters, unions, districts, states, nonprofits.

This is very hard work and very few people do it, but we have a moral obligation to save those kids.

States and districts need to step up and have the political courage to close failing schools and let others try. We have $3.5 billion in Title I school improvement funds to support this work and another $1.5 billion in the 2010 budget.

We need leaders with the courage to do the right thing and we need educators with the energy and determination to take on the toughest challenges in public education.

That's why our administration is pushing so hard to lift charter caps. We want new educational options for those communities. We want innovation to flourish, and where charters are doing well there should not be barriers to growth.

Where they are not doing well, however, they should be held accountable. Many of you have great charter schools in your states. I have visited some of them.

But many of you have charter schools in your states that, frankly, are not getting the job done. If they are failing, they should close and the children should have another option.

I opened more than 70 charter schools in Chicago. I closed down three for academic failure and mismanagement. Every state needs to look hard at the quality of their charter schools.

I also think that we need to break through the dynamic that positions charters against unions.

Albert Shanker, the legendary union leader, was an early advocate of charters. The AFT (American Federation of Teachers) represents something like 70 charters and the NEA (National Education Association) represents another 40.

So we should stop fighting over charter caps and unite behind charter accountability.

The fourth and final area of reform called for in the Recovery Act is around higher standards and assessments.

We think that every state should set internationally benchmarked standards and assessments that prepare students for success in the workforce and college.

World-class standards are the foundation on which you will build your reforms.

Some state leaders have been telling us that for decades. I mentioned governors Hunt and Romer earlier. There have been many others.

Governor Barnes of Georgia and Governor Tommy Thompson of Wisconsin led a bipartisan commission on changing NCLB. Fixing our patchwork of 50 [sets of] state standards was a key part of their proposal.

Many other governors have been actively involved with Achieve over the years.

I want to thank Governor Pawlenty (Minn.) for taking a leadership role at Achieve right now, and also thank governors Granholm (Mich.), Carcieri (R.I.), Rendell (Pa.), Bredesen (Tenn.), Heineman (Neb.), and Patrick (Mass.).

Gene Wilhoit has made national standards his top priority as the executive director of the Council of Chief State School Officers. Thanks to his organization and the NGA (National Governors Association). Your hard work and leadership are paying off.

As I said before, 46 states and three territories have now committed to creating common internationally benchmarked college–and career–ready standards. And you deserve a big, big hand for that.

Creating common standards hasn't always been popular. Right now, though, there's a growing consensus that this is the right thing to do.

The list of supporters for this effort is long: The National Education Association, the American Federation of Teachers, the Council of the Great City Schools, and business leaders. From what I've heard on our listening tour, teachers in the classroom are supporting you as well.

Just last month, the U.S. Department of Education started asking for comments on policy issues through the Web site. Our first question was about raising standards.

The first response came from a woman named Michelle Wilson, who identified herself as a library media specialist.

She wrote: “I believe one of our country's weakest points in education is that the level of standards differs for every state.”

Education is a state and local issue. You pay 90 percent of the tab, and our job is to support leaders like you.

Another woman wrote, “If all states followed the same standards then there would be less inequity for our students.”

I agree with them both. With higher standards that are common across states we can share best practices and collaborate on curricula.

We can learn together about how to improve teacher preparation and development so that far more teachers can help students master challenging standards.

This can accelerate all of your reform work.

It is especially important that this has started at the state level because some people will raise concerns that common standards across states will lead to federal over–reaching.

I am very sensitive to that issue. As I said before, I was a local educator before I came to Washington.

Education is a state and local issue. You pay 90 percent of the tab, and our job is to support leaders like you.

So let's be clear: this effort is being led by governors and chief state schools officers. This is your work and this is your agenda.

Federal law does not mandate national standards. It empowers states to decide what kids need to learn and how to measure it.

But common sense also tells you that kids in big cities like Newark and San Francisco, or small towns like Tarboro, North Carolina, are no different from each other.

Standards shouldn't change once you cross the Mississippi River or the Rocky Mountains. Kids competing for the same jobs should meet the same standards.

So while this effort is being led at the state level, as it should be, it is absolutely a national challenge, which we must meet together or we will compromise our future.

The president called on us to produce more college graduates than any other country in the world. We cannot reach that goal without your leadership and the commitment of educators all across America.

You've taken the first step. Your stated goals are “higher, clearer, and fewer” standards, and I absolutely support your goals. The standards must be tied to the end point of making sure students are ready to succeed in college or in the workplace.

For too long, we've been lying to kids. We tell them they're doing fine, give them good grades, and tell them they're proficient on state tests that aren't challenging.

Then they get to college and they're put into remedial classes. Or they go into the workforce and find out that they don't have the skills they need to succeed.

We need standards that will get them ready for the day after they graduate. That means they must be rigorous.

Today, our standards are too low and the results on international tests show it. Worse yet, we see the signals in the international economy as more and more engineers, doctors, and science and math Ph.D.s come from abroad.

You must resist the temptation to make these standards too easy. Our children deserve to graduate from high school prepared for college and the jobs of the future.

Your standards must be rigorous and they also must be tightly focused on the most important things students need to know.

Right now, standards are too broad, covering 35 to 40 topics per subject in each grade as opposed to 15 or 20 standards in many high–performing countries.

Teachers scramble to cover everything—a little of this, a little of that, and not enough of what's really important.

They can't dig deeper on a challenging subject that excites their students. And students can't master material when they are racing through it.

We must limit standards to the essential knowledge and skills our kids need so teachers can focus in depth on the most important things their kids should know.

And once these standards have been created—and reviewed by professionals in every state—I encourage you to adopt them.

That's when everyone will know that you are serious. That's when your leadership will be tested because people will push back.

The fact is higher standards will make some of your states look bad in the short term because fewer students will be meeting them.

So I will work with you to ensure that your states will not be penalized for doing the right thing.

And in reauthorizing No Child Left Behind, the administration will work with you and with Congress to change the law so that it rewards states for raising standards instead of encouraging states to lower them.

I always give NCLBcredit for exposing the achievement gap, but the central flaw in the law is that it was too loose about the goals and too tight about how to get there.

As states come together around higher common standards, I want to flip it and be tighter about the goals but more flexible in how you can meet them.

I trust states and districts to find the way, and I don't trust Washington to tell you how to do it. You have the ideas, the leadership, and the ability. I'm here to support you.

And then our next step is to work together to find a better way to measure success, and that brings me to the real point of this speech, which is the assessments.

Once new standards are set and adopted you need to create new tests that measure whether students are meeting those standards. Tonight I am announcing that the Obama administration will help pay for the costs of developing those tests.

As you know, we have $5 billion in competitive grant funding under the Recovery Act to help advance these four reforms.

Congress carved out $650 million for the Invest in What Works and Innovation fund, which is for districts and nonprofits that are pushing reform.

The administration will dedicate up to $350 million of the remaining funds to help develop new assessments.

We haven't worked out all the details yet, but, in the coming months, we will develop an application process that supports this effort.

We need tests that measure whether students are mastering complex materials and can apply their knowledge in ways that show that they are ready for college and careers.

We need tests that go beyond multiple choice, and we know that these kinds of tests are expensive to develop. It will cost way too much if each state is doing this on its own.

Collaboration makes it possible for this to happen quickly and affordably.

Now, again, some people may claim that a commonly created test is a threat to state control, but let's remember who is in charge. You are. You will create these tests. You will drive the process. You will call the shots.

We just want tests that are aligned with your rigorous standards and accurately reflect what is happening in classrooms so that teachers, parents, and students can trust the results.

And we also encourage you to work together to develop benchmarked tests so that teachers can understand how their students are doing during the school year and can target instruction accordingly.

Once new standards are set and adopted you need to create new tests that measure whether students are meeting those standards. Tonight I am announcing that the Obama administration will help pay for the costs of developing those tests.

This is a growth area for the testing industry, which may worry some that assessments used across multiple states will be bad for business even if it's the right thing for kids.

However, it's not my job to worry about their business. My job is to worry about kids, and I know that our kids not only need to be challenged but they want to be challenged.

Everywhere I go—a Montana Indian reservation, a high school in Detroit, or a middle school in West Virginia—the kids are telling us, “Challenge me, push me, make me work and I will do it.”

And that means that higher standards will require more rigorous teaching and curricula, and that's why the other three reforms are so important to our overall strategy.

But it all starts with you: Raising the bar, raising expectations, and raising our sights.

Before I finish, I want to talk about the Race to the Top fund. I explained that the Recovery Act provides $5 billion in discretionary funding.

After the set–asides for the Invest in What Works and Innovation fund and the money for the new assessments, we will have $4 billion for states to drive education reform.

This is your opportunity to be bold and creative, to think big and push hard on the kind of reforms that we know will create fundamental change.

But this money will go only to states that are absolutely pushing reform in real and measurable ways—states where great educators are turning around our worst schools, meeting the highest standards, and producing career– and college–ready graduates.

We will ask tough questions around these four reform areas. We will ask you to show us how you will build a coherent strategy around these four reforms to produce a world–class education system—not just for some kids but for all kids.

States can also collaborate with each other or apply on their own.

In addition to evaluating your Race to the Top proposals, we will consider how your other Recovery Act dollars are being invested because that's also an opportunity to drive reform.

The draft application will go public in late July and be final by early fall. We will award grants in two rounds, the first one early next year and the second one in September 2010.

States that lose the first time have a chance to win in the second round. But we must see real and meaningful change. You must eliminate barriers to innovation and create the best possible conditions for success.

We have invited education stakeholders across the spectrum to get involved and we encourage you to work with your districts, with educators, with nonprofits, and with labor unions, to put together the very best applications possible.

We have talked to leading foundations and they are eager to support your work, so I urge you to reach out to them and draw on their expertise and resources.

There has never been this much money on the table and there may never be again. And there has never been a greater need.

With 30 percent of our kids dropping out of high school and millions of those in college struggling to achieve, we are falling dangerously behind other countries.

Improving education is not just a moral obligation of society. It's not just an economic imperative. It's the civil rights issue of our generation—the only sure path out of poverty and the only way to achieve the vision of equality spelled out by our founders.

As we look to the years ahead, we will continue to look to the governors and state education chiefs for leadership and innovation.

We will continue to find more ways to support your work on behalf of children. We will continue to do everything in our power to fulfill your collective vision of great schools producing great citizens, great thinkers, and great doers.

Today, perhaps for the first time, we have enough money to really make a difference. We have proven strategies for success in schools all across America.

The only question is whether we have the political courage, the will to make the tough choices that are right for kids.

At the end of the day, this comes down to leadership, partly in Washington but mostly in state capitals all across America.

This is where reform will play out. It will filter up from classrooms and schools, districts and localities, but then it will arrive on your desks.

And when it does, I urge you to remember that the truest measure of a society's worth is whether it offers all of our children the opportunity to go where they want to go, do what they want to do, and fulfill their dreams.

This is the promise of education.

This is my promise. This is your promise. This is the American promise.

Thank you.

U.S. Department of Education
Arne Duncan
Secretary

Competencies Thought

I have recently been listening to the podcast, What you missed in High School, from How Stuff Works.

The podcasts are each about 15-20 minutes long and they are fascinating. One detailed exactly how Blackbeard worked. How he grew up, came to fame and eventually died. Another talked about the childhood of Queen Elizabeth--the daughter of Henry the VIII. One of the very best was the story of Gettysburg. They detailed in under 1/2 an hour how the South won that battle. And they were able to describe complex battle conditions in audio, without the help of maps or visuals.

Students should absolutely know the details in these podcasts. The should wallow in the details and become lost in the amazingness of history. But along with these details they should understand the context. This is where competencies come in. The details about Blackbeard are incredible and the fight that eventually leads to his death is incredible. BUT students need to also understand the context of why all of this was happening. The fact that Blackbeard was an outgrowth of the privateer system in England and how the ending of that system lead to an explosion of pirates.

Many have argued that there are no details to be learned in a competnecy based system. That is not the case. The fact is that the same details can be learned but we must explain to students the context in which they fit.

Bullying

Interesting program on NPR's Here and Now program today. Click to get the link.

The program on bullying began with the story of Karl a sixth grader who killed himself after a year of relentless bullying. They interviewed his mother and she was clearly a very strong woman who took the road of not only forgiving the bullies but dedicating the rest of her life to not only helping the victims but to helping the bullies.

The reason here and now focused on bullying today was because the American Pediatric Association just came out with a new report on bullying. Doctors are encouraged to ask about the school environment--not only in the classroom, but in the lunch room, hallways, etc. The later tend to be the places that bullying actual occurs according to the study.

I haven't studied bullies too much because it doesn't come up too often in in my teaching. Although it does happen and this story will help me be more vigilant in looking for it. I had a particularly nasty case this year where a student regularly made fun of a student with Asperger's syndrome.

The big take away for me is how schools have worked to solve bullying. There are 3 participants in a bullying situation. The victim, the bully and the bystander. Schools that have conquered bullying focus on getting the bystanders as a group to create a culture in the school where the bullies are seen as the outcasts.

Challenges 1 and 2

Help!! I need lesson plans for the first week of school and have no clue what the curriculum is or how to create a lesson plan that supports the district philosophy. Where do I go? Who do I see?

Well to begin I would venture to say that the district philosophy is to ensure that students know what the big picture is and what they need to do to understand the material. A lesson plan that supports this philosophy would have students engaged in a variety of instructional methods. Some direct instruction, some hands on, some individual, some in groups. The teacher would frequently check if the instruction was working and take corrective actions when necessary. Remember what Chris Demers said—we need to teach more like art teachers and coaches—with corrective action coming immediately not delayed till a test.

To find what the curriculum is teachers, even veteran teachers, should consult the teachers in the building who have gone before them. Lesson planning alone should be avoided. There is someone in your building who has taught chemistry before and someone who has taught second grade for 25 years. My mentor didn’t tell me what to do but she did provide every single activity that she had used the previous year. That meant that I began my teaching with activities that were created after 16 years of teaching experience. Why would we want to do it any other way? She sat with me and explained how she had used each one and made suggestions for how I might use them. She provided samples of the notes she had given and let me know about possible pitfalls I might encounter. When I had difficulty I went to her and said—this didn’t work…what did I do wrong. And I would go into her room and watch her teach something that I had never taught before. I hope this is how it will work for you.

I’ve noticed that after lunch, my students are dozing off in class… What can I do to keep them engaged?

My high school students do this because they often consume lunches consisting of ketchup packets and energy drinks loaded with sugar. I’m not kidding by the way, I can’t tell you how many boys come in and tell me that they were in a ketchup packet eating contest at lunch. This inevitably leads to a crash at some point.

Research on high school students tells us that we should never go more that 20 minutes on one activity. Even in AP Biology where we think the kids might be able to take longer—go for 20 minutes only. At the younger grades the time goes down accordingly. This approach also makes sure that you are varying your teaching style and approach during the class or day.

Rick Wormeli, a leading speaker and writer on assessment and instruction, cites research showing that tiredness is often caused by dehydration. Seems silly but it is really important to allow water breaks often during class. At the high school level if I see a sleeping or nodding student I make them get up and go get a drink. The walk wakes them up and it alerts me that I may have gone on too long with my talking.

Finally, don’t be offended by a child who is nodding off—unless they do it all the time. Use it as a sign that tells you—if this kid can’t even stay awake then I bet the other kids aren’t super engaged either. Use it as a critique of yourself and say, “Why aren’t the kids engaged with what we are doing right now?” You can use simple techniques like popsicle sticks to make sure everyone is listening. Write down every student’s name on a popsicle stick and pull them out of a can when asking questions. Dylan Wiliam has shown that this simple approach can increase engagement from a handful of students to nearly everyone in the class.

Arne Duncan on Ed. Reform

I was reading through Secretary of Education Arne Duncan's speeches on education reform. I got tenure after two years and didn't have to do too much to earn it so I read the one on tenure and unions first. This caught my eye.

I linked to all of the speeches below. The over riding theme is that we have to face out tough problems and to do that we are going to have to make some changes. Duncan squarely keeps the focus on children and that is definitely where it needs to be.

Take a read for yourself and let me know what you think.

• adopt rigorous standards that prepare students for success in college and the workforce at the 2009 Governors Education Symposium
• recruit and retain effective teachers, especially in classrooms where they’re needed most, at the National Education Association annual conference
• build data systems to track student achievement and teacher effectiveness at the annual conference of ED’s Institute of Education Sciences
• turn around low-performing schools at the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools Conference.

Collaboration and Communication

This is a section from the “synthesis” paper I have been working on. It is a first draft and I would love comments and suggestions.

Collaboration and Communication
When we had our first child my wife was in labor for 12 hours. During the 10 hours of that that we were in the hospital we must have seen 15 or 20 people. There was one wonderful nurse, Heather, who was assigned to work with my wife and I. But there were also other key people involved in the birth. Dr. Heidi, our obstetrician was there, of course and there were many other nurses and specialists.

If we compare the day to education Heather the nurse was like the classroom teacher and Dr. Heidi was the principal. The other nurses were like other teachers in the building. The people who drew blood were the specialists. The main difference in how they worked and how a school works is how they worked together. When Dr. Heidi would come in Heather wasn’t scared—she was excited. She would ask questions and make sure that she was doing all that she could for my wife and I. In turn, Dr. Heidi didn’t shout demands or give orders, she conferred with Heather and made suggestions about what might work in given situations. When my wife requested an epidural Heather, Dr. Heidi my wife and I all talked about the positives and negatives. They even suggested an alternative that we tried first. It wound up not working but we were glad we had tried everything before going to the drugs. (Once we went to the drugs my wife was quite happy.)

When our baby was born Heather stayed with us until the next nurse came on. Before leaving to go home she talked at great length with the new nurse and told her everything about us and our baby. The baby was five weeks early but was otherwise fine, vital signs, etc. Only then did she leave us. Since the baby was five weeks early a special nurse was called in. This nurse took a look at our child and concluded that our baby didn’t need extra help so she didn’t need to stay.

The analogies to education are obvious but the key thing we can learn from the medical profession is how they communicate profusely and how they collaborate with the interest of the patient foremost in their minds. As teachers when we collaborate (if we collaborate) it too often becomes a game of who is the better teacher. This thinking needs to go away. The vast majority of teachers are good, just in different ways. We need to lean on the strengths of other teachers to improve in the areas where they are a little stronger.

A few years ago someone told me how much work they had to do over the summer because they were teaching a new course. I asked them if anyone else in the department had ever taught it. They replied that about 6 other teachers had taught the course. It was clear from the rest of our conversation that the teacher wasn’t going to get much help from the other teachers on planning the course. Why? Imagine two dentists working in adjacent rooms. One knows a new tooth whitening technique, the other does not. Would the first dentist tell the second dentist to read about the technique to figure it out themselves? Of course not. So why do we have to behave this way in education.

Someone once told me that a new teacher was hired who had previously taught in Japan. She was told to come up with a lesson plan for a particular unit and said she couldn’t do it. When asked why she explained that she had never planned a lesson by herself—they just don’t do it that way in Japan. Doctors and nurses have learned that their collective knowledge is much more useful when there is a great deal of sharing and communicating. As teachers we need to work in the same way.

Learning

I have been musing about a post on learning--that the focus of education needs to be on learning. It keeps getting longer but the basic pieces are:

• Learning must be the focus of everything that everyone does.
• Hiring must be driven by a need to get the right people on the bus.
• Leaders must ensure that the focus of the school is learning
• Teachers must ensure that they are focusing on the most important learnings every day.
• Collaboration--teaching should not be an individual activity. Teaching should be an activity that is done collectively similar to how medical professionals work as a team to make you better.
• Special education is one tool to help students but there must be other tools that are equally robust to help students.
  

I've been trying to make it post length but it keeps getting longer. I'm thinking that the six things listed above might be a sort of synthesis for what schools and districts need to do to improve.