Brain Rules by John Medina

Summary of Brain Rules by John Medina

Compiled by Tom Crumrine

Brain Rules compiles 12 research based facts that we know about the brain. Medina summarizes what we know for sure about how the brain works and puts it into a very accessible format.

For a very good interactive website that goes into much more detail go to:

This website takes into effect all of the brain rules and provides a great way to learn all of the brain rules with great visuals, audio and graphs. There is also a 55 minute podcast available through iTunes. Search for Brain Rules and it will come up as episode 37 of the Brain Science Podcast.

The only advantage of this quick summary is that you can scan it faster than going to the website. If you follow the brain rules you will realize that the way to learn the brain rules is to go through them deeply and slowly. But this summary is just meant to entice you. I hope it will make you want to learn more about how the brain works.

One final challenge. As you go through the 12 Brain Rules some of them may seem obvious. But do we see them implemented in our classrooms? Especially as the grades get higher? If we aren’t seeing them in the classroom—why is that the case?

Let’s get started:

My thoughts are in this font.

Thoughts from Brain Rules are in this font.

At some points I added some red for emphasis.

Here are the 12 Brain Rules.

1. Exercise boosts brain power.
2. The human brain evolved too.
3. Every brain is wired differently.
4. We don't pay attention to boring things.
5. Repeat to remember.
6. Remember to repeat.
7. Sleep well, think well.
8. Stressed brains don't learn the same way.
9. Stimulate more of the senses.
10. Vision trumps all other senses.
11. Male and female brains are different.
12. We are powerful and natural explorers.
    

Rule #1: Exercise boosts brain power.

The human brain evolved under conditions of almost constant motion. From this, one might predict that the optimal environment for processing information would include motion. That is exactly what one finds. Indeed, the best business meeting would have everyone walking at about 1.8 miles per hour.

Rule #2: The human brain evolved, too.

• The brain is a survival organ. It is designed to solve problems related to surviving in an unstable outdoor environment and to do so in nearly constant motion (to keep you alive long enough to pass your genes on). We were not the strongest on the planet but we developed the strongest brains, the key to our survival.
• The strongest brains survive, not the strongest bodies. Our ability to solve problems, learn from mistakes, and create alliances with other people helps us survive. We took over the world by learning to cooperate and forming teams with our neighbors.
• Our ability to understand each other is our chief survival tool. Relationships helped us survive in the jungle and are critical to surviving at work and school today.
• If someone does not feel safe with a teacher or boss, he or she may not perform as well. If a student feels misunderstood because the teacher cannot connect with the way the student learns, the student may become isolated.
• There is no greater anti-brain environment than the classroom and cubicle.

Rule #3: Every brain is wired differently.

• What YOU do and learn in life physically changes what your brain looks like – it literally rewires it. We used to think there were just 7 categories of intelligence. But categories of intelligence may number more than 7 billion—roughly the population of the world.
• No two people have the same brain, not even twins. Every student’s brain, every employee’s brain, every customer’s brain is wired differently.
• You can either accede to it or ignore it. The current system of education ignores it by having grade structures based on age. Businesses such as Amazon are catching on to mass customization (the Amazon homepage and the products you see are tailored to your recent purchases).
• Regions of the brain develop at different rates in different people. The brains of school children are just as unevenly developed as their bodies. Our school system ignores the fact that every brain is wired differently. We wrongly assume every brain is the same.
• Most of us have a “Jennifer Aniston” neuron (a neuron lurking in your head that is stimulated only when Jennifer Aniston is in the room).

Rule #4: We don't pay attention to boring things.

• What we pay attention to is profoundly influenced by memory. Our previous experience predicts where we should pay attention. Culture matters too. Whether in school or in business, these differences can greatly effect how an audience perceives a given presentation.
• We pay attention to things like emotions, threats and sex. Regardless of who you are, the brain pays a great deal of attention to these questions: Can I eat it? Will it eat me? Can I mate with it? Will it mate with me? Have I seen it before?
• The brain is not capable of multi-tasking. We can talk and breathe, but when it comes to higher level tasks, we just can’t do it.
• Driving while talking on a cell phone is like driving drunk. The brain is a sequential processor and large fractions of a second are consumed every time the brain switches tasks. This is why cell-phone talkers are a half-second slower to hit the brakes and get in more wrecks.
• Workplaces and schools actually encourage this type of multi-tasking. Walk into any office and you’ll see people sending e-mail, answering their phones, Instant Messaging, and on MySpace—all at the same time. Research shows your error rate goes up 50% and it takes you twice as long to do things.
• When you’re always online you’re always distracted. So the always online organization is the always unproductive organization.

Rule 4 is probably the most applicable to the educational setting and what we can do to improve it.

• The 10 minute rule is really important to be aware of but it DOES not mean that you cannot lecture. What it means is that you need to have something emotional or interesting every 10 minutes. When I give notes on diseases caused by insects I give straightforward notes but also tell the story of my friend Mia who died in Kenya from malaria. This kind of thing brings student attention back because it connects with issues the brain was designed to handle—in this case a threat.
• Given the 10 minute rule it might follow that lecturing all class every class is not the way to go.
• The other important part of rule 4 is about multi-tasking. The research says that the brain cannot do this. Students often argue that they can check on texts and still pay attention to you—no they can’t.
• This is also important for adults in the CSD community. If everyone can give their full attention and focus to meetings I argue that they could be faster and more effective. If everyone at the meeting is using their phone or calculator and not participating in the meeting—that is a problem.

Rule #5: Repeat to remember.

• The human brain can only hold about seven pieces of information for less than 30 seconds! Which means, your brain can only handle a 7-digit phone number. If you want to extend the 30 seconds to a few minutes or even an hour or two, you will need to consistently re-expose yourself to the information. Memories are so volatile that you have to repeat to remember.
• Improve your memory by elaborately encoding it during its initial moments. Many of us have trouble remembering names. If at a party you need help remembering Mary, it helps to repeat internally more information about her. “Mary is wearing a blue dress and my favorite color is blue.” It may seem counterintuitive at first but study after study shows it improves your memory.
• Brain Rules in the classroom. In partnership with the University of Washington and Seattle Pacific University, Medina tested this Brain Rule in real classrooms of 3rd graders. They were asked to repeat their multiplication tables in the afternoons. The classrooms in the study did significantly better than the classrooms that did not have the repetition. If brain scientists get together with teachers and do research, we may be able to eliminate need for homework since learning would take place at school, instead of the home.

Rule 5 indicates the power of practice. Medina believes that sufficient practice during the school day could eliminate the need for homework. But before we spark a homework debate…the point is that students have to do over and over that which we want them to know.

Rule #6: Remember to repeat.

• It takes years to consolidate a memory. Not minutes, hours, or days but years. What you learn in first grade is not completely formed until your sophomore year in high school.
• Medina’s dream school is one that repeats what was learned, not at home, but during the school day, 90-120 minutes after the initial learning occurred. Our schools are currently designed so that most real learning has to occur at home.
• How do you remember better? Repeated exposure to information / in specifically timed intervals / provides the most powerful way to fix memory into the brain.
• Forgetting allows us to prioritize events. But if you want to remember, remember to repeat.

Rule 6 shows the need to cycle back at points in the day. Elementary is well designed to do this. In MS and HS it is more difficult but it can be done. The point is that to form lasting memories we have to follow up on the original learning. Also as seen below if you miss the beginning material you have trouble catching up. We all know this is true but what are we changing to make sure that students succeed?

Rule #7: Sleep well, think well.

• When we’re asleep, the brain is not resting at all. It is almost unbelievably active! It’s possible that the reason we need to sleep is so that we can learn.
• Sleep must be important because we spend 1/3 of our lives doing it! Loss of sleep hurts attention, executive function, working memory, mood, quantitative skills, logical reasoning, and even motor dexterity.
• We still don’t know how much we need! It changes with age, gender, pregnancy, puberty, and so much more.
• Napping is normal. Ever feel tired in the afternoon? That’s because your brain really wants to take a nap. There's a battle raging in your head between two armies. Each army is made of legions of brain cells and biochemicals –- one desperately trying to keep you awake, the other desperately trying to force you to sleep. Around 3 p.m., 12 hours after the midpoint of your sleep, all your brain wants to do is nap.
• Taking a nap might make you more productive. In one study, a 26-minute nap improved NASA pilots’ performance by 34 percent.
• Don’t schedule important meetings at 3 p.m. It just doesn’t make sense.

Rule #8: Stressed brains don't learn the same way.

• Your brain is built to deal with stress that lasts about 30 seconds. The brain is not designed for long term stress when you feel like you have no control. The saber-toothed tiger ate you or you ran away but it was all over in less than a minute. If you have a bad boss, the saber-toothed tiger can be at your door for years, and you begin to deregulate. If you are in a bad marriage, the saber-toothed tiger can be in your bed for years, and the same thing occurs. You can actually watch the brain shrink.
• Stress damages virtually every kind of cognition that exists. It damages memory and executive function. It can hurt your motor skills. When you are stressed out over a long period of time it disrupts your immune response. You get sicker more often. It disrupts your ability to sleep. You get depressed.
• The emotional stability of the home is the single greatest predictor of academic success. If you want your kid to get into Harvard, go home and love your spouse.
• You have one brain. The same brain you have at home is the same brain you have at work or school. The stress you are experiencing at home will affect your performance at work, and vice versa.

Rule #9: Stimulate more of the senses.

• Our senses work together so it is important to stimulate them! Your head crackles with the perceptions of the whole world, sight, sound, taste, smell, touch, energetic as a frat party.
• Smell is unusually effective at evoking memory. If you're tested on the details of a movie while the smell of popcorn is wafted into the air, you'll remember 10-50% more.
• Smell is really important to business. When you walk into Starbucks, the first thing you smell is coffee. They have done a number of things over the years to make sure that’s the case.
• The learning link. Those in multisensory environments always do better than those in unisensory environments. They have more recall with better resolution that lasts longer, evident even 20 years later.

Rule #10: Vision trumps all other senses.

• We are incredible at remembering pictures. Hear a piece of information, and three days later you'll remember 10% of it. Add a picture and you'll remember 65%.
• Pictures beat text as well, in part because reading is so inefficient for us. Our brain sees words as lots of tiny pictures, and we have to identify certain features in the letters to be able to read them. That takes time.
• Why is vision such a big deal to us? Perhaps because it's how we've always apprehended major threats, food supplies and reproductive opportunity.
• Toss your PowerPoint presentations. It’s text-based (nearly 40 words per slide), with six hierarchical levels of chapters and subheads—all words. Professionals everywhere need to know about the incredible inefficiency of text-based information and the incredible effects of images. Burn your current PowerPoint presentations and make new ones.

Rule #11: Male and female brains are different.

• What’s different? Mental health professionals have known for years about sex-based differences in the type and severity of psychiatric disorders. Males are more severely afflicted by schizophrenia than females. By more than 2 to 1, women are more likely to get depressed than men, a figure that shows up just after puberty and remains stable for the next 50 years. Males exhibit more antisocial behavior. Females have more anxiety. Most alcoholics and drug addicts are male. Most anorexics are female.
• Men and women handle acute stress differently. When researcher Larry Cahill showed them slasher films, men fired up the amygdale in their brain’s right hemisphere, which is responsible for the gist of an event. Their left was comparatively silent. Women lit up their left amygdale, the one responsible for details. Having a team that simultaneously understood the gist and details of a given stressful situation helped us conquer the world.
• Men and women process certain emotions differently. Emotions are useful. They make the brain pay attention. These differences are a product of complex interactions between nature and nurture.

Rule 12--We are powerful natural explorers.

• The desire to explore never leaves us despite the classrooms and cubicles we are stuffed into. Babies are the model of how we learn—not by passive reaction to the environment but by active testing through observation, hypothesis, experiment, and conclusion. Babies methodically do experiments on objects, for example, to see what they will do.
• Google takes to heart the power of exploration. For 20 percent of their time, employees may go where their mind asks them to go. The proof is in the bottom line: fully 50 percent of new products, including Gmail and Google News, came from “20 percent time.”

Bullying on the bus, the governor's race in Alabama, and Arizona immigration law. These have been tumbling around in my mind all week and I think I have finally been able to pull some thoughts together to say something lucid.

This thought process began on Sunday morning when I woke up early and turned on my DVR recording of SNL. It was a legendarily bad broadcast until Weekend Edition with Seth Meyers. He began by talking about the new Arizona law that required people to show their papers when asked. He riffed for a bit about how the main place you hear, "Show me your papers," is in WWII movies. I read a bit more about the law in some non-comedy news sources and came to the conclusion that the law seems a bit over the top to me. That said it is fair for people to debate what should be done about illegal immigration in our country.

Next I heard about Tim James and his advertisement to become governor of Alabama. He states that in Alabama they speak English so that they should only offer the state driver's license test in English. "If you want to live here, learn it. We're only giving that test in English if I'm governor."

Bringing it home to education and to Concord I have had conversations recently about bullying on school buses in Concord. School officials and bus officials are aware of the issues and are diligently working on all issues. The worry is that a racial/immigrant wrinkle is being added to bus bullying.

My concern is that the with the hot rhetoric that often happens in the news that this could spill over in a negative way to our students who are English language learners. Immigration is going to be coming up big in the news and the burgeoning ELL population in Concord could be an easy attack point for frustrated people. Many of these students have spent years in refugee camps only to finally find solace and comfort here in Concord. It would be terrible for them to again become victims.

I am confident that this will not become a major problem but the strength of the Concord School District is that we do an excellent job of preventing possible problems. I will be incredibly happy if this never becomes a problem. But I also want to make sure that we are aware of the possibility and that we work to keep all of our kids happy and safe.

Instructional Rounds in Education

Elizabeth City, Richard Elmore, Sarah Fiarman and Lee Teital

Summary by Tom Crumrine

The opening of the book:

“Pierce Middle School is stuck. Despite the best efforts of its leadership and teaching staff, Pierce’s results on the statewide test have leveled off, or slightly declined, after two years of more or less steady improvement. Pierce’s staff feels the urgency of the situation. There is no question about their commitment to improved student learning. they feel they are working at the limit of their current knowledge and skill. The school district’s leadership is equally concerned, since they were relying on Pierce to serve as a model for their system-wide improvement strategy. Now it’s not clear what they will do. Maybe it’s just a temporary glitch in the test scores. But maybe it’s something more fundamental. Pierce’s leadership team and the district leadership team huddle in a conference room at the central office trying to figure out what to do next.”

Quotes from Introduction

What are rounds?

Repeatedly, district and school practitioners tell us that one of the greatest barriers to school improvement is the lack of an agreed-upon definition of what high-quality instruction looks like.

The rounds process is and explicit practice that is designed to bring discussions of instruction directly into the process of school improvement. By practice we mean something quite specific. We mean a set of protocols and processes for observing, analyzing, discussing, and understanding instruction that can be used improve student learning at scale.

They talk further about the idea that this comes from the idea of rounds in medicine. Rounds where everyone learns.

Unfortunately, the practice of walkthroughs has become corrupted in many ways by confounding it with the supervision and evaluation of teachers.

This kind of practice is both antithetical to the purposes of instructional rounds and profoundly anti-professional.

The idea behind instructional rounds is that everyone involved is working on their practice, everyone is obliged to be knowledgeable about the common task of instructional improvement, and everyone’s practice should be subject to scrutiny, critique and improvement.

Chapter 1

First Principle: Increases in student learning occur only as a consequence of improvement in the level of content, teachers’ knowledge and skill, and student engagement. (24)

Second Principle: If you change any single element of the instructional core, you have to change the other two to affect student learning. (25)

Third Principle: If you can’t see it in the core, it’s not there. (27)

Does it really happen? It needs to be imbedded in the reality of the school. Presentations don’t do it. Looking at what is actually happen is what needs to be done.

Fourth Principle: The task predicts performance. (30)

It isn’t the curriculum. If students practice memorizing they get good at memorizing. If students practice analysis they get good at analysis. If a player practices free-throws they get good at free throws.

Fifth Principle: The real accountability system is in the tasks that students are asked to do. (31)

This is not that hard to do. We just don’t do it enough. The example that worked fairly well is the work of Feb. 2009 where the high school looked at what kinds of exams they give at mid-year time. Sure there are lots of constraints that go into giving mid-year exams but in general the tests asked more low level questions than high level question. (Following the seventh principle that will come later let’s not jump to an evaluation of this. Let’s talk about what we would like to see in mid-year exams and go from there.) This type of process can be repeated if we decide to make time to do it.

Sixth Principle: We learn to do the work by doing the work, not by telling other people to do the work, not by having done the work at some time in the past, and not by hiring experts who can act as proxies for our knowledge about how to do the work. (33)

There is a lot to learn from outside research. My friend cardiologist Ben Lowenstein regularly reads journal articles after his kids have gone to bed. But he also goes to conferences where he sees people performing best practice work and every single day—every single day—his decisions are examined and questioned by his fellow cardiologists, by nurses, etc. This last part is the cultural part that does not exist in education.

Seventh Principle: Description before analysis, analysis before prediction, prediction before evaluation. (34 and 35)

Their seventh principle outlines a common them in rounds discussions. Do not jump right from observation to evaluation. The community needs to come up with what they even want to observe when they do their rounds. After observation lots of conversation needs to happen about what the group would like to be seeing.

Alignment and Frequency of Assessment of Competency Understanding

Competencies at their basis come down to a goal, an assessment and a plan to get to the goal. A lot of work has been done in recent years on the first step--establishing the goal. Different groups will be ready at different times but the logical next step is to examine assessments. If your group is ready to examine assessments these are 2 simple activities that could help.

Inspired by the work of Larry Ainsworth.

If you look at the link above and scroll to page 70 and 71 you will see two activities that check common assessments for alignment to Power Standards (our word is competencies and I will use it from here forward) and for frequency of assessment of competencies.

Activity 1 Alignment
This is a check for whether or not current assessments align to the competencies. Teachers could bring some assessments and go through this activity. I would suggest that the groups would be small and used to working with one another. This is not a "gotcha" activity. The idea is to see where we are now and what we might want to do to improve.

1. How many of our assessment items align to the competencies? Which ones?
2. How many of our assessment items do not align to the competencies? Which ones?
3. Do our assessment items directly match the "unwrapped" concepts and skills of the competencies?
4. Do our assessment items math the level of rigor required by particular "unwrapped" competency skills, such as evaluate or analyze?
5. Do our assessment items use the same terms that appear in the standards as opposed to more student-friendly wording (i.e., identify rather than label)?
6. Do our assessment items align with or resemble the formatting of our district and state assessments so the such formats will be familiar to students?
7. What does this tell us? Are our assessment items matched to our intended instructional purposes (the targeted competencies)?
8. What do we need to do next in this regard? Which items do we keep? Which items do we need to replace or modify so that they do align with our competencies?

Activity 2 Frequency
Again teachers could look at the assessments that they currently give and go through these questions.

1. How many of our assessment items match each competency?
2. Are certain competencies underrepresented? Which ones?
3. Are certain competencies overrepresented? Which ones?
4. Are we trying to address too many competencies in this one assessment?
5. What does this tell us? Do we need to redistribute our assessment items so that the appropriate number of competencies are more equally represented?
6. What do we need to do next in this regard? Which items do we keep as they are? Which items do we need to replace or modify so that there is a better balance between the actual number of items and each of the targeted competencies?
   

Trying to Put it All Together--Again

4:45 am brainstorming about District in Need of Improvement

The keys remain for me:

• Focus. We need a laser like focus on student learning.
  
• Coordination of the focus. Individuals currently do a pretty good job at focus. The district does an OK job. This needs to change to the district doing an excellent job.
• The Extra Department. Currently we have Special Education for students with 504 plans or IEP. What about an Department of Extra Services. This would be a fully functioning and organized department just like Special Education but it would be for students that need extra help but are not in Special Education or English Language Learning.
  
• Eliminate the grades concept from our thinking at the high school. Make high school about completing the requirements not about progressing through grade 9, 10, 11, 12. Make being a 5th year OK--this will be right for some students.
• Hire "right match" people. Make sure new hires know what they are getting into. Lots of sharing, lots of collaboration, lots of openness. Very little of the closed classroom door environment.
• Leadership. Allow principals to spend some time each day focused on learning.
• More teacher leaders. In order for principals to spend more time on learning everyone will have to do a little bit more.
• Duties at HS--First and second year teachers do not have duties. Their duty is to visit other classrooms and watch what veteran teachers do.

Just some ideas--no permanent suggestions.

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