Incomplete Grade

ROBERT GALLERY, MASS. PRESIDENT OF BANK OF AMERICA: I love the chance for people to meet one another and make friends. But let’s get going. I wish I could stay for the panel but I have to be somewhere at 9 o’clock. We were happy to fund this study. There is a correlation between the horrible weather and the Red Sox winning percentage. This is an important topic to us. Five or six years ago when Bank of America purchased FleetBoston there was concern about our commitment. I hope most of you feel those fears are unfounded. We are as committed as ever. A big part of that is education. We have had the conversation of where is Boston? It’s a solid B with everything we have going for us – health care, the universities, the hospitals. What does it take to remain world class? A primary topic is public education. If we don’t address some issues raised in this report, I feel this is the time, it’s now or never. Welcome to you here today.

GREG TORRES, MASSINC PRESIDENT: I strongly endorse what Bob just said and a word of thanks to Bank of America. It has become fashionable of late to be critical of banks. On the non-profit side as partners with banks, we could not do what we do without the support of institutions like Bank of America. They have set the bar pretty high in corporate giving. This team has resolved any doubt about corporate giving. Three years ago they agreed to support this project in its entirety. Usually that doesn’t happen and it’s a coalition of institutions. They had no idea what the findings would be, just a belief in an unbiased look at a very important law and investment, that an analysis of data would inform future policy discussions. From MassINC’s perspective, we have hosted two special events and posted a special issue on education at Commonwealth magazine and we have reporting on education at Commonwealth Unbound, our blog. Rep. Walz, chair of education on the House side, is here and Tom Moreau, representing the Speaker’s office and an expert on the subject of education. Dave Magnani is here and was the Senate chair of education when education reform passed.

DANA ANSEL, MASSINC RESEARCH DIRECTOR: Fifteen years after the reform act, we wanted to analyze results of the investment and the creation of high standards and accountability. It was a two-year research report. A few topline findings. The act made a difference. It raised the level of achievement. But at the same time the achievement gap looms large. It would be wider without education reform. It’s a good news, bad news story. Our work in education is not done. We saw that in certain districts there has been a dramatic growth in low-income students, such as Chelsea and Springfield. There are education challenges in these districts with high concentrations of poverty. We cannot ignore this reality. The conclusion we reached is doing more of the same will not close the achievement gap. What next? We are here to discuss that and the role of state policy. There has been a lot of innovation across the country. We should take advantage of lessons learned. We have someone with us who brings a national perspective.

PAUL TOUGH, NEW YORK TIMES MAGAZINE EDITOR AND AUTHOR: I am here because I am an education reporter, an accidental education reporter. I thought I was writing about inner city poverty but it became clear that the story of inner city poverty is a story about education. The issues are increasingly intertwined. I spent five years reporting in Harlem and reading research on children and poverty. In reporting and research, I was struck by this: the obstacles that children face are huge and seem insurmountable. The gaps that separate the lives of poor and middle class children are wide. Poor children move more frequently, have less access to health care, are more likely to be in foster care, less likely to own children’s books, less likely to have a parent who graduated from college. The differences lead to an achievement gap that opens very quickly. It starts with recognizing the letters of the alphabet. The gap often gets worse when school starts and extends into adulthood. The fact of the gaps didn’t hit home until I talked to children and parents. I went through a nine-week class called baby college and I met a mother, 32 and single, pregnant with her fifth children. She was poorly educated, never had a steady job and lived in public housing all her life. Her daughter faced every risk factor. A child like her is almost sure to fail on paper, a good candidate for welfare, prison, foster care. What would it take to follow a different path? Until recently it seemed it would take a miracle. The best policy or philanthropy could do would be to cushion some of the blows. Until recently the debate was about what the mother needed. The theory was that with a little help she would rise out of poverty and bring her kids with her. Now the theory is what the child needs. She will be able to raise herself out of poverty and get on the path to middle class success. The many obstacles that poor children face can absolutely be overcome. The easiest way to help is to start as early as possible, at birth. A University of Michigan researcher highlighted early Head Start, a language enrichment program, and Bright Beginnings, a pre-k program in North Carolina. Roxbury Prep in Boston is two thirds poor, 100 percent black and Hispanic and two years ago they had the highest percentage of students scoring proficient. Successful schools like these are run according to common principles – students need many hours and operate on an extended day, the best teachers should be teaching challenged students, and you need to give constant attention to building the culture of your school. It’s about motivation, discipline, self control, confidence, ambition. The problem is the success stories are isolated and limited to a few years of a child’s life. Students may achieve great results in middle school and struggle in high school. What drew me to Harlem was the personal story of a boy who grew up in poverty in the South Bronx. He was a troubled kid, always in trouble and getting high and drunk. He managed to get out and get into Harvard and get a degree and went back to New York and tried to help kids in trouble. By the early 90s he was running a multi-million dollar non-profit. It’s an inspirational tale right? That is not the part of his story that pulled me in. Jeff Canada was a classic success story but felt like a complete failure. Kids in his programs may be doing alright but thousands more were failing. For every one saved, 10 or 20 more slipped through his fingers. He wanted to change the odds in big numbers so he invented the Harlem Children’s Zone, which has grown to cover 97 blocks. It’s programs that follow children from birth to college. About 8,000 children take part in one program or another each year. If you enroll five or 10 percent of children in a neighborhood, then taking part is seen as oddball behavior. At 50 or 60 percent, negative behavior seems strange and getting involved seems normal. Jeff calls it contamination, but in a positive sense. The zone combines a no-excuses charter school with social and educational programs to mimic the support that follows middle class kids. Even the best schools cannot overcome all the disadvantages children face. So there are parenting programs like Baby College. Children have continuous access to family counseling and after-school programs. Jeff and his staff collect a lot of data but the numbers that matter are educational attainment, higher graduation rates, better test scores. Why is Jeff Canada so obsessed with the benchmarks? It’s not love for standardized tests. It’s economics. The best and some say the only way to escape poverty is through educational attainment. In the last two years, students who entered in kindergarten and are now in third grade, 94 percent scored on or above grade level in English and 100 percent in math. They outperformed kids from some of the best schools in the state. In most cities a traditional public school education is not going to even the scales. Kids are going to need more help than regular schools can provide. We have to remake schools and reach kids wherever and whenever they need that help. We need new tools, different strategies and more ambitious goals. I told Jeff that when I thought of the obstacles, I could get overwhelmed on how to get them on the path of success. Other days it seems easy. He said he is always amazed at how easy it is. Changing a few key things can make a difference. It’s not rocket science. He’s right. We know how to raise kids to succeed. We do it all the time. Do we want to use research to make a difference for not just a few, but for millions of kids?

TORRES: Thank you. Rep. Conroy, Sen. Donnelly and Commissioner Killins from the Department of Early Ed is here. I want to introduce Tripp Jones, whose parents are here today. He has extensive experience in campaign management, in public sector and in the non-profit world and in getting MassINC started. The thread that runs through is he dedicates himself to getting something done and done in a different and better way. Whether it’s his work on education reform or civil engagement and journalism, or developing new models of human service delivery around the country, the guy is about getting something done. He is a first class thinker and can get people united around a common purpose.

JONES: I thank the team for getting the Jones family out of bed. Appreciate the introduction. This is a special day for me to participate in a MassINC event, the first that I’ve participated since I left six years ago. Nothing that I’ve been a part of has meant as much to me as the work I did putting MassINC together. Appreciate everyone coming out. I want to thank Greg also. There is no greater compliment to me than his reaching out to me to recruit me to join the MENTOR Network. He could only top that by joining MassINC. He’s got plenty of other things going on. Thanks Paul for what you did. I could not have asked for a more inspiring and insightful set of introductory remarks. Thanks for what you do every day. It’s a tough world and industry to do what you do. It’s inspirational. Everyone is following the challenges in the world of journalism. Our focus is on the topics we’ve begun to discuss. We want to pay particular attention to public policy and what we do next. We have three of the best commentators in this community. I want to kick this off with a general question, your take on how you would grade the state’s effort over the last 15 years? MassINC gave an incomplete, but you can’t use that, it’s been taken.

HOWARD: I would give the state a B-plus. Yes, we have issues and they are big and tough and will require focused effort but the work already done sets the table to get that work done. It’s created forward momentum that is unmatched in other places I go. Smart people are committed to this who can solve our remaining problems. We are way ahead of the curve.

PEYSER: I used to be at a think tank, the Pioneer. If we grade on the curve, I’d give Massachusetts a solid A. When you look around the country and compare what we have done on finance, allocating to low-income, high-need communities, and if you look at assessments and putting teeth behind that with high school requirements, and if you look at teacher certification reform, if you look at the results we have had on tests, compared to everybody else we have done really well. That’s a solid A. One thing we supposedly have done was move to a standards-based world and on that scale we are a C. We made very limited progress on closing the achievement gap between low-income and suburban and wealthier communities. We have lifted all boats to a certain extent but the gap is discouraging. We have made very little progress in the lowest performing schools and turning those around. This does take a long time, but I don’t believe we are on the right track. I am still trying to figure this out, how to really make a difference for students in the highest need communities. We need to recognize this is about doing whatever it takes to address that problem. We have been unwilling to do that. I work with a fund that supports entrepreneurial education organizations like Teach for America, New Leaders for New Schools. Until recently none of those were present here. We have been successful at pushing away talent and new ideas and organizations. Some of the organizations are comprised of great people who left Boston for New York. We have pushed people away. To move from a C to an A, we need to embrace talent and ideas.

JONES: I will give Paul more time to respond. Paul indicated prior to this that the administration is on the verge of putting forward a legislative package to move some issues we’re talking about. Maybe you can make a little news.

REVILLE: The advantage of coming in third is the comments I can agree with. We’re at the head of the pack. It’s unarguable. On the other hand, compared to our aspirations, we are a long way from eliminating the correlation between poverty and educational achievement. It’s just the right conversation to be having. Paul Tough’s analysis concurs with what the governor and I have talked about. Doing well isn’t good enough. We have the aspirations and many mechanisms right and our standards are the envy of the country. We have accountability and we made a substantial investment in the capacity of our system. The aspiration is an aspiration for all students. We keep saying all means all. But we haven’t got there. We have a higher floor in terms of achievement but the gaps between subgroups are some of the worst in the country frankly. What we underestimated in setting objectives was the amount of capacity we would need in the system. We were asking the system to educate all students to a high level. That changes the job of the teacher and the school. Teachers need great help, greater expertise in educating students in the achievement gap. It requires more time, not just in the day but in terms of when we start educating. There is no more important investment than in early education. We underestimated the impact of poverty. Children have special circumstances and need a differentiated approach. How do we build a more effective teaching course? As we think about going ahead, there is no bullet. We have to start early, high quality early childhood education, universally accessible. We need a comprehensive approach. The theories behind Readiness were to improve throughout the system and to give the child the wraparound support and services to have children ready to take advantage. We need a climate that fosters innovation, a more aggressive approach on our part to deal with underperforming schools, a broad comprehensive program of interventions that begin when a child is born. Notwithstanding the difficult budgetary times, the federal government is providing stimulus funds. The governor will put forward in the next few weeks a start on the Readiness agenda. Two pieces will be important. One is we want to build on the very kinds of experience Paul mentioned to take advantage of the promise of charter schools by doing a smart charter school cap lift, focusing on the lowest performing districts, the children with the greatest needs and utilizing the services of providers. This is our focus on taking the best of what we have learned from charter schools. The second piece is a Readiness school package. The first two elements are schools that are semi-autonomous and operate under a performance contract. To operate schools, they agree to meet performance targets. This will be outside providers coming in – museums, hospitals, businesses, institutions of higher education – educators forming themselves into clinical practices if you will. Outside providers, be they charter school operators or teacher unions, will have opportunities to propose a brand new form of schooling under which they want to be held accountable. The third aspect of this is about innovation and choice and more aggressive intervention – it deals with how we deal with underperforming schools. We need strengthened powers for intervening. Legislation will give stronger powers to the education department to create special conditions, special exemptions from collective bargaining, and give those schools back to the districts. After a short period of time, we would invite outside providers, those with a proven track record of turning around underperforming schools. That’s the package we are talking about, more opportunities for innovation and more choices for parents. It enables us to move where we find underperformance.

JONES: I am thrilled to hear what you are doing. I think it’s great. There is this question of speed and time. We have known for some time a lot of what Paul spoke to. Why the tentativeness we have seen? It feels to many that the pace we are moving at we will be lucky if our grandkids will see the scale and market penetration we are all looking for. Why the caution and tentativeness to take this charter school thing and move on this?

REVILLE: There is a tendency to oversimplify complicated debates into one issue, charters. The subjects of innovation and choice and strategy are critically important. We have great charter schools and traditional schools. It has to do with innovation and choice and freedom. Charter schools are a good bet. It’s something we should do. It is also something we can’t say are universally successful. For my colleagues in the Legislature, they have been deeply divided. It involves money staying in the system or going out. This issue has been locked down or stalemated. The question to us becomes how to take what is best – some charters have succeeded – and scale it up to make it more general. Our approach is to go to the mainstream educators and challenge them, to say we need the innovation that works well. The legislation we are submitting makes an attempt to migrate those effective practices back into the system to expand access to these schools to as many kids as possible.

PEYSER: There’s a big political issue here. A challenge is to address the political obstacle that stands in the way of what works. The charter sector has taken the position that if we run great schools, the doors of opportunity will be open to us. Charters have independence from school committees and collective bargaining and this hits all the hot buttons. We do need to address the political issue. When the bill gets into the hopper, it’s not very easy. There is a group of three at the top of the pyramid that make decisions. The stars are not aligned as they have been in the past. One thing about the existing caps is if they were gone, it would not be like the Wild West. The board of education is one of the most rigorous authorizers. If the cap were gone, the ability of charters with the capacity to replicate and create networks of schools could in a short period of time transform the landscape in the city of Boston.

HOWARD: This reminds me of a story. A guy wakes up and his house is old. His oil burner needs to be replaced. He calls and asks for a new one. The guy comes in and puts the burner in for a thousand bucks. He cranks it up and the heat doesn’t come on. He’s got no fuel. The burner was okay. If we get too focused on one solution, we might miss other things we can do that will take us further faster. There is an advocacy for charters that has focused that on the make-or-break, do-or-die issue and I don’t frankly share it. My committee did a lot of work cutting the issue to come up with the data. At a critical meeting of the subcommittee, we were going through charts and I’ve got 50 to get through. Policy wonks want to talk for ten minutes on each chart. We are running out of time and Chris Gabrieli says all these charts look the same, why talk about each one? The chair said I think Chris is right. Whites and Asians, high income, non-LEP, this is 240 proficiency. The average score for the upper groups is above proficiency. The lower groups are trending up. Every chart looks this way, LEP, blacks and Latinos, low-income, SPED. I did a cinematic projection of the lines into the future. What kind of society do we project when we have two different lines? It means nothing good for the kids or the society. The Roxbury Prep line starts in the bottom group and moves up to match the upper line and in some cases exceeds it. This is also the line for Brockton High School, especially for ELA. It’s the largest high school in the state. It’s not just charter schools. The things we are thinking about are charter schools. I like the idea of a smart cap lifting. We need to focus on the low-performing schools and Paul has talked about the state authority to do things there. Focus on early education and early literacy as a key factor. There needs to be a focus on limited English proficiency. It’s a big problem in the achievement gap. And implementing the 11 essential conditions developed by the department. It used to be 10. Jim Peyser commissioned the board to come up with a list. The new group has added another. They are good. I will not take the time to read through them. The focus has to be not on identifying what needs to be done. That’s been done. What the state has to do is organize itself to actually do it. I can feel energy now. I feel leadership for doing that and I think we’re going to.

JONES: Most of us that are fans of charter schools, the charter law has allowed for innovation and experimentation. A problem is we talk about charter schools like they are the same. It inhibits getting the real benefit of what the movement is about, which is allowing a lot of methods to be tested. People talk about extended learning time but ultimately it’s about how do we let innovation happen. It’s been extremely hard in the traditional public school setting. It has taken an awful lot of time. It isn’t about charter schools. It’s about innovation. How are we getting that done today? How do we get that energy and excitement to take the innovation and expand it to scale?

REVILLE: We have hit a turning point in terms of education reform. We are having conversations like this. It’s quite radical compared to what we talked about 15 or 20 years ago. If you are serious about getting to objectives like all students to proficiency, then schooling is insufficient to accomplish that goal. We have high standards and systems of accountability and we haven’t gotten there. What have exceptional schools been able to accomplish and how do we then put that into policy and create the sense of urgency to make things happen? Part of it is focus. We could focus on doing a better job on early childhood, making it universal and high quality. We can focus on time – we are trying to fit it all into a small box. Interventions with respect to poverty. And finally teacher effectiveness. We could put together a package that could make a difference.

JONES: Priorities were a key part of getting the ‘93 law passed. A challenge is getting things passed in a difficult economic period. There is so much on the agenda. Where is the focus and priority on what has to happen over the next months?

REVILLE: People in this room and across the education community generally speaking agree on the aspirations. Where we have problem is we disagree on what ought the priorities be. We have in some cases an outright war over charter schools. It gets us distracted. We are talking about the impact of poverty and how we intervene. I am trying to work hard to get some kind of consensus and agreement on a set of priorities to make a difference against those high aspirations. Let’s look at what works and let’s be totally accepting of where is comes from.

PEYSER: We are all policy people here. Great schools are all about execution and details and you can’t pass a law to make that happen. We are getting there. The things you talked about Paul are going to help us get closer to that.

JONES: Let me read some audience questions.

AUDIENCE QUESTION: If we are serious about closing the achievement gap, does that mean less for other schools?

REVILLE: I don’t think it necessarily does. We are at a time where what we ought to do from a moral standpoint coexists with our economic objectives. It won’t always take massive investments but it will take a renewed emphasis and a deeper investment in some places.

HOWARD: We cannot take anything away from our affluent communities that are doing an exceptional job with education because they will stop it cold.

JONES: Even students who are proficient need remediation in college. How can we better align pre-k to 12 to address this performance gap?

REVILLE: We have just created in the past four months a working group to address this problem. We are working on this. We have 37 percent in our last test of students who go on to higher education who require remediation. We don’t have adequate signaling going on. We are using different testing instruments to make judgments and there is not enough conversation. We have some experiments going on around the Commonwealth.

JONES: Paul Tough, can what’s happening in Harlem become national public policy?

TOUGH: Yes, I think it definitely can. There is a federal program called Promise Neighborhoods. In 2007 Barack Obama said he’d like to replicate the Harlem program in 20 cities. These have not started yet but there is a line in the department’s request for $10 million for planning grants. Congress has not approved this $10 million yet and it’s not clear if they would take this to the next step. The timetable that people in the White House are thinking about is the fall of 2009 and 2010, when the government would choose the first few communities to become promise neighborhoods.

REVILLE: We are hoping that at least one of those Promise Neighborhoods will be in Massachusetts.

AUDIENCE QUESTION: How do we engage communities and parents?

HOWARD: That is the most difficult part of the work. If we are going to do a better job early, schools have principals and superintendents. Communities don’t have boards of directors. You can’t order parents to come and engage. In too many cases, people in poorer communities have not had good experiences with schools so it’s not easy to get them out. I think we are going to make progress.

REVILLE: Policy is a weak instrument for community engagement but the best schools have found ways, typically through a leader, to engage parents.

PEYSER: Some schools have a home visit in the summer prior to the student entering in the fall. They sit down and talk to the student and it makes a direct connection that is very powerful.

AUDIENCE QUESTION: Why not divide underperforming schools up among MTA, AFT, charters, public-private partnerships and see what happens?

REVILLE: It’s a fascinating question.

HOWARD: There are core things we know have to happen in all these schools. We have to get good teachers in all schools. We may have to move people towards retirement. We have to have good principals. Roxbury Prep is in a third generation of leadership. Roxbury Prep needs to be persuaded to take their model and translate it – Brockton High School as well. Let’s do a Brockton High School model across the state.

PEYSER: Schools are not institutions but creations of a school district. They don’t have sustainable identities. It changes over time.

REVILLE: We have to do as a policy community what we are asking teachers to do: build on what works. What we ought to be about is creating the conditions for scaling.

JONES: Back to the politics question. Who is driving the action on Beacon Hill? Who is driving that agenda? In ‘93 there was real leadership. There was a lot of personal animosity. It was tough stuff.

REVILLE: We have leadership. I don’t know that we have consensus on particular strategies. There are huge distractions. The economic crisis is a preoccupation. The bottom is falling out of our revenue picture. Those with a vision are unable to afford going there. We have the budget, ethics, pension and transportation reform. Hopefully in a week or ten days all of this is behind us and we refocus. It’s not there right now but that doesn’t mean the interest is not there.

AUDIENCE QUESTION: Will there be the support from the business community that was critical to the ‘93 law?

REVILLE: I see business leaders deeply concerned about education. They see it as important to their ability to compete.

PEYSER: To build public confidence, leadership needs to make choices. Allocate funds for things that do work and address barriers to change. People are skeptical about layering program after program on a system that is doing great things but not making the breakthroughs we are hoping for.

HOWARD: We have to do demonstrations that show we can move a bunch of schools and a bunch of kids and then ask the Commonwealth to fund the rest of the state.

AUDIENCE QUESTION: What needs to be done to maximize teacher quality under the federal stimulus law?

REVILLE: It will be a central part of our application, a variety of strategies to improve teacher effectiveness and attracting and retaining the highest quality talent.

PEYSER: Part of what the feds are looking for here is a creative and innovative approach to engaging public private partnerships and opening up the system to new talent and new players.

JONES: You can’t have innovation without confronting the union issue. How are we going to do this? We confronted this in ‘93. It was a huge part of the battle. How do we confront an establishment that is awfully resistant to the innovation and change that is working in other schools?

REVILLE: The basic premise is the major impediment to reform is the teachers unions. I don’t believe that. You try to change the school schedule and it gets the biggest turnout. The labels conservative and liberal when applied to education are often flipped. I wouldn’t point the finger at unions and say all the resistance is there. They represent all the people that work within the system. If we think we are doing reform to the people who work there, we are kind of on a fool’s errand. I am frustrated periodically in my dealing with unions and school committees and superintendents on the appetite for change and there has to be a realization that a zero-sum approach to change is not going to work anymore. We’re engaged in those conversations but you don’t just do it at the top down as a mandate. It’s a combination of pressure and support.

REVILLE: Absolutely. As we watch what is happening in the economy, teacher unions are conscious of General Motors. The product in our industry is student learning and if we don’t come together around that then labor and management are going to lose market share and find themselves out of business. Accountability is here to stay. It’s only going to get tougher. Choice is here to stay. And we have newer members coming into the union who take for granted things older members fought for. I think they get it and it’s hard to execute at the local level with political forces working on you.