Solving the Urban Crisis Through Sustainable Community Development

Transcript

Sessions:
Introduction and Opening Remarks
Panel #1: Perspectives on Locally Based Community Development
Panel #2: Passing the Torch: The Next Generation of Urban Problem Solvers
Luncheon Discussion: A Conversation on Solving the Urban Crisis
Panel #3: Global Approaches to Fighting the Urban Crisis

I. Sawhill:

Well, it's a wonderful privilege to be here today and to be part of what I think is an absolutely wonderful project that Joyce has launched here. And being with a group of people who really have, you know, exercised leadership in solving some of our very most difficult problems.

Can you all hear back there, or should I put this on? Okay. You know, I think leadership is a much overused and abused word. And when I read the bios and have read a few articles, and have seen various newspaper stories about some of the people on this first panel, I thought to myself, you know, this is what real leadership is about as opposed to the kind that we normally talk about in our discussions of broader public policy questions, and politics in our society. And so, that's why I think I feel privileged to be moderating this discussion and introducing the people here.

Now, I think that we're going to probably go in the order that's on your program, so I suggest we start with Kent Amos. We're going to try to keep the initial presentations relatively short, and I'm going to be a tough moderator about that, because I think we want to have time to have some discussion and questions from the audience. And so, I'm going to ask everybody to keep their remarks to under 10 minutes. And I'm going to pass you a note if you go over that.

We will start with Kent Amos. He came out of corporate world. He was with Xerox. But what he has become famous for is the wonderful work he has done with young people, teenagers here in Washington, D.C. Actually opening his home, and working with them, enabling them to be successful, despite coming from very difficult backgrounds. Most of them have graduated from high school, many gone on to college, and had successful lives.

And having transformed in a very concrete way the lives of this group of young people, he went on to found and become the president of the Urban Family Institute. And through that he is working on a broader set of social change challenges in urban neighborhoods. And his institute believes, as I understand it, that every child growing up needs the nurturance and the care of the adults in that community. And I resonated with that since, as Joyce mentioned, I am doing some work here on all of that myself.

Well, I don't want to steal time away from him. The Urban Family Institute has several new structures they've set up. The Kids House where they provide safe havens. The Urban Family University, perhaps he'll be saying more about that. He is well known for this work. He's been featured on many major television and other media outlets. And I think many of you know about the many honors he's received for his work. So it's my pleasure to turn this over to you now, Kent.

K. Amos: Thank you, Dr. Sawhill.

Dr. Ladner, I really appreciate the opportunity to be a part of this distinguished panel today, and setting today. To my fellow panelists here, I welcome all of you this morning to Washington, and the day before the big mess, I guess, around here. It's already started as we come in here.

As indicated I come to this panel today by a route that probably was not necessarily planned by me, but certainly had been planned by someone, certainly more powerful than I. When I moved back to Washington 18 years ago as a vice president of Xerox, I put my children in the public schools, Dr. Brooks, where I went to school, where my mother taught school for 32 years, where my father met my—my father went D.C. public schools, where my grandfather went to D.C. public schools, taught there for 47 years, met my grandmother in the D.C. public schools. So I'm a committed person to the public school system. So therefore, I put my children in the public schools, and discovered very quickly that a lot of people thought that that was not a good idea.

The reason that they thought that was not a good idea is one that we probably know too well, but I believe it's still a good idea, because I think we have to have public institutions that serve our children and our communities very effectively. But, one of the reasons why public education and public systems are not as well as they should be is because people have withdrawn the resources that are necessary to keep those institutions alive and progressing. So we decided to use our resources in that way, to keep the system moving forward.

So instead of running away from the problem, my wife and I decided to do something about it directly. My son brought home three boys, who needed the kind of support that our family could provide, and what we did was adopt them. And over an 11 year period we adopted 87 children into our home. We sent 73 kids to college, 61 have graduated from college, 14 have advanced degrees. I spent about $600,000 of my own money on this effort, another $400,000-some from Xerox, over a million dollars we've pumped into the D.C. public schools, prior to anything they're doing with charter schools, Mr. Lott. This was all our personal effort.

But, the reason why we're here is not because we've seen our children succeed, but because I've had five children murdered. I've had three boys shot to death, one boy stabbed to death, and one boy hung. So I am a man, a father if you will, on a mission. And anybody who suggests anything other than that, that's their problem not mine. I'm real clear about where I'm going and why I'm going there. I made a promise to five children who died prematurely and unfortunately violently. And I want to see to it that the kind of pain that our family has been through, and those who are going through it in other parts of this country that we know so well, we can stop the foolishness.

But, if you have the kind of background that I have, a vice president of a Fortune 50 company, a combat officer in Vietnam, the kind of training that I have, then you have to think large enough, I believe, and challenge yourself, and put yourself at risk, if you will, to the same degree as the people you serve. And if all we're doing is moving along very casually, and doing things that we're capable of doing, you're not putting yourself at risk. And therefore, you're not solving the problem.

I'll tell you right now, you don't walk away from a Fortune 50 vice presidency to run a small nonprofit for an economic gain. That is not the right idea. The reason why you do it is because you want to do something different. Einstein tells us the significant problems that we face today cannot be solved by the same kind of thinking that got us there in the first place. So therefore you have to think differently. So we're in the business of thinking and acting differently. So what did we do? We said, okay, what is the problem? The problem is a developmental one. What's happened in Colorado, what's happening in this city, what's happening all around this country is a function of development. No one is born to do that. You are created to do the kinds of things that are happening in our society today.

So therefore, we believe that it's all about human development. Human development is a 24-7-365, 20-plus proposition to becoming an effective adult. Did you all get the numbers again, 24-7-365-20, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year, for over 20 years to produce an effective adult. My mother would probably suggest to you it takes over 50 years, because she's still working on me. But, the reality of it is, mama and daddy have never done that. Mama and daddy cannot do that. There is a system of converging institutions, family systems, faith based systems, educational systems, government systems, profit systems, nonprofit systems, all working together to manage the 24-7-365-20-plus.

So for us the question was, how do you create a paradigm for that period of time when children are not in school. I won't bore you with the statistics, but we all understand what happens when children are not in school. Schooling systems were designed to fit into the context of a much broader context. We're asking schools systems, Dr. Brooks, to do things today that they were not designed to do. And we understand that. And therefore, that puts pressure on the systems, and does not allow the systems to do what they're designed to do.

In non-school time, where much of your development takes place, we all know the statistics, the reality of it is a child is born and for 18 years of their life if they go to school every single day it's only 10 percent of their existence, 90 percent of their existence is outside of a classroom. Therefore, what happens then? For me as a child growing up in this city it was a very defined developmental process. That included Ms. Stokes, who made sure everybody on the block got home at dark. Ms. Stokes doesn't exist today. It included Uncle Joe who sat on the front steps near the house where we lived, the apartment where we lived, to make sure every child learned something. That doesn't exist today. So we now have all these programmatic efforts to try and replace them. Ms. Stokes and Uncle Joe were not 501(c)(3)s. In fact, I am a 501(c)(3), but that's a structural problem that we're facing today, and that's another story for another time.

So what we designed was a curriculum for non-school time. And we call that Kids House. We've been able to raise $2 million from various funders, including and most importantly, the Mott Foundation, and that curriculum now gives us the capacity to provide to an adult population anywhere in this country school based, church based, community based recreation centers. That allows us the ability to give them a curriculum, well thought out. We have work from the Smithsonian, again, there's over 200 different curriculums we've amassed. We have 2 dozen writers from all over the country, top educators, taking that material and putting it into a curriculum. That gives you six hours a day of developmental experience for 365 days a year, for 12 years. We haven't gotten to 365-20 yet, but we're going that way. But, we can give you six hours a day, we can give you 12 years, and we can give it from 3 years old to 15 years old this year.

So we now run Kids Houses, and we're testing our theories, and there are 18 locations around the country, including of course here in Washington, D.C. We're in churches, we're in schools, we're in homes, we're in all different kinds of venues. And one of the venues that we're in is in the prison. We're in the eighth largest prison in the United States where we're using our Kids House methodology to teach the men there, who are in fact fathers, the kinds of tools necessary for them to become active participants in their child's lives. What we were told as of yesterday, the Bureau of Prisons has studied all the different activities in prisons all over the country, state prisons, local prisons, as well as federal prisons, and this strategy was deemed the best in the nation for effective change in how the men in the prison not only changed their behavior within the context of the prison, but once they leave the system. And we're real proud of that.

Kids House also got us into the public housing arena, where we discovered that where we were working with public housing residents, the adults in that community needed certain supports as well. That gave rise to another curriculum based idea, the Urban Family University. It is mind boggling to me that we expect people who have gone through various systems, and failed going through those systems, which is why they end up in public housing in the first place, because they have not negotiated the systems that have been placed before them, that if they had appropriately managed through them they wouldn't be in public housing.

But, once they get there, then they're not only receiving housing, they're receiving in most cases foods through food stamps, and in most cases welfare. Then we turn around and give them a 90-day program, or a 120-day program, or a 1-year program, or a 2-year program that asks them now to do everything differently after 90 days that they didn't do after 9 years or 10 years or 20 years. It does not make sense to us.

So therefore, we're suggesting in the Urban Family University strategy that we build a curriculum. We think we're capable in this country of designing a curriculum for Cabrini Green [sp], Robert Taylor Homes. You have 29,000 people living in Robert Taylor Homes in Chicago, that's the university. It has all the same kinds of capacity the University of Chicago does across town. If you, in fact, design a curriculum for transformation, you ask everybody there to do certain things certain times.

I don't know how many of you went to college, but I know I did. And the first time I went to college I went to American University right up the street. They said these are the kinds of things you must do, and if you don't do these kinds of things, you are going to be put out of here. I didn't do those kinds of things, and they in fact put me out of there. When I got home my father said, you have two options, son, you can go in the Army, or you can go in the military. And I ended up in Vietnam. So I understand when you don't do what you're supposed to do, you can have some very harsh penalties.

So I need to note—I'm going to get out of here in a minute. But, the reality of it is, it was a system that I was asked to follow. And so therefore, the Urban Family University concept that we're operating now, which we now operate on in 11 public housing sites in three cities, 8 of which are in this city, where we are designing a curriculum for transformation for public housing residents, that deals with the entire family, that moves them from being dependent to independent like the rest of us.

And finally, that leads us to the schooling paradigm that we now have, as well. Two years ago this city decided to be a part of the national movement to create charter schools, Mr. Lott, again. And we signed up. Why? Because we wanted to see to it that in our community we had the ability to affect as much of the 24-7-365 as we could. So we said, if we could open up a school building that's an asset that we had control of then, and we could use that to effect not only our children's lives, but the adults in our lives. So our charter school is now operating. Our charter allows us to have 7,000 children over the next several years, and we intend to fill every single one of those slots. And what that will give us is the ability to effect change in an entire community, because all of our kids are coming, again, from our eight public housing sites. That's our targeted population. Each one of our buildings will have an adult component.

In our current building we have an adult component that teaches parents not only GED skills, but also automotive training. We are teaching young people to become auto mechanics. So in every one of our facilities we will have an adult component as well as a child component. Our buildings open at 7:30 in the morning and they close at 7:30 at night. Each year we will add a grade. We're at pre-K through seven now. We will add a grade a year until we get to 12. We've already entered into an agreement with the University of the District of Columbia to have a two-year associates degree. So therefore, we will be able to go—and we're going to also, in the year 2001, open an early childhood center. So we'll be able to go from pre-K, actually from early childhood all the way through two years of college. And we'll have the ability to effect not only children, but the adults in their lives as well.

That's the long and short of what the Urban Family Institute is about, and what we've been doing over the last several years.

Thank you.

I. Sawhill: Thank you, very much. And you really did keep to your time.

Our next speaker is Dave Dennis, and he is a founder and president of Positive Innovations, in Jackson, Mississippi. He's got a very distinguished educational background as a JD from the University of Michigan law school, a degree in political science from Yale, and many, many honors. He has practiced law. It's interesting that two of our innovators in social change, leaders here, have had very traditional kinds of backgrounds before they got into doing what they're doing now. I find that interesting, and you may want to comment a little more on that, or we may want to talk further about it.

He runs the Algebra Project. And I think you're going to hear more about that from him. Like Kent Amos, the work of their group has been widely featured in the media. So Dave Dennis.

D. Dennis: Good morning. It's a pleasure to be here. And I want to talk briefly to give you some background, it's sort of interesting to hear Mr. Amos talk about his involvement with this issue, and comparing that to mine, and to Bob Moses, who is really the founder of the Algebra Project.

Bob and I both were back with Joyce, back in the civil rights movement in the '60s, and we worked in the summer program there in 1964. And one of the things that happened is that Bob, who after his work there he went back in 1966, I think it was, he went to Tanzania, where he later became part of the Ministry of Education there, teaching math. And he came back to the United States in the late '70s, to do some post-graduate work at Harvard University. There he put his kinds into public school. And Miesha [sp] Moses, who is his oldest daughter, who is working with the Algebra Project, was there, and in the eighth grade. Bob is part of the family in the African tradition, he and his wife divide up the responsibilities for moving their children through the society. And Bob's role was to be in charge of the education of his children.

And so one of the things that happened there is his kids, Miesha was coming home very happy, you know, doing well in school, but he wanted to know what about your algebra. So she informed him that she was not taking algebra in the eighth grade. This bothered Bob. He went, as a parent, to visit the school, and to talk to the teachers there. And their response to that was, well, they're not teaching algebra in the eighth grade, and this by the way is in Cambridge, Massachusetts, a community close around Harvard. The reason why they weren't offering this is because they didn't feel that the kids were ready for algebra at that particular age. Well, Bob was disturbed by that, because he was teaching algebra, introducing algebra concepts to kids in sixth grade in Tanzania before that.

So he negotiated as a parent, and felt that his kids need to be in public schools, because the fact is that's where their tax money was, and the issue around his family was how do you get the public school system to work for his kids, and the other kids in the community. So during that time he was beginning to work on this process, seeing what the problem was. Well, it's a disconnect. Why would people feel that these kids weren't ready for algebra, because one of the things they would find is that algebra concepts—kids are introduced to algebra concepts in kindergarten and first grade. That's our first introduction, something happens after that, between that and the fifth and sixth grade, whereby kids lost sight of that. So we give them the same problem they had in the first grade that they could deal with in the seventh grade and the kids are totally lost, not understanding what that problem is. But, they were successfully doing that problem.

And what I'm talking about is, if you recall this, in kindergarten and first grade, you do this little block, right, block plus three is five, and try to figure out what goes in this empty space. Well, if you take that, that's an algebra concept. If you take that same problem in the sixth, seventh, and eight grades, and put a Y there, instead of that empty box, kids don't know what you're talking about, which is really crazy. So the issue is, what is this whole thing about algebra and this mystique that people deal with? Anyway, it is that Bob began to work with this problem, and he got a grant from the MacArthur Foundation, a Genius Grant, to use that money in developing curriculum, and a program to address this issue.

In 1989, during this period of time, I was doing something different. I had gone back to school, I had dropped out of school, went back to school, and became an attorney. I went to the University of Michigan and started practicing law, and was doing all right, I thought, until I met Bob in 1989, this reunion and you see these crazy things start going on. So at that reunion, we had a reunion in Mississippi in 1989 around this film called Mississippi Burning. And so at that reunion, these people who worked in the civil rights movement during the '60s came together because that was another lie. I don't know what happened in it.

So Bob and I met, we began to talk about this issue, and every morning we would meet, because we hadn't seen each other for a number of years. And he would talk about—we exchanged information about what we were doing in our lives. So every morning at 4:00 in the morning we would meet until about 7:30-8:00 and talk. When he got around to 1982 he started talking about his life and his involvement with the Algebra project, and creating. And then at that time I was married. And I had a wife that every morning would say, well, how did your discussion go with Bob? I'd say it was great. I mean, he was doing great, I mean, fine. But, this morning he talked to me about algebra, and the Algebra Project and that being—comparing that to the civil rights movement. And so I, in turn, went back and my wife asked, she says, well, how did it go this morning? I said, well, I don't know. I think Bob has really lost it, you know. He's talking about algebra and the civil rights movement in comparison. And I didn't see it at all at that time.

But, to make a long story short, I was talking about retiring from practicing law, getting out of practicing law at that time, to begin to work with other groups around organizing how we can begin to capture and control our history. And so Bob began to talk to me about coming to work with him at the Algebra Project, because at that time he was based primarily in Cambridge, New York, and Chicago. And he wanted to move it down South. And I didn't see that connection. But, pretty soon I did, and then I began to work with him in doing this work.

And so what the Algebra Project is really trying to do, and I just wanted to tell you that brief story, because of the comparison in terms of how this whole connection that people have with this. One of the things that we're trying to do is really prepare kids to be able to successfully take algebra at a middle school level, because we feel you've got to get an early start. We feel that this new technology that has hit this country and the world now, if kids can't master this and deal with it, then you know, you don't have an opportunity to become a part of this mainstream society. And that is, economically, you've got to make it.

We did all right in the civil rights movement, getting people prepared to register to vote. We did a good job with that. They did that. Mississippi has the largest number of black elected officials of any state in the country, per capita. But, at the same time, they're still at the bottom level economically, they're still at the rock bottom. Integration caused them to close down all institutions, and to have our buildings closed up, businesses closed down, houses are boarded up. In many of the communities, for instance, churches are even boarded up and leaving the communities. So it's really an issue around what we're talking about here. And so we feel very strongly that you've got to begin to prepare kids to become first class citizens. In order to do that they've got to get into the economic mainstream. In order to do that you've got to be able to master this technology that's out there.

What we discovered is that these kids don't have that problem with this technology. The gatekeepers that are there, which I call the adult population, has that problem. When kids grow today, being able to from the day they wake up, slapped on the behind, everything else has to be able to push buttons and see things move and things happen. They can master it. They don't have problems with these graphing calculators and things like that. Once you put it into their hands, what we found is that these kids can master this at a very early age.

We have kids now who are actually coming out of communities, for instance one of the areas of Brinkley [sp] Middle School in Jackson, Mississippi, what we're organizing there is that starting five years ago we started out with the kids there, and this is a 98 percent black school, in a community that where the school is located is only a few blocks from where Medgar Evers was killed, right across the street from the Fandle Haymouth [sp] Library. And these particular kids here, most of them were declared to be slow learners. Some of these kids now, in Mississippi at that time is that the average number of students taking Algebra I in any school at that grade level was around 20. That's around the entire state.

Now, at that time, we started work with 70-some kids at the 6th grade level. As they moved up there and began to improve all but three successfully took Algebra I in the 8th grade. Most of these kids were declared to be slow learners. We used the calculator as a tool, not as the driving force, but as a tool to move them through this. But just to give you an example here, these particular kids are now in the 11th grade this year, and are now moving around the country. They just left San Francisco. Last year they were over in Montgomery County, right here in Maryland. And they're doing workshops teaching teachers on how to use graphing calculators. They're put there using K-R 92, and other kind of pieces there is, and I actually do the workshops all the time in Mississippi, around the other areas, and they're also training other kids in what we call Math Literacy Works.

Now, what we feel is that one of the things the Algebra Project approaches is that you have to begin to do what we did in the civil rights movement. The civil rights movement is that around voter education and voter registration, we have to increase the demand side. That is, that people demanding that right to vote, I mean, that right to become registered voters. And what we look at here is you have to increase the demand side in education. One of the areas that we don't organize around very well is around education in this country. But, what we're trying to do now is to say that you can increase the demand side. The demand side not just around adults, because adults, we come to the table, we bring a lot of baggage to the table. You know, that sort of serves as a gatekeeper to a lot of the kids learning.

We feel that the concentration is around the young people. The young people being the driving force around what we call education reform. We also organize around, and the saying is that you can't have school reform without having community reform. It's got to come from the face of the community. What's driving that are young people. And I'll tell you why the young people have to drive it, and why it's being successful where we work, and they're driving this. Number one is, that a lot of the parents of these kids do not believe they can do this work, because they've been brainwashed to that fact is that they can't do this work.

And the more horrific piece about this, I guess, is that most of the teachers don't believe these kids can do this work. And they look at or deal with them as if they have to deal with remedial type workers. One of the reasons why is because most of our kids in the learning process, when we look at this gap between first grade and fifth and sixth grade, that's really where we're losing our kids, because we don't have the teachers there to provide the education source for the kids, because we're teaching them on a remedial level, based upon the fact—this is not their fault, because that's what they're getting in the universities. Universities are telling them, the teachers, they don't have to have a great math background to come out of—to be an elementary educator. So therefore, this whole system is set up in such a way that the driving forces in the classroom is that we're just not prepared.

An example about this not being prepared, and I'm moving pretty fast, I just want to touch on some things and open up some doors here for questions later on, is that this Franklin Middle School piece is we moved those 70 kids through this. They took Algebra I successfully in the eighth grade. When they got to the high school, they were ready to take geometry. The custom at Lanier High School was they would be ready to take maybe around 20 kids to take geometry in the sophomore year, not in the 9th grade. So there weren't any teachers.

So Bob Moses decided to follow these kids through. He went to Lanier and got a job teaching, so that those kids would be taught geometry, otherwise they wouldn't have been able to get it. Getting into the second year, Algebra II, these same kids came with same problem, because the number now is increasing, as other kids are catching onto this, that there wasn't enough teachers. So we had to go to Tulu [sp] College, which is one of the university schools that was our backbone in the '60s during the civil rights movement, and we got a couple of teachers to take a leave, a sabbatical leave, to go into Lanier High School to teach these kids.

Now these kids are in trigonometry. We had to do the same thing. Next year we don't know where we're going to find a calculus teacher to deal with these kids. And this is talking about just one system in one area. This is happening all over the place, as well in North Carolina. The kids that began the fifth grade three years ago, using those kids as training kids who became what we call Math Literacy Workers, working at the school, organizing other kids, who effected this school, which is a level one school system three years ago, who moved up to be a level four school system now.

But, the problem was, these kids as they move and organize through the seventh grade, these same kids who did this, who everybody is praising, the state came down and gave them awards praising them for moving that school system up. You've got kids teaching kids. When they got to the eighth grade, to take Algebra I, they had a major problem. There wasn't an Algebra I teacher, nobody could teach. So the problem we had there—they finally found an accountant to try to work with the kids, who had never had any classroom experience. So there's a great battle going on between the kids and the teacher.

The issue there—what happened here though, what makes a difference is that, what's making a difference is that those kids, about 25 of them, are saying they're going to take Algebra I next month. They're going to take the test. But, primarily over 6 percent of their work around this, because we get other teachers who go in on Saturdays and work with them after school if they can, and some of the high school kids are working with them, these kids are actually teaching themselves. So kids are now beginning to organize around this country, where we're working. They're coming together as a force, and beginning to now make a demand on this society about changes, but they are working with themselves and teaching themselves how to use graphing calculators, how to do this math work, and how to prepare around literacy, literacy covering all the courses that they have.

So we find this effort, and we're organizing this. And we're saying that, just as we did in the civil rights movement, where kids took to the streets, we're saying those kids have to take to the streets in a different way, in terms of the classrooms and outside, you know, working with the community. They are the driving force, and a lot of our efforts are around this. And what they're doing is bringing parents, parents are coming out now, but they're coming out just as they did in the '60s, young people. And Joyce was, you know, a teenager, I was a teenager, growing up in those places down there. Parents and community people came and rallied around us and gave us support and put a floor beneath us. And we feel very strongly that that's where it is now.

For instance, how do you get the young people to the table? I mean, I go to these conferences and everything else, and one of the things I like seeing is the target population being present, whereby they have a voice. I mean, how do you give these young people a voice? Well, in some places they're making greater decisions than we ever did at that same level. They're deciding in some places who lives or dies the next day. So all they want is an opportunity. Those kids don't want to be out in the streets. What choices do they have? They don't have any promises in terms of the future, because when they look in their own communities what's there? Boarded up buildings. Where do I get my economic base?

So a lot of these kids who are working as Math Literacy Workers are organizing where the communities and churches are supporting them, and they're actually beginning to make legitimate money. You take the dope money out of their pocket, you put something else in their pockets. How can I make money organizing communities economically and become a force in the community. So we're getting the school systems to hire these kids to do this work, training. So that base is how we're trying to move this through with the Algebra Project.

Thank you.

I. Sawhill: Thank you. That's very interesting to hear about.

And I think leads very nicely into our next speaker's story, which I read a little bit about last night. Joyce was nice enough to share with me a wonderful article about Thaddeus Lott, and what he's accomplished in Houston. It's called No Excuses, Houston Educator Thaddeus Lott Puts Failing Schools to Shame. And I think that probably sums it up a bit. But, he has a transformed this community in Houston called Acres Homes. He became the principal of an elementary school there back in 1975, and he's introduced some very unconventional teaching methods that I think have turned out to be very successful, that I think you'll hear more about. And in 1995 he put together a charter school cluster. Now, this is something, we've all heard about charter schools, but I had not before heard about the concept of a charter school cluster, about having four that worked together. And he has a very unusual position, I think, in the education field, of being the leader, or the project manager for that whole cluster of schools.

And so I think it's going to be very interesting to hear about that. As Joyce said earlier, this was an example of where setting very high expectations, I think, for kids made a difference and relates to what you just said, Mr. Dennis, about the problem of the parents and the teachers not having—not thinking that the kids could do the work, when of course they could if challenged.

So it's my pleasure to introduce you, Mr. Lott.

T. Lott: Thank you, Dr. Sawhill.

And to the members of the panel, it certainly has been an inspiration to be here this morning to hear your input, and to say that there appears to be a common thread that has gone through what has been said, previously, and what's been my experience as a parent. My wife and I moved into the neighborhood that I was born in and reared in, in 1969. I sent my two children to school, one kindergarten, the other one in second grade, and within about six or eight weeks we had to take them out and send them to private parochial schools, where they attended all the way through 12th grade, and then through the university. So I know what it means to have two children in your back pocket for all their career. And also I know what it means to be a parent looking for a school, particularly a public school, that should offer the quality of education that we received as youngsters. And for public schools to be less than that I think is criminal.

So I decided that if West Lee [sp] ever came open that I would come to the school and see what we could do, with regard to actually bringing it up to the status that it should have been, as it relates to providing effective instruction and education for all children. And so in 1975 I returned, at least the school came open and I applied for it. And I've been there since. Today I'm working, it's in the same community, Acres Homes, with three others. I have one middle school that's in a charter school configuration.

We're the first charter in the State of Texas. We were commissioned by the Commissioner of Education, prior to Senate Bill I that authorized the implementation of charters in Texas. We have three types of charters. One's a program charter, which can be an individual school or a group of schools, which is what our charter more or less that's the kind of charter that you described that we have, which is a program charter. Some of them operate under the auspices of the governmental agencies, ours in particular operates under the banner of the Houston School District. We use their buildings, et cetera. They do an excellent job of paying teachers, paying the bills and what have you. We just wanted to have the authority and the autonomy to do what we wanted to do, as it related to instruction, selection of teachers, and also curriculum staff development. And we wanted autonomy as it had to deal with that, and we signed a contract to that extent.

The other would be the open enrollment type charter, where you apply to the State of Texas and other governmental agencies to open up a charter. You find your own building, et cetera, and you do your own curriculum, that kind of thing. And the last is a home ruled charter, which more or less amounts to kind of seceding from the district itself that the school is presently working with, and forming your own little school district. Presently, we have none of those in Texas, but predominantly open enrollment charters, where in Texas we have pretty close—somewhere between 100 and 185 of those open enrollment type charters, with a service center, et cetera.

One of the reasons why we wanted to do a charter, and all the leaders in the community petitioned the board of education to set up the charter was because we wanted and we needed the autonomy that it took to do what we wanted to do for children. One of the other things that I have seen, and which impresses me here today is that we have people who saw problems, but not only did they see problems, they set out to find solutions to problems. That's basically what charter schools are about. It's basically what we have always been about. And that is trying to find another way to solve the problems that we actually inherit in the public school setting.

When I went to West Lee I found several things, one of which was that I found—I knew that the teachers would be in and out, we'd have a great turnover, simply because of the neighborhood. You have to really be dedicated to want to come to my neighborhood. The other thing is a lot of people mobility. But, most of all, one of the things that plagues us today is that I knew the universities were not preparing the teachers to do the kind of job that needed to be done instructionally, and especially as it has to do with reading in the schools that I was working with. And especially at West Lee, I knew that we had to do something that would enable the children to learn to read the first year that they were enrolled in first grade, et cetera.

One of the problems that we have in education today, which is the reason why we have remedial type courses in the universities, and we spend millions of dollars in the universities now a days with remedial courses, is because we don't do the job right the first time, down in the elementary grades. There is no reason why a child should not be able to read the first year after you teach him. I mean, read independently, and be able to read without someone having to sit there and, you know, tell him what the next word is. There is no reason why that shouldn't happen. If it doesn't happen there are two things that's wrong. And we found this out with a couple of things that we have done. First of all, this is nothing wrong with the child. And if you have a curriculum, a program that is research based, that has been proven to work, then there's nothing wrong with the program.

The problem is with implementation, poor implementation, ineffective implementation. We knew that. So what we did, knowing that the universities were not doing what they should have done, was we found some of our strongest master teachers, whatever you call them. We call them lead teachers, a teacher that can go into any classroom, at any level, and do an effective job of working with an experienced teacher and also new and beginning teachers. That is, the idea is not to let the teachers fall through the cracks. If they don't fall through the cracks, the children won't fall through the cracks. And we've been doing this for years.

The other thing is, though, before we even begin working with the children is this, that we treat children much like a doctor treats us when we go to the doctor. The reason why we don't do an effective job with children is because we don't know what we're teaching. We don't know enough about what they bring. We assume because they live in a shack, behind a picket fence that's falling down, they bring nothing to school. That's the biggest misnomer and lie you could ever think of. Some of the brightest children live in shacks behind picket fences. But, if you don't take time to one on one, what we do is we use the Brigands [sp] basic skills tests, all the way from kindergarten through fifth or sixth, all the way up through the eighth grade. And it goes all the way into fine gross motor skills.

If a child has actually been out in a mom and pop situation, where nobody told them not to teach the alphabet. You know, we got hung up in public schools with this idea of developmentally appropriate practices. I'm sorry, I don't mean any harm. Every now and then in education somebody comes up with a buzz word that throws everybody off. And they said what it meant was don't do anything with a child that developmentally he's not ready to do. Well, it's a dumb statement. If developmentally he's not ready to do it, he's not going to do it anyway. What they didn't say, if he is developmentally ready to do it, do it. What they really meant was, don't teach any academics where? In kindergarten. And Reedline [sp] and his group, and all the rest of these guys over in 14 regional offices all over this country have 30 years of research that's come up with the idea—well, really the research proves that the best time to teach children to read is when they are ready to read. In public schools, though, it's in kindergarten.

Now, I've done that for 10 years and I've been criticized, and people have come in who were dyed in the wool, developmentally appropriate practices people, and just thought I was the most terrible person in the world. But, here just last year when the Houston independent school district recited, once again, that we were going to begin doing non-reference tests, rather than relying only on the state test, I couldn't wait until the first grader's results came back for West Lee. What happened was, in September of last year, not at the end of last year, in September of last year we tested 169 first graders, more 1st graders than any other school in the school district, and West Lee rated with Houston's top 13 schools. Schools that had rated—that had ranked from the 80th percentile to the 97th percentile. West Lee's 1st graders, 169 of them, rated at the 82nd percentile in September on the Stanford 9. The only minority school out of 182 that ranked with Houston's best, which would be a suburban school anywhere else.

Now, what that says is this, that if I wait until first grade to teach my children to read, they're already going to be one year behind the children they're going to compete with. It also says this, that all children at five years of age come with the same enthusiasm, the same innate ability to perform as children anywhere else, but it depends upon what we do with them once we get them. So what we always do is go through and we give that Brigands. It may take 45 minutes, it may take an hour. The more a child knows, the longer it's going to take. But, what we then do is take all 169 of them and begin at the top and come all the way down to the bottom, together with the reading placement test, that we're going to use for the series that the child is going to be assigned to.

Now, I do this for every grade level. And I want to emphasize that it's the reading placement test. It's not an IQ test. I don't get into arguments with people about homogenous or heterogeneous grouping. I do what's best for children. And so we come down from the top and cut—we have a 22 to 1 ratio. Then at 22, I'm going to cut. Now, what I don't do is I don't lock children into any one of those groups, and I don't lock them into any one of those classrooms. It's constant monitoring. But, the important thing is to teach a child at the instructional level. If you don't teach him at the instructional level, you're not going to teach him. If you teach him above his instructional level, you're going to frustrate him, below it, you're going to hold him back. But, the idea is to put them into clusters as closely as possible, in such a way that that whole class can move as fast as possible, and ultimately you teach all the children.

Out of 1150 youngsters, we had only 3 percent of our children were special ed. Too many children are being assigned to special ed who are not special ed. They may be slow learners. But, they need to be taught, and need to move at the rate at which they can move. The important thing is, at whatever rate that they are moving, it's for them to achieve mastery at that rate. And when I say mastery, I mean when I turn them loose to do anything independently, he can independently, by himself, achieve a score of 90 to 100 percent, 50 percent, 50 is not mastery, 70 is not mastery. That means that a child knows what he knows. It also means that we've done one heck of a job of instruction.

So whatever we do is data driven. The idea of having staff development is one of our—we wanted to do the charter school configuration, because we want to get out from under this idea of the curriculum department in our district saying grace over what we were going to do, in terms of staff development.

[End tape 1, side 1]

T. Lott: [In progress]—I don't know about in Washington, but I know in Houston a lot of times, even if you decided that you were going to use a certain curriculum, you know, it had to pass through the curriculum department. They had to say grace or they had to decide, well, research says we shouldn't do this. Even though it was working for children, sometimes they didn't want you to do it because, philosophically, they were opposed to it. They didn't believe that you should teach reading that way.

So, our reason for even wanting to be a charter is that we could have the staff development and training that was unique for the teachers and the children and the building that we operate. There's no way that a school district can offer a generic staff development that will meet the needs of all of the teachers who anywhere in that school district. So, to have the freedom to do it, which is what we didn't have before.

So, the idea of actually being accountable, and again all three of the schools, the elementary schools, are exemplary. I'm working on the middle school. And the reason why we have to work on the middle school is that for years all over this country, and even in Houston, we have not had any standards. We're about to begin working on it. There's no one small body of information that teachers have that's user friendly that says what a child is supposed to know before he goes from first grade to second grade, and second grade to third grade, and so on. We have just been sending children up. Social promotion is what we called it. And, so we've got to get back to this idea of having prerequisites for children being promoted from one grade level to the next, or you're going to wind up with what we have, and that is this. In the middle school that I'm working with 20 percent of the children are on and above level in reading, 80 percent are lower, and 20 percent are special ed. Of the 20 percent, now that's a whole lot of special ed. That's more than the normal number of special ed children. In the whole school there's about 25 percent.

Well, what's happened is, in many instances, when it comes to state tests, the elementary schools have attempted, or at least they have exempted a lot of their children by classifying them as LEP [sp] and special ed. So that makes their scores go up. And a lot of children wind up going up to middle school. But when give a middle school that kind of a situation, 20 percent of its children on and above level, and the rest of them are below level. And then, on top of it, you don't have a curriculum in place to teach the children off level. If a child is reading off level, don't attempt to teach him on level reading. There's no way it's going to happen.

But besides this idea of doing a regular base level reading, or language, literature type program, you have to realize that the world of technology that we're trying to aspire for says that we're going to have to teach more content, content reading. And we're not doing that. There's a lot of difference in reading a science book, a math book, and the geography book. The vocabulary is not the same.

Thank you.

I. Sawhill: Thank you very much.

Yesterday, we had another conference here, and your talking about the importance of starting very young, in kindergarten, with reading reminded me that yesterday at this other conference, we had Senator Dodd here. And Senator Dodd tells a story about how they brought in some researchers to show the results of the new brain research. And they showed the senators two pictures. S One was a picture of a three-year-old child who had been raised normally, and the other was a child from a Romanian orphanage, who had never gotten proper interaction with an adult. And that the brain scans were completely different. And that the senators who were given this briefing, you know, all sort of leaned forward in their chair, and were impacted, he said, by this in a way that nothing else had impacted them.

And I think what we're learning, and what your story emphasizes is that is very important to do it right the first time, the first time around.

I turn now to Elois Brooks, who is the deputy superintendent here in Washington, D.C., and we know you've got a tremendous challenge on your hands. She comes from Riverside, California, where she was a teacher and administrator for many years before she came to Washington in 1994. And, she is currently working on her doctorate at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. I don't know quite how you do that and do your current job as well, but it's very nice to have you here.

E. Brooks: Thank you. Good morning. I am very glad to be here.

I did come to Washington, D.C., in October of 1997, and I would just like to tell you why I came, and how I got here, because I have spent 35 years in public education. I've been in five successful school districts. And to be perfectly honest, I was getting ready to retire. And one Saturday morning at a quarter to 5:00 in Riverside, quarter to 8:00 in Washington, D.C., I received a telephone call from Arlene Ackerman [sp], who was a friend of mine. And she said to me, I need you to come to Washington, D.C.

And I said, do you know what time it is? And she said, it's quarter to 8:00 in Washington, D.C. I said, Arlene, it is quarter to 5:00. It is a Saturday morning in Riverside, California. What is the problem? And she said, I took the academic officer's job in D.C. I said, you did what? You left Seattle and went to Washington, D.C.? And she said, yes. I said, well, you know what, this is one time I know you're crazy.

And so, she said, well, listen, the Lord told me to call you. He told me to tell you that you're needed in D.C. I said, tell me why is the Lord talking to you in Washington, D.C., and he's not talking to me in Riverside? She said, because you're sleeping. And so, two weeks later, I ended up in Washington, D.C.

And I'm going to tell you, in those two weeks, I thought about my own education. I am not a product of public schools. But I have been a teacher, a principal, and an assistant superintendent in public schools. And I am totally, totally dedicated to public schools. My children went to public schools. And I have been, except for when I taught in New Orleans for five years, I spent all of my time in suburban school districts. And understood the difference between suburban America and urban America.

And I decided that I would give a few more years of my life to education, and it would be in an effort to save public education in America, because having been a product of parochial schools, I fully understand when I went to public school what I missed. And so, I didn't want my children to miss the same thing. That's why they went to public school. And so, I understood that public schools were under siege. Arlene told me a lot about Washington, D.C., public schools. And I said, if it can be done, it can be done in Washington, D.C. And to be perfectly honest, I said, if we couldn't do it, if the two of us couldn't do it, it could not be done.

I want to say to you that we are reforming public education in Washington, D.C. We take the children that come to us because in public school we do that. We work with what we have. And we have improved academic achievement in the year that we've been here, at every grade level, in reading and in math.

And I want to tell you a little bit, because my talk is about the community. And Mr. Dennis said something that's very true, you must reform the community if you're going to reform public education. And when we arrived in D.C. in October of 1997, we found an erosion in the faith of public education like I've never seen before. And for good reason. Next to Mississippi, I think we were the lowest school district in the nation. We are not a state, but we get compared to other states on the NA Test [sp].

School had not opened on time for several years in Washington, D.C. We were under a court order around facilities. And I'm going to tell you, it was like nothing I've ever seen in my life. When I came in October, the judges were closing schools every day. Thirty minutes notice to move 800, 1,800 kids out of a school. The judge would say, get them out, the school is closed because of fire code violations. It was so hectic and so chaotic, and so unbelievable, until I walked around, I do believe, for a month in a literal daze. I've never seen anything like it. We were constantly reacting, constantly trying to find places for the children, trying to move books, trying to move supplies. Not knowing how long we were going to be in these temporary places. So, it was chaotic.

So, what did we do? We found that we had different pockets of our community. We had a very vocal community in certain wards. And in other wards, we had parents that didn't even know the condition that schools were in. So, Arlene Ackerman declared that the Washington, D.C., public school was in a crisis. She just publicly said it. You're in a crisis, our students are achieving below grade level, 75 percent of our 10th graders were below the basics in reading and math.

Now, I want to tell you that there were lots of people in this city who were surprised. And there were other people who knew that we were in this type of situation. And Arlene simply said, I don't understand this conspiracy of silence, that people are not talking about this, that families are not knocking at the door saying, what are you going to do?

The superintendent had adopted the Stanford Nine. He had said that there would be no social promotion, but there was nothing in place to support students. That we were ending social promotion. There were no accountability systems in place. So, we started a parent affairs office, and we had a plan of how we were going to get public support, because as we went out into communities, we were literally attacked by certain portions of our communities about, number one, standardized tests, and the fact that we were not going to promote children without their basic skills.

We were attacked around the area of stopping social promotion. We were attacked about the fact that Mrs. Ackerman came in and said, we were going to have an academic summer school, and that certain students would have to go to summer school. I'm telling you, we went on a mission to, first of all, inform many of our parents, and to have our parents understand that many of the parents who were against our eliminating social promotion, and were against Stanford Nine. And were against summer school were some of our wealthiest parents, and our parents whose children were doing very well, because I will tell you that we have a dual system in D.C., just like we have a dual system at most school districts. We have outstanding schools that we would match with any schools in the nation. And then we have schools that are some of the worst in the nation.

So, we started a parents affairs office, in which we went out to the community meeting, the superintendent, myself, our assistant superintendent. We went to every ward. Anyone who invited us, we went. We were out most of the time that first year, three nights a week we were out talking to parents about what we were attempting to do.

We also started parent centers in all of our schools, centers where a parent can go for information. We started having parent coordinators in our schools. And this year, we have trained 50 parents to be trainers of parents. We train them around the areas of standards. We do have standards in all of the core areas, in reading, in math, in social studies, and in science. We know what our students should know and be able to do. So, we train our parents in the area of standards.

We train them to be parent advocates. How to advocate for your students. We aren't afraid of parent advocates, so we are training our parents. We started a community and corporate affairs office, in which we have many, many, many, many corporate partnerships. And we have done that in a systemic and systematic way around our school career grants in which we got $10 million, something that this community has been trying to do for three years. We finally got a school of career grants, and there are many partners that lined up in the area of school to career.

We put in accountability systems. We have accountability for principals, 50 percent of their rating is in the area of student achievement. So, if your students are not achieving, it's impossible for you to get a satisfactory rating. And if you do not get a satisfactory rating, you are not employed the next year. The first year we were here, 39 principals left. We put in an evaluation for teachers, 50 percent of their evaluation is around student achievement.

As we said, we did standards. We have a huge professional development. We understand that teachers need to be re-tooled and retrained. This is an area in which we had to educate our parents, because we have a staff development day once a month. And we have to say to our parents, would you go to a beautician or a barber that had not been schooled on a continuous basis? Would you go to a doctor that's not continuously trained? But somehow our communities seem to feel that teachers do not need that same amount of training. In many instances teachers and principals are not treated as professionals, even chefs go to school every year to stay up to date. So, we want our parents to understand that staff development is truly important.

Around the area of facilities, we went into partnership with the Army Corps, and we have, indeed, improved facilities. Now, we have a long way to go in facilities, but understand that Washington, D.C., is an old city, and our children are in buildings that are, in some cases, over 100 years old. Can you imagine the amount of upkeep you need for buildings that are over 100 years old? So, we've done those things.

We have also attempted to go into partnerships around the area of technology. We have partnerships with Intel. We have partnership with Cisco. We have partnership with Bell Atlantic. And I can say to you that by September, all of our high schools, and all of our middle schools will have Internet access, not just from the office, and from the library, where we have it right now, but from every classroom. And by January of the year 2000, all our elementary schools, and that is over 6,000 classrooms will have Internet access. And we're training teachers around the area of technology.

So, we're doing all of these things. But the first thing that we had to do, we had to inform our community, and we did that on a consistent basis. We had to have not only their knowledge, but we had to have a certain amount of their consent. Because one of our core beliefs is that our parents are our partners, and that it takes an entire village to raise a child.

We also have tons of volunteers in our classrooms, and we targeted our second grade. For every child that was below basic, every child that had repeated, to have a tutor that went into the school for half-an-hour twice a week, and we met that goal of having a tutor for all of those children.

So, Washington, D.C., as a public school is on the move. And I can say to you that if we can do it with a convoluted, and I do mean a convoluted governance system, we have an elected board, we have a board of trustees, we have a control board. We also report to the City Council, to the Mayor and to the Congress. And if we are able to do it with that kind of reporting system, and when I say report, I mean, report, you can do it and it can be done in the public schools.

Thank you.

I. Sawhill: Thank you very much.

It's interesting that although this panel is called Perspectives on Locally Based Community Development, and you've all spoken to the importance of having parents and other parts of the community involved in what you do, that there is so much focus on education, and so it will be interesting to talk more about that.

But let me open this up for comments, questions, from the audience.

Participant: I have a comment, I guess, or a question for Dave Dennis. In your opening comments, you made a few comments that really hit home for me. I'm from Massachusetts, from Cambridge and am a product of the Cambridge Public School system, and did have algebra in the 8th grade. What I'm concerned about is, Cambridge considers itself a very progressive city. I took algebra in 1978, 1978 in the 8th grade. And I'm wondering if you think there is a dual system, a dual school system there?

I'm wondering if your friend Bob, who went and had discussions with the Cambridge public school system was in another area of Cambridge that did not offer algebra, which is pretty frightening, considering that Cambridge considers itself very progressive. And if it's happening in a city that considers itself progressive, you know, Lord knows what's happening in the rest of the country. It's pretty frightening.

D. Dennis: Yes. I wish I could comment on that. I'm not familiar with Cambridge. One of the things is that my work with The Algebra Project has been primarily in the South, and one of my deals with Bob was for me to come onboard, is that I would go visit above the Mason-Dixon Line, but not to participate in any type of organized efforts. I had that same standard when I was in the civil rights movement, that I would not move above the Mason-Dixon Line in terms of my work.

So, I wish I could comment on that. My story on that was based upon that which I've gotten in talking to Bob, and some of the other people in that particular area, and Miesha [sp], but not from personal experience.

Participant: Ms. Brooks, I'm a future elementary school teacher who will be facing a choice of whether to teach in public or private school shortly. And, you said that there was a difference for you, having grown up in parochial schools and then you made it a commitment to public schools. And I was wondering what that difference was?

E. Brooks: I think the difference was around diversity. I grew up in New Orleans, Louisiana, where there is and continues to be a dual system. There are probably as many students in Catholic schools as there are in public schools. And when I started teaching in New Orleans in one of the depressed areas of New Orleans, I found it very difficult to deal with the students, because I had not been exposed to the students, even though in 1964, when I started teaching, the schools were still all black schools in New Orleans. I found that I had been more or less sheltered, not aware of what was going on, and it was a real eye-opener.

And so I wanted my children to be able to deal with life better than I was able to deal with it the first year. Had I been a public school student, I would have been exposed to students at all levels. In the Catholic school, you have to pass a test to get in. You have to do this to get in. They put you out if you didn't measure up or whatever. In public school, you meet people from all backgrounds. And I wanted my children to have that. And I think in this day and age, it is vital that we do. If we don't, we will see things more and more like what we saw happen in Colorado a few days ago.

Participant: One of the questions that I had as I listened to the conversation, and that perhaps in an indirect way you touched on, but in a direct way you didn't, and that is the fact that if we're talking about urban education many of our young people do not understand that education leads ultimately to an employable force, and that there is no meaning to them about why they're in school, and what that ultimate education will lead to, and the fact that they will one day hold a job and make a contribution to society by holding that job. That we are in a highly technological age, but oftentimes our young people don't understand how they're going to participate in that highly technical era that they will be facing at some point in time.

So, school to work transition programs, to me, become the way that you begin to prepare young people who may not have an ultimate vision of what they're going to be. I sometimes talk, and I think I might have shared this with Joyce when we were talking once upon a time, is that I came along at a time, I don't want to say how old I am, but I came along at a time when there were minimal opportunities for me to decide what career I wanted to be in. But today that opportunity is open to young people, and they may not understand why they're in school in the first place, and that is ultimately to prepare themselves for the world of work.

E. Brooks: I would agree with you, and I would just like to say in our schools, I mentioned and touched on briefly that we had gotten school to career grants in all of our high schools. And many of them are divided into small learning communities around careers. They are given a test in the 10th grade to decide on what career they would like to go in, and then they go into a small learning community.

In those classrooms, we are training our teachers to relate to students how what they are teaching, even in this English class or math class, relate to the career that they have chosen. So, we have, in this grant, in 10th grade our students will do shadowing, job shadowing. In the 11th grade, they will be assigned a mentor. And in 12th grade, they will do internships. But it is a progression that starts with the 9th grade with what we call the success community in which we really emphasize support and bringing kids up in their reading and math. And then, in 10th grade, they are exposed to many different careers, and they make a choice. And in the 11th and the 12th grade, they are exposed to four electives around their chosen career. And the whole idea is to help them to understand that school is a preparation for work, and that they must see how what they are learning relates to the world of work, and have those experiences in the workforce.

T. Lott: In addition, I think it's very important for us to start at a very early age, as low as kinder, 1st and 2nd grade with activities for children which involves them with application. That's again what we're not doing enough of. Whatever they are learning is applicable to something in life and living. And they're not having those experiences. We're not going from the concrete to the abstract. We're not showing how what they are learning is related to life. And so, we don't need to wait until they get to 7th, 8th and 9th grade. Children need activities with application, with higher level thinking skills, reasoning, all the way from kindergarten, and that's what many times our teachers are not prepared to do. So, we've got to prepare the teachers in such a way that they present children with activities, once they have the basics, to have application of the basics.

K. Amos: I think I agree with both the comments that have been made here so far, that you have to, at some point in time, focus on a specific job skill. But before you get there, you have to prepare for a broader range of options for a child. And if you learn the basic skills necessary, then they're transferable to any workplace that you want to go into. We don't have high-school level yet. So, therefore, we're not dealing with that specific area. However, as I indicated, in our schools, we will have a transition to work environment for young adults and high school dropouts in many instances so far. But the more important thing is, if you learn the first time through what you need to know, then you can pretty much take those skills and go anywhere with them.

D. Dennis: I would like to take one more. The lady in the back raised the question earlier, what's your name, I think your question raised a bigger issue. There are addressed on a general basis, there are dual systems in this country around education. It's suburban areas versus the inner city. And the kids are being written off. There's the moving of kids from their political groups in this country at this present time that are actually involved in the removing of kids out of the public school system as it is, that is, into what they call remedial education programs, and to alternative schools. And then what they call it is, they're making space for other kids to get back into what they call the public school system. In the inner city, most of these kids are from the private schools. You get them back in under the disguise of what they call integration. And so what's happened here is, because of the fact that the whole education program, the system, has become so expensive, you can't continue these private schools as they have in the past. But they're not building new schools.

So the dual system now is moving kids out to make space for these other kids who come back into the system under the disguise of education. And this is why this whole piece around reform of community is so important. If we don't wake up to this, and not fall for this, because most of this program in this country now that's been happening, and lobby groups they're great with it because big business is now in education, that's where the money is. Your big business dollars are saying they're going to education and training programs. It's become a political issue, because as our kids are being moved out to these remedial education programs, and to these alternative schools, and what we also call jailhouse places.

So, the question is, how do we begin to organize to begin to attack, begin to develop means and process ourselves to protect our kids and to keep our kids in these systems, and also make sure that the system is operating and working on their behalf. This is very big to us. It's a big problem, because we're finding that the support of this system, this new process that's going on now, the Urban League, the NAACP, they're all there because these people are using the magic word "integration." How can we integrate our schools, which have never been integrated, bringing kids back in, but at the same time not building new schools, so the schools are already overcrowded. So, these kids who are presently in the schools, where do they go?

So the issue here is making what they call schools held accountable, and teaching kids who really want to learn, and who is making the decision about what kids want to learn, and how that process exists. So, I just wanted to say that because it gets into a bigger political issue, I think, which we're going to have to one day begin to really address on a national level.

I. Sawhill: Could I ask all of you, we're almost out of time, but I want to bring this back to a point that Joyce made at the beginning, which is, she was talking about what I would call public-private partnerships, and the fact that a great deal of innovation, some of which we've heard about here, your problems with some of the powers that be in the Texas school system, and certainly, I'm sure it's true in your situation, how does one work with the existing systems? Surely we need public resources to solve some of these problems and, therefore, we need public involvement. And yet the public sector has gotten a reputation for being, as Joyce put it, a somewhat bureaucratic quagmire, and it doesn't always seem to be oriented to being as helpful as it could be. And sometimes it's even an obstacle. And yet, I think we desperately need the resources that can only come from the public sector. Would any of you like to make sort of comments on that set of issues?

K. Amos: Well, the institute is involved with three major strategies, Kids House, Urban Family University, and Community Academy. In each instance, we have both public and private dollars supporting what we do. And, in each instance, more so with the school system versus the others, there are challenges dealing with government bureaucracies.

I think we have to also recognize, and this is part, unfortunately, of the kind of dialogue that goes on all to often, and we do, in fact, separate. When you ask the question, public and private, you have already set up a paradigm that you have two separate institutions. Well, the truth of the matter is, they're all one institution, because they're all about one people. And we have to continually remind ourselves that we serve but one constituency, if you will, and that is the citizens of this society. And that's what we kind of continually remind the folks that we go to for funding, that the goal is to accomplish certain tasks, not to complete certain processes. And we get those two things mixed up a lot.

And I will take this opportunity, Ms. Brooks, since were up here together, to say that certainly those of us in the charter system in the District of Columbia, Tom and others, would like a better working relationship with the D.C. public school system. And, candidly, we don't have it. We are all public schools. We serve the same children. We are not two different entities. We are managed by two separate processes, yes. But we're still the same children, and we serve the same children, we're both public schools. And I think that's an important distinction we have to make sure that we make, that it's not that we serve different children.

I keep hearing the notion that charter schools take away from the public schools. The fact of the matter is, we are public schools. You can't take away from yourself. We are the same entity. And that's the important thing we have do. Therefore, we have to work very closely together.

And, like I said, I'm going to take this opportunity, since we are here together, to ask you for an opportunity for us to talk about just that issue, today and beyond. Not just with our charter school, but all charter schools.

But is a very challenging issue in all instances. But, to everyone's credit, including our public systems, there are competent people with goodwill working toward the same means. And I think once we get beyond that, we can solve these problems of bureaucracy, because they're just human problems. To solve the bigger problem, which is the decay that is affecting our children and communities.

T. Lott: In addition, one of the things that has happened in Houston, five years down the road as opposed to when I started, was that we have a superintendent, Dr. Rod Page, who has bought into the idea that a lot of top down should be bottom up, and that have come up with a philosophy called the Beliefs in Visions, and Dr. Page has been one of those who actually pushed for charter schools, especially the ones that were under the umbrella of the Houston independent school district. We have quite a few of those. They are charter schools, but they are still under the umbrella of the Houston independent school district.

The other thing is, to make a public school system, or put together a system within the community which has now the support of the community, the belief, the trust of the community, and also the buy-in, reform usually does not work because we've not done enough legwork to convince people of why we need to reform. So, we go into reform, reforming and fighting as we're reforming, because people don't understand what it is we're trying to do. Well, we got over that.

And so, one of the reasons why we're not having the problems, for instance I'm not having the problem, is because of the leadership, and the fact that it has changed in such a way, that philosophically, they're in tune with the very thing that the superintendent is. And that is what he espouses. So, our leadership, and also getting the community to the point where it has the buy-in to support what's being done has helped a lot in solving many of the problems that we had initially. So, Houston is on the mend and on the run.

The only thing, too, that we are proving is that it's going to be hard for an open enrollment charter school to do a better job than the public schools are doing. That's what we're trying to prove.

E. Brooks: Let me say that, as a public school deputy superintendent in Washington, D.C., I have never seen the number of charter schools as we have in this city. Washington, D.C., has a public school system now of 72,000 students. And we have two chartering boards, each of which can charter up to 10 charter schools a year. So, in a school system that is not really a very large school system, there is a possibility of 20 charter schools every year. Now, we can sit here and act like that is not a threat to public schools, but it is a threat to public schools, simply because of the number, the sheer number of charter schools that can come up. Within three years, you can literally have 60 charter schools.

K. Amos: All of which are public schools.

E. Brooks: All of which may very well be public schools, but not public school as we know public schools. So, I am simply saying that that to me is a problem, not charter schools, but the number of charter schools that can come onboard in this city. Not charter schools, I am sure that the superintendent in Houston would be amazed, and Houston has a bigger school system that D.C., if there were 20 charter schools coming on every year in Houston.

K. Amos: But there are not, and that must mean Houston is doing one hell of a job with its public schools, because they don't want to go. So that's where we're trying to get in Washington.

J. Ladner: I just want to make a brief comment in response to Kent and Elois' concerns about communication between the two entities, or within the one entity. The problem is that the Congress mandated that it be possible to charter 20 schools per year in the District. It is their fault. And they've created a really serious problem because of two things.

Number one, as we try to rebuild a system that suffers from deferred neglect for many, many years, with limited resources. The Congress has used the District as a staging area. It's a testing ground as a forerunner for charter schools around the nation. So, it is their experimentation. They set up two different chartering authorities. One in the public school system, another as a separate private chartering agency. The limited resources is what the issue is about.

And the charter schools come on-line without adequate facilities, without adequate monetary resources, and it's a problem. And I see that the remedy really should come from the Congress. They ought to rethink this issue and cut back on the number of charters. Most of them are not going to survive either. Most of them are operating at the very edge.

K. Amos: I think it's important to note that both the comments are certainly accurate, that the Congress is using this jurisdiction as an experimental ground for transformation of the management structure for public education nationally. I don't think anybody has any illusions about that. Certainly, I do not. In fact, we do have two different chartering authorities in this city, and each has the ability to, in fact, as Ms. Brooks says, have enough charters here that she could have one for every child in time. There's no upside to it, either. You could do this literally every year forever and you could have every child have their own charter.

However, in the three years, I guess, that this has been going on, as to my knowledge, unless she knows something other than what I know, there will not be 20 charters awarded this year. So, already you see a diminution in the numbers that are going to be awarded each year. And, as you indicated, Joyce, that many of them are very small and operating on very thin margins. The business of running these institutions will cause some to not exist.

But I go back to, I guess, what we must understand is the fundamental issue here is that what will be the construct of public education in this country at the primary and secondary levels, and we should not be afraid of different management systems, however they come to pass. People send their children from around the world to this nation at our higher education. We have the finest higher education system in the world. And the construct of that higher education system is private, it's parochial, it is small, it is large, it is state, it is this, it is that, it's single sex, it's non-single sex. And all of those institutions get both public and private dollars, and the combination of those presents to the world the finest higher education system in the world.

What we do not have is the same kind of construct at the primary and secondary level. And I think the charter movement allows for that option to happen. To begin to bring to bear the kind of ingenuity that is represented by Mr. Lott, and Mr. Dennis, and Mr. Moses, and others around the country, in addition to those who are already entrenched in the systems. That allows for that kind of ingenuity and creativity to build the kind of full, rich educational paradigm for all of our children that is free, based on tax dollars. And that's really what we ought to look at. What are we willing to do, in terms of a construct for education. And that's where we're going.

I. Sawhill: We are more or less out of time. But, we—do you want to go a little bit further. Okay. All right.

Participant: I'm Eugena Kimball with the Albert Shanker Institute. As I listened to this I just felt compelled to say one thing. I don't think it's fair to be overly simplistic either about charters or about the conventional public system, in terms of options that are before us. There's plenty bad that goes under the charter school movement, and there are plenty of problems, and that's been true in the District. There is also plenty good that's going on in the conventional model in public schools.

And I would point you to look carefully at District 2, in New York City, where not using a charter model a very good, exceptional leader managed to turn over 80 percent of the principalships, create schools using those principals, where the teachers were committed to a high standards, solid curriculum, emphasizing literacy in math, and where the district went from I think 16th among 32 to 2nd, in terms of student achievement.

I mean, I appreciate the programs that are on the panel, in terms of the creativity and what they've produced. But, I hope we don't come out of this with a mind set that charter is all good, conventional public is all bad. You've got leadership on both ends. Thanks.

T. Lott: I don't think anybody suggested that.

I. Sawhill: I think Ms. Brooks has to leave. And we probably are running into the time of the next panel. I know this is a very interesting debate, and we could probably continue it.

But, I would like you all to join me in thanking everybody who has been up here.

D. Dennis: I would just like to point out one thing. This is a good example of how we adults, we have messed up things for kids.

J. Ladner: We want to thank this very excellent panel.

And we'd like for the participants on the second panel on Passing the Torch, the Next Generation of Urban Problem Solvers to come forth, please.

We'll get started in about five minutes.

[End of Panel]