Transcript
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Welcome and Introduction
Remarks by Marshall Smith
Remarks by The Honorable Chaka Fattah (D-PA)
Panel on GEARUP
Panel on LAAP and Distance Learning
Luncheon
Panel on Title II Teacher Quality
Wrap Up Session
Rep. Fattah: Let me thank the — I'm just going to call him the deputy secretary — acting is —
[LAUGHTER]
But I want to really thank Brookings and the Brown Center for hosting this because I think this is — the real challenge that faces us now is how we have a focused implementation process for a new initiative like GEARUP.
I want to suggest that GEARUP is really the result of a partnership forged — that is to say that the Clinton administration, the White House, the Department of Ed, almost unanimous elements within the higher education community around the country, and for a host of other youth-serving entities, wide-ranging, from the Boys and Girls Clubs, to many elements of the civil rights community, that supported this initiative as we moved it through the legislative process.
And so that not only is the focus of the program itself how we build partnerships to impact the lives of children, but it is the result of a very successful partnership. And I want to just thank all who have played a role in it.
Let me say a couple of things.
One is that early intervention is something that is not a new invention. That is to say that, back home in my district in Philadelphia, we have had a number of programs — and I'll just mention one or two — but I'm on the board of the Philadelphia Futures, which is an entity in which individuals who are adults in our city get the opportunity to sponsor one child to go to college from what we call our neighborhood comprehensive high schools. That is to say that they are high schools that are not magnet schools.
These are the kids who live in that community and, in the first 500 of them, not one dropped out of high school after getting a commitment that someone was going to pay for their college. And then 94 percent of them went on to college. It's an amazing statistic. And the — Ruth Hair, who was the president of our school board, who did rather well in the stock market, decided to take the school that she had been principal of when she was the first African American to be a principal of a school in Philadelphia. She was in her 80s at the time when she made this gesture. But she went into the school and she promised every sixth grader that she would pay for them to go to college.
And we know the story of Eugene Lang and there are other examples all around the country where young people have been given some assurance that, if they take the necessary steps and put forth the work, that they, in fact, will have the opportunity to have a substantial future in terms of building a career that they can be proud of and that the entire community can benefit from.
What's different here is that we have, in terms of federal policy, been able to move this legislation through, have a program, have it fully funded, so that we can take this — what is a proven result, even though limited examples exist around the country. We know it works — and to give it more of an opportunity to build the kind of scale that would have a societal impact.
When we see examples like the son of Bill Cosby, who was — wanted to be a teacher, his life was cut short by a young man who was an immigrant from Russia, or the son of the chair of the board of Time Warner, who was a teacher in New York City whose life was cut short by a young man who was a former student of his, we I think get the point that we can't build a future in this country with one set of young people who assume they have nothing to look forward to, and therefore act in reckless ways that endanger themselves and others, and another set of young people who just automatically assume that they have the brightest of futures.
I have a daughter who's getting ready to start at a top-tier law school and my son has never even missed a day in school in his education in Philadelphia, and he is going to be a high school senior next year. And there are families in which young people grow up and there's no other expectation other that they're going to go to college.
I mean, it's really not even a point of discussion. The point of GEARUP is to create the expectation that, for the young people in low-income circumstances, in middle schools in this country, that we expect for them to be 21st century scholars. That's why we named the certificate — they're the 21st century scholar certificate.
Different from some of my colleagues who wanted to pass the Juvenile Predators Act — that's an assumption that there are future generations of young people who are born to act in antisocial ways, and that the society has to protect itself from these young people, and that there are certain things that we need to do. And there are certain guarantees that the Congress would implement, in terms of mandatory minimum sentences. This is an absolute guarantee that you can have a multi-year scholarship to a juvenile or adult penitentiary, and all of our states had a fairly enormous cost.
In the state of New York — I mean, we're talking bout $70,000 a year to incarcerate a juvenile. So the focus of GEARUP is how do we focus on rewarding the behavior that we want young people to move in terms of a direction. And so the idea is to, first, let them in on a big secret, and that is if they actually went to school, got good grades, did their best, they could go to college in a country in which we have the finest higher education institutions anywhere in the world.
Now the truth is that even though they're going to get a certificate and it's going to identify financial resources, that it's actually not a new commitment or an additional commitment. These are programs that many members of the Congress and all of us involved in these efforts are very proud of — these vehicles that provide choice and access to college in terms of Pell or student loans or work-study. These programs exist. The problem is that, for many of the young people who are going to be the beneficiaries of GEARUP, is that they have no idea that already in place are vehicles for them to be able to afford a college education. And so we want to crystallize that information.
Secondly, the program design has a lot of intertwined and mixed purposes, mixed motives, to it. The bait, obviously, is the additional resources that could be made available. But in the legislation, there are requirements that the middle school has to create gateway courses that are actually focused at giving young people the course work that they need to be successful in terms of proceeding along the academic pipeline, if you will, and that the high school that these kids feed into also have to make a similar commitment.
So we are talking about curriculum change that is critically important, because we know that, you know, if we want kids to be successful in the SATs, they have to have, you know, geometry, and the other courses that will enable them. And we also know that, for most low-income students, only about 15 percent of them ever get exposed to the courses that would be normally associated with preparing kids for college.
So we have curriculum changes. We have partnerships that marry up higher education institutions with middle schools, but also provide the requirement that there be community-based involvement by business and civic and community organizations in those relationships. And additionally, what is critically important about the private sector initiatives that have happened successfully around this country is that it is the mentoring and the tutoring assistance that is important.
And so that is also included in the program design. There is a lot of excitement about GEARUP. I think we all know that this could be the signature program of the higher education reauthorization. This could be a historic Rubicon that we cross in terms of putting together K to 12 with higher education in a meaningful way that continues to evolve and to improve a relationship that is very, very important.
We talk about this pipeline issue a lot. While we are — GEARUP puts us right on focus to really expand the number of young people from communities in which a disproportionate number of them don't go on to college, and it's like to move them through this pipeline.
The other feature of GEARUP that is, I think, very important is that it is a program in which all of the young people have to be involved and exposed to. That is it is not some person, teacher — and we saw in the film, there could be all kinds of people who sometimes intervene positively in the lives of young people — that select some person and says, while you might have a future, we're going to provide you an opportunity.
This GEARUP says we're going to take every single person whose in this grade in this school and we're going to expose you to the courses that are needed, to the tutoring assistance that you may avail yourselves of, mentoring. We're going to burden you with the knowledge that there's financial assistance for you to go on to college. And we're going to challenge you to make choices about your life that can improve your life chances. And that young people will have to, in essence, select themselves out rather than — because there are lot of young people who we all point to and say — Well, isn't this great. This is a successful person who came out of a difficult circumstance.
The real secret is that there are many, many more young people who could be as successful, but we have to create the environment in which we let them know that we expect for them to be successful and that there is going to be the wherewithal built around them so that they can be — so that they can move in that direction.
You know, the president, who was very, very helpful in moving this forward, talked about that bridge to the 21st century. Well, this is — GEARUP is like in my mind a signpost showing you what direction that bridge is. And it also provides a ticket so that these young people can move over — over that bridge into the 21st century because, without a higher education, I think we all understand that their life chances are going to be diminished.
More importantly, and moreover, it diminishes their life chances for — collectively, the entire community and the entire country because it is not just their individual success or failure. All of those outcomes have costs or benefits for our society.
And I want to make mention of the fact that this did not happen just because of our efforts in the House. We had some help from my colleagues in the Republican Party. This was a bipartisan effort in which — and without the courageous votes of a few Republican colleagues of mine on the Education Committee, we may not have been able to move this forward.
So I do want to mention that and to say that, uniquely, this is a program from design to passage and signing it into law was not changed except for the name. And some of you may be familiar with that whole debate. So we have what we intended to have as the law governing GEARUP.
So we don't have a lot of excuses for not being able to implement the program in a way in which it should have the desired impact. So that's not a fall-back position that we can take.
And I want to just thank a number of individuals — particularly Claudia Farris [ph], my chief of staff, who worked very hard on this; and Bob Shireman [ph], who used to have a different title, who also worked extraordinarily hard on this; and Pauline, who you're going to hear from a little bit later, has been really one of the key people in the department.
There are many others that I could name, but I think that it's important that this not be in any way focused on as some kind of accomplishment that did not happen because of, you know, that it happened because of the collective work of a lot of people. And I want to thank the Ford Foundation for its work in helping make sure that the implementation of GEARUP and the knowledge of it across the country has been made, I think more meaningful because of the Ford's commitment, which continues to this day and beyond.
So, there is a lot of possibility. It's early in the morning as we sit here on Friday at Brookings. And for these young people, it is early in the morning in terms of their possibilities and potential. And GEARUP can play a role. There are opportunities within the Elementary and Secondary Reauthorization that — where we can continue to try to improve the circumstances of K to 12 education, which is really the focus of GEARUP. It's to get K to 12 as seeing itself really as just part of a pipeline that launches kids forward and it is not for — I think there's a lot of expectations that in, particularly low-income communities, that somehow a high school diploma is the ceiling, something that should be glorified as a major achievement in a young person's life.
That may have been so for generations past. But it is — it has to be nothing more than the floor in terms of academic achievement for young people moving into the next century.
We have our work to do in terms of implementation. And there are other issues, I think, for us to address inside the reauthorization that we're working on now, and we'll try to take advantage of those opportunities.
I want to wish you well. I?m going to be here for some part of the panel. At some point soon, I'll have to go because we have a vote on the floor. But I want to thank Brookings for hosting this, and I look forward to seeing the results of the entire session.
Thank you.
[APPLAUSE AND END OF REMARKS.]
Also Available:
Welcome and Introduction
Remarks by Marshall Smith
Remarks by The Honorable Chaka Fattah (D-PA)
Panel on GEARUP
Panel on LAAP and Distance Learning
Luncheon
Panel on Title II Teacher Quality
Wrap Up Session