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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
L. Rice: Thank you so much, Representative.
You're a wonderful father of this program, and I guess father of your son as well.
I'd like to move right along and, as I mentioned in my opening remarks, we're going to have two people make very brief remarks. Mike probably took some of your time, Pauline, but I'm not going to cut your short.
And I'm going to introduce people — I'll introduce the two department people at one time, and the others individually and very briefly.
Pauline Abernathy, was formerly — as a very young woman actually. I'm not going to tell you how young. She's typical of a lot of the very, very bright people who have come into this administration.
Pauline, before coming to the Department of Education, was with the National Economic Council. Presumably, she worked with you, Bob Shireman [ph]?
B. Shireman [sp]: She preceded me.
L. Rice: She preceded you. OK.
And she — since she's been in the department, she's been working very closely with — as an advisor to the deputy secretary, the acting deputy secretary, Mike Smith. I think we're going to drop that from his title sooner or later.
And she's been very much involved, too, with GEARUP in particular. And she's the liaison between the GEARUP program and the undersecretary's office.
Ed Fuentes, who is going to talk about this program implementation. In fact, I think it would be good if you could move down one, or maybe even all of us can move over just a little bit, so maybe we can put you, Steve, at the corner, so that people in the back can see each of you.
Ed is the director of the GEARUP program in the Department of Education. And prior to this appointment, he was the director of the National Institution on the Education of At-Risk Students. He's had various positions in the department — secretary for the Educational Research and Improvement Section of the department.
And prior to government service, he worked in education research at the Research Triangle in Durham. We have quite an array of institutions from which our speakers have come today.
Dr. Fuentes holds a Ph.D. in educational psychology from Stanford, and I'm pleased to say as a good Yale mother and stepmother and wife that Pauline comes from Yale.
[LAUGHTER]
So, Pauline, why don't you begin.
P. Abernathy: Thank you. Can you all hear me because I speak real quiet?
It's a pleasure to be here with the congressman. As he said, the GEARUP legislation was the product of many people's efforts and bipartisan on both the House and Senate sides. But there is no doubt in my mind, and I think anyone else's mind here, that we would not be here, there would not be a GEARUP program but for the congressman's efforts.
I was asked to speak a little bit about the motivation and history behind the program.
Congressman Fattah and the administration both had a strong interest in informing students at high-poverty schools about the financial aid that's available to them. But as the College Board and many others have found and lots of research has shown, financial aid is not enough, that while financial aid is essential to getting kids to college, it's not sufficient, and that it's not enough for the kids who drop out of school in middle school or in high school, not enough for the kids who don't have algebra or geometry in middle schools.
Research, again, shows that low-income children, who don't take algebra and geometry in those middle grades, are three times less likely to make it to college. So that told us we needed to start earlier and get involved in the middle schools and making sure they are offering those courses, to also make sure that the teachers and the counselors...
[TAPE CHANGE — PORTION OF EVENT MISSING.]
— those students can go to college and are doing the types of work we saw on the video earlier.
And also reaching out to the parents to make sure that they, too, understood that their children could go to college and what was involved in making that happen.
So we set about designing a program that would do all of those things, that would work in the middle schools, providing comprehensive services, trying to attack the low-expectation culture that pervades in many low-income schools, and working with whole grades of students no later than the seventh grade providing professional development, working on the curriculum where it was needed, leveraging college resources, partnering with the colleges and the community partners, leveraging their resources and their involvement, reaching out to parents and providing scholarships wherever possible.
Senator Jeffords then stepped up with the experience of a small state program. You'll be hearing more about the NIS program, which provided comprehensive services and also scholarships for the same goal, and that NIS program became what is now the state GEARUP grants.
And these different ideas were melded together in the final legislation. And without much effort at all, we had 300 — over 300 college presidents endorsing this concept, as well as over 60 organizations, both from K through 12, and the higher education community, civil rights community, community groups rallying around this concept.
And as a result, in just one year — in fact, less than a year — it went from legislation to law to be funded at $120 million.
This was all based on not just some ideas, but on some programs that exist that have developed proven results. I hope Steve will talk a little bit about some of the programs that the Ford Foundation has funded, which really have just dramatic outcomes. But I've now known him long enough to know that he is usually too modest to do so. So I will just briefly tell you a little bit about one of those programs, which is Project Grad, which is a college-school-community partnership that started in Houston, Texas.
And as a result of that partnership and the efforts there, they have more than tripled the percentage of middle school students in one feeder system that are passing the statewide math tests. They have tripled both the number of students taking the SAT and the percentage scoring over 900, again, in that feeder system. They have increased the number of students graduating from high school by 64 percent. At the same time, they've also increased five-fold the number of students going to college.
It is really remarkable. Likewise, I Have a Dream Program, started by Eugene Lang in the 1980s has just produced remarkable results in city after city around the country. Ninety percent of the first I Have a Dream class of students in New York City graduated from high school or received the GED, whereas the projected graduation rate was just 25 percent.
Likewise, in all of the I Have a Dream projects in Chicago together, they've produced a 69 percent graduation rate in schools with a predicted 60 percent dropout rate. And of the 66 percent of the graduates from the Chicago program continued their education, 22 percent found jobs, and 10 percent took vocational education.
And there are — I could go on and on — but won't. But that this combination of comprehensive services, academic support and scholarship has really produced some dramatic results.
And that's the experience on which GEARUP was based.
Lois had asked, and the question has come up in Washington much more than in the field — how does GEARUP differ from trio? And the answer is there are some important differences, but they're really complementary. And when we go out to the field, when we did the technical, people were there and were excited and understood how, and saw how the two programs can work together to make incredible synergy.
Some of the differences I'll just mention briefly are that GEARUP is starting and really focused in the middle school. The partnership grants start no later than the seventh grade. Talent search operates in the middle schools, but most of the services are in high school, and for students out of school, and in fact, the trio programs overall — less than 5 percent of the funding goes for students in the middle schools. The rest is for high school students and college students, of course.
So there's a different focus there, but that's not a fundamental difference. A fundamental difference is that GEARUP, as the congressman said, and you'll be hearing from everyone here, is really about transforming schools, and leveraging systemic changes in the schools. And so it works — again, the partnership has to work with whole grades of students.
Another difference is GEARUP is also a partnership program that demands a match and leverages non-federal resources from colleges, from the community and business. Again, that's in part an effort to ensure those kind of systemic changes that really require a larger community buy-in to make those changes.
There's also a state component in GEARUP, which you'll be hearing about.
And finally, a scholarship component in the 21st century certificates in GEARUP, which are another difference.
But again, I want to go back to the fact that, in the field, there's really tremendous excitement about how the two programs work together. And that's a fact that's often lost here in Washington.
You'll be hearing from, again, people with experience from both GEARUP, NIS and trio here.
I wanted to close with just a few of the comments that we have heard from people from the trio program about GEARUP and trio.
One talent search director was quoted in the Chronicle of Higher Education saying, "I'm excited to see what it's like to work with all the students in a grade level, to reach out to those kids who don't know that we can help them. In my opinion, GEARUP is long overdue."
Another trio director has said, "The GEARUP concept is one of the most exciting amendments to the Higher Education Act." And yet another said, "GEARUP will serve the students in ways no other programs can or do. It is imperative that GEARUP be funded."
And I really think that, as the programs or the grants are awarded, we are going to see that playing out around the country and that both programs will be strengthened, that the students in both programs will be better served by the two programs working together.
Thank you.
L. Rice: Dr. Fuentes.
E. Fuentes: I'll be very brief because we're all running over, and I'll just try to give you an update on what's happening.
When the — and I'll do it chronologically.
The application package was put out three days before I started and was released on March 1st, but there was an attempt in the package, and I think especially to echo the will of the Congress. The criteria in the package looked towards early intervention, raising expectations and requirements to get to college, academic preparation, and school changes and partnerships that will sustain the program after the grant ends.
After it was released, about a week, we had 11 workshops nationwide that were sponsored by the Ford Foundation. They were very successful. They were free applications. They were for people who wanted to apply but needed further information. People who were on the dais were people very knowledgeable about how to build partnerships and were very — had lots of experience on how to make these programs work, programs like the GEARUP.
Twenty-four hundred people attended those workshops. Later we had a teleconference with 435 links. It was my television debut. If you've ever been startled by hearing your voice for the first time on a tape recorder, you haven't experienced teleconferencing. It pales in comparison to see yourself on something like that.
And we had a department web site to give out information, where we've had over 48,000 hits — 48,000 inquiries about the application process.
The Ford Foundation also had a web site, and it was quite innovative. It had a chat room where people could interact.
So up until the application itself, I mean, before the deadline, we had many, many mechanisms to get people informed, give them the information they needed to apply.
The deadline for this application was April 30th.
A few numbers.
We received 632 partnership applications, 42 state grant applications. We have $75 million for partnership applications, federal funding, available, and $45 million for the states. But the total dollar value in the first year of funding that people asked for in those applications is over $250 million for the partnership and over $92 million for the states. So they are — the dollar value of the applications was much greater than the amount of money available. The demand is much higher than the money available.
If you take that over five years, the total amount of money that was applied for is $1.7 billion. So the demand is out there.
There's a matching fund, a matching requirement that Pauline talked about. We give up to $800 and then the partnership has to match in cash or kind another $800 per child per year.
If you do the mathematics, we can serve something roughly like 94,000 kids in the partnership with that $800 per child with $75 million.
However, the amount — the number of children that would be funded — I mean, that would be served under these partnerships if we had the money that was asked for would be over 300,000. More than that, the people are not really asking for $800 a person. The average is somewhere — right around $600.
So in fact, we're talking about over 400,000 — 422,000, roughly, children, who would be served if we had all the money that people are asking for.
In these partnerships, we've done a rough count and there's over 4,600 partners that are involved in these applications. That's quite a list. We have — and it was talked about before — businesses, lots of trio people, chambers of commerce, the College Board — and you'll hear from the College Board — lots of partners are from the College Board, the NAACP, and Girls Scouts and Boy Scouts of America, Boys and Girls Clubs of America.
So it's a very, very representative sample of different service organizations and businesses that are coming together. Also, even things like fraternities and sororities and colleges who are going to provide mentoring as partners.
One out of five colleges in America are part of these applications. That's pretty startling in itself.
We are engaged in a two-tier process for review for the partnerships. Because there are so many applications and because the disparities between the amount of money that's applied for and the amount of money that's available, we have to winnow them out and, through this two-tier process, try to in the first tier identify those that are further — worthy of further consider, those that are the best, and then have a second tier to get through those and rank them and then make the awards.
We began our process on June 1, and it will go all the way to the 30th of June.
The state applications is a much smaller pool. We received 42 of those out of a possible 53. That can be done a straight one-tier process of review. And it's going on simultaneously with the second tier of partnerships, which is going on right now, and will also be finalized on June 30th.
What have we learned about? We've learned some things about what people are looking for in the — during the first cut. We had some, you know, by sitting in review panels, we've gotten a feel for what people are looking, what reviewers consider worthy of — applications that had features that were worthy of further consideration.
They were impressed by clear and compelling need, and gaps in services, and a plan for filling that need, filling those services. They were impressed by plans that have clear description of plans that will lead to program improvements and will be sustainable after the end of the grant with systemic change in the school, and enduring partnerships among the community and the school in the future of higher education.
They liked applications that provide convincing ways that parents will be involved in schools, and teachers with their children. And they liked plans that laid out specific and quantifiable goals that they would meet over the course of the grant, and the impact the proposed program would have on the lives of children. That's what they looked for. That's the kind of descriptions of the ones that made the first cut.
So, when we get through with this review in June, we'll begin to process the various grants. We'll start to do negotiations and finalize them. And we will hope to make some announcements in late — very late — July 30th, July and early August.
But that's not the end of it. To ensure quality, to ensure that this program is successful, we'll have a series of workshops for the grantees, technical workshops for program improvement and to share information also sponsored by the Ford Foundation.
We're going to monitor these things, not just for compliance, which sometimes too often happens, but we're going to be monitoring to provide technical assistance and improvements.
The applications also provide for accountability. They have to — the successful grantees must provide information on how they're meeting their goals and their success. And we'll also have a separate contract that I think is being put out for bid right now on the impact evaluation so the report will tell us about the overall impact of these programs.
And we're still talking to other sources — private sources, foundations — about broadening that kind of information. Evaluations should be more informative so that you have more feedback to identify the features of successful programs and how you make these things enduring partnerships and feed them back into the grantees in the field for the next go-around.
So our mission is we need to be providing information and support — to support applicants' need to design proposals, select and fund the best of them through a thorough and thoughtful peer review, and provide the programs that we do fund with the kind of technical support that leads to success.
That's where we are right now.
L. Rice: Thank you very much.
E. Fuentes: You're welcome.
Rep. Fattah: Let me introduce our next panelist — Steve Zwerling, who I referenced in my remarks. He is currently the senior director of the Ford Foundation for education, media, arts and culture. More importantly, he is a strong supporter of GEARUP.
Let me introduce our next panelist — Steve Zwerling, who I referenced in my remarks. He is currently the senior director of the Ford Foundation for education, media, arts and culture. More importantly, he is a strong supporter of GEARUP.
And it's actually been helping to make a difference for this program.
He came out of the public school system. He's got a — you know — a great resume, but he's actually doing something to make a difference. So I won't bore you with that.
Steve.
S. Zwerling: Thanks so much.
It's really a pleasure to be here among a lot of old friends and new friends.
I was wondering at first why Lois invited me to be a part of the panel and —
L. Rice: Are these mikes on? I guess they are.
Oh, I'm sorry.
S. Zwerling: I'm from Brooklyn and I can talk without a microphone and be heard in Yankee Stadium talking across the Brooklyn Bridge from Ebbett's Field.
So I promise to talk a little louder so you can hear me down there. And it's looks like it's working.
OK, good.
I was wondering why I was included in this panel. Mike Smith, I think, tee'd it up to me and said that, among other things, the Ford Foundation is providing the coffee and the lunch money for -
[LAUGHTER]
— GEARUP-related activities and one of my fantasies, actually, is to one day be in the restaurant business, so Mike has placed me appropriately.
So, yes, we're providing some coffee money. We're providing some lunch money. No doubt about that, but I wanted to spend a few minutes telling you why the Ford Foundation really is involved in GEARUP and why it is sort of a bit of a crusade for us.
That's because, for the past four decades, the foundation — among others — has been seeking to fund better ways to reform and transform schools and colleges in order to help more low-income students than we would like to see move successfully through the educational pipeline into and through college successfully — not an unambitious goal, and an aspiration for us.
And we've moved across those decades through a series of stages of funding different kinds of things. But I think I would sort of divide them into two — this is oversimplifying, but we could talk about this if you'd like — two kind of stages.
The first stage I'll call sector-specific grant-making, grants that we made to say elementary schools that will improve elementary schools or middle schools or high schools or community colleges, different and separate sectors of the education system. The second, more recently, during the last decade or so, are initiatives that we've been funding that we might call cross-sectoral, that attempt to bridge across the sectors of the education system.
So let me briefly tell you about some of the stuff that we've been up to.
During that first stage, where we've done sector-specific grant-making, back in the early '60s, for example, we funded efforts — some of them turned out to be unsuccessful, even some would say fiascoes — to help reform the governance of schools, put a lot of effort, a lot of ideas, a lot of money on the line to help decentralize large, cumbersome, bureaucratic school systems in the belief that, if you would put more power and control in the hands of local communities, that failing schools would be transformed.
But that focus pretty much exclusively on elementary and middle schools.
Then we applied resources to the evaluation of existing reform models — again, sector specific. So for example, we took a lot, are taking a look at the accelerated school reform model. We've funded some evaluation work of some of the NASDAQ schools; again, all of it pretty kind of sector specific, again, all worth the goal to help more kids from low-income backgrounds move successfully through the full education system.
We, for a couple of decades, supported efforts to prepare the next — the current and next generation of elementary and high school teachers to hopefully see them to be more diverse and better prepared for changing communities.
We've also in a sector-specific way funded constituency groups that are external to schools, community-based organizations that advocate — advocate school change, school reform, that would increase the prospects and chances of kids from low-income backgrounds as they attempt to move through the school system.
And all along the way, like you, like Lois cited, we've been keeping an eye on the data.
And the data, frankly, continues to be very discouraging. Although there are pockets of excellence and success, when you look — as you know better than I — at the aggregated data on how kids do, particularly when you break out how Hispanic kids do or low-income kids do, that the gaps in some instances are worse and more critically of concern because, as we all know, it's essential, as the congressman and others have said, for people to get considerably more than a high school education in order to be viable in the current and future economy.
So we've been quite frustrated along with you about some of the results of even some of the work that we've been funding — although we've learned a lot and, as I indicated, like you, have been able to identify things that seem to work, but generally at small scale.
Back to that in a second.
Thus, in the second wave of work, we began to — and again in the context of this data — began to feel that we needed to work more cross-sectorally, across various sectors of the education system, in part because kids do not experience schools the way funders make grants. And they don't say — Well, I'm now in this grade and therefore these are the kinds of things, the special projects that I need. And also the interconnections between elementary and middle schools, and middle schools and high schools, and high schools and community colleges, and two-year colleges and four-year colleges are very often abrupt and incoherent and not in good alignment for people, particularly who come from backgrounds where they don't have the kinds of support that more affluent kids kind of have.
So we, for the last decade and then some — and Judith Eden [ph], when she was the president of Community College of Philadelphia, was a big part of a lot of the cross-sectoral work that the foundation funded.
A couple of examples — community college, high schools, which attempted to sit on the intersection between high school and community college. For example, the work that we did to strengthen the transfer function of community colleges, cross-sectoral work that attempted to sit on the intersection between two and four-year colleges — again, providing bridges.
The data still was not terribly encouraging. And in more recent years, we've begun to think that we need to think about K through 16 kinds of efforts. We're getting closer now to GEARUP and our interest in GEARUP, feeling that, since the kids experience the educational system differently, as I've suggested, than the way educators and funders often thing, that we needed to try to bring more coherence to the reform work, more alignment.
So I say that a lot of the stuff that we've been funding recently is — follows an aligned reform strategy to help align reform efforts in a way that youngsters experience schooling in a more comprehensive and coherent way. This is very different than the more constituency-based reforms approach where there's a sort of a silver-bullet belief, that if you fund this intervention at this point in a kid's life, they're immunized and will then go on successfully and constituencies get built up, as you know, around particular approaches.
And what we've been trying to do and it's hard work is to get various people who are involved in reform efforts to really get in alignment and work together. It's a real challenge, obviously, because resources are scarce — federal, foundation, what have you. And to ask people to work cooperatively together often means that they have to kind of work in a kind of sharing way rather than a competitive mode.
We're attracted to GEARUP for obvious reasons which should be evident from the kinds of things that I've just said. It is one of the very few — I don't know enough about federal programs, I'm embarrassed to say, that really does straddle key sectors of the education pipeline — middle school, minimally, middle school, high school and college. It does call for alignments in curricula, approaches to curricula, and methods of teaching.
In addition, of course, it has all kinds of other very powerful bells and whistles that demonstration work at small scale — the sort of thing that we saw in the video — have demonstrated to be critical — mentoring, raising awareness, parent involvement, after-school activities, what have you.
And as you've heard through the morning, some of the funding that we've made available to help GEARUP thus far has provided opportunities for potential grantees to learn about excellent programs that are GEARUP-like, to help strengthen their proposals. And as the congressman said, we will be providing — we have already provided funds for the first year's convenings.
The grantees, the GEARUP grantees, will meet in a series of technical assistance workshops though the course of the first year and beyond because we're committed to stay with this for the long haul. And we know it takes a lot of time to do this kind of thing well.
In a sense, we're trying to provide some of the connective tissue that makes an initiative work. An initiative means a lot of people in a lot of different places trying to do similar kinds of things but in different ways. And so there's a tremendous opportunity for them to learn from each other and to learn from each other's practices and to help build a field that we're calling education reform, as opposed to school reform, in that it focuses on the entire K through 16 education pipeline.
Now, a word about that, about the future of GEARUP and the secondary — Elementary and Secondary Education Act because, as some of the friends up here — Pauline has heard this a lot from me, enough so that she'll probably now switch off her hearing aid, and Ed Fuentes has heard this a lot, and the congressman has even heard me, you know, sing this song before, but some of the rest of you haven't.
As much as I'm passionate about GEARUP and these kinds of efforts, I think that it's necessary, but not sufficient, in that to begin work no later than the seventh grade — and I don't know what all proposals are looking at that have come in. My own guess is that we probably don't have a lot of proposals that start at the pre-K level and go all the way through. They're probably sixth grade, seventh grade to 12th grade, something like that, and in part because the funding is available, hopefully for five years, and you want to take the cohorts all the way through the 12th grade.
We all know — the Department of Ed, everybody in this room knows — that you've got to have kids up to grade level in reading and other things by the third grade. Otherwise, a lot of the later interventions are really, really challenged to work against almost overwhelming odds. And there are, of course, wonderful examples — the trio program and others — that do beat the odds, but still not for enough people. If they were working well enough, the data that we're all aware of would look a lot better than it really does.
So my fantasy — and I hope I live long enough to see this — is for the federal government, in spite of the way Congress does its legislation, in spite of the way the Department of Education is organized in K-12 — they are organized in a sector-specific way and, in my view, that doesn't make any sense at all. I would love to see a GEARUP legislation — GEARUP legislation to become truly K through 16, and to really bite the bullet and say — Look, this is not about the way we're organized in Congress, not about the way we're organized at the Department of Education, not about all of these sort of lobbies for particular programs, the Head Start lobby, forgive me, the trio lobby, and I'm sure there'll be a GEARUP lobby, you know, that will emerge, and they'll all be out there hustling, looking for their slice in competition with each other.
What about the possibility, the fantasy, that we would acknowledge that it's a K-16 issue. It's not a seventh grade-to-high school issue. It's not a Head Start issue. But it's about all of it. If we think about the kids, that it's about them, and it's not about us — and the us includes me, not just others — the us includes me, too, because we do our thing too much in the old, kind of sector-specific way, too, in spite of what I've said — but if we think about the ways the kids experience life, including school, it would seem to me that we need to sort of really break down some more of the barriers that separate the various education sectors so that we can really provide a comprehensive and coherent experience for kids who desperately, desperately need it.
L. Rice: Thank you so, so much, Steve, and thanks again for making the sacrifice to come.
I — just to make a comment — I'm delighted that you're thinking of K through 16. But I also, particularly now that I'm the mother of a brand new — not-so-new but of an under-two-year-old — grandson, and you see the developmental aspects of children — you forget with your own children and where they where, but you remember it almost better as a grandmother, it seems to me — you have that to look forward to — it just seems to me that we should be thinking of a continuum. We should even be broadening our thoughts — particularly now that we have all — so many more adults going back to school, nontraditional learners, learning on new technology, that if we could sometime even get from where we are today to K to 16, that would be an enormous leap, but somehow down the pike.
It will be long after I'm gone and you probably, too, we may think of education really as a continuum.
So thank you so much for that.
We're going to have two other speakers and then we're going to open this up. We are running behind time, so I'm going to encourage, particularly our speakers — and I hate you cut you back at all, so — I'm sure you'll be brief and help us all out because we do want to get involved.
Linda Shiller is our next speaker. Linda is the director of the outreach programs at the Vermont Student Assistance Corporation, and she's been there for the last six years.
Sixteen? Oh. Terrific. It says six on the little piece that I — I apologize about that.
She also is bridging, in many ways, the gaps that we've been talking about a little bit earlier between some of the concerns or the lobbies or whatever the certain sector programs. She has applied — oh, you have a trio grant? You are a trio program?
L. Shiller: We have two trio programs.
L. Rice: You have two trio programs and you're also — you recently applied for a GEARUP program.
L. Shiller: State.
L. Rice: It was a state. So you sort of epitomize all of the good things that are going on in support services, and I thank you very much.
L. Shiller: Thank you.
I guess I'd like to start out with a story — a story of collaboration in Vermont. Vermont is a small state and it's fairly easy to collaborate.
Let me tell you a little bit about trio and the programs called NIS that Pauline mentioned earlier.
We've had two trio programs in Vermont that are statewide — a talent search and an EOC, which serves the adult population. So that helps with that continuum because the trio programs do serve the adult population as well.
The NIS program was developed over five years ago as a program that Senator Jeffords wanted to see in terms of improving early intervention. It's called the National Partnership Program. It's longer than that. I won't actually go into the whole thing. But in any case, there are only nine states that currently have this program. We were one of the first six.
Vermont currently serves 500 students through this program, starting with fifth grade and following students to 12th grade, very similar strategies to the talent search services, except that there is a scholarship component, and the mentoring aspects of this program were greatly enhanced.
So the story is that, under one roof, we have a trio talent search program and this NIS program, which is really now becoming the state GEARUP grant, living side-by-side, working together under one roof successfully for the past five years.
And I have been asked here today to talk about the possibilities for trio and GEARUP working together. So let me tell you what I think are the ingredients for success that we experienced in Vermont for the past five years.
These programs work side-by-side, collectively, enhancing each other. They share joint activities, professional developing and training, as well as best practices and evaluation methods.
We were able to leverage resources and build community partnerships between both programs and with other trio programs in Vermont as well. And we also shared program dissemination and marketing opportunities successfully.
All of these can and should work as methods to promote trio and the GEARUP programs, to build a solid bridge between both of these programs together — and I really believe that it can happen. And I think it can happen for many reasons.
I think that GEARUP, as a new program, a new initiative, has a lot of new ideas and creative ideas to bring to the table, new ways of thinking about how to deliver services, new partners and personnel working for the same mission that trio has been working on for several years.
Trio, on the other hand, has been around the campus for many, many years, and has had successful strategies and successful ways to delivery services. So if we take the old and the new together, we can enhance what is currently being done now and create great new strategies for promoting basically the same goal.
And let me talk about that for a minute. I'd like to talk about the similarities between both programs. There are a lot of differences, but there are also a lot of similarities.
Similar goals, in that both have the best interests of disadvantaged families and students in mind with respect to aspirations, opportunities for higher education and financial aid availability. They're both college-access programs. Of course, trio has retention and graduate programs as well. And both of them, when you look at them side by side, especially with my experience with the NIS program, have very similar service-delivery strategies, such as college visits, mentoring and tutoring, parent involvement, academic support.
Those are basically the core of the services in terms of direct services. Now, I'm not talking here about the services offered to the schools in terms of professional development. But those are a lot of the similarities.
I think that, as I said, there are differences. I'm going to just address the state GEARUP grant because that does mirror the NIS program, and I think Juliet will talk about the partnership.
But in terms of the state grant, the state grant allows the project to serve priority students versus cohort students, to serve individuals who meet the criteria. That's very similar to the NIS program and to the current talent search program that we have right now.
The state grant requires a scholarship component that can also be awarded to trio students, and it does not require a formal agreement between schools and post-secondary institutions, although I'm hoping that a lot of the state programs will provide that.
I think that the state grant — and this is my own opinion — has the opportunity to provide more comprehensive services to the individual students and families.
I also think that the following things need to happen in terms of the opportunity for these programs to grow together, work together, live together, to again meet the same goals.
I don't know how many of you are aware of the fact that, currently, trio programs only serve 8 percent — I think — is it 8 percent?
Eight percent of the eligible population. So when we think about the similarities between the programs, as well as the differences, and if we have concerns about duplication and competition, I think we need to think bigger than that in terms of how do we serve all of the students who really deserve the same opportunities to aspire to a good future.
So here are my ideas. Here are the ingredients that I think in terms of how trio and GEARUP can work together to enhance each other's success.
Effective communication and information dissemination is really crucial. We need to develop campaigns on the local, state and even the national level to educate the public and key people and community members about both initiatives and to, basically, dispel any inaccurate assumptions that may exist.
I think that the opportunity for joint training and professional development opportunities are also essential.
The council, for example, plans to address GEARUP implementation by offering several GEARUP workshops at its national conference for trio individuals and is planning to invite the new GEARUP community. I think that's a perfect example of how trio is opening up an opportunity for new grantees to learn about successful projects and collaborate and meet each other to start a successful implementation process that would happen after the implementation trainings.
I think that, again, this is a great example of how programs and projects need to work together. The other initiative that's happening right now is one called Connect Ed, in which the College Board and the council, Sallie Mae and several other foundations are sponsoring, to bring together people from all over the country who provide successful college access programs.
And again, this is a great opportunity to replicate and sustain existing successful strategies — again, the same as what we're trying to do with GEARUP. So that's another example.
Joint programming and shared resources. In Vermont, we've had tremendous success with activities and successful strategies as well as resources for both projects. We host regional career fairs for both trio and NIS students, field trips, parent workshops, mentoring activities. We've hired tutors to work with participants in both projects. We've hired and asked trio students who are not in our current trio program, but other trio programs, around the state of Vermont to act as mentors or tutors for students. We have a joint summer program for the students as well and that's been very successful.
I'm really confident that local and state GEARUP and trio projects can find ways to collaborate on the service delivery, and I think that it takes a lot of work to develop that and a lot of openness, a lot of dialogue, a lot of meetings which I'm sure we all love, but they have to happen in order for this to happen.
One more area that I'd like to mention before I close, and that is advocating for student aid. I think that there's a tremendous opportunity here for both project to speak about the need for both an easier student delivery program — student aid delivery program, as well as more financial aid for these needy students.
Both programs are going to continue to deal with a lack of financial resources that are available for the lower-income students, and they can work collaboratively to educate and advocate for more aid for these students.
It's been mentioned earlier today that less students are continuing their education. We've done surveys in Vermont and I'm sure that it's not news to any of you that the one major factor that is keeping students from being successful in terms of staying in college and not just attending college is the lack of financial resources. We're seeing students with huge loads of debt with really no way to be able to pay that money back.
One thing that we're excited about with GEARUP is the scholarship component for the state grant, and we feel that that has worked very well with NIS and we've been able to give some of that money to our trio participants with success. And we're looking forward to that.
But we want to make sure that the post-secondary institutions can also work hard to make sure that the students have their needs met and to accommodate the scholarship component that they will receive. There's a lot of work to be done there and I could probably speak for a whole day about that issue alone, so I think I will close.
L. Rice: Linda, thank you so much for a number of healthy, helpful suggestions.
Our final speaker before we open it up for discussion is Dr. Julie Garcia. She joined the University of Texas system in 1992 after serving as president of Texas's Southwest College — I love these names in Texas — for six years. While at TSC, she was recognized as the first Mexican-American woman in the nation to become a president of a college at a university. We applaud you.
Dr. Garcia is responsible for developing a unique partnership between the University of Texas-Brownsville and the Texas university system, which was designed to consolidate resources, increase efficiency and eliminate barriers, thus improving the educational system in the lower Rio Grande Valley.
Dr. Garcia has also served recently as chair of the American Council on Education, and she is currently, as well, a vice chair of the congressionally-mandated Advisory Council on Student Financial Assistance.
So, I think we're going to let you speak for ACE, UT or the advisory council — whatever you choose. Thank you, Dr. Garcia.
J. Garcia: Thank you so much. And there's a real disadvantage to being the kind of clean-up hitter, as you understand. And I know that you're probably thinking of break time and not of one more story.
But I thought that I'd take just a few moments to take advantage of being so designated as clean-up hitter to talk about some of the things that haven't been talked about even though I could spend some time affirming what has already been said and clearly articulated.
But I thought I'd say a little bit about two efforts that might evidence for us what you learn from working in partnerships, and what we have then discovered to be the pitfalls and some inefficiencies, and then some wonderful successes as a result of that — two short stories.
The first started out in 1987 with a challenge grant then sponsored by the Department of Education. The challenge grant allowed for a community college — this was Texas Southwest College. By the way, Texas Southwest College is appropriately named. We are the southernmost tip of the state of Texas. Our college campus is located one block from Mexico.
So when you think of our name, think of our location as well, and that might surprise you.
We're famous — or infamous, depending on who you talk to — for where the hurricanes hit, and we're also infamous or famous for being one of the poorest communities in the nation where well over 50 percent of our population does not have a high school degree.
We have the highest unemployment rate, lowest per capita income. And the list goes on and on. And so, if you hear of us from time to time, it's usually not in the positive sense.
In 1987, we decide to challenge, with the Department of Education opportunity grant. We had to raise $1 million in 18 months in order to get $2 million back. The intent of this program was very, very simple. We saw what you described today. That is students were coming to our college without those skills necessary to do well. So we were flunking them out, 80 percent or more out of our college algebra class, and saying to the student "You've made a mistake; you shouldn't have come here in the first place," instead of what we all would like to see done.
So at that point, we decided we had to go back into the high schools, into the junior highs and figure out a way to better help guide those students. And the plan was very simple. We would take the $1 million that we would raise, the $2 million that would be matched by the Department of Ed. That corpus would be guarded for 20 years. Half the interest that would be generated from the interest would go back to reinvest in the fund. The other half could be spent.
It would spent then on scholarship dollars — scholarship dollars good for tuition upon graduation at the community college — Texas Southwest College — if you met, first, the criteria, if you took the more rigorous courses and if you made As and Bs in those courses.
We thought this would do three things — try to stop the dropout rate from bleeding our community as it has because we started out in seventh grade and most of our dropouts are in ninth grade; point to those more rigorous courses and teach parents and students about which ones to aim towards; and decrease dependency on financial aid.
This was 1987. To raise a million dollars in our community, when to raise $100 for the United Way was a great challenge, was unthinkable. As a matter of fact, we had many folks up and down the stream at the Department of Ed tell us — you might want to challenge for less because if you don't make your challenge, you don't get anything at all.
We knew. We had run the numbers. Our community was the fastest growing community in the state of Texas. Our state is one of the fastest growing states in this union. So to do less for less students was not going to have the impact that we knew we had to try and have.
So we challenged for a million. The story of how we raised that money is interesting because we raised it with car washes and black tie dinners. We would get a donation from the Knights of Columbus. I'd put it in the newspaper. The newspaper allowed us, you know, free advertising, so they partnered with us.
The moment I put it in the newspaper, the auxiliary of the Knights of Columbus would call and say — I have some money, too. The Democratic Women would give us money. We'd put it in the newspaper and the Republican Women would call us.
[LAUGHTER.]
And they had money as well. We went to every group we could think of in our community. I would drive down the street. People would — a fellow rolled down his window one day — I was parked next to him — and he said, "Are we going to make it?" Because we all knew — we had spent a bit of time marketing and everybody knew the deadline. He said, "Are we going to make it?" And I said, "Of course we are." And he said, "Oh, thank goodness." And he drove off and I thought, "Oh, my God, how are we going to make it up."
[LAUGHTER.]
Toward the end, we had gone to every — I call them animal groups — you know, all of the Elks and the Lions and all of those groups ...
[LAUGHTER.]
— and — in a kind way — we had gone to every group we could think of.
Children at one of the elementary schools — sixth graders who you might think would have no notion of what we were talking about, no notion of college, no notion of scholarships — went without eating lunch for three days. The cafeteria staff was furious. The principal called me and was furious. They were saving their pennies. They came to my office and you know those cafeteria, huge jars, where they have this mayonnaise — this huge — that was full of pennies and nickels that those children had saved for three days.
Well, I asked the young man when he came to my office with this little group to deliver that, "Do you know what you did?" And he said, "Yes." And I said, "Well, what were you doing?" And he said, "We were earning dollars for going to college."
It was such a simple notion for folks that it was easy to pick up and to support.
The first ones to give money on our campus were the janitors, the maintenance staff, at the college. They pledged to give us $1.72 over every two-week pay period. That total would end up being $100 at the end of this time that we had set out. They were the easiest to convince. They needed to no convincing. They needed no analysis. They knew that their lives had been greatly affected by not having a higher education. The easiest ones to convince and first ones to give you money.
It was easy then to go to the Rotarians and ask for money because we had already had benefactors like our own maintenance staff.
A long story, short version. The last week we had not made our goal. And we were in pretty much of a panicked state because this whole community had decided, you know, this was either sink or swim. We decided to go to the television stations and ask for time. That's — remember, 1987, we didn't have 100 cable stations, thank goodness. We had just a couple, so we went to them and asked for some time. We had testimonials. We had people ready to answer phones, and we started a campaign on a Sunday night. The deadline was Saturday.
Sunday night, people eating pizza, waiting for the phones to ring. We're on television. No phones ring. We ate pizza and went home.
On Monday night, the phones started ringing and they never stopped. The last day, on Saturday, television cameras were there because they're always there when they think you're going to fail. And this pretty much had been decided in many parts of our little world. And a lady came to our office. She had a child in her arms and a child in a baby carriage.
And she had walked — and if you've ever been in south Texas — this was in July — if you've ever been there in July, to walk from your car to you building — she had walked about seven blocks from Orcensia [ph] Street, which is close to our campus. She had the babies, and she came up, and of course, television cameras turned to her and she proceeded to turn around and walk off.
So I went out and caught her and I said "Can I help you?" And she said "I came to give you some money." She took out of her purse — her pocket — a $5 bill. And you know, if you've ever put money in your pocket and it gets kind of crunched up. She didn't want to give it to me crunched up, so she was trying to iron it out, the whole time she was talking to me.
Now, remember, I had raised money through everybody I could have found and it didn't bother me any more to ask people for money. This was the first $5 that I did not want to take.
I asked her, "Why are you giving me this money?" She said "Because it is the only hope that I have for my children's education." She understood what many of us argue about, have discussions about, try to dissect, try to analyze, and then finally don't understand very well. That community raised $1 million.
Now, let me go fast forward. Since then, we have had over 15,000 students earn scholarship dollars by taking the tougher courses and come to collect their scholarship dollars on our campus.
[APPLAUSE.]
Thank you.
I tell you — thank you.
[APPLAUSE.]
I tell you that story not because it was one of a kind, as has been mentioned here. I think you can find many such stories. We could never have done that without a Department of Education incentive. We simply could not have done it without the dollars. We could not have done it without a huge community effort. And I don't know that I've ever participated in anything at the state or at the national level or at the international level that has been quite so compelling or so impactful in the community as that one community effort was.
And it required a community effort — not in the stipulations from DOE — but to make it happen. Now you've got a program in GEARUP that is saying — We've analyzed some of these programs, and I think these are important things to make sure you include.
My message to you with regard to that story is partnerships can work. Community efforts like that can be much more powerful than a few statistics on paper.
The negative of the program — we prepared some students so well, they were recruited out of our community and are now at probably some of your universities, and we're now dealing with that second tier of students trying to help them. We've gone back. We've redone the program.
Every superintendent we've dealt with has said "Please make it more rigorous." They said it in private, and most recently had a press conference and they've come out in public asking us to continue to make it more rigorous curricula requirement, exit exams, whatever it takes to make sure that those students use that carrot in a positive way.
A second notion — we have had — we have seen great changes in industry. The health care industry had to make huge changes because of the marketplace. Communication industry — remember when we didn't — when we knew who we were dealing with when we picked up the phone? Today, you don't know what company you're dealing with.
It used to be very simple. That marketplace changed. And most recently, deregulation of utilities. The marketplace changes. Industry changes.
The marketplace for higher education has changed dramatically. We've all heard the demographers from Harvard and everywhere else telling us what we look like and what we're going to look like. But the academic industry is frozen. We have not altered ourselves and how we do business and how we provide services and how we think to meet this new marketplace.
So the second story is simply about our partnership. We are a partnership between a community college and a university.
We discovered, as in some of the studies that Steven mentioned earlier that Judith did, students in community colleges had a wonderful opportunity to come in. As a matter of fact, we know that most minorities and most nontraditional students and women start out in community colleges nationwide.
What we also discovered was that they weren't going on to a baccalaureate degree in the kind of numbers or even in the wishful thinking numbers that we would have liked. So we decided to eliminate all of the barriers between the traditional community college and university, form a partnership, and I am the president of this partnership, get it accredited by a regional accrediting agency and higher education coordinating board, get it through a legislature, get a governor to support it, and then have people provide us a chance for experimentation.
What I can tell you briefly is that happened in 1991. Every level of graduation has increased — certificate, associate, baccalaureate and masters. At the masters level, we've increased graduation by 246 percent. There is a time when the line has been blurred between secondary school, K through 6th or six through 12, community colleges and universities. And I think that any kind of plan — GEARUP, the trio program — that helps schools like us that are poor and that need additional resources to go out and experiment in communities, anything like that helps spur this kind of experiment.
I'll conclude with one comment about Texas. Texas is in the news a lot these days for lots of reasons, as you all know. But one of the good things that came out of our legislature this year was a scholarship program aimed at just this. And its acronym is TEXAS but it's name is the Toward Excellence Access and Success. And it's going to try and provide dollars, and it's funded at $100 million. And it is founded to attract those students to the rigorous courses, that maintain a GPA at the conclusion of their high school graduation, meet certain need requirements. And if they do all of that, then proceed on to higher education.
It's an idea that's so simple, we should have done it a long time ago as a state. We have now done that. I think it portends good things for our state.
If you look at the Rio Grande Valley, we are a preview of what the entire state will look like by the year 2030. The negative part about that is that we must change our characteristics if we want to say that Texas will look better than we do at this time. And so I think this is one of those efforts in that regard.
I'll conclude with one statement about the Ford Foundation.
Twenty-five years ago, I was very young — hard to believe — I had two babies, two years old and three years old, and I wanted to work on a doctorate. The Ford Foundation had grants that were available for — at that time, Hispanics and other students — to work on a doctorate. They were hoping that folks that continued on would go back to their communities and have some impact. I'm a native of Brownsville, Texas. And I am the president of the institution where I once was a student. So I don't think I've ever told you that, Steven, but I thought I'd take advantage to thank you.
S. Zwerling: Certainly. The program still exists, by the way.
J. Garcia: Yes. Well, it's a good program.
[APPLAUSE.]
J. Garcia: Thank you.
L. Rice: Congressman Fattah has to leave. And we just want to thank you so much for your contribution.
[APPLAUSE.]
Red light. We are truly running behind time. I think I'll shorten the break that we were going to take between the two panels. So feel free to move in and out as you need to.
I'd like to move right in now to some audience reaction to the panelists. And one of the things I'd just like to begin with, and maybe address to you, Dr. Garcia, as chairman or vice chair of the student aid panel, is what are the hopes for any simplification of the student aid process down the pike?
J. Garcia: Our hopes are that the Department of Education will be very successful in trying to streamline that process. I don't think there's an individual campus president, or, looking at from the national perspective, we have heard, especially on that committee and in testimony, such powerful testimony as the need for simplification in this regard. And folks believe that, for example, the on-line services that Mike Smith talked about today is the direction to go.
I might suggest one other thing, though. And I know lots of things are being suggested very specifically. But one of the things that works in our case is local qualification for some of these programs. And you know how you have empowerment zone opportunities where you say I know if I focus on these zones that I'm going to hit the educational disadvantaged, the economically disadvantaged student 99.9% of the time. Perhaps we can look at pre-qualifying some communities in that same way so that we would not be so worried about qualifying each and every student, but, in fact, qualify a zone, an area, and so that we would immediately eliminate a huge amount of bureaucracy. We've seen it work with empowerment zones. I'm sure you all know of other examples where that concept might apply. But we would like to see you take something like that and install it in this program.
But I don't think there's any more important issue than we've heard about as a committee.
L. Rice: Thank you. Why don't we move. If you'd like to speak, sort of the Brookings' tradition is to put your card in a vertical position, and then we'll call on you.
John?
Let me say one thing. Would you please identify who you are at the outset.
Participant: John Childers, the College Board.
There appears to be a difference in expectations and hopes for GEARUP between our two major speakers this morning. Congressman Fattah hopes it will be a program that will make a real societal impact. Deputy Secretary Smith said it's a program that will never be universal, but you hope to draw some lessons from some of the projects that can be sent out to all schools. The history of Trio, as we've heard this morning after 30 years and $600 million a year, is that it reaches 8% of the population, eligible population. Will GEARUP be a program that really makes a societal impact or a program that reaches just a few fortunate students who happen to be in the right place?
L. Rice: Should I direct that to you, Pauline?
P. Abernathy: I don't think there actually is a disagreement between what Mike and the Congressman said. What Mike, as you pointed out, was saying is that the idea is to have GEARUP leverage changes that are universal through how schools use Title I, how they use their other monies. While it may never be another Title I, but, if it's successful, it won't need to be, because it will help transform schools and create this kind of systemic changes in how they use their own monies and other federal monies to teach kids.
So I heard both of them, and I heard them saying the same things.
L. Rice: Anybody else wish to ...? Steve?
S. Zwerling: Let me chime in with sort of a more general response to, I think, a very acute question.
I don't think it's a money issue at all. I don't think Trio is about money. Forgive me. I don't think GEARUP is about money. Forgive me. It's about ideas and about ways of working and reforming the ways in which we work. I don't believe for a minute that an urban school system that spends, on average, 7,000 to $9,000 per kid per year can't come up with the small change required to sustain Trio kinds of efforts, GEARUP kinds of efforts, and other kinds of effective practices. In my view, it's not a money issue; it's an idea issue; it's a commitment issue; it's an allocation of existing resources issue.
L. Rice: Chancellor Orbach.
Participant: I would like to ...
L. Rice: You have to identify yourself.
Participant: Yes, sorry. I'm Raymond Orbach, Chancellor of the University of California, Riverside.
The concept of K through 16 has been addressed and we were talking about the idea of what I would call transparency between segments. We have, in California, worked out through legislative and collaborative programs a lot of interface between academic programs. And I would urge you to go beyond that in the conceptualization. It's easy to have a set of courses count if you fulfilled them in one sector and then have then transferred to the other. But what you're talking about, it seems to me, is actually bringing the university, for example, into conjunction with K thru 12 in an interface that makes the separation invisible or transparent. And it means sharing resources in yet another structure — namely a vertical structure — where the integration of faculties and facilities enable both sectors to profit from that relationship.
So it's more than simply a confluence of curricular structures. It really is, in that sense, a partnership.
L. Rice: Identify yourself, please.
Participant: My name is David Mundell. I'm an old colleague of Lois's. I'm here from IBM Research, but at a different part of my life I ran a number of partnerships at the local government level.
I'm struck by the role of incentives; you know, the teacher giving and the guidance counselor giving incentives to the kids in that school in the Bronx. "You do this, frankly, or else." You do this, or when you come within 20 feet of my office, you will be in trouble. Your community had an incentive which basically said we raise a million dollars, or we fail. And my background in running local partnerships with some federal money suggests that it's the federal government almost never gives long-term incentives for performance. In fact, at one point I argued with regional administrators who wanted to prevent me from giving incentives to grantees because that would be profit. That would not be reimbursement for expenses; it would be profit.
And I wonder in the GEARUP program where we look at five year proposals, and maybe this is where the Ford money can go beyond coffee. Maybe the federal money can't go beyond that. Is there a way to reward partnerships, community and state level partnerships, that do better the first year than others, that change awareness, that do better the third year to change high school completion rates, that do better the fifth year to change college-going and college continuation rates; reward them with more money, more accolades, more success. In the absence of that, in the absence of those incentives, running these partnerships is a very tiring activity. Making them succeed over time is an impossible activity. And nowhere in the legislation, nor in these things which my colleagues wrote, former colleagues wrote, do I see a reward at the community or at the state level, a reward for performance over time. And I don't know how and if, under the legislative terms or under the foundation terms you can do that. But you need to do that.
L. Rice: Laws can always be amended over time, as you well know, David. But you raise a much more generic question, which is what are the other missing elements either in the legislation or in the way that you've heard so far today about it being implemented. I, in part — and I may be wrong — showed that film early this morning because I just didn't — I saw some reference to guidance counseling, et cetera, et cetera, but I just didn't see quite enough. Maybe that missing link, maybe it isn't a strong enough link. I'm not sure. But, see, this may be something that occurred to you.
S. Zwerling: Quickly, another terrific set of points, David.
I think, by definition, funders are in the rewards business, because everything we do is by competition of one kind or another. So that's part A. And so you get in and you get a grant for a period of time, and then you have to show results in order to get a supplement and a renewal, et cetera. But yours is a subtler point than that. And I don't have a lot of wisdom about how to build that in.
There are obviously examples at the state level. A number of states have experimented through the years with discretionary money to reward, say, community colleges that do a particularly good job of beating the odds and helping people transfer at rates, say, higher than expected or anticipated to four year colleges. And they get a certain amount of money.
In New York State, for example, there's so-called Bundy money, as you may know. And that is a substantial sum of money. I think at this point it's about $5,000 for every baccalaureate degree graduate that you produce. So there's a real incentive to hopefully not just pass people through the system, but to provide with a quality education and to push the numbers so there's a real incentive.
So those are some of the kinds of things that we might be thinking about.
J. Garcia: I'd like to respond for just a second, because you hit right at the core of part of the problem. You're absolutely right. These partnerships are very time consuming and very difficult and require a tremendous amount of skill on the people's part at all levels to maintain and to guard.
Two things. One is our fund, for example, in our little endowment program has grown to $5.7 million. Our greatest hope and fear at the same time was that we would be so successful that we would have to go out and raise more money, because more students came and earned those scholarship dollars than our fund would generate.
The challenge grant said you could not apply for another challenge grant for ten years. I kept watching the clock thinking, okay, 1997 it's time. We can go back. By that time the challenge grants were gone. It was a huge disappointment for our folks, because we had counted on somehow showing the success of this program and being able to come back and then ask for additional dollars.
So I would encourage folks to listen to that advice. It's to the core.
The second point is with regards to state funding and successful partnerships. Our community college university partnership could show that we saved 52% of administrative costs as a result of this coalition and eliminating redundancy and all the kinds of things you do when you do that kind of work. When we presented that data, one of our regents said "What reward did you get for this?" And we responded "Zilch, nothing." Then her response to me was, "Then, why would you continue to do this?" Well, why would anyone want to go down a path that was very difficult to go down, you can imagine, if there're no rewards on the other side.
So I would simply affirm that those — that that's a very key part, both at the state and federal level, and at DOE funding levels.
L. Rice: Arnold.
Participant: I'm Arnold Mitchem. Like Lois, but not as effectively, I've dedicated most of my life to the interests of low income and minority students in higher education.
And I'd sort of like to follow up on the comments that David made. One of the troubling realities in American life, particularly if you look at polls and other evidence, is that minorities and whites often have different perspectives of reality, with all the attendant implications. As I think about GEARUP and Trio, on the one hand, it's wonderful. It's almost like I've died and gone to heaven to see that we finally, as a society, come to the conclusion that appreciates the value of early intervention programs. I remember a time when they were considered just peripheral. So now it seems that they're on center stage, and we've made some progress, and that's great.
But the issue really, I think, and where I disagree with Steve to some extent, unfortunately comes back to money. The issue is sustainability, to reward, create incentives; just to pay for substance and services. And that is something, it seems to me, that all of the principals who are involved and who've directed GEARUP so far need to pay much closer attention to than I think they have so far.
Let me just make one comment with respect to implementation, the matching requirement. Big problem. From my point of view, it's a big problem, first, because of the philosophical problem. But I feel that the federal government has a responsibility to provide equal educational opportunity in our society, and there shouldn't be a match. But hold that aside.
As a practical matter, raising this much money in a match requires, based on my experience, specialized staff and a lot of time. And if I understand the legislation, it requires a 50% match by the end of the grant. That can be hundreds of thousands, millions of dollars. And I suggest that that's going to be a real problem, or we're going to lapse into a practice we have here in Washington, which is just blue smoke and mirrors. And I hope this program doesn't go down like that.
Thank you.
L. Rice: Moving down the table, we've probably got room for two more based on what I see. Scott?
Participant: I'm Scott Swail with the College Board.
The College Board has a vested interest in these programs because, sort of the way I put it, they're like the fingers in the dike of opportunity for a lot of kids. Where the schools may not be able to serve everyone, these programs often step into place and catch a lot of the students that otherwise would just fall through.
But I want to make a couple of comments. First, I would like to agree with Steven that it is an idea thing, but it is a money thing as well. And I think foundations do provide a reward for programs that are put together. I think GEARUP is necessarily a reward system for work done in the proposal process of putting together a consortium.
I do caution, however, that in this age of political soundbites that everything is outcome based. We're attaching the outcomes of programs to whether they get future funding, and that is appropriate. But I think we have to be cautious on that, because we found out in GEARUP and other programs, linking desired effects with outcomes for these populations especially is very, very difficult. And if we just put concrete reasons on their outcomes, "If you don't do this ...," we're going to be hard pressed to find it. When we want to say that after the first year we want to give a reward for these outcomes, or after the third year for others, it's very difficult that you're going to show that, because they may take multi-year effects.
So all I'm saying is that it's not as simple as it sounds. It is much more complex. And I just warn a cautionary note here that it is a difficult process that we've all had to — we've tried to work before, but it is not simple, and we have to work harder. And we should just keep that in mind.
L. Rice: That's a useful comment. I can't see who the next card is. Is that you, David?
Participant: Yes.
I think it's going to be really important to address a number of these issues on how well we evaluate this program. David, we couldn't reward performance if we didn't know whether we had it or not in the program and which programs were better and which ones weren't. And so I think to Scott's point here, it's also very important that we have interim measures. But it's also very important that very quickly we have some idea. We obviously have a lot of interest and need for the program. We've got about four to five times as many applicants as we'll be able to fund. Then the question is going to be, to sustain this and to make it of interest to people in the Congress for continuing funding is how quickly are we going to be able to demonstrate to the external population what works and what doesn't, and how quickly are we going to be able to demonstrate to the participants what's working and what isn't.
So we're going to need some very different ways of looking at this along the lines of what Mike Smith was talking about in his opening comments about how we determine success in this early on. We don't have the luxury here of waiting 20 years for a program evaluation. We aren't going to probably have 20 months. And so I think it's going to require some clever interim measures. I think there are interim measures, yes. We want them to go to college. In fact, we want them to succeed in college. This may be the best persistence program, college persistence program that's come along in a long time. But we've got to have some interim measures, one of which is whether they stay in school. You know, if they're from Brownsville, maybe just staying in school is a pretty strong indicator, given the past records there.
So I think there's an awful lot on the evaluation side that we have to do differently in this program that we've done in the past.
L. Rice: I couldn't agree more, David. And I think that this is possibly still yet another role, Steve, that we could turn over or share some responsibility with the Ford Foundation to help to set up some of these criteria for evaluation as we go along.
S. Zwerling: Actually, it's one of the things that we're talking with the Department of Education about, about the possibility of partnering with them in regard to not only a design, but also provide some funds.
L. Rice: Terrific. Terrific. They can't solicit you, but I can.
I just want to thank the entire panel. Sorry we're running a little bit late. Rather considerably. But we will take, I think, a ten minute break and return.
[APPLAUSE AND END OF PANEL ON GEARUP.]
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