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
M. Smith: Thank you, Lois.
It's been a good 25 years, I think. A lot of exciting, interesting things have gone on, both in Brookings, and I think Washington over those years, and I think we're entering into an era now when we're going to move a notch up. It's going to be a little bit different in terms of — I think, in terms of the way that we think about public policy, and the way that we think about the relationship between the federal government and colleges and universities, state departments of education, and so on.
And there is a real change, I believe, in the federal role over the past few years. And a lot of it is exemplified in the programs that you're going to be talking about today because they're, in some ways, a very different set of programs than we've had before; in other ways, they are conceptually similar, but they're being implemented in a different style and with a different conception about what the end point might be.
I'll be fairly brief. I want to touch on three general points, and then raise a couple of issues that would be great if you could think about during the day, as well as the issues that Lois laid out, which I thought was a good agenda for the conference, and I certainly look forward to seeing the results of the conference if you can begin to get at some of the questions that Lois asked — how can these programs be improved over time? How can these programs really have the kinds of effects that we all want them to have? How do we take these programs to scale?
And in many ways, those are some of the same questions that I'm going to address over the next few minutes.
The three ways that these programs signal different roles in ESEA are fairly straightforward.
Lois mentioned the first one, and I think it's the most important one. And that is that the three programs that you're talking about fit the — that you will talk about — fit beautifully into the overall conception of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act. They fit into the K to 12 mission of the department. And they fit there in a principled way. That is, the fundamental purposes of those programs — to increase access to students moving on to college, to provide opportunity for all students so they can achieve to high standards, to begin to establish sets of understandings of students about their future and about the kinds of decisions that they'll have to make in their lives — these are all themes that permeate the Elementary and Secondary Education Act.
And one way — Lois, you asked whether or not there were ways that we could change the Elementary and Secondary Education Act or perhaps the administration's proposal to better link to these programs — in many ways, they are very tightly linked right now. That's not to say that we couldn't improve them. I?m sure we can and, with your help, perhaps we will in the near future or Congress — Congressman Fattah is here — and there are other folks in Congress who are interested in improvements.
I believe that the kinds of ideas that can come out of this conference can really help.
But the notion that we are emphasizing in these three programs the same purposes, the same sets of strategies in many ways — that is, improving teacher quality, for example, is one of the major themes of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act; bringing standards into the classroom and moving students to the point where all students, not just a few, but all students take advantage of the kinds of opportunities that schools give, take the kinds of courses that will move them, that will move them into a position where they can apply to colleges and get into competitive colleges is a fundamental part of GEARUP.
Providing the kinds of opportunities to students in remote places — we still have something like 35 to 40 percent of our high schools in this country don't have a calculus course. They don't have a physics course. They don't have some of the foreign language courses. These are — many of these schools are in urban areas — are in rural areas, but a few are in urban areas as well. And the kinds of work that can go on through the distance learning program, the strategies that could be looked at, trying to understand better the quality of those programs, and so on, can all feed into reforms at the elementary and secondary level.
So we have already established a link in purpose. And beyond purpose, I think we've also begun to establish a set of institutional links, which is really my second point, and the point that Lois mentioned.
And here, I believe it's almost for the first time — certainly the first time in such a concrete fashion — in the Higher Education Act, it's been a specification of the institutional relationships — institutional relationships — between higher education and elementary and secondary education. Both in GEARUP and certainly in the teacher training programs, you have specified in the law those sets of relationships.
In the past, in some very good programs that exist in the Higher Education Act, the trio programs in particular, you have a relationship that's based on students being in the schools, in the K to 12 schools, and the higher ed organizations coming in to give a hand. And we certainly have that same set of relationships going on in the college work-study tutoring programs. But we don't have the formal relationships, the formal institutional relationships, established in order to have both entities learning from them.
Now, it's an interesting time for all of this. Certainly, it's not only the Higher Education Act that is promoting these kinds of institutional relationships. All one has to do is go to California and talk to any of the chancellors of the California universities about what they're doing with K to 12 schools. They're doing it in a post-affirmative action era. They're doing it because they're motivated to do it because of that. They're also doing it, I believe, because they're motivated by a real sense of commitment to working in the schools and other places.
So that the GEARUP relationships, the teacher-training relationships all fit into a larger pattern that's beginning to emerge all over the country of strong institutional relationships between colleges and universities on the one hand and K to 12 school systems and individual schools on the other hand.
Relationships between those two entities are only part of the story, though. The relationship to the private sector is also powerful, and specified in these programs and coming out in many of the proposals for the programs.
I'll mention just one. It's not normally thought of as the private sector, although it is, and that is the relationship between the GEARUP program and the Ford Foundation, as Lois mentioned a little bit earlier. There, we've formed a linkage, a bonding, that is truly extraordinary.
The Ford Foundation has been interested in issues of the GEARUP nature for a long time, and when they saw that GEARUP passed, they approached us and then we got into a good conversation with them about establishing a relationship where Ford would be able to go out and do a variety of things around information sharing with potential applicants, putting together lists of exemplary programs, a whole bundle of things that often it takes the federal government a little more time to get ready to do. They could do it quite quickly, and they could do it, in part, because they'd already been working in these areas.
And over the period of time from the passage of the program to the first actual applicants coming in with proposals, Ford was out there — I don't know how many times, but a large number of times — with the department, talking to people all over the country about the nature of the program, stimulating better ideas, stimulating better proposals, stimulating interest in the idea in general, and so on.
This is a strategy of a sort that we've also followed in the department with another program — the 21st Century Schools Program — which is an after-school effort. And we've done it there with the Mott Foundation. And it turns out to be a really great model. It's not going to work for every program, but when there is that kind of interest by a foundation in a federal program, it is a wonderfully synergistic activity that we can all enter into because the foundations have — foundations can pay for coffee, for example, when groups come together, and sometimes even lunch.
[LAUGHTER]
We can't do that. And they can do well more than that, obviously, but they are much more nimble. They are much more like the private sector in that regard. And so they can act quickly and they can feed back information and so on, and make the programs really come alive to potential applicants.
Now, the third area here, which is a somewhat different role for the department, is the nature of really of the implementation of the programs themselves. And in this case, what's happening is that the programs, because they're new, are able to begin to move in a directions sometimes that some of the older programs have a harder time doing because there's been an established set of procedures for many of the tried-and-true programs in the department, not just in the Higher Education Act programs, but in the Elementary and Secondary Education Act.
And the business of the department typically in these areas has been to process grants. It's been very — there's been a lot of routine processes that go on. You take in applications. You process the grants. You process the applications. You bring people together to hold peer reviews and so on, and you do that during much the part, the bigger part of the year. You may do a little bit of monitoring in order to make sure that the money is being spent correctly. But by and large, you're not collecting outcome data from the particular projects. We haven't been really working with those projects in a way where we pass out good information and share exemplary practice.
When we have an evaluation, it's an evaluation that's really on the time schedule of the evaluators rather than on the time schedule of the people implementing the program. You know, so you'll start an evaluation perhaps in the first or second year of the authorization of one of these things. You'll go out and collect this large, large sample. You'll spend two or three years analyzing this and writing up reports and getting them cleared and so on, and it will be just in time for the next reauthorization of Congress.
So during that five-year period of time, you've learned nothing specifically that you can feed back into the programs — nothing. It's incredible. So we've not, either from the monitoring process of feeding back information there, and not from the process of the formal evaluations.
Now, all this can change, and it can change not because we've invented the Internet in the administration, but because the Internet came in in 1993 really and began to play a prominent role in the activities, not first of the government, but first of the private sector. And now the government is beginning to emulate much of the private sector in many of the same ways. And the department is moving in that direction with all deliberate speed.
We are trying to put into place the automation using the Internet of most of the routine processes of the department. Now, what does that mean?
Well, it means that, by and large, you're going to be able to apply for applications; you're going to be able to get information, apply for applications for programs, fill out applications, send them in, have them processed, have peer reviews that are done by some sort of distance communications, have a grant awarded, and then, basically, get information on a rather instantaneous basis about the implementation of projects — all through the Internet.
It used to be that when I'd get on a plane and I'd say I was from the Department of Education, you know, in response to a question — generally, I try to burrow down in the plane seat — but in this case, somebody asks you a question, so you respond. And then, I typically would turn around the question. I'd say — they'd ask — What do you do there? And I'd say — Well, what do you think the Department of Education should do?
And what you'd get would be the response that — Well, we think they ought to tell us about what are the most effective practices in schools. What makes schools works. How can we get our information from my school, the school that my kids go to or my grandchildren go to or whatever? How can you get it out there?
And I'd say — Well, we churn out lots of books and we do all this other stuff and so on, knowing all the time in my heart that there were 95,000 schools out there, 8,000 colleges and universities, 2.5 million teachers, and that it was impossible for us to reach out to all of them.
Well, extraordinarily, it's not impossible today to reach out to all of them. It may be impossible to have them all respond, but it is not impossible to reach them all — through the Internet, using the web, carrying out the provision of information in ways that we could not have imagined in the past.
And as we all know, it's not going to be too long before that pipe that now serves our web through the telephone lines and so on in our homes is going to be replaced. It's going to be replaced by much thicker pipes that deliver much more information, much faster, and with much more fidelity. And the kinds of things that we're going to be able to do with the web, which fits into the distance learning program, but it also fits into the general strategy of the department in ways of reaching out and thinking about how to serve a public out there.
The kinds of things that we can do will be truly extraordinary. They will go way beyond what the very best in business can do right now and they'll go way beyond it within the next three or four years.
So at the department, we're trying to move to a point where, like many businesses, we're going to automate those routine processes on the one side, and on the other side, we're going to create a system of customer service that reaches out all across the country — not just to our grantees, but to all of the people that we'd like to serve.
So it's not just the folks that would get a trio grant. It's all the folks that might like to get a trio grant or might think about it. Or it's also the students out there who may be at a school where there's no trio grant or it may be to the presidents or to the parents of the kids or whomever. It?s all accessible to everybody and it's accessible in a forum and a fashion which allows them to interact and do it on a continuos basis, late at night, early in the morning, whenever they might want to do it.
So there is an amazing change that's going on. And I think it would be terrific if you all would talk about that change, think about that change, think about how it affects the implementation of programs and so on.
Let me leave you with two final thoughts.
First, as an issue to continue talking about — and Lois has really already mentioned this — it's the issue of how do we keep prompting this beginning that we've gotten on a communication, a real communication, between higher education institutions and K to 12 districts and schools and so on. And I hasten to say that this is, as I said before, this is not just a communications that's been stimulated by any federal programs. It's a communication that's been stimulated by lots of activity out there by colleges and universities. The question is how do we keep that going. How do we make it pay off.
We have tried to do this for 25 years or 30 years. I mean, there have been fits and starts and many of you have participated in those efforts and come back disappointed often at the end of the efforts because, for some reason or other, while the initial passion was there, it began to die out. Somehow it didn't get rewarded. Somehow, the environment wasn't right. How do we get that environment right? How do we get the incentives right to make that continuously happen?
And the second issue that I'd like you to think about really has to do with the purpose of the programs. And here, I'm thinking, I think, more about GEARUP and the teacher programs. These are somewhere in between demonstration programs and service programs.
We don't expect them ever to be universal service programs. There's not going to be enough money in the budget to fund all of the really good ideas and take it up to — take them up to scale through federal funding. What we'd like is something different, I think. And let me just try it.
It seems to me that what we want to do is to, first, examine the quality of these programs, have a sufficiently immediate evaluation, have good indicators to feed back outcomes, and so on, so we have a kind of a continuous, ongoing record of what's happening with those programs and whether or not they're working.
Second, we need to somehow use the capacity that I just talked about — that is the capacity to put out information — gather information about the programs and put it immediately back out to all the programs — how are they implementing a program in Kansas? You get some information about what's happening in Kansas. You get some information about what's happening in Sacramento. You get some information about what's happening in Newark. And if it's good information, where people have tried to tackle a problem, that information shouldn't just be filed away. That information should be passed back out to all the people who are out there in all other parts of the country working hard to try to implement the programs.
They should understand that, in fact, others are going through the same efforts and they should try to learn from those others. We're trying to do this in the 21st Century Schools Program. That is, we're trying to feed back information from people who've been working on problems back out to all the people in the field. We're trying to do in the comprehensive school programs, both in ESEA — we should be trying to do that in the higher education programs we're talking about here as well.
Third, there is a — I think a kind of an interesting theoretical problem in social change, which a lot of people have tried to address over time. And it goes something like this. If you have a set of good ideas, and you try them out in the field, and you improve them over time, and you get some reasonable results for them, how do you create an environment where those ideas spread? And where they spread with enough fidelity so that they keep up the same kinds of effects that the programs that have been more in the incubator — the kinds of characteristics that those programs have had? How do you turn a set of ideas into things that travel from one place to another?
You know, there is a kind of a growing set of theories, complexity theory and chaos theory, that have come out of the hard sciences and biological sciences, which discuss issues around complex, adaptive organisms. And one can think of colleges and universities as complex, adaptive organisms. One can think of school systems in the same way. That when they're put in the right kind of environment, they will flourish. They will try to figure out ideas. There'll be connections made between them, networks turn out to be tremendously important when you look at the way that organisms grow and when you look at the way institutions grow and people learn and so on. That is human networks, connections of ideas, the flow of ideas, and so on.
But it also needs — there needs to be some watering. When you're dealing with organisms, somehow you need to keep fueling them somehow. You need to keep making that environment work so that they can actually grow and change and improve and learn from other things over time.
How do we create that kind of environment in the long run, rather than having just a set of 200 or 500 programs of this sort? How do we create an environment in the country where, if these programs are working, we have 1,000 of them — one for each higher ed institution?
OK. Let me leave you at that. I have one other task to do, which is a great honor here.
Several months ago, I was in Philadelphia at a GEARUP session that Ford was sponsoring, along with the department. And we were there and giving some talks and information and so on to people in the field. And one of the folks there was a congressman, a young congressman, who had sponsored the GEARUP program, been the inventor in many ways of the GEARUP legislation, from Philadelphia.
And he rushed in because he had a vote that was going to happen midmorning or late morning in the House, gave a rousing talk and then rushed out again. But he had made time during that day, when he had a vote to do, made time during that day to come downtown to speak to a significant number of people and a fairly large number of people interested in this program because he was committed to it.
Congressman Chaka Fattah has — knows something about the interconnections among organizations and levels of government. He's worked in the city government. He's worked in the state government, in the state legislature. And he's been in the Congress since 1995, where he has been an active leader in lots of education issues, and a particularly active leader in this one.
It's my great honor and pleasure to present to you Congressman Chaka Fattah.
[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