Transcript
M. Armacost: If I can have your attention, we'll get started. I'm Mike Armacost, and it's my pleasure to welcome you to the Brookings Institution this afternoon.
Four years ago, we tried to sort out our work on education by concentrating first and exclusively on K through 12 educational reform, and though we had the Brown Center at Brookings, we had no resident director. So we were fortunate enough to solicit the help of Paul Hill, then, as now, at the University of Washington, to help us figure out more effective ways of providing options for city leaders who are forced to intervene in failing public school systems.
The two books that I think you have in your hands today are products of that initiative: It Takes a City and A Legacy of Learning. They complement each other, I think, quite nicely, because both show that mayors and other civic leaders can make very important contributions to the educational system, and they show that city children need options that are not necessarily available within existing public school systems.
As It Takes a City says, we need to consider a city's public education to include all the assets that are available and relevant to children's learning experience, and that includes museums and libraries and research organizations like our own, universities and businesses. It's quite heartening to see Potomac Associates in our own city has taken that kind of approach and is trying to organize the educational institutions beyond the schools and make a contribution. The Legacy of Learning also describes a whole variety of new designs for school and that can help restore the United States to a preeminent position in public education around the world.
So, I'm very proud of the progress we've made in the last four years. We've now added a resident director, Tom Loveless, so that we've got a sharper focus to our own work in the institution. And I'm happy to have this opportunity today to have a nice discussion of that work.
I would like to introduce Don Feuerstein, who has just taken the presidency as of last November in New American Schools, a nonprofit organization which is helping to design new types of schools, to bring them to the attention of civic leaders around the country. He's a member of our Brookings Council.
So it's a special pleasure, Don, to welcome you today. Say a word of welcome before Belle Sawhill introduces our panel.
D. Feuerstein: Thanks, Mike. Yes, I am a member of the council. Of course, we're a very nonpartisan and non-doctrinal organization, so I've had to join a few other organizations as well since assuming this job.
I'm really pleased to be here on behalf of New American Schools to cosponsor this conference for these two wonderful books. For those of you who don't know us, we are the organization that was started by David Kearns and his colleagues on the Business Roundtable some nine years ago, almost nine at this point, to bring research-based, comprehensive design to schools to help all children to raise substantially their achievement. We are — at this point, our design teams are in 2,500 schools in all 50 states, and we owe a particular debt to David, not only for having started us, but for having brought to New American Schools and to school reform the business notions of strategic planning and whole entity restructuring for ailing entities and outside assistance, and these ideas have illuminated everything that we've done. We're also grateful to Paul Hill for having focused on the need for flexibility and for accountability at the local site level. So we're pleased to sponsor this event in launching their new ideas, which I'm sure will help illuminate what we do as well as what the entire country does as we move forward trying to improve our schools.
With that, I would like to introduce Belle Sawhill from Brookings, who is going to be the moderator of this panel. Thank you.
I. Sawhill: Thank you very much. It's really a great privilege to get to moderate this session, because I'm personally enormously interested in the topic of education reform. My interest comes from the fact that I have been particularly concerned about issues of social mobility and opportunity in our society. And I think education is not only the way in which we can compete as a nation in an increasingly global economy, but it is also the major vehicle through which we can, in this time of great prosperity, make sure that everyone has an opportunity to move up the economic and social ladder. And as one of the books that's being released today says, the road out of poverty and despair leads through the schoolhouse door. And I think that's terribly true.
I think what I find most impressive about these two books is not just that they address this critical issue. However, it's