The Role Of Faith-Based Organizations

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MR. E.J. DIONNE, JR.: I want to welcome everybody here this morning. I want to thank the Pew Trust for making this possible. Is Barbara Beck here yet? I just want to thank her and I want to above all thank Ming Hsu for putting this together and doing an extraordinary job. You should know that any praise for this event going well should go to Ming, any complaints should come to me because that is the fair division of labor here.

This is the fourth in a series of five sessions organized around what we call the Sacred Places, Civic Purposes Project. What we are doing is we are looking at areas where the faith-based institutions, the houses of worship are deeply involved in solving particular social problems. We have had sessions in the past — and I want to thank Staci Simmons who is in the back, who sort of started off this project with us — we have had sessions on crime, teen pregnancy, and neighborhood economic development. Today, we are focusing on education, but we are focusing particularly on public education. We are focusing on partnerships between faith-based institutions and the public schools as well as other educational institutions. Our focus is not on vouchers even though people on our panel and in the audience who have expertise on the subject. I hope they will speak up on that issue whenever they deem it appropriate. And the fact that this is not about vouchers should not be read as either an endorsement of or opposition to vouchers. But there is much fine work already being done on vouchers, including at this very institute. And I think too little attention is paid to the less controversial but vital roles played by the congregations in helping parents and children and, yes, in improving the public schools. I think collaborations between the religious congregations and public institutions offer us an opportunity to examine the powerful contributions made by the faith-based organizations, contributions made in ways that raise few or no First Amendment debate and often involve remarkably little or even no government money. I think there will necessarily be important debates over the First Amendment and the promise and dangers of government partnerships with faith-based organizations. I hope there will be just as much debate over what all the institutions in our society, including the religious community can do to improve the lives of our children, especially the poorest among us.

I would like to give you a little preview of what you are going to hear from our two excellent presenters today. Mavis Sanders notes that there is a role for faith-based organizations to act collaboratively and independently in the lives of children and youth because, and I quote her, "It is evident that schools alone cannot provide all students with the opportunities and supports they need in order to be successful." Mavis offers a wonderful list of cooperative ventures in her paper, she offers a wonderful list of cooperative ventures between the public schools and faith-based groups from Alexandria, Virginia to Phoenix, Arizona, from the Shiloh Baptist Church right here in D.C. to the Chicago Public Schools Inter-Faith Community Partnership.

And in his paper this afternoon, Dennis Shirley begins with a sentence that I think should be enshrined on front of the offices of any group dealing with this subject, "If you like irony, you will love the many paradoxes about church and state relations in the United States." And I will let him elaborate on it, but it is just one powerful example of where congregations and the public schools can be partners. Dennis talks about efforts to recruit parents to assist in a child's learning. And I quote Dennis: "The almost universal strategy tends to be of using the students as conveyers of messages. Students bring home slips of paper inviting parents to PTA meetings, school dinners, sports events, and cultural activities. And, yet, the message of parental engagement is much more powerful when it is supplemented by the persuasiveness of a religious leader." And we will hear more on that this afternoon.

Let me just do a few housekeeping notes here. Our friend Bill Galston, who is the director of the Institute for Philosophy and Public Affairs at the University of Maryland, also worked in the White House during the 1990's, Bill has to go, appropriately enough at an education conference, he has got to go teach this afternoon. So, he won't be with us this afternoon. Bill is very polite, and I have encouraged him not to be so polite. I want him to intervene more often than he might in the morning session because I really want his voice in the discussion. He is in my mind one of the smartest public policy people around and very engaged in this subject. We are missing Nina Rees, who is an assistant to the Vice President on domestic policy. She is working on budget issues in the White House this morning, and we can ask her what her problem was this morning, maybe we can all help her out. But she will be joining us this afternoon. She apologized for not being here.

We are going to go until about noon and then we have lunch nearby. We will direct you to lunch. We think we have enough — we should have enough lunch for everybody. However, we had people come in on a waiting list later on, I think more people will be coming as the morning goes. If you have reserved your place, just take your place. If you don't have a reserved place, wait a bit just to make sure we have space for you. For those who can't get a seat, we have an overflow room where you can get lunch in the cafeteria. This is for people whom we said couldn't reserve for lunch and there will be an overflow room where you can hear Ernie Cortes, the executive director of the Southwest Industrial Areas Foundation, who will talk about the Alliance schools in Texas, which are I think a classic case of the kind of partnership that we are going to be discussing today.

We will have Mavis present this morning; Dennis present this afternoon. Just so we know, when we have the respondents come in, I am going to go to a couple of respondents and then go to the audience before we go down the whole list of respondents. Having sat at panels before, it is always troubling to be sitting in an audience and know you have to wait for five, six, or seven people to talk before you have your say. And so what I am going to do is have a couple of respondents go to the audience and then go back through our panelists.

Two other things: future events. We are having our last session in this series on March 14th and it will be on child care. And there should be in your packets a list of who are giving the papers, who will be the respondents. The Pew Forum on Religion in Public Life, which is our sister organization, is having its launch on March 1st. You can see more about that at www.pewforum.org. Senator Joe Lieberman will be there. J.C. Watts will be there. David Saperstein, who is in the audience here will be there. It is a very exciting event. And we may at the end of all this organize a final conference to bring together people who have worked on this project from the beginning.

I will introduce Mavis now, and I will give a formal introduction to Dennis this afternoon. Mavis Sanders got her Ph.D. in education from Stanford University, and she holds a joint appointment as research scientist at the Center for Research on the Education of Students Placed at Risk. And she is an assistant professor in the Graduate Division of Education at Johns Hopkins University. She has published and presented numerous papers. I think her bio is in your packet. Her most recent book, Schooling Students Placed at Risk: Research, Policy, and Practice in the Education of Poor and Minority Adolescents, includes several chapters that highlights the importance of family and community involvement for the school success of all students.

Our distinguished panel of respondents includes Bill Galston, whom I have already introduced; Charles Haynes, who is senior scholar at the Freedom Forum First Amendment Center and a very respected author in this area; David Hornbeck, the much-acclaimed former superintendent of the Philadelphia Public Schools, a place where many of the experiments we are talking about today have taken place. Robert Muccigrosso is principal of the Nazareth Regional High School in New York. It is in East Flatbush. I should confess an interest here: my wife went to that high school and that is how I got to know Bob Muccigrosso. It is a school that — it is a Catholic school with almost entirely minority enrollment. And Bob has a great interest in what links Catholic and public education, what Catholic schools can learn from the public schools and what public schools can learn from Catholic schools. And his family defies the stereotypes in this argument because he works in the Catholic schools and his wife works in the public schools, so they know what partnership in this field is all about. Nina will join us this afternoon. And, finally, Ruth Wattenberg is director of Educational Issues at the American Federation of Teachers and is smart, in my experience, on just about every issue having to do with public education and also very smart on a lot of issues having to do with politics. Ruth, welcome.

Mavis, it is so good to have you here and welcome.

DR. MAVIS SANDERS: Good morning. It is very good to be here to be able to talk on this particular topic, which I think is very important in the field of education. Also, I really would like to thank the Brookings Institution for giving me the opportunity to delve more deeply into the topic and to be able to present this paper to you.

I look at the role of faith-based organizations in public education through the lens of school, family, and community partnerships. And I would like to take about 10 to 15 minutes to briefly highlight some points that I make in the paper, and I will do so by answering or discussing four particular questions. The first is why are school-community partnerships so important in education at this point in our history; why are faith-based organizations potentially effective partners, community partners for public schools; what are some current examples of partnerships between public schools and faith-based organizations that give us some flavor or taste of the possibilities that such partnerships hold for our students; and, last, what factors influence the success of partnerships between public schools and faith-based organizations.

So, to begin with the first question, why are school-community partnerships so important. To answer this question very briefly for you, I will draw to your attention the research of people like my colleague, Joyce Epstein, as well as Shirley Brice-Heath and Milbrey McLaughlin, who make the point, and I think quite effectively, that given the needs of our student populations, the growing needs of our student population, and I won't bore you with the statistics because most of you know them, but increasingly our schools are much more diverse socio-economically, racially, ethnically, including linguistically, and also as we think about the inclusion movement, we have to deal with that public schools have to provide students with special learning needs new innovative and appropriate strategies to make sure that all students can reach their full potential.

Now, given these additional responsibilities placed on public schools, there are continued stresses placed on families. You have a greater number of families where either both parents, if it is a two-parent home are working, are fully engaged in the work force. If it is a single parent home, that single parent may also be working. People are working more. There are more hours that families have to work in order to provide their children the basic needs of health and home. So that given the additional stresses on family, given the additional responsibilities of public schools, and given that our communities and our neighborhoods are less cohesive than they have been in past decades, you really need to bring a coordinated effort of families, schools, and communities working together to make sure that all students have the support and opportunities they need to realize their full potential.

The activities that can be implemented through school, family, and community partnerships are numerous and should ultimately be defined by the needs of the school. But in my research, I found that they can be student-centered, school-centered, family-centered, or community-centered. If we really understand education to be something that takes place not only in school buildings but also in communities and families, we realize that the partnerships between faith-based organizations and public schools need not solely be centered in the school. If they are student-centered, that is great. It can mean providing mentors and tutors to students. It can mean providing incentives or rewards for student effort. But it can also mean providing school assistance, providing equipment to schools, adopting schools, making sure that students have the supplies or the school teachers have the supplies they need to carry out their particular work. It can also mean working with families, making sure that families have the information that they need to be strong role models for their students. It can mean working with other community-based organizations so that once children leave a public school building, they can go to another safe place that is transmitting to them a very important message about the importance of school, about the importance of appropriate behavior, and consistent effort in school. And we have found that when students receive those consistent and coordinated messages from home, school, and community, that they are triply benefited. And they usually are committed to school efforts and are much more successful in the school domain.

Faith-based organizations, as I move to the second question of why they are potentially effective community partners, and it is because faith-based organizations have a very long history of involvement in the social and educational development of children and youth. If you go back historically to the colonial period, religious institutions, and I will use these, I will go back and forth between religious institutions and faith-based organizations, but religious institutions are the primary institutions responsible for the education of youth. As we moved into the 19th century where the separation of church and state became a much more prominent issue and religious organizations or faith-based institutions took a diminished role in public education, they were still very much involved in the social and educational development of youth. You had religious organizations that were involved in providing educational opportunities to formerly enslaved African-American students. You had Catholic churches in particular who were very much involved in the education of the immigrant population throughout the 19th century. And then even as the religious institutions have always had private schools that were available to students, they also had other enrichment type programs that were based within those faith organizations that supported students in public schools. So, from the colonial period up until the present point, the church has been consistently, or excuse me, religious organizations and faith-based organizations have been very much involved in the social and educational development of children and youth because beyond the religious mission of many faith-based organizations, there is also a social mission and an outreach mission that allows them to readily have a cadre of volunteers who are committed to helping young people and their families, especially those who are in need.

I don't want to give the impression that the relationship between faith-based organizations and public schools has not been without conflict. There have always been philosophical and I think legal debate over issues such as school prayer, school vouchers, government funding, and the teaching of values in public schools. This conflict or the conflictual nature of the relationship between public schools and faith-based organizations has been increasingly obvious over the last decade or so with the growth of some Christian fundamentalist groups, such as the Christian Coalition. However, an equally prominent movement has been the movement towards collaboration in which faith-based organizations and schools have carved out some common ground and have a shared vision about how they want to support students and their families and the community.

Some examples of this, there are many examples, hundreds of examples, but I want to bring a couple to your attention. One is in Phoenix, Arizona where a coalition of faith-based communities and education associations use America Goes Back to School as a focal point each year to honor teachers, both current and retired, for their work on behalf of children and youth. This is a way that they are focusing actually on teachers and educators but they are emboldening these teachers and praising them and giving them the type of recognition that they need as they go back into public schools. You have another example of Chicago Public Schools Inter-Faith Community Partnerships, which is a multi-cultural inter-faith group of religious leaders who provide crisis intervention, workshops for parents, curriculum development in the areas of character education and values. They sponsor radio and television interviews with public school staff to promote Chicago public school initiatives. This is yet another example of the kind of partnership that can occur between faith-based organizations and public schools.

And a more common example, more common but no less important, is the example of Shiloh Baptist Church right here in Washington, D.C. It has a number of community-outreach initiatives. One is a learning center that teaches critical thinking and problem-solving skills to children in grades four through eight. And it is open after school and evenings. And it is staffed by both paid and unpaid staff. So, we see that there are a lot of possibilities in terms of what can be achieved through collaboration between public schools and faith-based organizations.

And there are three key factors, as I see them, in terms of what influences the success of these partnerships. And I would like to discuss each of these in turn. One is shared vision, the other is clearly defined roles and responsibilities, and the last is open communication. We know that these three factors are important to any collaboration, but I think they are particularly important to collaborations between faith-based organizations and public schools for a number of reasons.

When we are talking about a shared vision, it is very important for all the participants in a collaboration to really understand what the goal of that collaboration is and how they will move towards achieving that particular goal. In order for faith-based organizations and public schools to collaborate successfully, I think as they construct this shared vision, it has to be informed by established principles about the separation of church and state, what is appropriate, what is inappropriate, as it has been interpreted by policy-makers, legal minds around the interpretation of the Establishment Clause in the First Amendment. There are many documents that have been produced to help schools in faith-based organizations to do this. And it is very important that before a collaboration is entered into, that all parties understand what is possible, what is appropriate, what is desirable, and develop a common vision around those principles.

And it is the connected factor that influences the success of partnerships between faith-based organizations and public schools and that is clearly defined roles and responsibilities. We have found through our research at the Center for the Research of Education of Students Placed at Risk and in my own reading, I have found that when roles and responsibilities are clearly defined, it diminishes misunderstandings and confusion that can jeopardize the success of a partnership. This is especially important, again, for faith-based organizations because when public schools use certain religious facilities, there may be responsibilities that are unique to the use of those facilities that may not come into play when you are using the facilities of secular organizations. So, again, these collaborations have to be informed collaborations in order to be successful.

And then last but not least is the importance of open communication. In my own case study research of an elementary school in Baltimore that has a number of community partners, including a faith-based organization — and I am wrapping up — including a faith-based organization, one of the volunteers from the faith-based organization said that her particular group, her church had offered to volunteer in a number of public schools but their offers had been declined in part because of public school officials' concerns about the motivation or the intent of volunteers from religious organizations. Open communication is very important so that these types of concerns that many may hold for any variety of reasons can be aired and dealt with effectively and fairly. This particular volunteer emphasized the fact that her mission group really had the desire to support public schools and students. They wanted to provide school supplies. They had no intention of recruiting students or proselytizing but because of maybe past experiences or any number of concerns that certain individuals may have, they did not allow for the opportunity with a partnership with this particular organization that may have benefited their students as well as their school staff.

In conclusion, I would just like to emphasize the fact that through our research and through anecdotal evidence, homeschool and community partnerships are very important, especially those that are well-designed and focus on meeting mutually-held goals for school improvement. But the homeschooling community also have separate and distinct roles to play in the lives of youth. For example, a fundamental responsibility and mission of faith-based organizations is to transmit religious knowledge and doctrines to youth. This is very important because a wealth of research shows that religious faith has a positive influence on students' success in school independent of the more academically-focused activities that churches also sponsor. But it may not be permissible or desirable for faith-based organizations to carry out this particular responsibility or mission when in collaboration with public institutions like public schools. Faith-based organizations then have a challenge. They must identify when collaboration with public schools will best meet their educational goals for youth and when strategies and activities that do not include public schools would be most appropriate.

It appears through research and practice that when faith-based organizations that are committed to improving learning opportunities and outcomes for students in the U.S. public schools allocate time and resources to act both collaboratively and independently, then that is the best way to serve the growing needs of our families and children.

MR. DIONNE: I want to thank Dr. Sanders and just say, no, I wasn't rushing you, I was pushing hair out of my face. But I appreciated the talk very much and the brevity. I want to just point out for those of you who have the papers, there is a wonderful list of the very kind of partnerships Dr. Sanders is talking about on pages 18 to 20. It is just a very compact and I think extremely useful list of what possibilities there are out there.

I forgot to say earlier on that we tape these sessions and have posted transcripts of past sessions at The Brookings Institution Web-site so that when we pass the mike around, please speak into the mike, please identify yourselves. Eventually, there will be a book produced out of this called Sacred Places, Civic Purposes. And we have found that at these meetings our audiences have been so distinguished that in some cases we will come back to you and say, "Do you want to write something for us off your remarks?" So, in any event, just know that that is happening with this and that the mike will be going around.

I want to call, as I said I would, first on my friend Bill Galston. He is professor at the School of Public Affairs at the University of Maryland, director of the University's Institute for Philosophy and Public Affairs. He is the executive director of the National Commission on Civic Renewal. He was deputy assistant to President Clinton for domestic policy and a senior advisor to Al Gore's 1988 campaign. He is a philosopher activist, and I am very glad to have you here, Bill.

DR. BILL GALSTON: Thank you, E.J. Well, a couple of preliminary remarks. First of all, I want to thank Professor Sanders very much for offering us such a rich menu of practical examples and possibilities that is really going to help ground this discussion, which if it were left to me alone would otherwise soar off into the academic empyrean. Secondly, I want to make it clear at the threshold that I have had a longstanding public position in principle in favor of charitable choice and related public strategies. And, nonetheless, I am going to raise a series of I hope tough-minded, non-rhetorical questions about some of the issues that are arising as we try to move from the in-principle to the in-practice, which I think we are going to be compelled to do sooner rather than later by public policy proposals that are coming down the pike and in some cases are already upon us.

I was particularly struck by a phrase that Professor Sanders used in her remarks, which you have just heard. The phrase was "coordinated efforts." And what I want to suggest is that for all sorts of reasons, it is not just the fact of coordination that matters but also the mode of coordination. And what I want to suggest is that it is one thing to have what I will call civil or voluntary coordination and it is quite a different thing to have coordination under the aegis of an official public program. And we have to ask different questions depending on whether we are talking about civil or voluntary coordination or coordination under the aegis of a public program.

I will treat the first of those two questions relatively briefly. If we are talking about civil or voluntary arrangements, then subject to the very appropriate caveats that you stated in your paper, I think the principal question there is one of effectiveness.

In her paper, Professor Sanders says something that didn't surprise me at all but which I thought it would be useful to put on the table since she didn't have time to, on the top of page 21, she said, "School-community partnerships is an emergent field of inquiry in education. As such, comprehensive research on processes and outcomes of partnership programs with specific partners is relatively limited." Now, that is the sort of social science caveat that it seems to me is writ large in this entire area and it serves an important not red light but yellow light, a cautionary note. There is much more that we don't know about these partnerships in general and specifically partnerships involving faith-based institutions. And we had better not let the wish be father, or for that matter, the mother to the thought. We want these partnerships to work so ardently that we may be drawn to either over interpret the very scarce evidence that is available or to plunge ahead even in the absence of evidence. And this is a point that John DiIulio, among others, has stressed repeatedly with regard to this entire area. But since it is frequently stressed and then overlooked in the same breath or in the same paragraph, I think it is important to put it on the table and keep it there squarely.

Now, let me now move to what I regard as the much more problematic mode of coordinated effort where it arises under the aegis of a public program. And I just want to make a handful of points very quickly here. First of all, in recent years, there has been I think an important shift in the constitutional frame within which this issue must now be debated. For many years, it was argued on the basis of the then dominant Supreme Court cases, that public aid to "pervasively" sectarian institutions, including pervasively sectarian educational institutions, was simply forbidden under the terms of the Establishment Clause. Important Supreme Court cases in recent years I think have altered that presumption very, very significantly so that we are now talking about the secular purposes of the public programs rather than the pervasively sectarian nature of the receiving entities. And so what used to be decisive, knock-down arguments against proceeding in this area strike me now as being much more complicated but the people who know much more than I do about this may wish to debate on that question.

Next point that I want to make, it is not just the existence or non-existence of a public program that structures the cooperation. I think it is also the nature of the public program, the structure of public assistance. And here let me distinguish two models of public assistance, which I will call the direct aid model. You have a public program that is open to competitive bidding and faith-based institutions may compete on all fours with others for grants pursuant to that program as opposed to the certificate model where vouchers or certificates are made available to individual families which can then be redeemed for specific purposes and let us say after school programs.

Now, it is interesting to note that the Bush Administration is on the verge of officially proposing both of those models as part of its education package. On the one hand, the Bush Administration wants to open up education programs, such as in particular the 21st Century Learning Programs, which rose from $1 million a few years ago to $847 million last year. So, we are talking about a big pot of money and a big deal. And on the other hand, they are talking about $400 million in certificates that families could redeem for after school programs, including faith-based programs. Now, I don't have time to flesh this out constitutionally. I happen to believe that the certificate model is considerably less controversial as a matter of public policy and constitutionally than is the direct aid model. So let me just raise a couple of questions about the direct aid model.

First of all, under the direct aid model, it is very, very important that the public program define with some clarity the public secular purposes to be promoted by the program. And it is equally important that the potential recipient organizations be able to show with some plausibility the capacity to promote those public sector purposes effectively. And for the reasons that I have stated at the beginning of my remarks, that evidence is frequently conspicuous by its absence, so I think we are going to have some interesting public problems in administering these competitive programs.

There are also going to be some interesting issues I believe as to what gets funded. The leading figures, such as John DiIulio and Steve Goldsmith have stated repeatedly, it is not the religious activities that are going to be funded. It is not the Bible, et cetera, et cetera. The record is replete with quotations of that sort. But I saw an article in Education Week just last week, and I will put it on the table for your consideration. Tom Lewis, who founded the Fishing School 11 years ago in a poor Washington neighborhood said last week that, "I would be happy to be first in line for such government aid." His program serves about 70 students at a time, mixing inspirational Christian messages with homework tutoring, Spanish lessons, and computer time. If that organization applies for, qualifies for, and receives a direct federal grant under the 21st Century Learning Program is the federal government or is it not funding Bibles and religious activities? That is not a rhetorical question, ladies and gentlemen. But we are going to have to grapple with it sooner rather than later.

Another question, which is I think not trivial, under existing federal civil rights statutes and under existing federal constitutional law, faith-based organizations enjoy a very wide latitude in hiring practices, to use religious criteria in hiring that no other forms of organization in the country may use. That seems relatively unproblematic as long as their is no cash nexus between those organizations and let us say the federal government. But what happens if there is a cash nexus? Then the question arises should the federal government be in the position of funding organizations that use religious tests for their employment decisions? Once again, not a rhetorical question but one that we are going to have to grapple with sooner or grapple with later.

In conclusion, let me say that while I do not regard this area as the proverbial slippery slope, there are some important warning lights that are flashing. In his paper to be delivered this afternoon, which unfortunately I won't be here to participate in the discussion of so that I feel free about raising the issue now, Dennis Shirley offers an example that occurred just last year. It was a day of teacher professional development for an entire school district. It had been turned over to the Industrial Areas Foundation group in Houston. The day's activities began, and I quote, "With a prayer by a minister who concluded a homily with a statement, 'In Jesus' name we pray.'" No one protested. But this was an obligatory event for teachers, which they could skip only by getting docked a day's pay. Anybody troubled by that? I am troubled by that. And I was troubled, in conclusion, for the same reason by the not one, but two episodes of the most recent Presidential Inaugural where I as a Jew sat through the invocation of divine blessing in the name of Jesus, a perfectly appropriate thing to do in many, many venues but not, I would suggest, a public venue. I think we are going to get more and more episodes of this sort as we go down this road, and we had better think about them now because it is going to be much more difficult to think about them later.

Thank you very much.

MR. DIONNE: I want to thank Bill very much. You should know that Bill Galston is very good at pricking everyone's balloon in a constructive fashion. He has spent years trying to get liberals to take the work of the faith-based institutions seriously and now he is doing the useful work of getting conservatives to take the problems in the faith-based approach seriously. And I think that is all to the good.

Charles Haynes, and I am going to go to Charles, and then for those of you in the audience who want to jump in early before I go on to David Hornbeck, please indicate. We are going to have mike's going around the room. Ming has a mike and also Andrea McDaniel has a mike — oh, and Andrew has a mike, so we have got a lot of mikes. If you could indicate that you want to speak, we can get a mike to you right away, and we will have a few questions and then we will bring in David.

But it is very, very good to have Charles Haynes here. He is the senior scholar for religious freedom at the First Amendment Center of the Freedom Forum and director of religious freedom programs. He is the author of, appropriately enough for us today, Finding Common Ground: A First Amendment Guide to Religion in Public Education. And he is the author of the forthcoming and timely, Living With Our Deepest Differences: Religion in American Public Life. He holds a master's degree from Harvard Divinity School, a doctorate from Emory University. Charles Haynes, welcome and thank you.

DR. CHARLES HAYNES: Thank you, E.J., very much. It is a privilege to be a part of this, and I want to echo what Bill said and thank Professor Sanders for a wonderful paper that got us started. And Bill has taken some of my thunder. I am not going to go over all the First Amendment issues he raises, so I will take a little different tact. He has done it better than I could do it anyway, so I am glad he went first. But he does raise some of the core issues that I hope that you will engage as we go along.

I think I will back up a minute though because Professor Sanders puts on the table a model that is existing around the country and is proliferating in terms of these kinds of partnerships and cooperation under existing law, so I want to say something about that first. And that is to say, to reinforce the fact that this is happening all over the country. I spend lots of my time in local school districts, so I bring back that report to you, from Utah to California to Maryland, we have clergy going in and doing character education on the Eastern Shore of Maryland. We have the school district in Broken Arrow, Oklahoma relating to the community and assigning administrators to speak with the local churches. In California, we have all kinds of things going on in districts involving faith communities. Many of these programs I think are fully constitutional. They may not sound like it at first blush when you hear me talking about it that quickly, but if you look closely, many of these people have worked it out in ways that Professor Sanders talks about that are constitutional and that are clear and that are very supportive and helpful for public schools. In fact, I don't know in many of these communities what the schools would do without these partnerships. They have become essential.

Now, of course, as I move around the country and work in school districts, there are lots of bad stories and I won't belabor all of that, but there are places where people I think mostly unwittingly are doing things that are unconstitutional. They don't know that they are in many cases but they are. They have clergy coming in and counseling students in a way that really is faith formation during the school day, for example, and they don't really see a problem with it. In many communities, the relationship between the churches and the schools is seamless and has been for a very long time and it is very difficult for people to take a step back and say, well, where do you draw the line or why should you even draw a line. And then there are other models where, in fact, it is unclear as to whether it is constitutional or not and people are puzzled by what they should do. Should Mormon volunteers in the public schools where badges that identify them as elders in the church or what should the badges look like, what should they be called, these kinds of tough gray area calls. And we have to address those as we move around the country. So that is kind of the state of the art.

Let me say that that is why we put out guidelines. Not everybody was happy that we did. But we did. The First Amendment Center working with Marc Stern at the American Jewish Congress and Steve McFarland then at the Christian Legal Society, two I think wonderful religious liberty lawyers, were the primary drafters of these guidelines. They are back there on the table you can get later. The point is Professor Sanders mentioned the guidelines that are available and so forth. Actually, there is very little out there to give I think good constitutional advice. It is a bit risky because some of these areas are unsettled in the law. The people we got to support this struggle with how to say everything in here, as you can imagine. But I think we came up — it is not the most common ground document in the world because there are some people not on the list, but I think we felt that we had to put out some guidance because there is really not very much out there right now. The Department of Education sent this to every public school in the United States last year but that doesn't mean that every public school read it, obviously. It got stuck somewhere and we have actually taken a poll since then and found out that many administrators, the majority, didn't know they received it. And teachers in very small numbers are aware that such a mailing took place. So just to put it out there doesn't answer the question.

But I think it is a risk worth taking, I would argue. Some of my friends in the religious liberty community argue against taking this risk, saying that if you put out guidelines, and they didn't argue much with the content, maybe a little around the edges, but if you put out guidelines, it will encourage the bad stories, it will encourage the violations of the First Amendment. I think the risk of guidelines is worth taking because I think that these partnerships are important. I think they are a reality. And I think that if we are going to have them, we ought to do them in the right way, not so much because of the legal or lawsuit issue but because the First Amendment is there to protect the conscience of every student and parent. It is often couched as though, oh, we have to have these silly guidelines because you know separation of church and state lawyers. It is deeper than that. It is a matter of in our public schools, can we do things that will protect the conscience of our citizens, our parents who entrust their young people to the public schools. That is I think why the First Amendment is important in this conversation and should not be an after thought. Should not be something, oh, gosh, we have to deal with it, which is often the response I get, "Will you please look at this at least before you enter into these relationships." So, the bad news is that in spite of the fact that we have crafted as close to a safe harbor as we can on this, it is not perfect and I welcome others, but as close as we can to a safe harbor, it is in many places ignored, not understood or deliberately people go around it and try to do what they want to do in the first place.

The conference I attended in Philadelphia, the superintendent put on with the Department of Education, another one in New York, when many groups came together to talk about this, there is great enthusiasm for doing things in this area. And then I have to be the spoiler at the party, and I have to raise there is the First Amendment, there are guidelines, there are safeguards that you have to have in place. And everybody says, "Oh, yes, yes, yes," and then goes on to the revival meeting and how wonderfully we are all going to work together. And then after the sessions, how many people come up to me, it is extraordinary, Muslim leaders, African-American leaders, and many leaders come up to me and say, "Yes, religious liberty is very important but what is this separation of church and state nonsense? Why do we need to worry about that? Kids need our help. We need to get in there. They need our help." And, again, I have to say, "Well, let's take a step back."

Let me end my remarks here by saying that if the First Amendment is not an after thought, if it is a matter of conscience, which I think it is, however you interpret it, if it is a matter of protecting conscience, the questions that Bill raises become even more deeply important to us, all of us, that is to say what do we do now? And what do we do now that there is going to be a center to encourage this at the Department of Education, not that the last Secretary didn't encourage this, the last Secretary was deeply supportive of partnerships, and he put on these various programs. He encouraged it. But this Secretary I think has taken a step further, especially because, as Bill suggests, money is coming into it. When funding comes in, then all the questions get more difficult, more challenging, especially the First Amendment questions.

So, now, we have to rethink I think the guidelines. We have to think about the questions Bill has raised in clearer ways and try to craft some common ground. Will the common ground be about hiring? I don't know. I doubt it. I don't think that religious groups are going to surrender their right to discriminate on the basis of religion when they hire people to deliver these programs. I doubt that is going to be possible. But maybe. Will there be other safeguards? I don't know how that is going to look. But I do know, and this is my own editorial perspective here at the end on the First Amendment, I do know that under the charitable choice conversations that are going on in this town this week, last week, next week, big conversations, these issues aren't I think as urgent or important, the issues of conscience. But when young people are involved in our public schools, I think issues of conscience are very high indeed. And I think that whatever solutions we move towards as we craft common ground so that these partnerships can go forward must first and foremost take into account the need to uphold our experiment in religious liberty. Our public schools are the model where we in fact learn what it means to be religiously free, to be citizens, to work together across our differences. The proposals that involve funding, that involve religious groups getting more connected with schools must I think first take into consideration how we can protect the conscience of every parent and every student as we go forward.

Thank you very much.

MR. DIONNE: Thank you, Charles Haynes. And if I could put on the table a question inspired by your remarks, not to be dealt with now but perhaps before the morning is over, should we view this issue differently in big city public school systems where religious diversity among students in neighborhoods is a fact and a given versus how we view this in smaller communities, rural communities that are more homogenous where you may have a clear minority feeling pressured by a clear majority. And I am wondering if jurisprudence is capable of looking at those two different situations differently and how should we look at them practically? And if later on somebody would like to take that up, I would be grateful.

Let's go to a couple of questions first. Sir?

Q: Joe McTighe from CAPE, Council for American Private Education. I am wondering if any of the panelists, so inclined, might address the issue of the unique contributions, the distinctive contributions that religious institutions can bring to public education because tutoring in secular subjects, as important as that is, any volunteer organization might be able to do that or any secular charitable organization can do that. But religion has got a unique perspective on life, it looks at the world in a particular way, the moral and religious, spiritual way is as important I think as looking at the world mathematically or historically or scientifically, et cetera. And how do we tap that resource because I think one of the points that Charles made is these social ills that a lot of schools and society in general are addressing right now, whether it is dropouts or teen pregnancy or whatever, the sense is that there is a moral dimension to that, and we have got to address that in some way. The model I have in mind is release time. It is perfectly constitutional, already upheld by the Supreme Court, where you get a chunk of time out of the school day and kids go to a sacred place, the mosque, the synagogue, the church, in order to address that particular dimension of life. Would any of the panelists who are inclined address that?

MR. DIONNE: Could people hold that and we could bring in a couple of other voices and then I could turn to Dr. Hornbeck and then people could pick up on some of these questions because that is a good question. Sir?

Q: Good morning. My name is Edgar Schick. I am the president of the Luther Institute here in Washington. I would like to make two points, if I might. The first is for Dr. Sanders. In Baltimore, there is an example of a faith-based organization, Christ Lutheran Church in the Inner Harbor, that has for a long time worked with a variety of south Baltimore issues and decided to focus on reading. And I emphasize this because it fits, first of all, what you were talking about, shared vision, that is having an involvement in the community. And, secondly, very specific roles and responsibilities to identify only one area, reading, and to do that both in the classroom and then after the school did it in Thomas Jefferson and now in Federal Hill Elementary School with startling results in increasing the reading ability of the pupils but nothing in there involves any sort of religious activity at all, strictly volunteers and growing out of a longer commitment but with very specific activities and with no money trading hands.

The other comment I would make is I hope during the course of the presentations today, there will be a little more clarity about two different issues which have run together in the panelists' presentations so far, that is on the one hand an example like I have mentioned in which a faith-based organization, a church, enters into some kind of activity in a school and the kind of points that Professor Galston raised, namely, where faith-based organizations receive funding from the government. Now, we are talking about two things related to the same topic but really moving in two different directions and so far the comments have intermingled as though they are one issue and they are not. They are related but they are two separate issues, and I hope that during the course of the day, the panelists will separate these threads and focus on the issues involved at each one of them. Thank you.

MR. DIONNE: That is a very helpful question. I would just like to say my personal interest in this subject began a long time ago. My first time as a teenager I volunteered anywhere was in a Head Start in the basement of a Methodist church. The Head Start program was government-funded, it had no religious content, yet it was in the basement of a Methodist church because that was one of the best spaces available for these kids. So that I raise only to suggest that these questions end up being complicated, number one, and, number two, we have actually been grappling with this a lot longer than we like to think.

I will take one more question and then if questioners feel their question wasn't answered, just come back and let us know. Sir?

Q: My name is Bill Taylor, and I am a civil rights lawyer who works on issues of public school reform. And I asked these two questions out of a real belief that more and more resources need to be made available to public schools, so I have a real sympathy for broadening the base for support and help for public schools.

Question one is should we view this as a question that is bounded completely by constitutional considerations? In other words, I don't know what five members of the Supreme Court are going to say these days about the establishment of religion or about anything else for that matter. And does the discussion end if the Supreme Court says that this is not a violation of church and state or are there some core principles that are embedded in our public policy that we ought to be thinking about regardless of what is determined to be a violation of the Constitution?

The second question is I hope during the course of the day we will hear something from the speakers and panelists about questions of implementation. In other words, I guess it is now several decades since the Supreme Court said prayer in school was not permissible under the Constitution but some of us have noticed that it is still going on in some places. So, when we talk about new arrangements for facilitating the participation of faith-based organizations in the schools, and there are limitations on that participation, how do we police it, how do we implement it? Because a lot of this is not easily implemented. So, if we have concerns about boundaries, how do we find out whether those boundaries are being observed?

MR. DIONNE: Thank you. Mavis, do you want to take on a couple of those and then I will turn to Dr. Hornbeck and Bob Muccigrosso.

DR. SANDERS: Okay. Should I address them as if there will be no author response at the end or should I address them as —

MR. DIONNE: No, you will have a last shot at all of us.

DR. SANDERS: So, I will just quickly try to address the comment that you made in terms of what is unique about the faith-based organizations and is there a role for that sort of spiritual, I think you were making the point of the sort of spiritual message or life view that individuals in faith-based organizations see as their role. And to address that I would like to emphasize that when faith-based organizations began to think about their role in public education, they had to think about their role with public institutions, public schools versus their role with young people in public schools. And if you look at it that way, you will see that when we talk about faith-based organizations partnering with public schools, we do need to keep in mind the fact that these young people come from different backgrounds, different religious beliefs, and their families have different religious beliefs, and we really have to honor that whole separation because it is mandatory that children attend public schools, I mean that children attend school. So, many children are there with different backgrounds, with different religious orientations. And the involvement of faith-based organizations have to respect that and there is a role to play to help schools achieve improvement goals that they have set for themselves.

It is a misconception that there are plenty of volunteers out there. There really aren't. Increasingly, because people have to work and because families are overwhelmed with the responsibilities they have, schools have a difficulty drawing in volunteers. Faith-based organizations, because of their outreach and because of their service mission are often one of the few viable institutions where schools can readily get the kind of volunteers to help with reading, to help with math, to provide student incentives to help with classroom management and lunch room management and all of those day-to-day nitty-gritty things the schools have to do in order to educate children. Now, that doesn't prevent faith-based organizations, separately from the public schools, to provide a spiritual life view for young people who attend public schools. But they can do that within a separate domain from the public school.

I didn't mention the whole notion of social capital. One thing that our research has shown, one reason why children's involvement in religious organizations and faith-based organizations is so important to their social and emotional development is because of the relationships that they build with individuals and adults in those faith-based organizations and the transmission of values and attitudes to really help those children to be successful, to cope.

So, to put it in a nutshell, the notion that faith-based organizations have to identify ways where they can collaborate in ways that you suggested, like what is going — some of the innovative things going on in Baltimore, and in ways where they act independent as faith-based organizations that can reach out to young people in a voluntary way to sort of relay to them religious and spiritual tenets, attitudes, ways of being that will help them achieve the goals to improve their own life chances, if that answers your question.

MR. DIONNE: That is great. Bill, I know you are going to have to go, can I give you a shot at those now and then I will keep moving down the panel.

DR. GALSTON: Well, let me very quickly deal with them in reverse order. Problems with implementation, absolutely. That is why I put Tom Lewis' school on the table as an example, to ask us to think through what it means to offer federal assistance to a school that seamlessly intermingles instruction in reading in Spanish with Christian religious messages, right. And I think we are going to be dealing with hundreds of examples of that sort.

To your first question, Mr. Taylor, no, I was at pains to point out but will now underscore, this is not simply a constitutional question. There are many things that are constitutionally permissible, which are questionable as a matter of public policy. I think that is one of the most basic facts about American constitutionalism. And there are issues of comity, of shared citizenship, of mutual respect that ought to guide us individually and collectively in the employment of our constitutional rights and powers, however the Supreme Court may interpret them. So, yes, absolutely, to say that, "Oh, well, the Supreme Court has said that "X" is constitutional and permissible," that opens the discussion. It certainly doesn't close it. So, I agree with that absolutely.

To the previous question, yes, I think it is very important to distinguish between Case A and Case B. And Case B is Tom Lewis' school, Case A is when a faith-based organization comes to the Department of Education or a local education authority and says, "We know how to teach reading to kids who are behind in second grade reading in a way that decisively supplements and beefs up what the schools are now doing such that by the time those kids get to fourth grade, they will be on track. And here is the evidence. And we want to work with you to make that happen." And I think that poses an entirely different set of issues and ones that we ought to take very, very seriously. And that is why I distinguished at the outset between modes of cooperation in order to drive exactly that distinction. I agree with you entirely.

With regard to the first question, which Professor Sanders has already addressed, very briefly, I yield to no one in my celebration of the distinctive contribution that religious institutions, qua-religious institutions, qua-sources of spiritual guidance and growth can make to the development of young people in ways that promotes their educational achievement. I think we would both agree that it does not follow from that that the federal government ought to engage in the direct funding of the spiritual mission of those institutions in order to promote the educational attainment of young people. So there is some daylight between the premises and the conclusion. I don't know much about the constitutionality or public policy debates about release time, but I would point out that there is a reasonably authoritative discussion of release time. It is found in the Bible. It is called the Sabbath. And I think that might be the place to start this discussion.

MR. DIONNE: Thank you very much, Bill. David Hornbeck didn't realize that his entire education was designed to prepare him for this panel this morning. He has a law degree from the University of Pennsylvania and theology degrees from Oxford University and Union Theological Seminary. He was a very successful superintendent in Philadelphia from between 1994 and August of this year. It is a time when students posted dramatic gains in academic achievement. He serves as chairman of the board of directors for both the Children's Defense Fund and the Public Education Network. Welcome, David Hornbeck.

MR. DAVID HORNBECK: Thank you, E.J., and I am delighted to be here. This morning, I would like to make a comment or two, which will include some observations about a couple of the questions, but on what I would characterize in my own lexicon as the pastoral side of the faith community or religious community entry into this foray, leaving to this afternoon's panel comment about what I would characterize as the prophetic role of the religious community or the faith community in relationship to public education save for one observation at the end of my comments.

Professor Sanders makes an observation early in her paper, particularly as it relates to school districts with concentrations of low-income students, that to effectively educate these and all students, public schools require greater resources, both human and material, community organizations, including faith-based organizations possess, and I might add or can generate, such resources. It is from that perspective that I make comments.

For six years, I had both the obligation and the opportunity of contributing to the learning conditions for 215,000 kids in 262 schools and not a minute passed any day of the week in which my first thought was on how I was going to meet that opportunity and that obligation in the face of too little resources. And so it is against that backdrop that I offer several comments about the ways in which, in a very practical sense, in Philadelphia we connected to the faith community. I would begin in the somewhat traditional way, that is all of those things that connect schools and faith communities, the tutoring, the mentoring, and so on, we had a central piece of our work in Philadelphia was something we referred to as Project 10,000. It was the commitment to increase by 10,000 the number of school volunteers over a five year period. And we managed to recruit 15,000 in a three year period, primarily by going and asking people to join us in the venture and then providing a little training and then putting somebody at the door of the school acting like they were glad to see the person when they walked in the school itself.

And one of the key institutions to whom we went to achieve that kind of success were the faith communities of Philadelphia. And we had all the things that are in Professor Sanders' paper, the ones that Professor Haynes has commented on. We had some sort of interesting variations. One of the earliest was one we referred to as safety corridors. In Philadelphia, there are places where it is dangerous for a child to walk to school. And so we went ultimately in 59 schools to, in that instance, entirely churches in the area and said, "Would you give us parishioners to go out and stand on street corners in orange vests, and we will give them walkie-talkies and the parents or other caregivers will get the kids to that corridor and then they will walk safely to school." And then similarly in the afternoon, more largely older parishioners came and stood on street corners in their orange vests again and went the other direction. But all of these thousands and thousands and thousands of activities in which faith communities played a prominent role were very, very important. And I might add to it something that Professor Sanders alluded to in another instance, the honors to teachers, the Sundays in most instances that were devoted to honoring the teacher members of congregations, the scholarships that were developed for kids and so on. So that was one whole section.

And one of the early things that I realized is that for decades I think we public schoolers have sort of cut off our nose to spite our face. There is this very important line you don't cross because of the First Amendment but you don't want to give up the 95 percent of things that you can do with faith communities legitimately, appropriately, whatever the Supreme Court says, in the name of what you can't do. You just have to be clear, as best you can. And I am happy for the guidelines, frankly, because it gives things that ordinary people like me and my teachers and my principals can relate to.

A second way that we related, and I raise it and on this one I am not quite sure we were on the right side of the line, but we made a judgment along the way, I happen to believe strongly in service learning and citizenship as a major tenet of what it means to be an educated person. And as a consequence taking its place alongside math and science and social studies as promotion and graduate requirements, we enacted a provision that before you get out of the fourth grade, again before you get out of the eighth grade, and again before you get out of the twelfth grade, a student would participate in a substantive service learning opportunity. And the question arose, well, what if the kid wants to do his service learning opportunity in connection with his faith community if that faith community activity involved activities that were clearly faith-related and that would under normal circumstances be barred if they were taught in the public school. And we made a decision to permit that on the premise that one of the key ingredients that separates that is the compulsory character of these experiences for kids, this representing a decision for the student for where that takes place. But I think is in our world, one where we came closer to the line but to share with you what we did, and we can debate this as one might wish.

The third observation that I would make is that, going to the CAPE question, we did believe, I did believe that there were significant behavioral impact from churches and mosques and synagogues. And there wasn't I don't think a teacher or a principal in the Philadelphia school district that didn't recognize a significant difference in behavior among and between kids who were deeply involved as participants in their faith community. I have got no research to prove that, I just know that principals and teachers were grateful when there were students in their class that had that kind of family-based experience.

But, in addition, I preached about once every five or six weeks in a synagogue or in a church and once in a Muslim setting. I didn't get asked very often in that setting. And one of the things that I would always encourage was that the congregation go after their kids in a behavior-shaping kind of way, not as a public school responsibility but as a responsibility of the congregation. It had overtones of the Sunday set aside or in the case of other religions, other days of the week are set aside for those kind of purposes, recognizing that issues of drugs and drinking and behavior generally and teen pregnancy and all the rest have moral implications. And part of my sermons had to do with the responsibility of congregations not just for their own children but for all children.

The fourth area on which I would comment is that schools also became supportive of religious institutions as community institutions. And to illustrate the point, during the course of six years a number of churches burned down. They came to us and said, "Can we worship in your school on Sunday?" And we said yes in the same way that if other institutions came to us and said, "Can we meet in your school," we said, "Yes. You have to pay. You have to clean it up." In one instance, we threw the church out of the school because they couldn't abide with their agreement to clean it up. In another instance, we gave them one more time and they managed to respond appropriately in that instance. But it was an important sort of connection.

We also wrestled hard, particularly with the Muslim kids, around the issue of opportunity to meet their prayer obligations. And we finally in schools set aside places where the Muslim kids could in fact meet their prayer obligations. And we also, and this was probably the most difficult thing to work out, I am not sure we ended up satisfactorily working it out, but we tried, the Muslim kids leaving just after lunch on Fridays where there is a special obligation that Muslim students have because it was too early to dismiss them for the day and we needed to get them back so that they could get their last period in, but we wanted to give them the space, that we didn't get in the way of what was a very fundamental set of opportunities.

One other comment on the behavior front, which was an interesting observation. Kids becoming Muslims was the fastest growing faith tradition in Philadelphia by far. And one of the things we discovered was that in addition to kids actually professing the Muslim faith, we had increasing numbers of young women, who though they weren't Muslims, decided to wear the dress of Muslims because it became interestingly a barrier to unwanted male advances. There was a recognition that it brought with it certain norms of behavior that I found really quite fascinating. I don't know, I must have had six or eight principals at one time or another comment to me about this phenomenon that was taking place.

I will close by simply making an observation that Professor Sanders speaks to in her paper, that is the connection between all of this and whether kids can read and do math and do science better. I don't know from a research point of view. I have got no double-blind study to demonstrate it. I think in fact many, many instances the factors that come to play are so complicated that it is hard to sort out a single dimension of what makes for change. I do know that over the four years when we had comparative data in Philadelphia, that there was a dramatic increase in achievement in the schools, K to 12, 44 percent in reading, math, and science. In the fourth grade, which were the kids that had sort of the full dose of what we were attempting to do, 48 percent, a 20 percent increase in the graduation rates during that period of time. And we considered the relationship to faith communities as an important ingredient in that, so important in fact, two years ago, after having encouraged partnerships with faith communities with my schools, I moved two years during the convocation for my principals to require each school to seek out at least one faith community partner for those kinds of tutoring, mentoring sorts of activities. And there was by that time a significant enthusiasm among the schools for it because they recognized that major contribution.

The last thing that I would say, and it alludes to the prophetic but it relates to taking money to do this stuff, is that — which is why I mention it this morning rather than this afternoon, I have in addition to the constitutional issues and the non-rhetorical questions that Professor Galston raised a little while ago, I have a different kind of concern and that is in the faith community, having taken the community, what does it do to the prophetic role that the faith community has as it relates to the institution from which it has taken money. I think that my experience, having nothing to do with faith, but watching, for example, the way research agendas and universities are designed, they often reflect funders' priorities, not the priorities either of need or of the individual applying for the grant. I think we are going to begin to see the Jeremiah's and the Isaiah's of 2001 muted in their voice as they wonder how they will replace the $50,000 for the after school program that has sustained their church. And I think that along side the constitutional issues of the kind that have been described earlier represents a very serious concern as we contemplate receiving these millions and millions and millions of dollars from the government.

Thank you very much.

MR. DIONNE: Thank you so very much. I want to go hear you preach whatever venue you are in. That was very powerful. Thank you. Next, I want to call on Robert Muccigrosso. He has been the principal of two inner-city Catholic schools in New York City, including Nazareth Regional High School in Brooklyn where he is currently principal. Previously, he served for seven years as the associate superintendent of schools in Brooklyn. And he has written on many subjects and in particular on what public school reform could learn from Catholic schools and other religious institutions. Welcome, Bob Muccigrosso.

DR. ROBERT MUCCIGROSSO: Good morning. When I got over the elation and flattery of being invited to be part of such a distinguished panel, I asked Ming Hsu to please check back with E.J. to make sure he understood what I do for a living in that I go to work everyday in a faith-based educational organization, in this case, as just described, an urban Catholic secondary school. And my familiarity with the programs that are under discussion today comes from in fact reading these papers and listening to the discussion. So if there is a naivete to some of my comments or maybe naivete will help. I hope so anyway. But I wanted to forewarn you.

My analysis really goes through points. First, being that the separating wall between church and state is certainly more difficult to scale and more difficult to circumvent, if one is of that mind, in some contexts than in others. That, for instance, in health care and social service areas, we seem to find no difficulty in entering into partnerships which involve huge amounts of money to provide care for the bodies and the mind and so on. Even in the areas of schools, it is not a monolithic separation. As mentioned in E.J.'s book several times, the GI Bill of Rights financed the education of thousands of returning veterans to all sorts of denominational colleges and universities. And, in fact, the parents of my secondary school students, all African-American, predominately nurses, police personnel, teachers, civil servants, all look forward after making monumental sacrifices to afford our school's tuition, which is higher, for instance, than our city college system or our state college system, look forward to having government play a role in the financing of their children's university education, including those that decide to go to St. John's or Holy Cross or if they are fortunate enough, Fordham. So, it is a different set of circumstances depending on the context, it is a different barrier depending on the context.

And when I looked at this particular set of programs, my sense was, well, this is going to be fairly easily dealt with, negotiated in a couple of respects. The first of which being that the recipients of the programs, the beneficiaries of the programs, as I read them, was the public school enterprise. It wasn't government financing church enterprises but rather state schools in various ways were benefiting from a special cache that church institutions and church affiliations enjoy with the client population. And that would pose the question in a way that would make the negotiation more achievable. And, secondly, the activities that were involved, which I categorize as after-school school, curriculum development, which I could see treading on more dangerous areas in that regard, and recognition programs. And those I think are a fair — well, educating of parents and making parents better consumers of public education, making parents more active in the public education of their sons and daughters. Again, those were activities, it seems to me, which were a fair, in my mind, a fair description of the programs that I read about and listened to. And that those were activities, again, that would be viewed benign enough and beneficial enough to allow for the successful negotiation of the church-state issues.

And the last point I would make, and it comes I guess as a little bit of a question, is I am not sure it would matter. In other words, one of the difficulties I have with the programs as described and as discussed so far, is that it seems to me, and really supported by the discussion which preceded me, is that in carrying out the carving out, in successfully carrying out the carving out of the acceptable levels of collaboration, we would be left with at least a questionable contribution to be made.

And I looked in the papers and there is a section of Professor Sanders' paper in which she talks about enhanced educational outcomes resulting from some of this collaboration. But it seemed to me, as I read it, that those findings were subject to the same kind of critique that I am very familiar with that comes with the analysis of reported enhanced outcomes on the part of private school students as compared to Catholic school students as compared to public school students, namely, that what is really being measured is the population, intrinsic population differences, namely, in this case things go with being part of a family where parents and family are actively involved in a church. I think that was part of the point that the preceding speaker was making.

So, those are my observations. One, that this church-state issue is interesting as a non-lawyer and as a real non-participant in it. I mean this has nothing to do with what I do everyday. I hope someday we can find a way to bridge that gap when it comes to schools. But I act everyday as though it will never happen because that is my responsibility to that. Secondly, as I heard them and as I read about them, I thought this would be a sort of neutral ground in which the negotiation would be easily accomplished. And, thirdly, going with that second point, in negotiating it, I am just a little fearful that we are also limiting potential for the contribution that could be made by faith-based organizations.

MR. DIONNE: Thank you very much. I hope that some time in the course of today, Bob, you would talk some about, when you look at these programs and compare them to what routinely happens, or maybe doesn't routinely happen but nonetheless happens, in your school in terms of, for example, the interaction with parishes. Whether there is a lot or a little. I think that would be instructive to this discussion.

Ruth Wattenberg, it is very good to have you . She is director of the American Federation of Teachers, Educational Issues Department. Her prior experience involved working with the AFT on issues related to academic standards. She coordinated the Education for Democracy Project whose purpose was to build consensus to enable schools to aggressively teach core civic values. She also worked as editor of AFT's magazine, the American Educator. Welcome, Ruth Wattenberg.

MS. WATTENBERG: There is a lot to comment on here, and we are almost at lunch. And Mavis Sanders still has to sum up. So, I am not going to comment on everything that has been raised and instead try to raise one other direction that I think hasn't come up. It speaks a little bit to the remark about how can we tap the uniquely moral dimensions that faith-based organizations have. I want to talk about that.

Let me say I think the lists of activities that Mavis Sanders has put forward are tremendous lists. I really agree with everybody on that. I would say that the premise that kids come to school with so many needs and that the schools are often just overwhelmed with trying to deal with these needs and so that they can't even get to the academic mission is oh-so-true. And so the schools need so much, and these are her words, "material and human support to meet those needs." Because of that, there are hundreds of things that faith-based organizations could do to support the schools. Many of them are the same things that frankly any community-based organization could do to support the schools. That doesn't mean they are not needed, they absolutely are as they are from the other groups. And I do think it is true also to note, as others have, that faith-based organizations at this point in time, maybe always, do have a unique ability to tap volunteers who want to serve. And so I think their ability to mobilize people to support the schools is in fact unique and should be drawn on.

But I want to try out a slightly different tact here — oh, and I want to go back a little bit to where E.J. started, which was to say that not everything here is controversial. And, frankly, I am a little worried that with the addition of so many dollars and all those proposals to add dollars that just as we are beginning to have conversations that would allow people to come together in some very useful, effective, and non-controversial ways, the push of those dollars is going to blow apart some of these conversations and we will never get to them.

But since we did start out by saying it doesn't have to be controversial to be important, I want to go back and talk about something that I think is not so controversial, it does draw uniquely on faith-based organizations. It is one example, but it may give us some other ideas in this area.

If you go back and say "what are the problems that schools face?" — if you ask adults that question, if you ask parents that question, if you ask teachers that question, if you ask citizens that question — the two issues that are always on the top are: (1) discipline in the schools is a huge problem, and (2) the lack of parental involvement is a huge problem. It tops the polls every year and we have 20 or 30 years of polling and while they switch places one to two, they never switch much. And I should just, in the interest of the teachers I am here representing, say that overcrowded classrooms is usually a close third. So I don't want to miss that one.

But if discipline is a problem, discipline is fundamentally a moral question. It is fundamentally a question about whether or not the adults in a given institution, in this case a school, have the moral authority to establish and enforce ways of behaving that are conducive to the mission of that institution. And I would say that schools to a great extent over the past two decades have seen their moral authority to do this eroded. And I think that one very unique contribution of the faith community could be to collaborate with schools and to try to re-confer on schools some of this moral authority. And let me just take you through a bit of this argument.

First, we all have I think an image of a point in the past when schools, and the teachers in them, were expected to transmit core community and civic values and moral values. And as part of that, they were entrusted to act in loco parentis. And you didn't have the kind of discipline problems that you have now. I am sure it did not come up as the number one problem in polls. But that authority has eroded and just consider some of the reasons, just so that it is in your minds. One, a growing demographic divide between many neighborhoods and their school staffs, which has often led to lesser communication and more troubled communication; the pervasive sense coming out of the 60's really that established authority was to be questioned and for kids, of course, established authority is the teachers; a wave of books in the 60's and 70's, and the persist, that portrayed teachers as overly authoritarian, as oppressors, often as the people who were responsible for having low expectations and were locking kids into paths where they could not succeed; increased sensitivity by parents, courts, and the community to practices, including discipline, including promotion practices that might have a disparate racial impact; increased reliance on the courts to hand-wrap solutions to problems, including what students can wear to school, what they can say, how they can behave. And I should say these rules did, in fact, restrict a lot of school authority. But even more, and this is worth thinking about, they probably created a certain timidity on the part of schools about what they could do and left them often just not to try because they didn't want to end up in courts about it. So, the result of this is that school people did lose a lot of their ability to establish and to enforce rules of conduct and civility.

And I am just going to quote — this is from an article that is actually 20 years old but it is still great — a guy named Gerald Grant. He talks about some of the things I just did. And he says, "Teachers, to do their jobs, they must establish control, motivate, ensure that even their involuntary clients actually learn. They must insist that these students do often difficult and sometimes boring tasks without being able to offer them the usual rewards of pay. Teachers are drained by the emotional demands of their pupils and are troubled by their inability to meet the intellectual needs of the students. The authority teachers need to do their work is both individual and social. The social sources have eroded. They have suffered a loss of social esteem and status. They are now more uncertainly buttressed by the law. Parents are more critical, demanding, and divided." Also, during this time, of course, parents had become so much more educated and feel appropriately that they have a lot more questions that they can bring to the school. And it has become as a result more difficult to establish a generalized set of expectations and shared norms within the school that support teachers in their efforts to maintain control and to inspire students. And I should also say every second that a teacher has to spend trying to keep control via their own authority, instead of the shared sense of authority, that is time and energy that is really sapped from the academic commission.

Now, people have talked about schools, churches, and families as places where kids develop their values, where they get shaped. We all want schools to be places where kids operate according to strong values related to hard work, related to respect for adult authority, related to respect for themselves, their bodies, and for their classmates. I think that one thing that could happen is to help overcome this sense that schools have that they are out there alone on this mission, which of course they are not because everybody cares a lot about this for their kids. But you could imagine churches and other religious groups coming together with schools to formulate codes of conduct that would govern behavior, that would cover dress codes, which has come up in an interesting way here, standards for social behavior among students and faculty, things like doing your homework, being prepared to pay the consequences of not doing your homework and so on. And if we had these codes that really came out of the participation of the faith-based community as well as other community groups, that would give the schools something to hang their hats on. I think the faith-based groups could promote this substantially. They could build parental support for this. People have talked about the role of the faith institution in sending home a message that is so much stronger than schools are sending home. Oh, here is one more flyer, today we have a new discipline code. I think faith-based groups and faith leaders could really animate and give life to a new resurgence of standards of conduct, which, again, I say are primarily standards of how we are going to behave, moral behavior. And I also think in bringing people together, and this is one example, I think a very important example, I think you would open up lines of communication between these institutions that have simply been closed down and everybody has talked about that, and you would find dozens of other ways in which there could be the kind of collaboration that would allow these two very important institutions in kids' lives to present consistent messages about what is appropriate.

One last thing I want to say. If you open up these lines of communication, you will create avenues for cooperation. Somebody has said, I guess it was in Dr. Sanders' paper, that some faith leaders asked the school, "How could we help?" And no one knew what the answer could be. And I would suggest that a huge barrier now is people in the public school community, they are very nervous and timid. They don't know what is allowed in terms of dealing with the faith community. And I think Charles is exactly right. I totally support the idea of having guidelines that helps people because now they don't know what to say when somebody asks. So, I will save other comments on that, but I wanted to put that out as one way to think about collaboration.

MR. DIONNE: Thank you. I think Ruth said something which actually united her comments to Bob Muccigrosso's and should be inscribed. It should be a journalism course, a politics course, or a book, she said, "It doesn't have to be controversial to be important." And I think we should all go away with that in our heads today because I think that is very important.

I would like to do a couple of things here. I would like to turn — I wanted to get Bill in before he left. Charles also wanted to come in. We will do a round of questions. We started a little late, the lunch will still be there. And, by the way, has Ernie gotten here yet? Welcome, Ernie Cortes. And so let's go to Bill and to Charles. And then I know this gentleman in the front of the room, if we could have mikes over here, will bring in some comments. And then we will have sort of concluding remarks, including with Dr. Sanders. Bill?

DR. GALSTON: Well, I want to be very brief. First of all, to remind everybody of two very interesting examples that Superintendent Hornbeck put on the table: the service learning example and the prayer obligation example. Just to say that from my standpoint, he resolved both of those issues appropriately. But I think it is important in organizing our thoughts for each one of us to think through his or her stance on issues of that sort and the reasons why. I happen to think that with regard to prayer obligations, that issues of free exercise, which are connected to questions of conscience because they have to do with conscientious behavior, are enormously important and to be given enormous deference in all aspects of our lives, including educational institutions. And with regard to the service learning issue, I think that was appropriately resolved for at least two reasons. One of which has to do with the voluntariness of the activity and the other having to do with the fact that in the United States anyway questions of citizenship and questions of religious belief are not easily disentangled. And a pedagogical practice that not only bows to but respects that sociological fact is very much in order.

Here is my final comment. I have learned a lot but now I must go teach. My final comment, which is a commentary on both Ruth's comment and E.J.'s commentary on her comment, is that my usual stance in meetings of this sort is to pour oil on troubled waters rather than to pour it on burning gasoline. But I have departed from that because although it is perfectly true that things don't have to be controversial to be important, (A), and, (B), that there are a lot of important non-controversial things going on in this area, it is also true, (C), that the question of dollars and the programmatic, public, political, as opposed to civil nexus between educational institutions and religion is being thrust on the table of discussion whether we like it or not. And I confidently, and I hope very much that this public policy discussion does not, as you put it, Ruth, blow up a possible emerging consensus in the less controversial areas. But the idea that we can avoid this debate when a billion dollars of Department of Education money alone is now being put on the table strikes me as utterly fanciful. So, we must engage the political as well as civil debate, and I hope we can engage both problems with that civilly.

Thank you very much.

MR. DIONNE: Thank you very much, Bill. Bill's comment reminds me of John DiIulio's comment a couple of weeks ago at our sister organization, the Pew Forum on Religion in Public Life, John is the only public official I ever heard look at an audience and say, "Sue me," because he argues that an issue is not taken seriously in American public life unless it produces a lot of litigation. But thank you very, very much, Bill. Charles Haynes?

DR. HAYNES: I think this afternoon we should focus on what Bill just said. I think that the fact that this question of funding and how we are going to deal with the religious character and its unique contribution of programs that churches and synagogues offer for kids are very deeply important issues. And I hope we will keep looking at that because I share Ruth's concern and Bill's that the common ground. I mean I have been working for common ground on these issues for the last 15 years, and I have a lot at stake in continuing that work and the great progress we have made over the last decade particularly on the issues. So I think we need to address that because it could blow up. It could distract us from these achievements and these possibilities.

But I did want to make maybe a footnote or an addendum, I am not sure which, to Ruth's comments that I think will help pull us back together in this conversation this morning about what is possible now and what is important to do now under the First Amendment under current law. The word "partnership" can mean many things. And I think Ruth has helped us to see that it can mean more than simply focusing on these after-school programs. It means working together in a community across our differences. It means all of the stakeholders being at the table and being involved in our schools. Most communities I work in don't think of these public schools as government schools. They think of them as our schools, community schools. So, working together.

About partnership, though, 90 percent or so of the differences we have had historically on the role of religion and values in public schools have been resolved. We have agreement on most of the issues. We are arguing around the edges on things like prayer in schools. The Supreme Court never outlawed prayer in schools, of course, but we are talking about state-sponsored religious activity. Kids can pray in school. The point I am trying to make here is that if we don't change the school culture, including the relationship to the community and parents on lots of these issues involving religion and values, we will never really fully realize our mission in public schools. All school districts aren't fortunate enough to have great superintendents like Dave Hornbeck. We will have to rethink the school culture on these issues. So, in addition to these partnerships with religious communities and so forth, we have to think about how we are going to make the schools welcoming places for people of all faiths and none. On the issue of religion and values in schools, we have agreement. Unfortunately, many districts aren't taking them seriously, aren't implementing them, aren't developing policies and practices, religious liberty rights of students, the right to distribute religious literature, the right to speak religiously, and so forth and what does that look like in a school. Most districts are still not addressing those issues even though we have national agreements now on how that should look.

Teaching about religion in the curriculum. I know this is a favorite hobby horse of mine, and I won't get off on it, but I will say this: if we don't become more fair in our curriculum to various world-views, then how do we really think we are going to develop partnerships with people for whom these world-views are deeply and ultimately important. And we are still not doing that in spite of the fact that we have strong agreement across our differences that we should do it, we can do it, we just don't do it, still. We can support various ways and models, release time was mentioned and others, but in the school culture, character education, something I am deeply involved in and think is very important, is a shared vision for public schools. And this echoes what Ruth was saying in her comments, we can bring all of the stakeholders together and say, "Look, across all of our differences, what are the core moral values and civic principles and virtues we want the school to model and teach?" In other words, changing our understanding of the mission of public education to really address what is most important to millions of parents out there in terms of their faith commitments, in terms of their moral commitments, will I think give us a better foundation for developing appropriate partnerships and relationships. It shouldn't be partnership between a secular naked public school that ignores religion and faith communities that take religion seriously. Public schools need to take religion seriously in the ways that are appropriate under the First Amendment in my view. If they do that, if they take religion deeply and religious liberty seriously, then I think the conversation is richer and gives us more opportunity to create a shared vision for what education should be like.

Thank you.

MR. DIONNE: Thank you, Charles. A couple of closing questions for this part of the session and then Dr. Sanders will send us to lunch.

Q: Thank you, E.J. My name is Abdulwahab Alkebsi with the American Muslim Council. And, first of all, I want to applaud Superintendent Hornbeck. We have been following the issue in Philadelphia and you have done a marvelous job, given the First Amendment constraints, giving the Muslim students the ability to perform their prayers and the fasting, giving them special rooms to stay out during lunch hour, we really applaud you. Because we have to understand that although every Christian gets his Sunday off, every Jewish American gets his Saturday off, no Muslim, ironically at even Muslim schools, get their Fridays off, and they don't get their religious holidays. So, we really applaud you.

But my question here is, actually, my worry about the stampede, the bull run of our community to support faith-based initiatives without knowing the details. Let's assume for the time being that what Professor Sanders talked about, the school-community relationship, will not be a seamless one. The lines between spiritual and religious programs vis-a-vis the secular programs will be clear. It is still a two-way First Amendment street. What happens vis-a-vis the influence of the government on the faith-based organizations? It is a problem of implementation, it is a problem of specifics, of details. For example, the faith-based organizations that get government funds, will they be bound by the federal labor laws, especially for employment? Are they going to be able to discriminate for employment based on religious reasons? Are they going to say, "I can't hire you because you are not from my religion?" Would a Muslim mosque have to hire a non-Muslim for their federally-funded programs? And, for that matter, let's assume they don't have to, let's assume they get the privilege of not having to hire somebody from the same denomination, will they be allowed to use this same criteria to discriminate for race, ethnic background? I don't like you, I can assume you are African-American, you are not from the right church so I am not going to hire you. Are we worried about this? Can somebody answer these questions? Thank you.

MR. DIONNE: Thank you. Could I just say as a factual matter, there is a very interesting piece in the New Republic in this current issue on this discrimination question. Also, at the Pew Forum site there was a long discussion of this with John DiIulio and Bobby Scott, a Congressman from Virginia who is very worried about the discrimination question. It is my understanding that there is a whole spattering of basic civil rights laws that faith-based organizations have to live by, but that still leaves the question of religious discrimination. DiIulio has a long answer to part of that question on there, but it still leaves open some of the issues you raise.

Ma'am, if you could just wait for the mike and then I will get one more voice in. We are going to have much of the panel back and so I will let Dr. Sanders close. Ma'am?

Q: My name is Jan Resseger. I work for the national setting of the United Church of Christ. As we speak of the role of faith communities and their connection to public schools, I just wanted to point out another role that I don't think has been raised here particularly of partnerships. In the United Church of Christ, I work on public education as lodged in the justice ministries. And a big part of my job is to help our members understand how their faith informs the issues in the civic debate around public education. They are not going into schools to preach, but our with them is to try to help them understand how their religion affects their values. And we are always hoping that our volunteers begin to understand the major civic issues, not just that they are there for service and charity.

I also chair the National Council of Churches Committee for Public Education and Literacy and our little brochure out there talks about several roles for faith communities in public schools, celebration, collaboration, these are partnership roles, consultation but also a concern for equity. So, I guess I think there is a real role for people who are volunteering through partnerships to be learning about the civic world. And that is one of the things that we consider absolutely to be the most important. I guess I share Dr. Hornbeck's concern then about the dulling of the prophetic voice because that is our key interest in partnerships, frankly, as much as we believe in service. We are hoping that our people go in and learn to understand school finance equity and adequacy because they see that things are inequitable and inadequate. Thank you.

MR. DIONNE: Thank you very much. One last comment over here, and I am sorry if I have left somebody out. I hope you will be back this afternoon. I just want to eventually get us over to lunch.

Q: My name is Dale McDonald. I am with the National Catholic Educational Association. And I have I guess it is more a concern, somewhat related to what I call truth in advertising. The expectation and the emphasis on faith-based as the modifier in all of this with a government program certainly gives people reasonable expectations that the religious dimension of the organization - that the organization as a religious organization and acting in that capacity - would be part of that partnership. And what I am hearing really is that faith-based religious organizations are really institutions with personnel, resources, institutions, facilities, expertise that could be put to public service. They might just be another community organization and not there because of their religious dimension but because of what they have. And, personally, I find that compromising to the religious organization itself. But I also think that is not what is all of the hoopla seems to be about in terms of this initiative and the federal role in promoting it. If someone wants to respond to my naivete on this.

MR. DIONNE: No, I think when Bob Muccigrosso or you say, "I am naive," it is like Sam Irwin saying, "I am a dumb country lawyer," and then chasing Richard Nixon out of the White House. So, I don't think that is a naive question. Why don't we go to Dr. Sanders for a conclusion. We can get back to some of these other issues [after lunch].

Dr. Sanders?

DR. SANDERS: I appreciate it. I think that this has been very instructive and a very important conversation, but it also shows the limitations of trying to deal with a very broad topic in two hours. But I think there are several points that were raised that I do want to address. There were three and hopefully in the next five minutes, because I know many of you are hungry, I can address three of those questions.

The first is the notion of how beneficial are partnerships between public schools and community-based organizations, and in this particular context, faith-based organizations. I would be the last to say that partnerships are the panacea for what ails our public schools. I think any of us who are involved in public education know that there are many issues that public schools are dealing with and that the way to address those issues include, but are not limited to, appropriate funding for our public schools, committed over an extended period of time because we know that there is a generational effect to achievement. And many of our students are currently marginalized, have not had the opportunities, nor have their parents or their grandparents. So we know that funding is an issue.

We know that the appropriate professional development of our teachers is an issue. We know that we need to improve both pre-service and in-service education. We also know that we need educational policies that are visionary and appropriate for our schools at both the federal and the local level and that we need support for schools so that they can implement those policies effectively. But, lastly, we also know that family, and I see as an extension of that, community involvement has a role to play. The research shows that it is that little something that can make a big difference, especially for resource-strapped schools. So, in this conversation, let us be clear that it is not a panacea, it is not the answer to revolutionizing and transforming public schools but it does have a documented role to play.

The second is this whole notion of federal monies, public monies, going to faith-based institutions. I see faith-based institutions as not only religious institutions, and I think this is something that is coming up over and over again, but also institutions that house resources for youth, for families, for communities. Many faith-based organizations have this service mission. That has always been a part of their identity. It does not mean that the religious nature of faith-based organizations has to be ignored. It just simply means that in this world in which we all have — which many institutions have many different missions, those missions can be carried out in many different ways. And those multiple missions have to be explored fully. And one way to think about the service mission of faith-based organizations is to think about how they can partner with public institutions, like public schools, to improve the quality and the educational experience and opportunities of children and youth.

And in that vein, a number of partnerships have flourished. I have only been able to mention a few. The paper mentions others. Other individuals in the audience could probably give you examples of others. Because it was only an hour and a half, we couldn't talk about all the many ways that these partnerships are developing but information, giving people information to be more activist in the public educational realm is one of those. These partnerships have flourished thus far without the transfer of public money or government to faith-based organizations. And although I share the same concerns as many of the respondents, and I think the respondents have been excellent and I value their comments and will incorporate them in the final version of the paper, as I understand it, many of these faith-based organizations may also have the same concerns that you have, Dr. Hornbeck, especially in term of, well, how will accepting public funds constrain us in what we want to do for children, for youth. And although the concerns are very valid and must be grappled with, from my interaction with many schools, not only in Baltimore but throughout the country, who are focused on school, family, and community partnerships, most of the faith-based organizations that are currently in partnership with schools will not apply for a lot of the federal money that is out there because of all their restrictions, the red tape, and so forth. A lot of these are smaller faith-based organizations that will continue to carry out their service mission without those public funds. And for those, we need to have guidelines. We need to have supports available.

I applaud the document that was produced and I actually quote extensively from this document in the paper. This goes to my third point about how we give guidelines for the many faith-based organizations that are ready to partner with public schools to carry out their service mission for young people. How do we give them guidelines to do that effectively and successfully. And we need to give them more information about how to. The information is out there, whether or not people have been given the opportunity to digest that information and act on it accordingly is the issue at hand.

And it is not just in partnerships, but in many of the activities that I have been involved with. In Baltimore City, for example, you have individuals who are teachers, and who may also be ministers or religious leaders. And I have been to many activities where a prayer is given and ended with a statement like, "In Christ's name we pray." And I think that it is a lack of awareness on many people's part about separation issues. So we need to think about the professional development of our educators. They need to be educated on how to collaborate, and they need to be given information such as this in how to collaborate effectively and appropriately with not just faith-based institutions but other institutions as well.

Our teacher unions also have a role to play in making sure that all of our educators are prepared to seize the opportunity that is before us, to use the wealth of experience and knowledge, and commitment that is housed in our faith-based organizations to forward the educational cause for our students.

MR. DIONNE: I want to thank Dr. Sanders for getting us off to such a great start. We are very grateful that you are here.

[END OF PANEL.]