Transcript
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Morning Discussion
Lunch Keynote
Afternoon Session
MR. DIONNE: I am sorry to interrupt a bunch of delightful conversations here. I would like to introduce our friend, Ernie Cortes. Thank you so much. First of all, thanks to everyone in this room for a fantastic discussion this morning. This was a great morning, not just because of the people on the panel but also because of an extraordinary audience. And, again, I want to thank Ming for putting this all together.
It is such a joy to have Ernie Cortes at an event. It was said once upon a time that "When this man speaks, you say, 'How interesting.' And when that man speaks, you say, 'Let's organize.'" And Ernie is in the latter category. And if you have never heard Ernie give a talk, you are in for a real treat. Ernie is the southwest regional director for the Industrial Areas Foundation, which provides leadership training and civic education to poor and moderate income people in more than 40 grassroots organizations. In 1974, Ernie organized Communities Organized for Public Service, otherwise known as "COPS," which is a nationally-recognized, church-based grassroots organization of San Antonio's west and south side communities. He later founded a network of 11 other organizations in Texas, which work together on a state level to help poor people gain a voice on a variety of issues, including education reform.
One of the reasons I so much wanted Ernie to join us today is because what Ernie and the IAF have done in Texas with the Alliance schools is a fascinating example of how religiously-based, congregation-based institutions can organize to improve public institutions. I think one of the troublesome things about this debate about faith-based organizations is that these entities, the government and the churches, the synagogues, the mosques, are cast as enemies or competitors when in fact in many cases the successful working of public institutions depends on the successful workings of our civil society institutions, including perhaps especially our religious institutions.
So that he can send us out of the building organizing, I am very proud to introduce Ernie Cortes and thanks for coming, Ernie.
MR. ERNIE CORTES: Well, as usual, E.J. is way too kind and obviously his flattering remarks either intimidate the hell out of me or challenge me, so hopefully a little bit of both. I want to thank all of you for allowing me to be here with you and to speak to you. I'm trying to figure out where to begin. E.J. told me he didn't want me to talk about organizing.
MR. DIONNE: I never said that.
MR. CORTES: He didn't want to "rap" on organizing. Let me finish my deal, don't interrupt me because you are going to take the wind out of my sails. Later, later, okay. Anyway, he said I shouldn't talk about organizing. I don't want to talk about religion, okay, because I am not competent to do so. And I am not a professional educator, so I don't know what the hell I am going to talk about. So I thought I would talk about what I do, and probably in an inadequate way. What we are doing in the IAF is trying to build a network of broad-based organizations which really are about the creation, if you will, of the political capacity to engage effectively in a school reform agenda.
Now, we got into this business because we were concerned back in the late 70's, early 80's with the whole question of the adequacy and the equity of school funding, in fact, the unconstitutionality, if you will, of the Texas school system. So organizing in San Antonio, organizing in Edgewood, of course, forced us to deal with issues of how do we get the money for books, how do we get the money for bathrooms, how do we get the money for teachers, how do we get the money for anything. And so it took us to Austin a number of times and finally as we began to develop the critical mass in the Rio Grande Valley, in El Paso, and other places, as we began to develop this network of IAF organizations, we began to bring some pressure, effective pressure to bear on public officials. And at the 10th anniversary COPS convention in San Antonio, we were able to get then-governor of the state of Texas, Mark White, to publicly commit himself in front of 15,000 of our leaders to call a special session which would be focused totally on equalizing public education.
Now, in order to do that, of course, we had to have an alliance with the corporate community. And Mark White, ironically, at that time appointed an interesting and somewhat, I thought then, dubious fellow by the name of H. Ross Perot. And so we entered into a rather interesting and somewhat strange alliance with Mr. Perot to try to reform public education and finance in Texas. And we tried to figure out why was he doing this, and he used to argue, I don't know if it was truthful or not, but Nietzsche used to tell us that people do the right thing for the wrong reason. But he used to argue with his fellow associates that the reason he got involved in this was because he would tell them, "I know you don't like the color black because you don't like black people. I know you don't like the color brown because you don't like brown people. But I know you like this color, you like green, okay. And if you are going to get involved, if you want to make money in Texas, you better get involved in public education." So that was his supposed rationale for why he and the corporate community got involved in this whole issue of public school finance.
Be that as it may or whether that is true or not true, it is irrelevant. One of my favorite theologians is a fellow by the name of Mario Moreno, Continflas to most of you, because he did a movie called El Portero. And in the movie he says, "And Jesus said, and if He didn't, He should have." Or as my friend, Bill Greider used to say, there was a saying in The Washington Post news room that some stories are too good to check out. So take that one in that same vein.
All right. Anyhow, for all these reasons, we got involved in public school finance and were successful. And we initiated a bill called House Bill 72, which didn't equalize public education in Texas, but did generate a billion new dollars in tax dollars for property poor school districts. And as a result of that, there was the ability of many property poor school districts to do things that they could not do before. Now, I want to be clear that money matters. Money matters. Money matters. But money is not the only thing that matters, and we found that out, unfortunately, particularly in Austin where, because even though there was a lot more money for poor school districts, it didn't make much impact on the performance of those particular schools. And part of the reason was that we found out that it doesn't do a whole lot of good to reduce the classroom sizes, for example, for schools from 22 to 1 or 25 to 1, or even 30 to 1, to 12 to 1 if the teacher still teaches 12 kids the same way she taught 30 kids. And so, unfortunately, you can have 12 kids in a class or, as my son told me at Swarthmore where there were eight kids in each one of his classes, "Dad, it doesn't make a whole lot of difference if there are eight kids in the class if the professor stands up there and lectures the whole time and there is no engagement." What good does it matter to have eight kids if all he does is lecture as if there were 500 kids in the class. Well, that same thing is true, unfortunately, what is true for Jacob also, unfortunately, was true for kids in Austin. And as a result, we saw very, very little change in a lot of property poor school districts in the east side of Austin and in Fort Worth.
And I am going to let one of my colleagues later talk about what went on in Fort Worth, and I am going to let Dennis Shirley talk about what went on in Fort Worth at Morningside Middle School. But I want to talk to you a little bit about how we got into the Alliance School Initiative in Austin after having successfully turned around the worst performing middle school in Fort Worth, Texas through the involvement of a school principal, Odessa Raven, and through the involvement of the organization that my colleague, Mr. Willie Bennett, works for. After successfully getting that initiative going with that school district, we began to try the same kind of strategy in Austin. And we picked a school which was the worst performing elementary school in Austin, Texas, a school by the name of Zavala, who had a brand new teacher named Al Melton, who unfortunately had the temerity to tell his parents the truth because even though the kids were making A's and B's in their grades, when the tests came out, the kids unfortunately were often two and three grade levels behind. So what was happening essentially is that the teachers had figured out a kind of innovative strategy for grading kids. If a kid was in the fifth grade but was performing at a second grade level but was doing well at the second grade level, they would get an A, even though they were really doing second grade or third grade work because they felt like that they were doing the best they could and that they were improving. And, consequently, even though the work was second grade or third grade, they were getting A's. So what was happening was that then the parents didn't find this out, unfortunately, until they tried to get their schools admitted to magnet schools, science academies, which are often within eight and 10 blocks, and were finding out that their kids kept getting turned down. And they didn't understand why that was happening because their kids were doing so well at the elementary school level. And so they began to raise questions and then Al, who was the new principal and he didn't know any better, he showed them the results of their test scores. And, of course, the parents when they found that out hit the ceiling and screamed. And then there was a meeting of the parents and the teachers.
And to make a long story short, there was what our British friends would call a slaying match, which pretty well polarized the school.
Now, about this time we began to get involved with Zavala and began to work with Al Melton. And, frankly, he turned to us because he just didn't know what else to do. He had turned off his teaching staff; they were demoralized because he had not defended them because he felt that what they were doing was not defendable. And he had turned off the parents because they felt like the school that they thought was a good school was really not. So some of the parents left and some of the teachers left.
So, we began to put together the remnants of that particular faculty and the community. And to make a long story short, we began to organize the parents and the teachers of Zavala. We began to do all kinds of things, get the parents and teachers to organize, first of all, to get a clinic inside the school, get the parents and teachers organized to get an after school program, to get the parents and teachers organized to get rid of some dangerous impediments. To make a long story short, as a result of this collaborative relationship that began to develop between the parents and the teachers, Zavala, after doing some other innovative things like getting an additional grade, a science grade, a sixth grade science academy to prepare kids to go to the magnet schools, Zavala went from being dead last, to being a blue ribbon school. Zavala went from a school which had a teaching staff which was demoralized. Zavala went from a school where teachers were dumped into the school or only had brand new teachers in the school and, because of that, had incredibly high turnover. Zavala became a school where there was a waiting list of teachers wanting to get into the school.
I guess for me the most important thing that happened were two things. Two things happened at Zavala which I thought were indicators of success. Number one was that four of the teachers of Zavala Elementary School became principals of other (what became known as) Alliance schools. And, secondly, in addition to the fact that attendance went up and parental involvement went up significantly, Al Melton got a call from his boss, the superintendent. And he said, "Mr. Melton, your parents and your teachers have been down at the school board demanding after-school programs, demanding health clinics. Now, they just came back here and demanded this science academy. They are out of control. You've got to rein them in." And Al said, "You know, you are right, they are out of control, but there's nothing you or I can do about it, and I am not sure I would want to do anything about it if I could because I think that is their rights as citizens."
Well, the Zavala model became an interesting one for us because now there are 18 what we call Alliance schools in Austin, 18 schools which come together on a regular basis and collaborate and try to figure out what they can do for public school reform. And that model has spread to El Paso, the Rio Grande Valley, and so now in Texas there's about 120 Alliance schools. Not all of them have the great success that Zavala did, but, by and large, these schools are doing much better in terms of increases in achievement than most of the schools in the state of Texas.
More important for us, what they are beginning to do is to create what we think are a powerful constituency which is committed to school reform, a constituency not just of parents but of parents, teachers, and school principals, a constituency which also takes into account the role of congregations, churches, synagogues and other religious institutions, community-based organizations and teacher organizations, unions and other bodies which are committed to the general welfare of kids and community well-being. The evidence of that is that the Alliance schools state-wide have been able to create what we call an Investment Capital Fund, a fund of now $14 million a year. As we speak, they are now beginning to agitate and to advocate that that fund be increased to $20 million a year, a fund which makes it possible for grants to go to the particular school campuses of up to $100,000.
And those grants are for three purposes. One is to restructure the schools, to create a different model or a different culture of collaboration between parents and teachers and classified workers and congregations and other institutions to begin to restore somewhat the civic culture of that particular community. Two is to change the kind of instructional culture that goes on inside the school, moves from one which is top-down and bureaucratic and unilateral to one which is much more collaborative. And, three, is to hopefully reconnect the fabric, the social fabric of the school with that of the community.
Those capital grants go to schools which are willing to collaborate with 501(c)(3) or 501(c)(4) organizations, which have a track record, a history of organizing parents, have a history of holding schools accountable, and have a history of being able to effectively mentor and guide and develop leadership. If you read between the lines of the legislation, you will kind of gather that our model of the kind of organizations that we thought schools ought to be able to collaborate were an IAF type organization, one which would have this kind of capacity to create the kind of collaborative power between parents, teachers, and community institutions.
What our vision is that these Alliance schools are about, number one, increasing the capacity of kids to learn at high levels by developing rigorous standards of inquiry, rigorous standards of accountability in education. But also we think that public education has a larger role, and that is it has the responsibility to teach all of us what it means to be an American, what it is to be involved in this kind of civic culture. And I happen to believe that firmly, but then I read a book which says that actually there was a Supreme Court decision which said that that's the role of public schools. I can't remember the court case, but I'm sure David Hornbeck can tell me, but there is actually such a Supreme Court decision which says that public schools do have that responsibility and the rest of us have the right to hold public schools accountable to teaching our young people the attitudes, disposition, and culture necessary for them to be effective participants in a democratic society and hopefully aspire to republican virtues.
Now, I happen to believe that public schools are public institutions. And by "public," I don't necessarily mean governmental. What I mean, I happen to believe that public schools ought to be institutions which are the public expression of our commitment to development of our young people, of our commitment to the education of our children. Now, Hannah Arendt wrote an essay called, "The Importance of Education," where she talked about that there are three purposes to education. Number one is to open up the world to children. Number two is to protect children from the world. But number three is to protect the world from children. Now, I happen to believe that this would not be a great world if it was run by people like my son. Now, he is a great guy and I love him, but he's 18 right now. And I don't think that 18 years old ought to be running the world. So, I think there is a role for an institution which is going to protect us old folks from the likes of my children. And if we don't get together as adults, we are going to get run over. And so when I was a young person, I didn't believe in trusting anybody over 30 but today I don't believe in trusting anybody under 30.
Anyhow, the vision of Alliance schools comes out of my own experience, my own experience of growing up in San Antonio where, when I grew up, there were 250 adults who felt responsibility for me. There were 250 adults who thought they owned me, and so going to school in the morning was like going through Checkpoint Charlie because every street corner, I was going to be interrogated by any number of adults about what I was going to do and where I was going and what was I going to do when I grew up and what was I studying, and all kinds of questions. I would get on the school bus and the bus driver would remind me that he knew my parents. And so the explicit understanding was that these 250 adults felt that they had the right to intrude and to invade my life, to inquire about me. When I went to see my grandmother and my grandfather, I had aunts and uncles and all kinds of people so that my brother and I would have to rehearse our answers to them.
Now, this culture was so thick, and frankly somewhat depressive, so I got out of town as fast as I could and I went to, of all places, Texas A&M, but somehow managed to survive three bonfires. But, nonetheless, I compare this experience of growing up in San Antonio to the one I now see as I am organizing in east Los Angeles and south central Los Angeles and the San Fernando Valley in Los Angeles where instead of 250 adults organized against every kid, sometimes you have communities where 50 or 60 kids are organized against every adult and the adults are living under house arrest.
Now, that kind of situation where adults are disconnected from one another, isolated from one another, not connected to communal institutions does not augur well for public education, because I happen to believe that the only reason that we can even talk about a time when public schools were successful was because we had two things going for us then. One is we had lots of very bright, intelligent and educated women who couldn't do anything else because we weren't willing to let them do anything else and so, as a consequence, we were subsidized by their willingness to sacrifice themselves to public schools. Those women now are heads of universities, doctors, lawyers, heads of labor unions, professors. And so if we are going to attract and maintain that kind of talent, we are going to have to be willing to spend a lot more than we currently do on public schools. And the second thing we had going for us was we had the involvement of whole numbers of parents, particularly women, who were running schools and running unions and running other kinds of institutions who were willing and had the capacity then to put time and energy and money into collaboration with public education.
Well, the capacity of those kind of communal family, institutionally-based, faith-based institutional involvement in public schools is unfortunately not present today and, of course, we're not willing to pay the kind of salaries that we are going to have to pay in order to maintain the quality of public schools.
So for all those reasons, we think we have got to begin seriously organizing to make public schools much more effective in Texas and in the Southwest. For all those reasons, we think we are going to have to, again, do those three things that we think are real important. Number one is create this powerful political constituency for school reform. And that means teaching parents, teachers, community leaders how to think about power, how to understand power, and how to get power, not unilateral power, not the command and control model of power, but one which is much more collaborative. Two, again, we are going to have to change the culture of education, the culture of schools. We can no longer rely on a factory model of education. We can no longer rely on a bureaucratic model of education. We can no longer rely on an educational system which is basically about teaching basic skills in literacy and numeracy, which are appropriate to a factory system. We now have to recognize, that as Frank Levy and Dick Murnane talk about in their book, Teaching the New Basic Skills, that if young people are going to do well, they're going to have to master algebra, they're going to have to be able to collaborate, they're going to have to create new knowledge, they're going to have to be able to make public presentations. In other words, they're going to have a whole range of other skills. And, unfortunately, the difficulty, at least in Texas, maybe other places are different, but in Texas we don't have institutions which teach our teachers those soft skills, those critical skills that Murnane and Levy talk about. We don't have schools of education which teach collaboration. We don't have schools of education which teach making public presentations. We don't have schools of education which teach how do you create new knowledge.
And I ask the question, if the teachers don't know how to teach these skills, if they don't understand them, then how in God's name can we expect the kids to know these skills. And how can we hold the teachers accountable, if we haven't created models or institutions which are about the business of teaching those kinds of skills? And so part and parcel of our strategy is how do we begin to develop an institutional model that enables teachers and principals and parents and other institutional leaders to learn these critical skills that Levy and Murnane talk about in their book.
I want to say a couple of other things and then I want to open it up for questions or comments. One is that I happen to believe that all the reform efforts that all of us are involved in are not going to make much difference unless we can figure out how do we develop the capacity of our principals of the schools, particularly elementary and middle and high school, to become educational leaders. Unfortunately, in Texas, most of our school principals are compliance officers rather than educational leaders. Their job is to comply, to dot i's, to cross t's. Their job is to comply with all the rules and regulations which come down from the federal government, from the state of Texas, and also from the local school districts and whatever the expectations they have inside their profession. Very few of our principals feel that they have the space not to be in compliance, but to be educational leaders.
Number two is most of our principals, in Texas at least, don't go to school everyday to learn about learning. I asked our school principals the question: What are you learning about learning? Because if you're not thinking about how you are learning, then how is it possible for teachers to think about what they're learning and how they are learning. And if teachers don't have that attitude of the joy of learning, than I am not sure how we inculcate that in kids. How do we inculcate in kids the notion that learning can be creative, can be enjoyable, that learning can be something which gives them energy and hope and imagination unless that attitude, that perspective is inculcated by teachers and principals.
Final point. What does all this have to do with President Bush's faith-based initiatives because I know that is the topic of this meeting. Nothing, but maybe everything. I don't know. I have no idea. I don't even understand it, to be quite honest with you. Number one is what the Alliance schools are an example of is how people of faith, people who are in churches, congregations, synagogues, Muslim societies, can begin to draw from the deep reservoir of inspiration and understanding and meaning that their faith tradition gives them, whether they be Jews or Christians or Muslims or Buddhists, but they then therefore have the responsibility to translate their traditions into meaningful and understandable public policy. And they have to be responsible therefore to be evaluated appropriately — their actions have to be evaluated not on the basis of their faith traditions but on the basis of the common faith that we all share, which is our civic culture. I think that John Courtney Murray said this best, that we can operate out of the traditions of the Gospel, but we have the responsibility to translate those traditions and those ideas into understandable public conversations and dialogue and actions.
And so, therefore, in the IAF language, the Alliance schools are not faith-based institutions. The IAF organizations are not faith-based institutions. They are political organizations. They are political organizations which are involved in public policy, political in the sense of engaged in debate and dialogue about issues of education, and they draw deep inspiration and meaning from their faith traditions. But we don't want to be held accountable as faith-based organizations. We want to be held accountable as organizations which are involved in public policy and in public dialogue and public debate. Now, I don't know whether or not that's anything interesting or new, but I just want to make that statement because we don't want to be put in the position of providing services. We don't want to be put into positions of doing that which the federal government doesn't want to do or the state governments don't want to do. We see our position as one of beginning of hopefully playing a somewhat engaging and hopefully prophetic role in a sense of comforting the afflicted and afflicting the comfortable in this whole business of public education.
Okay, I am going to stop here and see if anybody has got anything at all to say and if not, I am going to let my colleague, Mr. Bennett, give some examples of what we're doing.
Yes, sir?
Q: I am curious, what is your experience generally with students that have drug problems? And do you have any direct involvement or observation of Teen Challenge in Texas specifically, because I have been personall