Transcript
MR. BERUBE: Thanks for being here. My name is Alan Berube. I'm the Research Director for the Metropolitan Policy Program here at Brookings.
So, on behalf of our program, the Brown Center on Education Policy, and everybody at Brookings, I want to welcome you to this briefing and discussion on a new report published by the Center for Reinventing Public Education at the University of Washington, entitled “Facing the Future: Financing Productive Schools.”
And there are copies of the report on the front table, if you didn't receive one.
So, a little context: a few months ago, Paul Hill reached out to us at the Metro Program, and he said, “I got this interesting little report. It’s based on a six-year, $6 million research effort; and it's got a few things to say about the way we pay for public schools in America, so what do you think about that?” And admittedly, we're not experts in public school finance at the Metro Program, but we do spend a good bit of our time talking with city, county, metro leaders across the country about how to build healthy cities and healthy regions.
And time after time, as we do that, school quality surfaces as a key issue, if not the key issue, from their perspective for how to grow a stronger economy, for attracting and retaining workers and firms, for reducing inequality and building the middle-class, and for creating more vital places that limit sprawl and segregation.
So we tend to follow what the innovative cities in particular are doing to improve public school quality, experimenting with new models of schools and ways of managing them, opening up their systems to high-performance charter management organizations, offering new teacher pay incentives tied to student performance, and using data and metrics to improve decision-making by parents and administrators.
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