[Senate Hearing 110-702]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office]
S. Hrg. 110-702
NCLB REAUTHORIZATION: MODERNIZING MIDDLE AND HIGH SCHOOLS FOR THE 21ST
CENTURY
=======================================================================
HEARING
OF THE
COMMITTEE ON HEALTH, EDUCATION,
LABOR, AND PENSIONS
UNITED STATES SENATE
ONE HUNDRED TENTH CONGRESS
FIRST SESSION
ON
EXAMINING NO CHILD LEFT BEHIND REAUTHORIZATION, FOCUSING ON MODERNIZING
MIDDLE AND HIGH SCHOOLS FOR THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY
__________
APRIL 24, 2007
__________
Printed for the use of the Committee on Health, Education, Labor, and
Pensions
Available via the World Wide Web: http://www.gpoaccess.gov/congress/
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COMMITTEE ON HEALTH, EDUCATION, LABOR, AND PENSIONS
EDWARD M. KENNEDY, Massachusetts, Chairman
CHRISTOPHER J. DODD, Connecticut MICHAEL B. ENZI, Wyoming,
TOM HARKIN, Iowa JUDD GREGG, New Hampshire
BARBARA A. MIKULSKI, Maryland LAMAR ALEXANDER, Tennessee
JEFF BINGAMAN, New Mexico RICHARD BURR, North Carolina
PATTY MURRAY, Washington JOHNNY ISAKSON, Georgia
JACK REED, Rhode Island LISA MURKOWSKI, Alaska
HILLARY RODHAM CLINTON, New York ORRIN G. HATCH, Utah
BARACK OBAMA, Illinois PAT ROBERTS, Kansas
BERNARD SANDERS (I), Vermont WAYNE ALLARD, Colorado
SHERROD BROWN, Ohio TOM COBURN, M.D., Oklahoma
J. Michael Myers, Staff Director and Chief Counsel
Katherine Brunett McGuire, Minority Staff Director
(ii)
C O N T E N T S
__________
STATEMENTS
TUESDAY, APRIL 24, 2007
Page
Kennedy, Hon. Edward M., Chairman, Committee on Health,
Education, Labor, and Pensions, opening statement.............. 1
Prepared statement........................................... 2
Enzi, Hon. Michael B., a U.S. Senator from the State of Wyoming,
opening statement.............................................. 3
Prepared statement........................................... 5
Balfanz, Robert, Associate Director, Talent Development Middle
School Project, Baltimore, MD.................................. 6
Prepared statement........................................... 9
Wise, Bob, President, Alliance for Excellent Education,
Washington, DC................................................. 14
Prepared statement........................................... 16
Habit, Tony, President, New Schools Project, Raleigh, NC......... 22
Prepared statement........................................... 25
Varner, Edna, Senior Program Consultant, Hamilton County Public
Education Foundation and Public Schools, Chattanooga, TN....... 30
Prepared statement........................................... 33
Podesta, John, President and CEO, Center for American Progress,
Washington, DC................................................. 40
Prepared statement........................................... 42
ADDITIONAL MATERIAL
Statements, articles, publications, letters, etc.:
National Middle School Association........................... 60
(iii)
NCLB REAUTHORIZATION: MODERNIZING
MIDDLE AND HIGH SCHOOLS FOR THE
21ST CENTURY
----------
TUESDAY, APRIL 24, 2007
U.S. Senate,
Committee on Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions,
Washington, DC.
The committee met, pursuant to notice, at 10:00 a.m., in
Room SD-628, Dirksen Senate Office Building, Hon. Edward M.
Kennedy, chairman of the committee, presiding.
Present: Senators Kennedy, Bingaman, Murray, Brown, Enzi,
Burr, Isakson, and Murkowski.
Opening Statement of Senator Kennedy
The Chairman. Good morning. First of all I want to thank
all of our panelists for getting their testimony in. You know,
we have a rule around here, sort of like a school day, you
know, you have to get your homework in. All of you got them in
at the end of last week, and I had a chance over this weekend
to get through them all. They are just superb, just superb, all
of them. They really capture, I think, the challenge in
education with a lot of very good constructive and helpful
recommendations. I want to thank all of you. I'll come back to
particulars--and enormously informative. I find very, very
informative information and facts that were just incredibly
useful and helpful.
I'll just be very brief and put my statement in the record.
The challenge that we're facing in K through 12, is the obvious
focus that No Child Left Behind spent on the early years.
However, we don't get into the middle schools and what's
happening in the middle schools and the high schools. We spend
our life in the early years and miss what is the basic and
underlying, I think, goal that all of us are interested in.
That is having children that are taking advantage of
opportunities and developing skills and looking to a future
with greater hope. If we don't really work at it, in terms of
how they are getting into college, and how the colleges are
relating to the job market, in terms of the future and a fast-
growing world, then we're missing the continuum.
I thank so many of our members. When I talk about the
future, I'm very aware--Senator Bingaman, present here, and
working with Lamar Alexander and others on the Competitiveness
bill that's on the floor right now. I'm enormously grateful, as
well, to Senators Bingaman, Burr, and Murray for their
leadership in this area, and for their legislation in this
area. I thank--as always--my friend, Senator Enzi, who at each
and every step along the way, has been an invaluable partner as
we're trying to deal with these issues.
We have very good help and assistance from the Alliance for
Excellent Education Foundation, Jobs for the Future, and The
Center for American Progress. They've all been right on target
and incredibly useful and helpful.
I have a more extensive statement, which is enormously
eloquent.
[Laughter.]
I know all of you want to remain and have me read that, but
I think we know why we're here. We've got some very good people
that can help guide this committee on these issues and we're
looking forward to their testimony.
[The prepared statement of Senator Kennedy follows:]
Prepared Statement of Senator Kennedy
I welcome our witnesses to this hearing on modernizing
middle and high schools as we prepare to reauthorize the No
Child Left Behind Act. The act sets lofty goals for all schools
to meet, and requires States to establish strong standards, a
rigorous curriculum, and reliable assessments. It's helped
schools make significant progress in closing achievement gaps
and helping students learn.
One of our principal priorities in the reauthorization is
to ensure that the act is working for all students at every
grade level in elementary school, middle school, and high
school.
Recent surveys demonstrate that we still have much to do in
secondary schools. Only 30 percent of 8th grade students scored
proficient or better in 2005 on math assessment and reading
assessment. In 12th grade, less than a quarter of students
scored proficient or better on the math assessment, and only 35
percent were proficient or better on the reading assessment.
It's clear that secondary school students need as much
attention and help in these essential courses as students in
lower grades do.
We also need to do more to assist students in the
transition from middle school to high school and help them
graduate. About 1,000 high schools across the country only
graduate half their students. Among African-American and
Latinos, only 55 percent graduate on time. It's clear that high
schools need more assistance in supporting and retaining
students.
Federal investment at the middle and high school level is
not sufficient. The main source of Federal funds is through the
title I program. Yet, only 8 percent of students who benefit
from these funds are in high school. Ninety percent of high
schools with very low graduation rates have very low-income
students. But only a quarter of these schools receive title I
funds. We need to dedicate more resources and support for
secondary schools to improve academic achievement and ensure
that every student has a fair opportunity to graduate.
States and cities across the country are already taking
steps to address these challenges, such as offering extra help
during the school day and extending learning time and other
school-based interventions.
To improve Boston's high schools, the district worked with
private partners to create smaller learning communities,
improve instruction, and strengthen professional development.
Boston high school programs now focus on business, technology,
health professions, arts, public service, engineering,
sciences, international studies, and social justice. Through
many of these programs, students can enroll in courses for
college credit or get hands-on experience in a field that
interests them.
We know that proven strategies and interventions will help
students make progress, stay in school, and succeed. Research
conducted by one of our panelists, Dr. Robert Balfanz shows
that we can identify students who are at-risk for not
completing high school as early as 6th grade. Early
intervention, quality teachers, small classes, and data driven
instruction will strengthen schools and keep students engaged.
We also know that better alignment of standards and
curricula between middle school and high school can ease the
transition for many students. High school students also have to
be prepared to meet the expectations of college and the
workplace. We need to promote models that allow students to
pursue college level work as soon as possible, such as dual
enrollment, early college high schools, International
Baccalaureate, and Advanced Placement programs, each of which
can make a difference in students' skill level and future
opportunities.
To do all this, we can't remain bound to the schoolhouse
model of past decades. We need to bring our middle and high
schools into the 21st century.
I look forward to hearing from our witnesses today about
the successful programs they're implementing.
The Chairman. Senator Enzi.
Opening Statement of Senator Enzi
Senator Enzi. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I appreciate your
holding this hearing today on modernizing our high schools. I
would agree that your statements are eloquent.
[Laughter.]
We lose something, though, when we don't have the delivery.
[Laughter.]
You have a unique delivery that really gets the points
across.
I also want to thank you for the outstanding and very
cooperative way in which you've selected witnesses for all the
No Child Left Behind hearings that we've had. I too, have had a
chance to look through the testimony and appreciate it being
available already and know that this is another group of people
with ideas--ideas that I think can be transferred across the
Nation and make our high schools a better place, a more
educational place.
I'm sure Senator Alexander is sorry that he isn't here this
morning, but he is involved in the Competitiveness debate over
on the floor, which deals with a lot of the same topics that
we'll be covering today.
Because we do need to find ways to encourage high school
students to stay in school and prepare for and enter high-
skilled fields, such as math, science, engineering, technology,
health, and foreign languages. We also have to strengthen the
programs that encourage and enable citizens of all ages to
enroll in postsecondary education institutions and obtain or
improve knowledge and skills. The decisions we make about
education and workforce development will have a dramatic effect
on the economy and our society for a long time to come.
I do find the present situation to be rather discouraging.
Every day in the United States, 7,000 students drop out of
school. If the high school students who have dropped out of the
class of 2006 had graduated instead, the Nation's economy would
have benefited from an additional $309 billion in income they
would have earned over their lifetimes. That's an incredible
statistic. Because we couldn't reach those 7,000 students, it
will cost us, and them, more than $309 billion in income. We
both lose.
We simply can not afford to lose those resources. We have
to deal with the situation head-on. We can't allow students to
waste their senior year and graduate unprepared to enter
postsecondary education and the workforce without the necessary
skills and knowledge.
The future outlook is not good. Unless high schools are
able to graduate their students at higher rates than the 68 to
70 percent they currently do, more than 12 million students
will drop out during the course of the next decade. The result
long-term will be a loss to the Nation of $3 trillion. As you
can imagine, even more in terms of the quality of life for
those high school drop-outs.
In addition, it's important to remember the fact that a
high school diploma does not guarantee that a student has
learned the basics. Nearly half of all college students are
required to take remedial courses after graduating from high
school before they can take college-level coursework. Each year
more than one million first-time, full-time, degree-seeking
students begun their undergraduate careers at 4-year colleges
and universities with every hope and expectation of earning a
Bachelor's Degree. Of those students, fewer than 4 in 10 will
actually meet that goal within 4 years, barely 6 in 10 will
make it in 6 years. Among minority students, remediation rates
are even higher and completion rates are even lower.
To remain competitive in a global economy we can not afford
to lose people because they do not have the education and
training they need to be successful. We need a plan. We need to
ensure opportunities are available to all Americans, because
our future depends on widely available and extensive knowledge
and training and a commitment to excellence. Strong
partnerships and alignment among K-12 schools, institutions of
higher education, business, and government will help us meet
the needs.
In the HELP Committee we're using this opportunity to shape
policy and strengthen the education and training pipeline
through the reauthorization of Head Start, No Child Left
Behind, The Higher Education Act, and the Workforce Investment
Act. We can make sure that every individual has access to a
lifetime of education and training opportunities that provide
the knowledge and skills they need to be successful and that
our employers need to remain competitive.
I look forward to the chance to hear the testimony and ask
some questions.
[The prepared statement of Senator Enzi follows:]
Prepared Statement of Senator Enzi
Thank you, Senator Kennedy, for holding this hearing today
on modernizing our high schools. We need to make sure our high
schools are designed to prepare our students for the 21st
century.
We need to find ways to encourage high school students to
stay in school and prepare for and enter high-skill fields such
as math, science, engineering, health, technology and critical
foreign languages. We must also strengthen the programs that
encourage and enable citizens of all ages to enroll in
postsecondary education institutions and obtain or improve
knowledge and skills. The decisions we make about education and
workforce development will have a dramatic impact on the
economy and our society for a long time to come.
The present situation is discouraging. Every day in the
United States, 7,000 students drop out of school. If the high
school students who had dropped out of the class of 2006 had
graduated instead, the Nation's economy would have benefited
from an additional $309 billion in income they would have
earned over their lifetimes. It's an incredible statistic.
Because we couldn't reach those 7,000 students, it will cost us
and them $309 billion in income we will both lose. We simply
cannot afford to lose those resources. We must deal with the
situation head on--we cannot allow students to ``waste'' their
senior year, and graduate unprepared to enter postsecondary
education and a workforce focused on skills and knowledge.
The future outlook is not good. Unless high schools are
able to graduate their students at higher rates than the 68 to
70 percent they currently do, more than 12 million students
will drop out during the course of the next decade. The result
long term will be a loss to the Nation of $3 trillion, and as
you can imagine, even more in terms of the quality of life for
those dropouts.
In addition, it's important to remember the fact that a
high school diploma does not guarantee that a student has
learned the basics. Nearly half of all college students are
required to take remedial courses, after graduating from high
school, before they can take college level coursework.
Each year, more than one million first-time, full-time,
degree-seeking students begin their undergraduate careers at 4-
year colleges and universities with every hope and expectation
of earning a bachelor's degree. Of those students, fewer than 4
in 10 will actually meet that goal within 4 years; barely 6 in
10 will make it out in 6 years. Among minority students,
remediation rates are even higher and completion rates are even
lower.
To remain competitive in a global economy, we cannot afford
to lose people because they do not have the education and
training they need to be successful. We need a plan. We need to
ensure opportunities are available to all Americans, because
our future depends on widely available and extensive knowledge
and training and a commitment to excellence. Strong
partnerships and alignment among K-12 schools, institutions of
higher education, business and government will help us meet the
needs.
In the HELP Committee, we are using this opportunity to
shape policy and strengthen the education and training
pipeline. Through the reauthorization of Head Start, No Child
Left Behind, the Higher Education Act and the Workforce
Investment Act we can make sure that every individual has
access to a lifetime of education and training opportunities
that provide the knowledge and skills they need to be
successful and that our employers need to remain competitive.
I look forward to hearing the testimony of our witnesses
and to working with members of the HELP Committee in developing
a sound policy to address these critical issues.
The Chairman. Thank you.
We are joined by Senator Murkowski, and we're delighted to
see you. Senator Bingaman has been a particular leader on the
issue of dropouts. I was interested in those statistics that
show that 15 percent of the schools have 50 percent of the
dropouts. It suggests to me that this is, possibly, a
manageable problem. When I look at a number of the urban areas,
I see the enhanced poverty and enhanced dropout. It's a big
challenge, but there's some very encouraging signs.
We'll start with introducing the individuals just as they
speak, rather than everyone. Welcome Dr. Balfanz, who's the
Associate Director, Talent Development Middle School Project.
Dr. Balfanz is a research scientist at the Center for Social
Organization Schools at Johns Hopkins, and Co-Director of the
Talent Development Middle and High School Project. Talent
Development works with 100 high-poverty secondary schools to
strengthen curriculum, improve professional development, and
provide extra help to students in developing strategies for
success.
He'll discuss some of the findings from the research, as
well as his work at Talent Development and talk to us about
identifying students at risk of dropping out and how strong
schoolwide programs, high-quality teachers, and early
intervention strategies can help keep the middle school and
high school students on track to complete their work.
Please.
STATEMENT OF ROBERT BALFANZ, ASSOCIATE DIRECTOR, TALENT
DEVELOPMENT MIDDLE SCHOOL PROJECT, BALTIMORE, MD
Mr. Balfanz. Thank you, Mr. Chairman, members of the
committee. Thank you for inviting me here today to speak about
the Nation's graduation rate crisis and to talk about what we
can do about it.
We are at a moment of time when a well conceived action at
the Federal level can have a catalytic affect in ending the
Nation's dropout crisis and, in so doing, fundamentally change
the Nation for better. Pick any issue that's important besides,
in addition to high-quality public schooling, economic
competitiveness, reducing crime, reducing social welfare costs,
improving urban and rural development, and I would even gamble
to say, deficit reduction, and I can make the case that
creating a system of secondary schools where everyone graduates
prepared for career, college, and civic life is your issue.
More importantly, I'm here to say today that we can really
do something about it. The time is now. We know the high
schools kids dropout from, we know why they dropout, and we
know what will make it fundamentally better, so we can really
do something about this here and now. Central to this will be
creating a Federal, State, and local partnership that provides
these schools with the accountability frameworks, resources,
technical assistance, and capacity building so we can do this
soon.
Let me explain. I come at this issue from three angles.
First as a researcher, who has looked at the causes of
dropouts, its location, and its cures. Second, as a developer
of a comprehensive whole school reform model, the Talent
Development Program, which over the past decade, has allowed me
to work with 30 districts--urban and rural--and over 100 high-
poverty middle and high schools. And finally, as an operator of
a innovation high school in Baltimore City that's a partnership
between Johns Hopkins and the Baltimore City Public School
System. It's a public school, it's in one of the highest
poverty neighborhoods in America and West Baltimore. It takes
all comers and it gives you really--nothing shows you how to do
it than having to do it yourself.
Putting all those three perspectives together, what do we
know? We know that about 15 percent of the Nation's high
schools, about 2,000, produce half its dropouts. These are high
schools where, year after year, only 6 out of every 10 students
who enter, graduate. And often, it's only 3 out of 10 or 4 out
of 10 or 5 out of 10. This happens year in and year out,
despite often a decade of State and then National
accountability efforts. These high schools are, unfortunately,
the Nation's dropout factories.
Second of all, we know these schools are primarily attended
by low-income and/or minority students. This is a National
tragedy, but 2,000 high schools, as Senator Kennedy suggested,
is a solvable number.
Second of all, we know these schools are located wherever
we find concentrated poverty so, about half are in the Nation's
Northern, Midwestern, and Western cities. The other half are
across the South and Southwest in every State. These schools
are man-made, they are not inevitable. They happen because what
we've done, largely unintentionally, is concentrate,
overwhelmingly concentrate needy students in a small subset of
under-resourced schools.
What do I mean by this, overwhelmingly concentrated? In a
high school with a high dropout rate, where only 50 percent, 40
percent, 30 percent of the students graduate, you will
typically look in the ninth grade and find 400 students. Of
those 400 students, 8 in 10, 8 out of 10 are repeating the
grade, are overage for grade, are in Special Ed, are two or
more years behind grade level, or enter high school having
missed a month or more of school during middle school, meaning
they're already starting to dis-attach from schooling.
Normally schools might have 5, 10, 15 percent of high needs
kids and they can mobilize around them. When it's 80 percent
and it's over hundreds in number, you're just overwhelmed. And
second of all, instead of over-resourcing these grades in
schools, they often get the lowest level of resources. That's
the least desirable teaching assignment, so they get the
youngest teachers and have the highest teacher turnover rates
and the highest level of vacancies.
What do I mean by under-resourced? They don't have enough
skilled adults in the building that are committed to getting
the job done. They don't have enough time and stability and
leadership. The Principal changes every year, the
Superintendent every 2 years. They don't have access to high-
quality technical assistance.
We also know that 8 out of 10, maybe 9 out of 10 of these
students of schools, it's highly predictable who's going to
drop out. These kids actually wave their hands up and start
signaling, ``Help!'' as early as the sixth grade when they fail
math, when they fail English, when they get in behavioral
trouble. Or, as a sixth grader, a 12-year-old, miss a month or
more of schooling.
The system is not set up to recognize this. The system is
set up to say, ``It's early adolescence, it's a new school, we
hope you grow out of it.'' But what we know, is they don't grow
out of it. In fact, it just gets worse. In sixth grade, you
might just have one of these things. By ninth grade, you're not
coming, you're failing everything, and you're in behavioral
trouble. We really need to have a systematic approach of both
the high schools and the middle grade schools that feed them.
Finally, we know that students in these schools desperately
want to succeed. If you ever want to affirm your faith in the
human spirit, come visit our innovation high school in
Baltimore and talk to the students. What these students
overcome just to get to school is amazing.
So it's not the case, we have to get rid of this image in
our heads of the dropout of this disaffected youth who's
alienated, who doesn't care, or maybe has got pregnant, or has
to work. That's a small percentage of the dropouts. We're
always going to have those kids, but that's 10 percent. It's
not the case when you go to 50, 40, 60 percent dropping out
that that's the majority. The majority of kids that are failing
in school and kids that are being failed by the schools not
giving them the supports they need.
The big picture is, we know today what's going to happen
tomorrow. I can point to you to the schools by district, by
State, that produce most of the dropouts in those States.
Within those schools we can point to the kids in need of, who
need help and support to graduate. That really tells us we're
in a position to have action.
Furthermore and finally, before my time runs out, and we
can answer this in the questions, we know a lot about what to
do. Over the past decade we've learned that comprehensive
reform when well implemented makes a difference. By this, I
mean organization changes that let teachers work with just a
small subset of students over time so they're not overwhelmed,
4 teachers, 75 kids, in my view, is the equivalent of the
platoon in the Army. It's the fundamental unit of organization.
Four adults can help 75 kids, but oftentimes a single teacher
is responsible for 150 kids. And so, it doesn't work.
We have to have strong instructional programs, high
standards, high challenges, that relentlessly provide the extra
help you need to succeed, which is just multiple and multiple
layers. Because you're taking kids that are at the sixth-grade
level in math and saying, ``You're going to pass algebra.''
They have the ability to do that, but they need intensive
support for that to happen.
Finally, teachers need supports because we're asking them
to do much more than teach a good lesson. We're asking them to
actually make phone calls to kids. In our school, if you're not
there in the first 30 minutes you get a phone call so I know
where you are, we help you out. What's the story? But teachers
have to have time to do that.
What's the Federal role? At a global level I thinks it's to
be the grease and glue, to create the system that--the Federal,
State, local system that provides the resources, the
accountability systems, the capacity building, the technical
assistance. It's also specifically to help provide additional
targeted resources--this is the other part of the story--we can
really target these resources to where they're most needed and
will do the most good. In exchange for accountability, that the
schools will implement the evidence-based reforms we know work.
In very specific terms, it's supporting and fully funding
the Graduation Promise Act, introduced yesterday. It's getting
graduation rates right in the reauthorization of No Child Left
Behind, making them count as much as test scores, measured
accurately and measured for everybody.
Finally, it's investing in research and innovation. We know
right now how to make these schools tremendously better, but to
get to the promised land of every kid, no matter where you
start, graduating prepared for college, career, and civic life,
we will have to learn more. We will have to figure out for
extra times, is it better to extend the school day, the school
year, the school week, for how many, for which kids and what to
do with that time. We'll also have to think of more innovative
ways to help the most neediest kids who need recovery, who are
overage and under-credited. How do we take a 17-year-old with
three credits and create a program where they succeed?
I believe it's in our power to do this and I ask you to
work together with us so we can do this within the next decade.
Thank you.
[The prepared statement of Mr. Balfanz follows:]
Prepared Statement of Robert Balfanz
We are at a moment when well-conceived action by the Federal
Government can play a catalytic role in ending the Nation's dropout
crisis and in so doing change the Nation fundamentally for the better.
Pick the issue you care most deeply about--the Nation's
competitiveness, equal opportunity, lowering the crime rate, reducing
social welfare costs, urban or rural development, social justice,
economic growth, or unleashing the full potential of all the Nation's
citizens and the case can be made that creating a system of public
secondary schools which graduate all students prepared for success in
college, career, and civic life is your issue. This is within our
grasp, we know how to do this and we know what needs to be done to make
it happen. Central to this is a focused Federal effort to create a
Federal-State-local partnership which provides the accountability
framework, capacity building, technical assistance, research,
evaluation, and resources necessary to transform the Nation's low-
performing secondary schools.
Let me explain. I come at this issue from three perspectives. First
from what I have learned as a researcher who has studied the causes,
consequences, and location of the dropout problem at the national
level, as well as the reforms, policies, and resources needed to end
it. Second from validating this learning through practice as a whole
school reform model developer who has worked with over 30 diverse urban
and rural school districts and over 100 high-poverty middle and high
schools across the Nation to implement the Talent Development Middle
and High School's comprehensive organizational, instructional and
teacher/administrator development/support reforms. Finally, my
perspective is informed by first hand experience operating a
nonselective, public Innovation High School in West Baltimore which
serves a high-poverty student population. The Baltimore Talent
Development High School is run via a partnership between Johns Hopkins
University and the Baltimore City Public School System and has given me
the insight which comes from having to help design an instructional
program, implement a multi-tiered system of student supports, select
and train a teaching staff, get facilities in working order, and do
what it takes to prepare students no matter what their entering skill
level and motivation for adult success in college, career, and life.
From the sum of these experiences here is what I have learned.
what we know
For the past decade I and my colleagues at the Center for Social
Organization of Schools at Johns Hopkins and the Philadelphia Education
Fund, have studied the dropout/graduation rate crisis at the school
level. We have learned that about 15 percent of the Nation's high
schools produce close to half its dropouts. These 2,000 high schools
are the Nation's dropout factories. They have weak promoting power--the
number of seniors is routinely 60 percent or fewer than the number of
freshmen 4 years earlier--and year after year, often for a decade or
longer, about as many students drop out as graduate. In the worst
cases, 400 freshmen often produce 150 or fewer graduates.
About half these schools are in northern, midwestern and western
cities; the other half are primarily found throughout the south and
southwest. Whether the national graduation rate has gotten better,
worse, or remained static over the last decade is unclear to us. What
we do know is that the number of high schools with weak promoting power
has nearly doubled in the last decade.
We also have learned that poverty is the fundamental driver of low
graduation rates. There is a near perfect linear relationship between a
high school's level of concentrated poverty and its tendency to lose
large numbers of students between ninth and twelfth grades. In the
States we have looked at in more depth, minorities are promoted to 12th
grade at the same or greater rates as white youth when they attend
middle class or affluent high schools in which few students live in
poverty.
Relatively few minorities attend these high schools, however.
Between a third and two-fifths of the Nation's African-American and
Latino students attend high schools with high poverty and low
graduation rates. This is social dynamite because in modern America a
good education is the only reliable path out of poverty. The fact that
most of these high-poverty, high-minority high schools, do not receive
title 1 funding, the Federal program designed to help offset the impact
of poverty, is deeply problematic.
We also have been able to follow multiple cohorts of students
through two major northeastern school districts. Our data show that the
majority of dropouts in these cities leave high school with few credits
because they failed the majority of their classes. This is not to
ignore important sub-groups of dropouts who demonstrate some high
school skills, persevere to 11th or 12th grade and leave school just
shy of graduation in response to a life event, boredom, or frustration.
We have found, however, that graduation rates in the 50-60 percent
range typical in many cities are driven by students who enter high
school poorly prepared for success and rarely or barely make it out of
the ninth grade. They disengage from school, attend infrequently, fail
too many courses to be promoted to the 10th grade, try again with no
better results, and ultimately drop out of school. Our data show 30-40
percent of students in these cities repeat the ninth grade but that
only 10-15 percent of repeaters go on to graduate.
Our direct experience working to improve more than 70 high-poverty,
nonselective high schools through our Talent Development High Schools
program further tells us that the Nation's dropout factories are not
primarily the result of students, teachers and administrators who do
not care or try. Many care and try a lot, but they are often over-
matched by the immense educational challenges they face. There are too
many under-resourced and increasingly economically and racially
segregated high schools that lack the tools and techniques needed to
meet the challenges they face. In these high schools it is not uncommon
for less than 20 percent of freshmen to be on-age, first-time ninth
graders, with math and reading skills at the seventh-grade level or
higher; in short, the type of students high schools have traditionally
been designed to educate. Up to 80 percent of the ninth-graders can be
over-age for grade, repeating the grade, require special education
services, or have math and reading skills below a seventh-grade level.
Yet increasingly, we are asking these students to pass Algebra courses
and even exams before they can be promoted to 10th grade.
These students have the ability to do this, but they need much more
intensive and effective instruction and adult support than our high-
poverty, comprehensive high schools, with current levels of resources,
typically provided. Schools which beat these odds and have high
percentages of students who succeed in challenging courses provide
multiple layers of support. Strong instructional programs are matched
with a schedule that allowed for double-dosing in these subjects, and
extra help from caring teachers within a personalized interdisciplinary
team structure. But this is still not enough for all students to
succeed, some require summer school and a few need further focused
instruction in the fall to earn promotion to the next grade. Pulling
off this level of intensive support requires not only committed adults
who refuse to give up on their students, but additional time,
resources, training, and materials as well.
Finally, our most recent study reveals that many students begin to
fall off the graduation track at the start of adolescence. We have been
able to identify over half of four major school district's future
dropouts as early as the sixth grade by looking at just four variables
commonly measured in schools--attendance, behavior, and course failure
in math and English. Across these districts high-poverty middle grade
students with any one of the following risk factors--attending school
less than 85-90 percent of the time, being identified as having
behavioral problems, or failing math or English typically had less than
a 20 percent chance of graduating within 5 years of entering ninth
grade.
Hence, one reason that the ninth grade finishes off so many
students is that many of them have already been struggling and
disengaging for 3 years or more before entering high school. Along with
the recent on-track measures for ninth-graders developed by the Chicago
Consortium for School Research, this tells us that there are powerful
and accessible indicators that schools can use to identify the
overwhelming majority of students who will drop out in time to prevent
it, as well as indicating the areas in which these students need
supports.
Thus, States and districts can use currently available indicators
to identify both the high schools that produce the majority of dropouts
and the students most likely to drop out. This means resources and
supports can be targeted to the schools and students where they will do
the most good and are needed the most.
what we can and must do
Our research also points to concrete steps we can take right now to
address the graduation crisis head on. At least three types of
intervention are required.
First, the Nation's Dropout Factories need to be fixed or replaced.
This cause should unite everyone, the urban North, and the rural South,
Civil Rights advocates and policymakers concerned about
competitiveness. Transforming these schools and systems is the best
shot we have at ending the stubborn grip of concentrated and inter-
generational poverty that engulfs too many of our citizens and their
communities.
We have the knowledge to do this, but it will not be easy, fast, or
cheap. A central feature of dropout factories is that they serve an
overwhelming concentration of needy students. Thus, it is essential
that Federal Government, States, districts and foundations bring to
bear human and financial resources that are equal to the challenge. We
have recently shown that high schools vary considerably in resources.
Some struggling high schools can implement proven reforms by re-
allocating existing resources, many need modest additional support, and
a quarter or more need a substantial increase in resources. Moreover,
because reforming or replacing these schools is the educational
equivalent of open heart surgery, States and districts need to develop
sufficient technical capacity to do the job and/or support third-party
intermediaries who can.
Second, investments in more research, development, and invention
are needed, particularly in curriculum, instruction, and assessment
High school coursework needs to develop student's intellect and reflect
tighter and more substantial connections to higher education and the
workplace. It should incorporate significant experiential activities
that engage our emerging adults in meaningful activities that build
their skills and connections to supportive social networks. It must be
adaptable enough to address diverse needs, including the increasing
number of adolescents who are English language learners. Assessments
need to support and encourage meaningful intellectual development and
not limit learning to what is easily testable.
Finally, we must acknowledge the impact of poverty and activate
``outside the box'' approaches for our most vulnerable students. That
means investments in improving and integrating social service and
community supports in schools that serve high-poverty neighborhoods and
regions. It means providing intensive supports to help students from
poverty negotiate the treacherous transitions between educational
levels. It means embracing a K-16 framework, but also acknowledging
that adolescence (especially combined with poverty) brings its own risk
factors and that a secondary approach spanning middle and high schools
is needed to keep all students on track toward graduation.
We need to transform the high schools that produce most of the
dropouts and the middle grades schools that feed them. With a targeted,
inventive, aligned, and integrated approach, we can do this.
the cost of inaction/the reward of well-conceived action
We must do this. The social, economic, and individual costs of
inaction are high. There is essentially no viable work, work that a
successful life can be built around for young adults without a high
school diploma. When large numbers of young adults and adolescents from
a neighborhood are out of school and out of work the social structure
becomes frayed and the under-class becomes self-perpetuating. In our
research in Philadelphia we have shown that students who are in foster
care, who are abused and neglected, who have a child, or are
incarcerated almost never graduate from high school. This creates
thousands of dislocated youth within a single city which often leads to
tragic results. This year one of the students at our Innovation High
School, a student who had dropped out in the sixth grade, whose parents
were both in jail, who was a recovering alcoholic and who was on his
way to a bright future, having remarked to a visiting reporter that the
best thing about our school was positive peer pressure, was tragically
shot to death in random street crime perpetuated by other young adults
who more than likely had themselves already dropped out of school.
Conversely, the social, economic, and individual returns to ending
the dropout crisis and transforming the Nation's low-performing schools
are almost staggeringly high. Recent research by economists at Columbia
and Princeton has shown that cutting the dropout rate in half through
proven programs and effective efforts would, even after calculating the
costs of those efforts, produce $40 billion a year in economic returns
via increased tax revenue and decreased social welfare costs. Once we
can say to any student entering high school--rather they are from
Akron, Baltimore, Worchester, Chicago, New York, Albuquerque, Los
Angeles or North Carolina, Georgia, Arizona, or Florida--that if you
come to school every day and work hard you will graduate prepared for
success in college, career and civic life, we will have changed
American society profoundly for the better and made true to its promise
of equal opportunity for all. The students regardless of their
circumstances will respond. If you do not believe me, come to Baltimore
and I will introduce you to another one of our students--a self
described bad boy gone good, he raises himself, while an aunt raises
his child, and he has become a consistent honor roll student who pats
himself on the back every time he makes it because there is no one else
at home to do it. On his way to a successful career in advertising, he
tells anyone who asks that the streets outside are mean but his school
is heaven.
We can do this, make high school a transformative place for all the
Nation's students and in particular those who live in poverty. We know
which schools need to be fixed or replaced, we know which students
within them need multiple layers of continuous academic and social
support, we have learned enough about how high schools can be
successfully turned around or started anew to make them fundamentally
more successful, and we know what else we have to learn. Its time to
get to work.
the federal role
What is the Federal role? The Federal Government in partnership
with States and local school districts needs to lead the effort to
transform the Nation's low-
performing secondary schools. As my friend at the Philadelphia
Education Fund likes to say it needs to be the grease and glue that
gets the job done. It needs to insure that the accountability
framework, capacity building, technical assistance, research,
evaluation, and resources necessary to transform the Nation's low-
performing secondary schools are put in place and sustained for the
decade it will take. It needs to insure that these efforts are strong
enough and directed enough to overcome the obstacles that will stand in
the way--lack of will, uneven know how at school, district, and State
level, limited or misallocated resources, leadership churn, and policy
misalignment.
One large step in this direction is the Graduation Promise Act
recently introduced by Senator Bingaman. This bill provides a means to
target what we know works, to the high schools that need it the most,
and to insure that in exchange for receiving the resources and support
(human and financial) necessary to introduce state-of-the-art reforms,
schools and school districts are held accountable for implementing them
well and sustaining them over time.
Congress also needs to help the Nation get the measurement of
graduation rates, right. In the re-authorization of No Child Left
Behind, graduation rates must be measured accurately, disaggregated for
all groups, and count as much as test scores in accountability systems.
In addition when it is re-authorized NCLB at the secondary level needs
to be structure so that low-performing middle and high schools have the
incentive to engage in the comprehensive, whole school reforms they
need and are held accountable for implementing and sustaining effective
reforms. This will require a set of intermediate on-track indicators,
since it can take 3 to 5 years for effective whole school reform to
show its full impact. Currently too many of the implicit and explicit
incentives in NCLB push schools to focus on a few students rather than
reforming the entire school.
In addition, there needs to be support for continued invention and
discovery. All of my learning and experiences tell me that central to
reducing poverty in America will be the creation of grades 6 to 14
combined middle, high, and community college full service (supplying
integrated services) open at 8 a.m. close at 8 p.m. schools in the
Nation's most impoverished neighborhoods. So students can enter in at
the cusp of adolescence when they are most at risk of becoming
disengaged from schooling and falling off the path to graduation and
leave fully ready for successful, meaningful, and economically
important employment. The Graduation Promise Act sows the seeds for
this in title II by setting aside funds for the development of more
effective models of secondary school for struggling students who are
over age and under credited but a parallel effort in curriculum and
instruction will also be needed so we can create secondary schools
which fully engage, educate, and develop the Nation's adolescents.
Last, and I could no longer call myself a researcher if I did not
include this, we need increased investment in knowledge building. The
Federal Government needs to support a program of research designed to
establish which educational inputs, implemented in what manner, in
which types of schools have the greatest impact. The Graduation Promise
Act begins this but over time even more support will be needed. For
example, we need to know, is it better to increase the school day, the
school week, or the school year and if so, how best to use this time,
or in fact is increased time not worth the cost and hence lost
opportunities to bring to scale more effective reforms. This can only
be answered through large-scale randomized studies that will cost tens
of millions of dollars to run. Currently there is funding only for
small scale randomized studies that cost millions of dollars to run. So
we need to increase our Nations' funding for educational research and
development by an order of magnitude. But as any scientist will tell
you, change something by an order of magnitude and you change the
world. We are at such a moment, and with a well-conceived federally led
plan of action for transforming the Nation's low-performing
secondary schools, that we can do that.
The Chairman. Thank you for excellent testimony. You know,
what I think is fascinating is, that it is North, South, East,
and West. Around here you can try and get a coalition together
to do something. That's not the most important thing we're
going to hear today, but something that's perked up my
attention.
Governor Wise, good to see you. Governor Wise became
President of the Alliance for Excellent Education in 2005, was
the Governor of West Virginia from 2001 to 2005, where he
implemented the PROMISE Scholarship Program, established
character education curriculum, and helped increase the number
of National Board-certified teachers in the State by offering
financial bonuses. He'll discuss the need for stronger
accountability systems at middle and high schools, including
the importance of tracking and reporting graduation rates in
reliable manner.
Governor Wise recommends more effective use of data,
building the capacity to make school improvements possible,
improving methods of measuring student progress, and anything
else he wants to comment on.
Thank you.
STATEMENT OF BOB WISE, PRESIDENT, ALLIANCE FOR EXCELLENT
EDUCATION, WASHINGTON, DC.
Mr. Wise. Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman, and members of
the committee for your interest.
You all outlined so graphically, the problem with dropouts,
the glaring statistics, when many of you will be attending
commencement ceremonies and we watch those students next month,
high school seniors walk happily across the stage. We also have
to remember the over one million who are not walking across the
stage that started ninth grade. For those one million, it will
be just another day of either being unemployed or working a
minimum wage job.
In all the numbers, Senator Enzi, that you will, that you
said so eloquently bear out. There are two groups affected when
somebody drops out. First it's the student themselves and all
that befalls them, lost opportunities. The second group are the
rest of us.
Let me move quickly to No Child Left Behind and how it can
help high schools. First of all, we have to remember that there
is a crisis. We know what to do about it. Bob Balfanz and his
colleagues have illustrated and demonstrated well, both the
research--through the research of the problem and the
solutions. We know what to do about it, we have to have the
will.
Why are we in this shape we're in? Well, first of all let
me address what we call the missing middle. The missing middle
is the Federal funding for our educational system. If this is
an air graph, from here to here is $18 billion, which is what
the Federal Government--Federal Government only--spends for
pre-K to grade six, basically, Title I, Head Start, and Reading
First. Let me move over here to higher education,
postsecondary, this is about $16 billion, essentially Pell
Grants and campus-based financial aid with--this does not
include guaranteed student loans--that would go to the ceiling,
so that's 18 and 16.
So what do we spend for middle and high schools? About two
point five for middle schools, and about two point five for
high schools, for a total of $5 billion. We can show you direct
return on investment. We're making gains here in scores and
reading scores and math scores in the fourth grade. Our higher
education system still is one of the envies of the world. Here
is where we're seeing the problem in the dropout rate that's
not declining, and indeed a third of our kids that are
finishing high school, but not with the skills they need for
success in the workplace.
Second problem is, NCLB does not have true accountability
at the high school level. The law looks at test scores, but not
if students actually graduate. And so, the irony is, we run our
kids a mile race, assessing them rigorously as we should, at
every tenth of a mile, they cross the finish line and we don't
really count it. And so, we don't, at the finish line we're not
keeping track, we're not disaggregating data, we're not holding
States to it.
Beyond accountability, the school improvement requirements
under NCLB, such as School Choice and Supplemental Educational
Services don't really apply. One reason is that 75 percent of
school districts have only one high school, so choice is really
not an issue in that situation.
But finally, the main reason, is what is the main carrot
and stick of NCLB? It's title I dollars, and yet only 8 percent
of students receiving title I services are in our high schools.
What that means then, is that whether or not a school makes AYP
doesn't really matter because if title I dollars don't go
there--and most of the schools don't get title I dollars, high
schools--then the services, supports, and sanctions won't
apply.
Now, we know that there're very successful models that can
be implemented to deal with this. Talent Development, which Bob
Balfanz and his colleagues head up, Jobs for American
Graduates, The Institute for Student Achievement, First Things
First, I can rattle off a number of them. There are a number of
individual high schools and school districts, as well, that
have been successful.
What can we do? Well, first to turn around low-performing
high schools, NCLB must include a new system of meaningful high
school about accountability tied to school improvement, that
also requires constant disaggregated graduation rates that
count as much as test scores in determining AYP.
Second, in the improved measure of AYP, should determine
whether or not schools qualify for a new high school
improvement fund using proven strategies to turn around low-
performing schools, the dropout factories that Bob referred to.
This new system is outlined in the Graduation Promise Act,
introduced yesterday by Senators Bingaman, Burr, and Kennedy.
We thank all of you very much for your commitment to this.
The GPA authorizes a $2.4-billion high school improvement
and dropout reduction fund to turn around America's slowest
performing high schools. Remember that air graph, we'll still
only be up at that point to $7.5 billion for our six secondary
school grades.
In this approach, States would set up Statewide systems to
use multiple measures to appropriately access high school
quality. States would then use this information to place high
schools in need of improvement into one of three types of
differentiated school improvement categories based on--not on
how long the school has been failing--but how badly the school
is performing. These high school strategies would come from the
local level and not be designed by the Federal Government.
Additionally, I want to thank Senator Burr for introducing
The Graduate for Better Future Act, which also supports the
goals of the GPA.
We also need to look quickly at some other reforms that are
significant. Seventy percent of our eighth graders are not
reading at grade level. Now, they're entering high school with
the toughest courses. That is why Striving Readers
Authorization--which would target money to the lowest
performing high schools to develop these literacy skills that
are so important. Senator Sessions and Murray have introduced
this in the Striving Readers Act of Senate bill 958, and we
also thank the co-sponsorship, the members of this committee,
Senators Dodd, Burr, Bingaman, Isakson, Harkin, Murkowski, and
Senator Brown.
Rather than having States differ greatly in defining
proficiency, NCLB should also establish a process for
developing voluntary shared education standards, to ensure that
all students are held to the same high expectations aligned
with the requirements of postsecondary education in the
workforce. The need for these shared standards has also been
recognized by various members of this committee in legislation,
various pieces of legislation introduced by Senators Kennedy,
Clinton, and Dodd.
From the classroom, as well, high quality data is necessary
to make important education decisions to turn around low-
performing high schools. Still, too rare are quality
longitudinal data systems, using individual student identifiers
critical to proving student achievement. From the classroom to
this committee room, we need good data to improve educational
outcomes. The Federal Government assisting States to develop
those, must be the main vehicle.
We would urge a major investment in grants to States to
build quality data systems in accordance with the
recommendations of the Data Quality Commission--or Campaign.
Again, I want to thank the chairman and the committee for
the leadership on this critical issue. If, as several of you
have talked about, it's not just a matter of the dropouts, it's
also a matter of our economy. The $2.5 billion that we asked
for in the GPA, Graduation Promise Act, I can demonstrate
chapter and verse economically, a return on investment to the
individual, yes to our society overall. Thank you.
[The prepared statement of Mr. Wise follows:]
Prepared Statement of Bob Wise
Mr. Chairman, thank you for the invitation to speak with you today.
I appreciate your commitment to education, as well as that of the other
distinguished members of the committee.
In the coming month, millions of high school seniors will walk
across the stage at graduation ceremonies to receive their high school
diplomas. Auditoriums and gymnasiums around the country will be packed
to the brim with proud parents and relatives. For many students,
Graduation Day will be the culmination of 13 years of study; for
others, it will be the doorway to postsecondary education. But for
nearly 1.2 million students who started high school with these
graduating students, it will likely be just another day that they are
unemployed or working at a minimum wage job because they have already
dropped out of school.
crisis and economic impact
Forty years ago, the United States was No. 1 in the world in high
school graduation rates; it now ranks seventeenth. The Nation's 15-
year-olds, when measured against their counterparts in other
industrialized nations, rank fifteenth in reading, twenty-third in
math, and thirtieth in problem-solving skills.
This does not bode well for the future economic well-being of the
Nation, nor for the continued prosperity of its people. An increasingly
global, technologically based economy is demanding ever higher levels
of knowledge and skills from its workers. The U.S. Department of Labor
estimates that almost 90 percent of the fastest growing U.S. jobs
require at least some postsecondary education.
In a world in which a meaningful high school diploma has become the
minimum qualification necessary to obtain a good job and support a
family well-being, far too many American students are being allowed to
fall off the path to prosperity. This problem has escalated to crisis
proportions in thousands of the Nation's high schools and is hampering
the opportunities of millions of students.
Every school day, 7,000 students drop out--that's 7,000 students
who could have become teachers or researchers, small business owners,
or Senators. Of the students who enter ninth grade each fall, a third
will not graduate from high school within 4 years. Another third will
graduate, but without the skills and knowledge needed to succeed in
college or the 21st century workplace. And only a third will graduate 4
years later with these necessary skills.
The numbers are even worse for minority communities in our country.
Only about 55 percent of black students and 52 percent of Hispanic
students graduate on time from high school with a regular diploma,
compared to 78 percent of white students. Only 16 percent of Latino
students and 23 percent of African-American students graduate prepared
for college, compared to 40 percent of white students. And the news
could get worse. Based on projections from the U.S. Census Bureau, the
white population is expected to grow by only 1 percent by 2020, while
the Hispanic population will increase by 77 percent and the African-
American population by 32 percent. If the Nation cannot do a better job
of serving minority students and ensuring that they graduate from high
school, the Nation's overall graduation rate will fall even further as
a growing number of minority students are left behind.
The cost of a poor education is not just to the individual.
Analysis by my organization, the Alliance for Excellent Education, with
assistance from the Met Life Foundation, reveals that if the 1.2
million high school dropouts from the Class of 2006 had earned their
diplomas instead of dropping out, the U.S. economy would have seen an
additional $309 billion in wages over these students' lifetimes. And
that's only for 1 year--we can expect the country to lose another $309
billion in potential earnings later this year as dropouts from the
Class of 2007 fail to graduate with their classmates. If this annual
pattern is allowed to continue, more than 12 million students will drop
out of school during the next decade at a cost to the Nation of $3
trillion.
Recent research conducted by a group of the Nation's leading
researchers in education and economics has shed some light on exactly
how much a high school dropout costs the Nation in lost taxes,
increased health care costs, higher spending on crime, and greater
expenditure on support programs such as welfare. According to a recent
report, published by Teachers College at Columbia University, male high
school graduates earn up to $322,000 more over the course of their
lifetimes than dropouts, while college graduates earn up to $1.3
million more.
On the flip side, the Alliance projects that if the U.S. education
system could raise minority high school graduation rates to the current
level of whites, and if those new graduates go on to postsecondary
education at similar rates, additional personal income would increase
by more than $310.4 billion by 2020, yielding additional tax revenues
and a considerably improved economic picture.
While some high school dropouts might eventually find good jobs and
earn decent livings, most will spend their lives in a State of
uncertainty--periodically unemployed or on government assistance. Many
will cycle in and out of prison. In fact, about 75 percent of America's
State prison inmates, almost 59 percent of Federal inmates, and 69
percent of jail inmates did not complete high school. If we could
increase the male graduation rate by only 5 percent, we could save $7.7
billion a year through reducing crime-related costs and increasing
earnings.
High school graduates have better health and lower rates of
mortality than high school dropouts. Individuals with higher
educational attainment also are less likely to use public health
services such as Medicaid. An Alliance analysis found that if every
student in the class of 2005-2006 graduated from high school, the
Nation could save $17.1 billion in lifetime health costs.
federal role and nclb reauthorization
The good news is that, although there is a significant crisis, we
know much about how to respond. The reauthorization of the No Child
Left Behind Act (NCLB) offers an opportunity for you as the education
leaders in the Senate to put the ``Secondary'' into the Elementary and
Secondary Education Act and take some critical steps toward improving
our Nation's middle and high schools. The realities of global
competitiveness, the rapidly-diminishing prospects of those students
whose high schools fail to prepare them for college and work, and the
resulting widening opportunity gap all make middle and high school
reform an imperative issue from an economic, national security and
civil rights perspective.
The time is right for the Federal Government to take bold
leadership in advancing secondary school reform--leadership that is
appropriate to the crisis and in line with the Federal Government's
tradition of intervening to assure the security of the Nation, reduce
poverty, increase equity, and advance research to inform effective
practice. The increasing urgency to address the trouble plaguing
secondary schools has been bolstered by an avalanche of reports
recognizing the link between improving secondary education and
increasing and maintaining competitiveness. Such reports include ETS's
The Perfect Storm and National Council on Economic Education's Tough
Choices-Tough Times.
For education reform to truly take hold and be successful, it must
happen at all levels of education, from the schoolhouse to Capitol
Hill. As a Nation, we will never reach the goals of No Child Left
Behind or make every child a graduate without significantly increasing
funding to improve America's high schools--making levels of investment
equal to the levels of reform. But I am not interested in making the
current dysfunctional system just more expensive. Reforms must be
targeted and research based and investment should match that reform.
Currently, there is little Federal investment in our Nation's high
schools and we are getting what we pay for. As of now, the Federal
funding in education targets the bookends of the education system--
concentrating on grades pre-K-6 and higher education. The ``missing
middle'' is our Nation's secondary schools, which receive little to no
funding from the Federal level. Funding for grades pre-K-6 totals
nearly $18 billion. Funding for postsecondary education totals nearly
$16 billion and that is without taking into account student loans or
other tax incentives. However, funding for grades 7-12 is only about $5
billion.
why nclb doesn't work for secondary schools
Unfortunately, the focus of NCLB reflects the current Federal
funding priorities in education--NCLB was just not set up for secondary
schools. I am not here to criticize NCLB. I am here to tell you why it
does not work for high schools and how you can fix them in
reauthorization. However, I believe it is critical for us to remember
all of the core reasons NCLB was written and became law when we discuss
the crisis in our Nation's high schools. The law was written to provide
all children, including poor and minority children, with access to a
high-quality, standards-based education; the same reason Federal action
must occur at the high school level. NCLB, despite its shortcomings,
has put a spotlight on the achievement gap--a startling gap that is
illustrated in the shocking graduation rates I described earlier.
NCLB was designed to address grades K-8--generally it did not even
really contemplate the law's interaction with secondary schools. For
example, the original Bush administration proposal was 28 pages and
only mentioned high schools twice. In addition, NAEP, known as the
Nation's report card, is only required in 4th and 8th grades so there
is no on-going national measure of student achievement. And despite low
literacy rates in the upper grades, Reading First, the Federal
investment in reading skills, is only a K-3 program. As a result, NCLB
policy is often neglectful of or even at odds with the needs of
America's 14 million high school students, particularly the 6 million
students who are at risk of dropping out of school each year.
NCLB at its core is about accountability for improving student
achievement. However, there is not true accountability at the high
school level--the law looks at test scores but not if students actually
graduate. It's as if we are clocking runners in a race every mile but
then do not pay attention to whether they cross the finish line.
Because Adequate Yearly Progress (AYP) is focused solely on test
scores, there is a perverse incentive to push out the kids who do not
score well. Further, these tests generally measure proficiency in the
10th grade, not preparedness for graduation and beyond.
Despite calculation of graduation rates being part of the law,
there is no accountability tied to those rates. States calculate high
school graduation rates in different and, in many cases highly
inaccurate and misleading, ways. Subgroup graduation rates do not count
for NCLB and therefore the graduation gaps and the low graduation rates
of poor and minority are not reflected in AYP determinations. Even if
the graduation rates were accurate and accounted for students in
subgroups, NCLB does not require schools and States to make meaningful
progress in increasing graduation rates. While States, districts and
schools are held accountable for getting all students proficient in
math and reading by 2014, there is no such ultimate graduation goal for
graduation rates. The consequence is that most States do not have
meaningful goals for improving graduation rates each year and schools
can make AYP while showing little to no progress on graduation rates.
In 2005, the National Governors Association (NGA) took an important
first step in recognizing this problem and moving toward a solution.
The NGA Graduation Rate Compact was originally signed by all 50 of the
Nation's Governors pledging to adopt accurate and consistent
measurements for reporting high school graduation rates. However, two
States have since backed out of the commitment; only a few States have
yet implemented the Compact rate; and because the Compact did not
address accountability, definitions, rates, and growth goals for
accountability are still not consistent State to State. NCLB should
operationalize the Compact by requiring that graduation rates are
disaggregated and increase over time as part of accountability.
Beyond accountability, the school improvement requirements or
sanctions under NCLB (which only apply to title I schools thus missing
the vast majority of high schools) namely school choice and
supplemental education services (SES), simply do not work at the high
school level. School choice often is not applicable at the high school
level. Seventy-five percent of school districts have only one high
school. In cases where districts do contain more than one high school,
they are often concentrated urban districts with many low-performing
high schools. And in the cases where such districts do contain high
performing high schools, those schools only have a handful of transfer
slots available, thus ensuring no real improvement for a failing high
school. In the case of SES, because title I funding is extremely
limited, very few students in high schools actually receive the
services. Further, given extracurricular, social and work demands, high
school students are not likely to opt-in to extra tutoring. Finally,
regardless of whether or not SES and school choice even could work for
high school students, neither provide the research-based improvement
strategies that will increase turn around low-performing high schools.
At the root of why NCLB does not work for high schools is the fact
that of title I funds almost never even reach high schools. Title I is
both the ``carrot'' and the ``stick'' that gives NCLB impetus. NCLB
requires all schools to report on their assessment performance every
year, however sanctions only apply to and are funded for the schools
receiving title I funds. Yet only 8 percent of title I participants are
high school students. Other major funding streams are also not reaching
high schools. Seventy percent of entering freshman cannot read at grade
level. However, the major Federal investment in reading, Reading First,
stops in third grade.
Given the problems facing our Nation's secondary schools, secondary
schools need systemic reforms that NCLB simply does not provide or
require. Much is now known about how to renew and revitalize the
country's middle and high schools so as to ensure that more students
succeed. Local school districts and the States have an undisputed and
critical role to play in redesigning the Nation's secondary schools to
meet the needs of the 21st century, and many of them are working hard
to implement effective reforms. Schools such as JEB Stuart High School
in Falls Church, Virginia or Granger High School in Yakima, Washington
and programs, such as the Institute for Student Achievement (ISA) or
Talent Development, in communities scattered across the Nation are
proving that with high expectations and the necessary support, today's
students--even those who are most highly at risk of dropping out--are
up to the challenge. These schools are successfully keeping students in
attendance, improving their achievement levels, and graduating them
prepared for success.
nclb reauthorization and high schools
For all of the reasons I described earlier, the Alliance believes
NCLB reauthorization must look at multiple means to improve the
Nation's high schools from accountability and improvement to literacy
to critical data systems. First, I will discuss accountability and
school improvement, the cornerstone of Federal school reform policy.
accountability and improvement
To turn around low-performing high schools, NCLB must include a new
system of meaningful high school accountability system that is tied
closely with school improvement. While the current structure of NCLB
does not work for high schools, it can be built upon to leverage the
student achievement gains and improved preparedness and graduation
rates needed for students and the Nation to succeed.
As discussed earlier, AYP currently does not include the
appropriate indicators of a high school's performance. An appropriate
measure of AYP at the high school level must include high-quality
assessments that are performance-based and aligned to college and work
ready standards not administered before 11th grade and consistent,
disaggregated graduation rates. Both assessment performance and
graduation rates should be required to increase over time. In this new
system of accountability and improvement, such a measure of AYP would
act as a ``thermometer'' to see if schools are meeting appropriate
goals. In other words, it would tell us something is wrong but further
diagnosis and treatment are needed.
This improved measure of AYP would determine whether or not schools
enter a new school differentiated improvement system. This new system
is outlined in the Graduation Promise Act (GPA), which I am pleased to
say, was introduced yesterday by Senators Bingaman and Kennedy. GPA
authorizes a $2.4-billion High School Improvement and Dropout Reduction
Fund to turn around America's lowest performing high schools and give
students attending those schools a chance to graduate ready for college
and work. The High School Improvement Fund would support more
comprehensive State accountability and improvement systems at the high
school level.
As stated in the GPA, under this new system of improvement, States
would set up new statewide systems that utilize multiple measures or
indicators to appropriately assess high school quality. Formula grants
would be distributed to the States, based on poverty and graduation
rates, to establish and/or expand statewide differentiated high school
improvement systems guided by research and best practice. These systems
would be approved by the Secretary as part of a rigorous peer-review
process. States would then develop a set of school performance
indicators to be used, in addition to the new measures used to
determine adequate yearly progress (AYP), to analyze high school
performance, determine the amount and type of support each school
needs, and guide the school improvement process. States would also
define a minimum amount of expected growth on each school performance
indicator to demonstrate continuous and substantial progress.
States would then determine how data from the school performance
indicators and AYP data will be used to place high schools in need of
improvement into one of three school improvement categories. Unlike
current law, how schools fit into the following categories is not
determined by how long the school has been failing, but by how badly
the school is performing. The first category is schools needing
targeted assistance, which are schools that have just missed making AYP
and are performing well on most indicators, but a targeted
intervention, such as improved instruction for ELL students or a
schoolwide literacy plan, is likely to improve student outcomes. The
second category is schools needing whole school reform, which are
schools that have missed making AYP by a significant margin or for
multiple subgroups and are struggling on most other indicators. Such
schools could benefit from a schoolwide strategy to address the
multiple layers of school improvement demonstrated from research and
best practice. The third category is schools needing replacement which
are schools that are failing large numbers of students by most or all
measures and likely have been for some time. Improving student outcomes
in those schools would call for replacement with more personalized,
rigorous and well-designed school models.
Under this new system, development and implementation of the
improvement strategies would come from the local level. For each high
school that did not make AYP and was placed into one of the three
categories I just discussed, district-led school improvement teams
would use the school performance data, a school capacity audit and
needs assessment, and data about incoming ninth graders, to develop
appropriate school improvement plans. The high school improvement plans
would lay out the evidence-based academic and nonacademic interventions
and resources necessary to improve student achievement, reduce dropout
rates, meet annual benchmarks, and make adequate yearly progress.
Districts would then apply to the State on behalf of their high
schools, for funds necessary to implement the high school improvement
plans and complementary district-wide strategies. States would award
subgrants to districts with approved applications, with funds going
first to those districts serving high schools needing whole school
reform or replacement.
Districts and high school improvement teams would implement the
high school improvement plans, directing funds first to implement the
plans for schools in need of whole school reform or replacement. In
subsequent years, high schools that meet the annual benchmarks on
school performance indicators, even if they do not make AYP, could
continue to implement the school improvement plan. High schools not
meeting the annual benchmarks for 2 years would be redesignated into a
different school improvement category and required to develop a new
school improvement plan with State involvement.
Research, evaluation and technical assistance are critical for this
system to work. States would be able to reserve 10 percent of funds to
implement the requirements of the statute and also to build the
capacity to support the school improvement efforts. The Secretary would
also reserve funds to provide technical assistance and regional
training programs; to develop and implement or replicate effective
research-based comprehensive high school reform models; and to evaluate
the program and determine the most effective interventions.
Consider a new, more appropriate measure of AYP and the High School
Improvement Fund provide the foundation for true, systemic high school
reform. However, alone, a new accountability and improvement system
will not be successful in preparing students to graduate with the
skills to succeed in postsecondary education and the workforce. NCLB
must include other measures that will inform teaching, support students
and provide the interventions that will ultimately improve student
achievement.
graduate for a better future act
I want to thank Senator Burr for introducing the Graduate for a
Better Future Act, which specifically targets the dropout factories.
The legislation, authorized at $500 million, provides States,
districts, and schools with the resources and tools necessary to target
interventions to high school students at risk of dropping out, improve
graduation rates, and provide the rigorous curriculum necessary to high
school students to succeed in postsecondary education and the
workforce.
striving readers
As I mentioned earlier, 70 percent of 8th graders cannot read at
grade level. Unfortunately, the Federal investment in reading, the
Reading First program, disappears after third grade, which is exactly
the point at which expectations for student literacy increase. This
lack of basic reading skills contributes greatly to students failing to
master the knowledge they need to succeed after graduation, or simply
dropping out entirely. In the last year, Congress has repeatedly
discussed improving our Nation's competitiveness. Clearly education
plays a critical role in how economically competitive we are as a
Nation. I understand the Senate may soon consider legislation on this
very topic. While the conversation has focused tightly on math and
science, I ask you to consider the role literacy plays in the success
students have in math and science. A 2006 report by ACT found that high
school students with higher level literacy skills performed better in
math, science, and social studies courses in college, had higher
college GPA's, and returned to college for a second year at higher
rates.
In response to the need, Senators Sessions and Murray have
introduced the Striving Readers Act, S. 958, which would improve
literacy skills by helping every State, district, and school develop
comprehensive literacy plans that would ensure every student reads and
writes at grade level. Authorized at $200 million for fiscal year 2008
and increasing to $1 billion over 5 years, the bill would support
training teachers to use assessments and literacy strategies to help
struggling readers, train leaders to support teachers, and provide
reading materials for schools that lack them. NCLB must include
Striving Readers so that low literacy is no longer a reason students
fail to succeed in high school. I want to thank Senators Murray and
Sessions for introducing this legislation and the numerous other
members of this committee who have cosponsored this bill--Senators
Dodd, Burr, Bingaman, Isakson, Harkin, Murkowski, and Brown.
voluntary national standards
To be competitive, students need to leave high school with a
college- and work-ready diploma. Our students and the Nation are
spending billions of dollars at the college level and in the workplace
on remediation because our students are not leaving high school with
the necessary skills. The Alliance estimates that the amount that could
be saved in remedial education costs at U.S. community colleges if high
schools eliminate the need for remediation would be $3.7 billion a
year. This figure includes $1.4 billion to provide remedial education
to students who have recently completed high school. This figure also
includes the almost $2.3 billion that the economy loses because
remedial reading students are more likely to drop out of college
without a degree, thereby reducing their earning potential.
NCLB should establish a process for developing shared education
standards to ensure that all students are held to the same high
expectations aligned with the requirements of postsecondary education
and the workforce. The Federal Government should also offer States
high-quality performance assessments to regularly measure student
progress toward those standards and fulfill the testing requirements of
NCLB. This action would remove a significant financial burden from
States and increase the quality of assessments. In addition, the
Federal Government should provide States with incentives and supports
for adopting such standards and aligning them with their key systems,
such as their curricula, graduation requirements, and professional
development. The need for such shared standards has been recognized by
various members of this committee in legislation introduced by Senators
Kennedy, Clinton, and Dodd.
data systems
To turn around low-performing high schools, educators and
policymakers need accurate information about how students are doing in
school. High quality longitudinal data systems using individual student
identifiers are critical to improving student achievement. However,
most States and school districts have not yet fully implemented such
systems. The Federal Government must help States build the
infrastructure needed for data to be collected, reported to the public
and used by educators to improve education. NCLB should include a major
investment in grants to States to build such systems in accordance with
the recommendations of the Data Quality Campaign, as well as grants to
build the capacity to use data to improve teaching and learning through
professional development, effective data collection and other key
functions. NCLB should include $100 million in competitive grants to
build those systems, and $100 million in formula grants to every State
to align those systems with district systems and build educator
capacity at State and local levels to use the data to improve teaching
and learning.
thank you
Again, I want to thank the chairman and the committee for their
leadership on this critical issue. I urge you to seize the opportunity
of NCLB reauthorization to take our Nation's high schools into the 21st
century. The quality of high school education is increasingly central
to national concerns, including securing the Nation's global economic
position, reducing threats to national security, and assuring equal
opportunity for a population that is growing increasingly diverse. By
appropriately extending its education focus to include the needs of
students in middle and high schools, the Federal Government can move
the Nation from ``no child left behind'' to ``every child a graduate.''
The Chairman. Thank you.
We'll hear now from Tony Habit, who's the President of the
New Schools Project in North Carolina. The New Schools Project
is a public-private partnership focusing on improving North
Carolina's high schools. The Project works to create small
autonomous high schools across the State. Their work includes
redesigning high schools, while creating technology-enabled
high schools, early college high schools, and high schools
focused on international studies, and on health and life
sciences.
He'll discuss the importance of the small school model,
data-driven instruction, quality teachers, improving student
achievement and graduation. He'll share the challenges North
Carolina's faced in making high school a priority, as well as
some of the successes that they're beginning to see.
Let me just say, I've listened carefully about the
importance of data. We have the IES--now it's called the
Institute of Education Science. We spend $335 million in
research on education. I'm going to ask the panel to consider
recommendations on the type of research and data conducted by
IES. Our committee will need to have a hearing on ``IES
Reauthorization in the Future.'' I want your opinions about
where we are on some of that material, and whether we ought to
spend more, or do better. Perhaps some of you who are familiar
with it can give us a little bit of information on the issues.
We want to thank you so much, Mr. Habit. Again, thank you
for your testimony, which was enormously helpful about what's
happening in North Carolina. Please.
STATEMENT OF TONY HABIT, PRESIDENT, NEW SCHOOLS PROJECT,
RALEIGH, NC
Mr. Habit. Thank you, Mr. Chairman and Ranking Member Enzi
and members of the committee. I appreciate the opportunity to
testify before you today and to consider the changes that are
much needed and overdue in our Nation's secondary schools. It's
an honor to be able to talk about the work that's taking place
in my home State, North Carolina.
In our State, we're very fortunate to have leaders who
appreciate the urgency for change and the magnitude of change
that must take place in the very near term. As has been
referenced earlier this morning, Senator Burr--working with
Senator Kennedy and Bingaman--have introduced the Graduation
Promise Act, aimed at raising high school graduation rates.
We're also very pleased that our Governor, Governor Mike
Easley, has really championed secondary innovation and
transformation during his two terms in our State. He has
repeatedly connected that process to the need to ensure future
economic vitality for North Carolina.
We've also been very fortunate as an organization, to
benefit from the remarkable philanthropic support of the Bill
and Melinda Gates Foundation and their vast network of schools
around the country who are learning, quite frankly, from a lot
of research that's taking place in the field. Our State, like
most States, and many States have really been punished
handsomely by the unprecedented restructuring in our economy.
And yet, when we look at what's happening with our students,
there's very strong evidence that we are graduating students
who are unprepared for the workforce that's before them and, of
course, the students who are not graduating are being punished
handsomely for that.
In a poll we commissioned recently, half of North Carolina
graduates, graduates who went on to enroll in college, reported
that they felt there were major gaps in their preparation to do
high-level college academic work. As I've referenced, far too
many of our students never see graduation day and only 68
percent of our students who enter the ninth grade in 2002 will
walk across the stage in 2006. For our minority students and
our poor students, the results are far, far worse.
My organization, the North Carolina New Schools Project was
established to accelerate the pace of innovation in our State,
to ensure that all students have access to high-quality schools
that will prepare them fully for college, for work, and for
life. We have an aggressive three-pronged strategy for this
work. The first, is to establish more than 100 focused and
academically rigorous new high schools across the State.
Second, help to create a sense of urgency and momentum around
this change process for every member of our society in North
Carolina. And third, advance funding and policies that will
ensure that the change that's underway in our State will be
sustainable and that it will ultimately benefit every single
one of our communities.
Since 2003, we have designed over 58 innovative new high
schools across our State. That number will move toward 90 by
September of this year. We engage with school districts and
with schools in a 6-year process, a process that really
recognizes the complexity of change, especially if that change
is to be meaningful and sustained over a longer period of time.
I'd like today, to offer four observations from our work in
the field and working with these schools. The first, is that
changing teaching in our schools really means changing belief
systems.
Stated simply, low expectations prevent effective teaching.
In a typical high school, some students are tracked into
demanding courses, which prepare them for a future beyond high
school, while others are tracked into classes that offer little
challenge, and even less future. In our partner schools we work
to instill the notion that preparation to tackle new demanding
content is the responsibility of the teacher more than that of
the student. Teachers and administrators typically do not
believe that all students can achieve at high levels,
especially poor and minority children.
To overcome this, we've taken hundreds of educators from
North Carolina across the country, to sit in the classrooms of
schools that are getting remarkable results with their
students. While it seems counterintuitive, with greater
challenge, students put forth greater effort and perform at
higher and higher levels. Our students know this to be true.
In a survey we conducted of recent graduates, 77 percent
said that high school graduation requirements were not very
demanding or were too easy, one of those two categories. Eighty
percent of our graduates said they would have worked harder,
had the demands been placed in front of them while they were in
high school. As adults, the message is very, very clear. We
have to expect more from all children, while we're addressing
this need to transform our secondary schools.
Second, being ready for college and being ready for work
are now exactly the same. The overarching goal for North
Carolina's innovative high schools is to ensure that every
student graduates college-ready. We're even more explicit in
asking that all students meet our State university graduation
admission requirements. And second, that every student, as a
goal, should earn college credit before they walk across that
stage to receive their high school diploma.
According to research by ACT, and others, the math,
reading, and writing skills that graduates need to be ready for
the new economy are really the same between that historically
expected of a 4-year university and those of students who are
going directly into the workforce. This means that students
must all take more demanding courses. We know that they can
meet these higher expectations.
For example, in our early college high schools in North
Carolina, these are schools that are based on the campus of a
college or university where students in grades 9-12, or 9-13,
are expected to earn both their high school diploma and 2 years
of credit toward a 4-year degree. We're seeing a consistent
pattern of poor children who are under-prepared for high-level
academic work, being able to master those courses to lead to
those college degrees.
Third, changing schools to graduate all students to be
college-ready means fundamentally rethinking how resources are
applied in our schools. This means primarily the roles of
adults. Most schools and districts lack the expertise or
organizational structure with which to manage change and
innovation or with which to effectively and meaningfully engage
their communities. Current funding and professional development
programs reinforce a piece-meal approach to change that
typically fails to support a coherent, sustained, and focused
model for schools.
Our organization, the New Schools Project, supports clear
supports, provides clear supports for new schools that deviate
from this norm. That includes a commitment to professional
development for teachers, principals, district administrators,
and school-change coaches, which are all aligned along the same
framework and the same targets. We believe that it is this
alignment that is essential to success in changing the schools.
Finally, on the notion of leadership--the creation of new
kinds of schools requires new kinds of leaders. This requires a
proactive effort to identify, recruit, place, and support
principals who have the knowledge about school design, not just
about pedagogy, and they understand their role to facilitate
learning among teachers in that new school.
While transforming schools in North Carolina is relatively
recent, in the last few years, there are some promising results
and I'd like to conclude with those results. More students are
staying in school, more ninth graders are being promoted to the
tenth grade, more students are coming to school, and most
importantly for us, the early warning signal that teachers are
saying that they see their new school as a place, a good place
to teach and learn. In fact, teachers in new schools are twice
as likely to say their new school is a good place to teach and
learn, compared to the traditional high school in our State.
These recommendations and considerations are really a tall
order for us, to think differently about resources and about
leadership. We bear dual responsibilities in this regard. We
know what it means to take students and help them to be fully
prepared for the new economy. We also know the cost to them and
to society when they are not adequately prepared. The task in
front of us is clear. All of us are very grateful for the work
of this committee and the United States Congress in bringing
forth solutions so that some of these important recommendations
can be implemented.
Thank you for the opportunity.
[The prepared statement of Mr. Habit follows:]
Prepared Statement of Tony Habit, Ed.D.
Mr. Chairman, Ranking Member Enzi and members of the committee,
thank you for the invitation to testify today. I am pleased to be with
you to consider the urgency for change in our Nation's middle and high
schools. My name is Tony Habit, and I am president of the North
Carolina New Schools Project.
We in North Carolina are fortunate to have leaders who appreciate
both the urgency for change and the magnitude of the change that must
occur. As you know, your colleague Senator Burr, along with Senator
Bingaman, has introduced the ``Graduate for a Better Future Act'' aimed
at raising high school graduation rates. Our governor, Mike Easley, has
championed innovation in our State's secondary schools, repeatedly
drawing the connection between that work and our State's continued
economic vitality. As Governor Easley has said, North Carolina must
create the most skilled, most educated workforce in the world, not
simply in the United States.
North Carolina also has benefited from the unparalleled
philanthropic leadership of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation to
transform the Nation's high schools to meet the demands of this
century.
By many traditional measures, North Carolina is fortunate to have
high schools that in relative terms have succeeded over the last
century in moving from institutions that served very few to ones that
strive to serve all students. At 59 percent, North Carolina is ranked
first in the country in the percentage of high school students taking
advanced math courses.\1\ Ninety-three percent of our State's public
high schools offer at least one Advanced Placement course.\2\ Seventy-
four percent of our State's 12th grade students took the SAT in 2005,
and North Carolina had the second largest 10-year gain in SAT scores
among States with over 50 percent of the population taking the SAT.\3\
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
\1\ National Center for Public Policy and Higher Education (2004).
Measuring Up 2004. Available at http://measuringup.highereducation.org/
default.cfm.
\2\ Southern Regional Education Board (2003). Progress in Advanced
Placement and International Baccalaureate in SREB States. Available at
http://www.sreb.org/main/HigherEd/readiness/ap-ib.pdf.
\3\ Public Schools of North Carolina (2005). The North Carolina
2005 SAT Report. http://www.ncpublicschools.org / docs / accountability
/ reporting / sat / 2005/sat_report_2005_part1
.pdf.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
At the same time, North Carolina has felt acute pain from an
unprecedented restructuring of the economy of our State and, for that
matter, of our country and across the globe. In the first 5 years of
this decade, for example, North Carolina lost nearly one-quarter of its
manufacturing jobs--184,200 jobs in all. Over the next 10 years, the
``Big Four'' of our State's manufacturing base--tobacco, textiles,
apparel and furniture--which account for one in three jobs are
projected to lose another 18 percent of those jobs.
North Carolina lost 1,000 farms in 2005 alone, leading the Nation
in that category according to the United States Department of
Agriculture. Our State has lost more than 10 percent of its farms since
2002.
The State, however, has rebounded strongly. Investments in
education led North Carolina to stronger employment growth in the last
12 months than any other State east of the Mississippi.
As low-skill, high-wage jobs have vanished, some communities are
left bereft of opportunity. Idled middle-aged workers often are trapped
in a string of low-skilled, low-wage jobs or are required to return to
college for retooling without the preparation in high school required
to succeed.
There is strong evidence as well that our most recent high school
graduates are under-prepared for the demands they are facing in the
``real world.'' In a poll commissioned by our organization earlier this
month, half of recent North Carolina high school graduates in college
reported gaps in their preparation for college academic work and half
of recent graduates in the workforce report gaps in their preparation
to get a good job. A quarter of the recent graduates in college
reported having taken a remedial course.
In addition, far too many high school students never reach
graduation. North Carolina recently released cohort graduation rates
for the first time. They showed that only 68.1 percent of the students
who entered 9th grade in 2002 graduated with the Class of 2006. For
African-American students, the graduation rates was only 60 percent.
For Hispanics, it was only 51.8 percent--a particularly troubling
statistic given our State experienced nearly a five-fold increase in
Hispanic enrollment from 1993 to 2003, according to the Pew Hispanic
Center.
My organization, the North Carolina New Schools Project, is an
independent, not-for-profit corporation that serves as the nexus of the
leadership of Governor Easley and our State Board of Education; the
strong interest in change among the Gates Foundation and other
philanthropies, public and private colleges and universities and the
private sector; and the pressing economic need that North Carolina
faces.
While impressive in relative terms, the incremental gains of our
high schools are insufficient both in terms of scope and in terms of
pace to address a changing economy. North Carolina must graduate more
students with more skills and knowledge than ever before. The New
Schools Project was established to accelerate the pace of innovation in
our State and to ensure that all students have access to high-quality
schools that will prepare them fully for college, work and life.
As a private-public partnership with our State's various education
sectors, elected officials and the private sector, the New Schools
Project can be nimble without sacrificing meaningful impact. We can
work across institutional and political boundaries so that innovation
is not frustrated by real or perceived barriers.
In pursuing change and innovation, and with the leadership of
Governor Easley and the State Board of Education, we have an aggressive
three-pronged strategy:
Establish more than 100 focused, academically rigorous and
effective innovative new high schools across the State;
Foster greater urgency for higher standards and schools
that will make achievement of these standards feasible; and
Advance policies and funding to ensure that all North
Carolina communities benefit from the promise of new schools.
lessons learned on the road to meaningful change
Since 2003, New Schools Project has partnered with local school
districts and, in some cases, with national partners such as the Asia
Society, the New Technology Foundation, and the KnowledgeWorks
Foundation to open 58 innovative, highly effective high schools across
North Carolina. We engage with a school and its school district for 6
years--a planning year followed by 5 years of implementation. This
timeframe recognizes both the scope of the change we are pursuing and
its complexity. This day-to-day, on-the-ground experience in working to
foster innovation--along with what we have gleaned from the experience
of others in the field--has offered us important insights into what it
takes to, in the vocabulary of this hearing, modernize high schools and
middle schools. Let me offer you four specific observations to
consider:
Changing Beliefs
Simply put, low expectations are a cancer that can weaken a school
enough to make significant changes in teaching impossible. It is clear
how this occurs in a typical high school--some students are tracked
into demanding courses which prepare them for a future beyond high
school, while others are tracked into classes that offer little
challenge and even less future. The usual justification is that
``those'' students were not ``ready'' for Algebra II or honors English.
Some parents reinforce these beliefs by advocating that certain
students be discouraged from enrolling in advanced courses.
If I do not believe that all students can do the work, I do not
feel obligated to assume responsibility for changing the way my school
is organized or the way resources are allocated to ensure that all
students succeed. In the schools we partner with, we work to instill
the notion that preparation to tackle new demanding content is the
responsibility of the teachers, not the students.
In our partnership with schools, we insist that they be fully
representative of the student population of their district; we do not
allow access to innovation to be limited to the best and brightest.
This is one of our stakes in the ground to enforce what we believe as
an organization about who can do the work. Notably, 12 of our 16
partner schools subject to No Child Left Behind's growth provision last
year made Adequate Yearly Progress.
Teachers and administrators typically do not believe all students--
particularly poor and minority students--can master the knowledge and
skills that lead to true opportunity until they see it first hand. As
part of our work, we have taken hundreds of educators from across North
Carolina on study visits to schools in other parts of the country whose
results are irrefutable. Educators study some of the country's most
successful high schools to learn how changed instruction and high
levels of student support combine to improve student outcomes. This
includes direct classroom observation that leads to deeper reflection
about changing instruction. More than 20 schools such as University
Park Campus High School in Worcester, Massachusetts, and Urban Academy
at the Julia Richman Education Complex in New York City are used for
these site visits. We are working with our partners across the State to
establish these kinds of ``schools of promise'' within our State to
make these transformative site visits even more accessible.
By way of example, we are working with a school on the western edge
of our State and meeting some resistance. Two teachers who were
themselves graduates of the school went on a site visit to University
Park and saw the possibility as well as the gaps in their own work.
They have become our strongest advocates and have brought their
colleagues along in moving forward.
While it seems counter-intuitive, there is strong evidence
supporting the premise that with greater challenge, students put forth
greater effort and perform at higher levels. This is particularly the
case when schools and students focus on the most important content and
skills and when the material relates to students' own aspirations. The
term ``comprehensive high school'' speaks to the difficulty of
achieving this kind of focus in the traditional setting. We work to
create high schools of no more than 400 students that provide focus
either through an academic theme, an instructional approach, or their
location on a college campus in the case of our Learn and Earn early
college high schools. Additionally, a school's focus represents one
strategy to enable teachers in the core courses to work together to
make connections between courses and the world of work. The intent of a
focus is not preparation for a specific career, but rather preparation
for a lifetime of learning and workplace changes.
As adults, we should not shy away from expecting more from all
students. In our survey of recent graduates, 77 percent said that high
school graduation requirements were easy to meet. Eighty percent said
that they would have worked harder had the expectations been higher.
And 68 percent said that they would have worked harder in high school
had they known then what they know now about real world demands. As
adults, we must bear the burden of our knowledge of what preparation
for college, work and life requires and must act on that knowledge.
Setting College as the Goal
Often, the limitations of beliefs about students' capabilities
emerge around the notion of making every graduate ``college-ready.''
Inevitably, someone raises the challenge that not every graduate will
go to college.
The overarching goal of North Carolina's innovative high schools is
to ensure that every student graduates college-ready. We are even more
explicit in asking, first, that students meet the admission
requirements of the University of North Carolina system and, second,
that every student earn college credit before leaving high school.
This college-ready imperative is intentionally provocative. It
becomes a point on which a faculty must agree and collaborate. Another
value to the small scale of our innovative high schools is that they
allow teachers to be flexible in meeting the academic needs of
students, to alter what is offered and for how long in ways that a
2,000-student high school cannot.
At the same time, this imperative is based on a growing body of
research that shows that the skills high school graduates need in order
to be ready for college and ready for the 21st century workplace are
the same.\4\
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
\4\ See ACT, Ready for College and Ready for Work: Same or
Different?, 2006 and Achieve, Ready or Not: Creating a High School
Diploma That Counts, 2004.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
The most recent such study, conducted by ACT, analyzed data and
items from its college and work readiness tests, found that 90 percent
of jobs that do not require a bachelor's degree but that do provide a
``self-sufficient'' wage require the same level of mathematical and
analytical reading and writing skills as those needed by students who
are planning to enroll in a 4-year university.\5\ The report goes on to
state that this finding suggests that:
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
\5\ Examples of jobs cited in the report that do not require a
bachelor's degree but do provide a ``self-sufficient'' wage include
electricians, construction workers, upholsterers and plumbers. From
ACT, Ready for College and Ready for Work: Same or Different?, 2006.
``all high school students should be educated according to a
common academic expectation that prepares them for both
postsecondary education and the workforce. This means that all
students should be ready and have the opportunity to take a
rigorous core preparatory program in high school, one that is
designed to promote readiness for both college and workforce
training programs.'' \6\
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\6\ ACT, 2006, page 2.
However, another ACT study released this month showed that high
school teachers' view of college-ready content misses the mark in terms
of focus.
Voters in North Carolina, perhaps intuitively, understand this
convergence. In a poll we commissioned, 70 percent agreed that the
skills to succeed at work and in college were the same. Eighty-four
percent said it was important for nearly all high school graduates to
move on to a 2- or 4-year college, with 69 percent calling it very
important.
We have good reason to believe that students can meet this higher
expectation. Last year nearly three-quarters of students in North
Carolina's early college high schools, from which students graduate
with both a high school diploma and 2 years of college credit, took at
least one college course. Their passing rates in those courses ranged
from 76 percent to 100 percent. Nine high schools recorded passing
rates of 90 percent or better.
And the Governor's budget proposes to dramatically change this
landscape by creating Learn & Earn Online opportunities for all
students across the State, with a goal of enrolling 40,000 high school
students in college courses by next school year. This coupled with his
new EARN Scholarship opportunities, will provide students the
opportunity to complete a 4-year degree debt-free.
Managing for Significant Change
Meaningful change in high schools is essential and elusive; it is
worth remembering that A Nation At Risk was a report about changing
secondary education. Schools and school districts are rewarded for
maintaining the status quo and for adding new programs. For example,
rather than consider the absence of personalization and effective
student supports within a school, districts will add a dropout
prevention program or a specialist for that problem. At its heart,
however, changing schools to graduate all students to be college-ready
means redirecting all of the resources of a school to provide greater
student support and to address highly focused targets for achievement.
This is especially true in using the resources represented by the role
and responsibilities of adults in the school.
While the private sector has experienced decades of organizational
restructuring in which workers are displaced in one function and then
rehired in another to adapt to changing market conditions, the
education sector possesses no such history. Changing the roles of
adults in schools typically results in conflict and undermines the
overarching school change process--if not derailing it altogether. Most
schools and districts lack the expertise or organizational structure
with which to manage change and innovation.
Further, since communities and educators must embrace the need for
change, the absence of resources and expertise for most schools and
districts to effectively engage their communities means that well-
intentioned efforts can be undermined by relatively few, well-organized
citizens or disgruntled educators.
Current funding and professional development programs reinforce a
piecemeal approach to change and typically fail to support a coherent,
sustained and focused model for schools. It stands to reason that if
tools and plans for school change are not supported by high-quality and
aligned training that the likelihood of success will be greatly
diminished.
The New Schools Project and its partners provide specific supports
for new and redesigned high schools that deviate from this norm. They
include:
Teaching for Results: This annual series of intensive
professional development sessions for teachers supports the use of
protocols and other tools to sustain the focus on instruction, academic
rigor and professional learning communities. The sessions stress
differentiating instruction, teaching literacy across the curriculum,
facilitating meaningful learning, and providing effective student
support.
Leadership Institute for High School Redesign: In
cooperation with the University of North Carolina Center for School
Leadership Development and the Principals' Executive Program, the
Leadership Institute for High School Redesign offers a peer support and
professional development network for principals in new and redesigned
high schools. The network promotes effective instructional leadership.
Coaching: Each new school also benefits from coaching
services in which experienced educational leaders and master teachers
assist with facilitating the overall change process and with the
development of instructional strategies such as differentiation of
teaching to meet individual needs of students; lessons and units which
engage students in learning; and the improvement of literacy and
mathematics skills.
Investing financial resources and expertise in building the
capacity of schools and districts to manage change is essential.
Schools and districts must be expected to define a single,
comprehensive model for change regardless of what that model might be
and sustain the work over time.
Further, within the broader model for change, strategies for
professional development of teachers and school administrators and
district office personnel must be tightly aligned and integrated so
that they are connected at all levels to point in the same direction.
In our work this year to help schools define rigor, the sessions
involved both principals and teachers; in essence, they debated within
their school the definition after visiting other schools in North
Carolina thought to offer rigorous instruction. Expectations of
teachers and principals must be aligned with those of district
administrators for high school innovation to be sustained.
Rethinking Leadership
Finally, a new generation of student-focused schools calls for a
new model for school leadership. The principal in a traditional high
school is a building manager first and an educator second. Schools
which place teaching and learning above all else are led by principals
who understand both school design and who facilitate among teachers an
unrelenting focus on high quality teaching and learning.
One element of our partnerships aimed at ensuring the
sustainability of innovation is our expectation that our partner
schools are completely autonomous, with its own principal and school
budget, an essential step to create more entrepreneurial faculties with
both the responsibility and accountability for the success of all
students. This increases the demand for capable leaders.
New, proactive initiatives to identify, recruit, place and support
principals to lead schools are required. Leadership preparation
programs should emphasize both school designs that support achievement
and the role of principals as facilitators of adult learning in schools
intended to strengthen teaching.
Since most district administrative staff begin as principals,
creating a new generation of school leaders who believe and act as
though all students can succeed will inevitably change districts over
time.
early, but promising results
In the 2005-2006 school year, 24 redesigned high schools and Learn
and Earn early college high schools were open serving 3,000 high school
students. This was the first year of operation for nearly all 24
schools. While transforming a school in meaningful ways that actually
change teaching and learning is hard work, there are some initial
results emerging that indicate that high school innovation is taking
hold in North Carolina.
More students staying in school.--Nine of the 24
innovative high schools last year had no dropouts. In the crucial 9th
grade year, where research has shown that most high school students
either dropout or choose to dropout, 14 of the 24 innovative high
schools had no 9th grade dropouts. Overall, the 24 innovative high
schools had a combined dropout rate of 3 percent (compared to the
statewide high school dropout rate of 5 percent).
More 9th graders are being promoted.--To graduate, a
student must complete required courses and be promoted from grade to
grade. Research has shown that promotion out of 9th grade is an
especially strong indicator of a student's likelihood to graduate. Last
year, 15 of the 24 innovative high schools promoted more than 90
percent of their 9th graders, with seven schools promoting 100 percent.
Overall, the 24 innovative high schools had a combined 9th grade
promotion rate of 88 percent (compared to the State 9th grade promotion
rate of 85 percent).
More students come to school.--Student attendance in the
first group of 11 redesigned high schools topped that of their
comparison schools by nearly 1 percentage point. The initial 13 Learn
and Earn Early College High Schools had attendance rates that surpassed
their districts' rates by nearly 2 percentage points. Even fractional
increases in high school attendance are considered significant.
More teachers believe in their schools.--The percentage of
teachers in innovative high schools who ``strongly agree'' that their
school is ``a good place to work and learn'' is nearly double the
percentage in traditional high schools (48 percent compared to 26
percent). In fact, teachers in redesigned and early college high
schools are significantly more satisfied in every area measured by the
State's Teacher Working Conditions Survey.
It's early, but some schools do better than expected.--In
the first year of implementing their planned transformation, a third of
the innovative high schools met or exceeded the expected academic
growth projected for them in the State's ABCs accountability system.
Nine of twenty-four schools outperformed the other comprehensive high
schools in their districts.
I know first hand that the observations I have made today place a
tall order before our schools and our educators. They will not be able
to meet this test alone. It will take sustained and strong support
evidenced by political will and committed leadership. We bear dual
burdens in this regard. We know what it means for students to be fully
prepared for the demands of the 21st century--and the cost to them and
to society when they are not. We also know, based on our work in North
Carolina and on the work of our peers in other States, what it takes to
create schools that can graduate all students ready for those
challenges. We all must put our shoulder to the task of carrying that
load on behalf of this Nation's children as Americans always have. They
deserve nothing less.
Again, I thank you for this opportunity to speak with you. I
welcome any questions you may have.
The Chairman. Thank you very much.
Edna Varner, who's the Senior Program Consultant, of
Hamilton County Public Education Foundation. Ms. Varner's works
on middle and high school reform in Hamilton County Public
Schools in Chattanooga, TN. Previously, she has been both a
middle school and a high school principal. She'll discuss how
Hamilton County has worked to improve high schools, middle
schools by strengthening teacher workforce, improved data
systems, and creating rigorous standards and curriculum. Edna
will also discuss more Federal and State support could assist
districts in these efforts. I'm sure we'd extend a warm welcome
to you from our colleague and friend, Senator Alexander. Edna,
thank you.
STATEMENT OF EDNA VARNER, SENIOR PROGRAM CONSULTANT, HAMILTON
COUNTY PUBLIC EDUCATION FOUNDATION AND PUBLIC SCHOOLS,
CHATTANOOGA, TN
Ms. Varner. Thank you, Chairman Kennedy, Senator Enzi, and
members of the committee for this opportunity to speak to you
again. I was a part of the roundtable, and that was a wonderful
experience. Time is short, it's hard for the teacher and
principal to talk for 5 minutes, but I will attempt it, as my
colleagues did.
They have done an excellent job of giving a lay of the land
and I don't want to repeat what they've said. I want to spend
the time I have talking with you about some work we've done in
Hamilton County and why we're making the recommendations we
have.
At about the time No Child Left Behind legislation was
being written into law, we were already thinking about how to
modernize our high schools. We were fortunate, in that, we had
just gained some support from the Carnegie Corporation,
Annenberg, Bill and Melinda Gates, and two local foundations,
Benwood and Lyndhurst. They gave us the opportunity for some
possibility thinking. Not only did they give us that
opportunity, they also said, ``We will give you financial
support and we will also give you technical assistance.''
Our little group came together and our little group was
made up of teachers, principals, community leaders, a public
education foundation, and Hamilton County Schools Partnership.
We may have been naive, but we just started thinking about some
``what ifs.'' What if, for example, we started in Hamilton
County to monitor what matters? And then we started thinking
about what matters to us. It matters to us that all of the
students of Hamilton County graduate, prepared for college and
prepared to accept any of the opportunities of the 21st
Century.
It was important to us that all of our students get a
rigorous, relevant education. It was important to us that the
students in the lowest-performing schools would no longer be in
low-performing schools. That all of our teachers would have the
skills to teach all of our students.
We decided, again maybe being naive, to act on those. One
of the things we decided to do was to look at who was
graduating and how students were graduating. We realized in
2001 that we had several diplomas for students. We had special
ed diploma, then we had a diploma for students who merely
showed up for 4 years. We had a diploma for students who
graduated meeting State requirements, but they weren't eligible
for college. Then we had a diploma for students who would be
eligible for college.
We decided that that was not acceptable. And so, this was
hard to do, and we talked about it at the roundtable, we
decided--what if we had one diploma? And that one diploma
guaranteed all of our students all of the opportunities? It was
difficult to do, but our school board, our community--we had
lots of conversations--and our school board passed that. After
we achieved that, we thought now we've got to deliver on that.
Because in talking to people the greatest concern was this. We
would fail more students, we would have more students dropping
out. We had to realize, we're already failing students, we
already have large numbers of students dropping out.
What do we do to make sure that we can deliver on the
promise of all students graduating with the kind of diploma
that would give them all of the choices available to any
student?
We established academies to replace our vocational courses.
Our vocational courses, in the past, did a good job of training
students for some jobs that would be available. We realized
that in the 21st century, we don't even know what jobs will be
possibilities for our students when they graduate.
We decided that maybe what we ought to do is teach kids,
not how to fix a car or to build a building, but how to be
entrepreneurial in their thinking, how to solve problems. What
kinds of questions do you ask when you're really curious? What
does it mean to really be persistent? We decided that, while
it's important to monitor whether students can define and spell
those words, it is more important to determine the extent to
which we're helping students be those words. It's a tall order,
but it's really doable and we're showing that in Hamilton
County.
We also looked at our dropout rate and you've described it.
We were shocked. We had not, we knew the numbers, but when we
decided to sit down and spend whole evenings looking at them,
because it was just unacceptable. We decided to do something
simple. What if we call the students who had recently dropped
out and ask them if they would come back to school, if we could
find ways to help them graduate with a regular diploma? What if
when students went to their guidance counselors and said they
were thinking of dropping out, we talked to them about that and
offer them that? What if we invested in a high school that
could help students who were three or four credits short?
I have a brother who dropped out of high school in his
senior year and he's spent a lifetime as a college dropout.
This has a personal meaning for me. What if we talked to
students and offered a way for them to take those two or three
credits and not be at a school with--they don't have to do
cheerleading or whatever.
We actually established an adult high school. We were
hoping to lure 100 dropouts back. We're having to open other
schools to meet the needs, to meet the demand. These are
students who would have been dropouts for the rest of their
lives.
What if we tackled the issues of equity? I'm talking about
issues of equity for promises that were made as early as 1954.
What if in our district, we decided to do something about that?
One of the best ways to achieve equity is to make sure that all
students have access to a highly qualified teacher. This is not
just highly qualified in the paperwork. Right now we have
schools that can say, ``Check that off. We've got highly
qualified teachers,'' but many of them are teachers who just
graduated a month ago. They will be wonderful, but they're
still working on that.
Let me share this with you. Suppose I wanted my seniors to
spend their senior year, instead of cruising through it, to
learn about how our Government works, to learn, for example,
how the Senate works. I couldn't hire you to. I'd have to, I
can hire you now, a year ago I could have hired you, but I
would have to send a letter home that says, ``Senator Kennedy
and Senator Enzi are----
The Chairman. We got some Republicans you can hire, over
here.
Ms. Varner [continuing]. Are not highly qualified.''
[Laughter.]
That is not to say we don't believe teachers should have
the credentials. There are teachers in our schools who have
their teaching credentials. There are subjects that schools
can't offer because they're not highly qualified in those
areas, even though they have all the talent and experience.
We're advocating for broadening the definition of highly-
qualified teacher.
In our districts we've set up networks. Some schools have
great principals. Some schools have great teachers, and they
produce great thinking. Some schools are not as fortunate. They
have principals and teachers who are getting there.
We have a series of networks, and our principals come
together and they learn together, and so that every school
benefits from the collective wisdom and knowledge in Hamilton
County. We have change coaches. These are folks who are in the
schools to help provide instructional, professional
development. Those folks come together and learn together, so
every child in our district benefits from the collective wisdom
there. We have literacy coaches, and literacy is a big issue.
The Striving Readers Act is a great step in the right
direction.
When you hear the numbers about students who are not
reading well, and you visit a school you think, ``That can't be
true, they sound as if they read well.'' Well, Cris Tovani, in
her novel, in her book, ``They Read It, But They Don't Get It''
detailed a problem.
We have kids in school who are fake readers. They seem to
be reading well. They can call words, but the reason we aren't
doing well in science and all those advance level courses is
they're fake reading. They really don't comprehend. When do we
find out? When they take the ACT, and we see those scores.
Well, by the time we see those scores, we're doing what Doug
Reeves calls, we're just doing, reading an autopsy report.
They're already juniors and seniors and we've wasted middle
school years, and we've wasted high school years, that we could
have been addressing that.
I'll stop now by just saying this. I'm proud of my
district. We've done a lot to act on our ``what ifs,'' but not
to suggest you can do it without the resources you need. You do
need the resources. What if we had great data systems? What if
we had support beyond the length of these grants? What if we
had all the support that we could get from No Child Left Behind
to act on the expertise that our schools have? I agree with my
colleagues. What if we had that? Our recommendation is to help
us make that ``what if'' a reality.
[The prepared statement of Ms. Varner follows:]
Prepared Statement of Edna E. Varner
Chairman Kennedy, Ranking Member Enzi, and members of the HELP
Committee, thank you for the invitation to give testimony about middle
and high school work and make recommendations on behalf of my
colleagues for NCLB reauthorization.
My name is Edna Varner. I am presently a senior program consultant
for the Hamilton County Public Education Foundation and Public Schools'
partnership, working primarily on middle and high school reform. I am
also a leadership associate for Cornerstone, a national literacy
initiative. In my previous life I was a teacher, a middle school
principal, and a high school principal, serving students in schools
with poverty as high as 98 percent. I am a product of Chattanooga
public schools; in fact, my K-12 education was in segregated public
schools in Chattanooga. In my experience working with schools in
Hamilton County and across the country, I have had an opportunity to
see some of our worst public schools and some of our best.
In 2001, the Public Education Foundation in partnership with
Hamilton County Schools began two major multi-million dollar
initiatives aimed at transforming our 9 lowest performing elementary
schools and reinventing all 16 of Hamilton County's high schools. These
5-year initiatives joined existing long-term programs in leadership
development, highly effective teaching, and community engagement. In
2005, PEF launched a multiyear, multimillion-dollar project to boost
achievement in Hamilton County's 21 middle schools, bridging the gap
between successful elementary and high school work. In partnership with
the school district, we have built support for students from
kindergarten to college.
Hamilton County Schools and PEF welcomed the promise of NCLB. We
developed rigorous standards, engaged faculties in the training
necessary to deliver appropriate instruction, and jumped at the
opportunity for resources and technical support from the Carnegie
Corporation, the Annenberg Foundation, the Gates Foundation, and local
Foundations, Benwood and Lyndhurst. Even before the NCLB Commissions
affirmed it, we understood that our students must be able to compete
globally, that our standards must take us there, and that our
assessments and data must give us confidence that we are reaching our
goals.
At the time NCLB came into existence Hamilton County Schools
received a generous grant from the Carnegie Corporation and matching
funds raised by our local Public Education Foundation to provide
resources for possibility. We are proud to say our schools have been
good stewards of the resources, using them to experiment with what
ifs--what if we encouraged principals to build knowledge and capacity
and to work in collaboration instead of competition and isolation? What
if we provided schools with expert teachers to work as on-site
professional developers and instructional coaches? What if we asked
students how they learn best and engaged them as colleagues to help us
achieve rigor and relevance through new career academies? What if we
beefed up support for 9th grade and focused on 9th grade promotion
rates? What if we made it possible for high school drop outs to drop
back in to school and finish with a regular diploma? What if we invited
outside evaluators to come into our schools and tell us what they see
as strengths and weaknesses of our implementation practices? What if we
strengthened the roles of parents on school leadership teams so that
they can help inform curricular decisions? What if we held ourselves
accountable for closing the achievement gap and for providing
opportunities for all students to learn at higher levels? What if we
used data routinely to guide our work? What if we held all our students
to high standards and offered only one diploma that would make all our
graduates eligible for postsecondary education? And what if we learned
ways to sustain possibility at the end of the grants, knowing we can
not go back once we have developed the habits of moving forward. And
what if we are determined to do this and comply with NCLB.
schools for a new society in hamilton county
Reinventing 16 High Schools With 16 Unique Blueprints for Success
Every high school in Hamilton County is reinventing itself to
create a more engaging, more challenging, and more personalized
learning experience for all students.
In 2001, PEF and Hamilton County Schools jointly received an $8
million Schools for a New Society grant from the Carnegie Corporation
of New York, the largest private grant in the history of our schools.
PEF committed to raise a matching $6 million, making a total of $14
million dedicated to high school reform.
Because Hamilton County high schools are unusually diverse--urban,
rural and suburban, as well as magnet and conventional zoned schools--
each school has developed its own blueprint for reform while addressing
four basic goals: to establish a more challenging, relevant and
engaging curriculum; to improve teaching by providing more professional
development for teachers, leaders and staff; to create a more
personalized and engaging experience for students; and to allow more
flexibility to meet student needs more effectively.
A key element is a new single-path diploma for all students.
Beginning with students entering ninth grade in 2005, the single path
diploma will raise graduation requirements for all students and put
them on a track that will prepare them to graduate with a diploma that
qualifies them to enroll in a 4-year college or obtain a higher skill
job.
Eleven high schools have now established career academies. The goal
is to create interest-driven, challenging learning experiences and to
increase student achievement by fostering small learning communities.
Academies at different schools include business & technology,
engineering, environmental sciences, global studies, transportation,
health sciences, and construction. Some schools have several academies.
All academies combine college preparatory courses with a career theme
to make academic learning more engaging and challenging. Ninth grade
can be a make-or-break year, often ending in dropout or setting a long-
term pattern of low expectations and low achievement. That's why all
schools are addressing the ninth grade year through summer transition
programs and some are creating ninth grade academies that give students
more individual attention in this critical year.
Other important strategies include eliminating low-level courses,
increasing the number of low-income and minority students who take
rigorous academic courses, providing advisory classes for all students
and expanding the use of literacy coaches to increase reading skills of
all students.
Building a working partnership between PEF and the school system on
the scale required by this initiative has been vital. The school system
has supported the efforts of individual schools by taking many steps to
create a decentralized environment in which new ideas can be nurtured
and practiced.
So that every student has access to the best Hamilton County has to
offer, we have created networks of principals, change coaches
(established at schools to provide on site expertise), college access
counselors, and literacy leaders. Networks meet monthly to learn
together and share best practices to take back to individual schools.
In 2005, we launched a planning year of work to build on the
success of the high school initiative and bridge the gap with Middle
Schools for a New Society.
This has been the work of Hamilton County Schools and the Public
Education Foundation since 2001. In some areas we are succeeding. Some
of our data are included in this testimony to show our progress. We
have momentum and evidence to support it, but we have not reached the
high goals we have set for ourselves--all of our students achieving at
high levels and graduating with the knowledge and skills to pursue any
opportunity available to students of the 21st century. This is why we
are here today to ask for your help.
nclb implementation: promises, promises
While much of the discourse on the subject of NCLB is around
closing the achievement gap for subgroups, a gap that needs equal
attention is the gap between overall intention and reality. One reality
is that NCLB is attempting to deliver on an unkept promise made years
ago in the form of a 1954 landmark decision declaring separate but
equal schools inherently unequal. The separate but equal schools for
that century were visibly black and white. For the 21st century the
distinctions are less obvious because students of poverty come in all
colors. More than 50 years since that decision, it should be impossible
to walk into an empty school on the weekend and tell who it serves by
looking at the children's environment and their work. The broken
promises are even clearer if one visits a school when children are
present.
With No Child Left Behind, we received another promise: that public
schools would now be held accountable for at least the promise of
having students bloom where they are. But blooming in spite of
overwhelming challenges is reminiscent of an era we hoped to leave
behind. Children in the lowest performing schools do not get the same
education as their peers in schools with resources, access to large
numbers of highly skilled adults, and diversity. The climate and
performance of a school is very different when the school is constantly
faced with heavy sanctions if the scores are not up, when the school
can not attract the best teachers (teachers who are creative and
innovative and find no time for their talents in ``schools in
improvement'') or the best principals (the heads are the first heads to
roll). These schools are inherently unequal, and that is not what we
promised.
Children in the lowest performing schools can transfer to other
schools where their poor test scores are unwelcome (a few poor test
scores can mean the difference between AYP success or failure) and so
unwelcome test scores translate into unwelcome children. When they are
welcomed, their teachers may feel unprepared for the challenges they
bring, so these children are pulled out for special ``remedial
classes'' where they remain--not just left behind, but left out.
Schools want the promises of accountability, but they want to feel
equal to the challenges accountability brings. That requires
resources--as predictable as interventions and sanctions. Educators are
frustrated, of course, by poor test scores, but they are equally
frustrated by scores from low-level tests that say their students are
making great progress when teachers know they are not. (Compare
published State test scores to NAEP scores).
Educators want to prepare students for life and work as well as for
tests. We understand the challenges of modernizing for the 21st
century, especially preparing our students for jobs and opportunities
that we may not imagine at this moment. We can be globally competitive
with populations that far outnumber us, just one more reason to leave
no child behind. That is a promise we can keep, but not until we
confront the realities of NCLB implementation and work harder to make
them reflect the intent.
recommendations for improvement
We concur with many of the recommendations by the NCLB Commission.
The following three are high priority for middle and high schools.
Recommendation 1: Support Highly Qualified and Effective Teachers and
Principals
We must invest in teacher capacity, and that costs money.
We especially recommend greater investment in building teacher
capacity at the secondary level. The overwhelming percent of title I
funds go to elementary education, yet data show increasing need for
support at the secondary level. We are not suggesting that elementary
schools do not need these funds and we know that trying to use existing
funds more creatively only shortchanges our children. We need
additional funding to support more capacity building for secondary
teachers and principals who need high quality professional development
that prepares them to prepare their students for a world that is
rapidly changing.
We also recommend using NCLB to break the log jam on differentiated
pay or incentive payments for shortage area teachers (math and science)
to teach in hard-to-staff schools, for example, high poverty middle
schools. We need increases in funding for principal and teacher
leadership development.
Recommendation 2: Support Fair Accountability and Improved Data Systems
to Track Student Performance
We encourage support of the following recommendation by the NCLB
Commission:
Improve the accuracy and fairness of AYP calculations by
allowing States to include achievement growth in such calculations.
These calculations would enable schools to receive credit for students
who are on track to becoming proficient within 3 years, based on the
growth trajectory of their assessment scores, when calculating AYP for
the student's school. Including growth as a factor in AYP will yield
richer and more useful data on student performance--both for the
classroom and for school accountability purposes.
To determine growth, it is crucial that States have in
place sophisticated, high-quality data systems that can track student
performance over time and assessment systems that can monitor student
growth from year to year. Therefore, we recommend that States be
required to develop high-quality longitudinal data systems that permit
the tracking of student achievement over time.
Recommendation 3: Increase Funding for Literacy and Numeracy
Whether students remain in low performing but improving schools or
they transfer to higher performing schools, their ultimate success
depends on their level of literacy and numeracy. Research is telling us
that even high performing students are able to mask weak skills until
they begin testing for college. The Federal Government spends $1
billion (or $72 per child) for literacy in grades K-3, but it only
spends $30 million (or 13 cents per child) in grades 6-12. We get what
we pay for--4th grade NAEP scores have risen significantly in the past
5 years. Unfortunately, 8th and 12th grade NAEP scores have remained
flat or even declined.
Without the literacy skills needed to succeed in all subjects,
students will be left behind. The Federal Government must invest in
literacy in NCLB. We appreciate the Federal Striving Readers program
for older students. We also urge you to support the Striving Readers
bill introduced in the Senate that would expand and strengthen Federal
efforts in adolescent literacy. The Striving Readers Act is a step in
the right direction for improving the achievement of all students:
The bill would provide targeted intervention to students
far behind;
The bill would train teachers in all core subjects to use
literacy strategies; and
The bill would include grades 4 to 12 so that all grades
(K-12) are served.
The Striving Readers Act can also help all States improve literacy.
The current Striving Readers program serves only 8 cities across the
country; 150 districts applied, and Memphis schools in Tennessee
received one of the grants. The proposed Striving Readers Act would
ensure every State is served.
In conclusion, all of our children deserve our best, and our
teachers and principals deserve the training and resources to offer
nothing less. Accountability helps us confirm that we are doing our
best work. We welcome that. We appreciate the opportunity to share our
experiences and make our recommendations to the committee. America has
always been a land of promise. If we continue to work to improve the
model, NCLB can be a promise kept. Again, thank you for this
opportunity.
Hamilton County High School Data
The Chairman. Good for you. Thank you so much.
Final witness this morning, John Podesta, the President and
CEO, Center for American Progress. John Podesta was Chief of
Staff and Policy Advisor to President Clinton. He will discuss
the Center's recommendations, how to increase graduation rates,
including increased Federal support, promoting State and local
initiatives, investing in research and strategies of work,
building State and district capacity, developing and
implementing proven models.
He's an old friend. We welcome him to the committee. Thank
you, John.
STATEMENT OF JOHN PODESTA, PRESIDENT AND CEO, CENTER FOR
AMERICAN PROGRESS, WASHINGTON, DC.
Mr. Podesta. Thank you, Mr. Chairman and Senator Enzi and
members of the committee. I appreciate the opportunity to
testify before you this morning.
My written testimony lays out the specific arguments about
why I think the Bingaman, Burr, Kennedy bill that was recently
introduced, the Graduation Promise Act, is a necessary and
vital step toward improving our Nation's graduation rates. This
morning, I'd just like to make three brief points.
First, the detrimental effects of our Nation's graduation
crisis, coupled with the overall poor State of our children's
educational proficiency, really just can not be overstated.
Simply put, I think we're headed, as a Nation, toward a
significant erosion of our economic well being and our way of
life, unless we find more effective ways to keep our kids in
school, increase their ability to compete with others in a
turbulent, globalized economy.
In America today, two and three students leave high school
unprepared for college or the modern workplace. While at the
same time, the Department of Labor estimates that almost 90
percent of the fastest-growing jobs in the United States
require at least some postsecondary education. In the shifting
global economy where knowledge and skills are crucial to good-
paying jobs, too many of our students are falling off the track
to economic independence and advancement. We know that's much
worse for poor kids and children who are members of racial
minorities.
That hinders our Nation's overall competitiveness, as
students in other nations become better prepared for the jobs
of the future. In turn, the lack of basic educational
attainment, unduly consigns millions of young people to a life
of low earnings and poverty, as the other panelists have talked
about.
The graduation crisis in our schools must, therefore, be
seen as a genuine threat to our Nation's prosperity. I just
would note that that is the heart, I think the heart of the
reason why the strange bedfellows of the Center for American
Progress and the Chamber of Commerce, Tom Donahue and myself,
came together recently to propose a joint platform for
education reform, whose targets for reform include the 2,000
high school dropout factories that Bob's talked about.
I raise that because, for those of note, who know me and
Tom, we don't agree on that much. This is not a left-right
issue, this is not a partisan issue. I really want to take a
moment to commend this committee for approaching this issue in
a bipartisan way and finding the right solutions for our
Nation's kids and our Nation's economy.
Second point I want to make, as some of the other panelists
have made, is that there are innovative and proven solutions to
address the graduation crisis and increase the academic
readiness of our students. We know they exist. We recently did
a report with Jobs for the Future, which highlights approaches
like expanded learning time, rapid response, intervention, and
intensive focus on language and math skills in the ninth grade,
which all help to better prepare students for advancement to
the sophomore year, which is a strong predictor of future on-
time graduation.
We also know the importance of creating more challenging
academic environments, developing more direct connections
between academic standards and college or job readiness
requirements, and making explicit the links between high school
and postsecondary opportunities. States and cities from New
York to Chicago to Portland, Oregon, as the chairman noted, all
across the country, have all created successful policies and
programs to increase graduation success, and many have, of
those programs have been successful.
Let me just note one, the Multiple Pathways to Graduation
Program in New York City, which replaced 20 of the lowest-
performing high schools with 189 new small schools. Many of
those schools are now graduating two to three times as many
students who have fallen off the normal path than other high
schools that they replaced.
Third, the Graduation Promise Act that, as I mentioned, I
think is a critical tool to help lower the dropout rates,
improve academic readiness, and support proven models to keep
kids in school and on the path to educational success. There's
a clear role for the Federal Government in addressing our
Nation's dropout crisis. I love the Gates Foundation. You see
some of their grantees here, but it's not enough to just rely
on the Gates Foundation to fund innovative means of improving
school graduation and performance. Worthwhile State and local
efforts deserve Federal support, as well, and that's why I
think this committee is considering what they need to get done.
The Graduation Promise Act provides a critical set of
Federal tools to assist States as they fight high school
attrition. It seeks to directly interrupt the dropout crisis in
the worst performing schools. In addition to the Federal,
State, local partnerships for improving low-performing high
schools, title II of that act will offer new grants to schools,
higher education institutions, non profit organizations, and
other partnerships to develop specific ways to help current
dropouts, perspective dropouts, and older students, and those
facing English language barriers, better navigate high school
toward the goal of on-time graduation and solid preparedness
for college or a career. Title III of the Graduation Promise
Act also authorizes additional competitive grants to States to
devise successful policies to align the twin goals of higher
graduation rates and maintaining high academic standards.
In 1989, Congress set a goal that America's schools should
have a 90 percent graduation rate. We still haven't bumped up
over 70 percent. Seven in ten students only, graduate from high
school. If you look at racial and ethnic minorities, only about
half are graduating on time. That's unacceptable, it's
detrimental to our Nation's long-term economic competitiveness.
I think the efforts that this committee is undertaking will
prove practical, cost-effective, and reasonable steps toward
improving life expectations of our young people and reversing
that, that potential for economic tragedy for our country.
I strongly encourage the committee to move both the
Graduation Promise Act and the other initiatives that have been
discussed this morning.
[The prepared statement of Mr. Podesta follows:]
Prepared Statement of John D. Podesta
Thank you, Chairman Kennedy, Senator Enzi, and members of the
committee. I am John Podesta, President and Chief Executive Officer of
the Center for American Progress. I am also a Visiting Professor of Law
at the Georgetown University Law Center.
I appreciate the opportunity to be with you today to discuss the
serious and growing graduation crisis in American schools. As the
committee considers the reauthorization of the No Child Left Behind
Act, it is imperative for our Nation's economic success--and for the
life chances of our children--that you examine ways to not only improve
school standards and accountability but also increase the ability of
States and localities to keep kids in school and move them successfully
through to graduation.
I would like to talk with you today about the Graduation Promise
Act (GPA), introduced yesterday by Senators Bingaman, Burr, and
Kennedy, and developed with the support of the Center for American
Progress, Jobs for the Future, the Alliance for Excellent Education,
and the National Council of La Raza. I believe the GPA is a necessary
and vital step toward improving our Nation's graduation rates. It will
provide critical Federal resources to aid States in their efforts to
develop, implement, and expand proven methods for keeping a diverse
range of students in school and on the path to economic success.
It is well established that our students have fallen behind past
generations of Americans and young people in other nations in terms of
on-time high school completion rates. For decades now, the United
States on-time graduation rate has failed to top 70 percent. This is
below national graduation rates recorded in the middle of the twentieth
century and well below current graduation rates in other countries. The
United States ranked first in the world in terms of secondary school
graduation rates 40 years ago. Today it ranks 17th.
For racial and ethnic minorities, the statistics are even grimmer.
Graduation rates for African-Americans and Hispanic students today
range between 50 percent and 55 percent. Every year we lose more and
more of these students in schools that are essentially ``dropout
factories,'' a term used by Johns Hopkins University researchers Robert
Balfanz and Nettie Letgers to describe the 2,000 worst performing
schools in terms of graduation rates.\1\
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
\1\ Balfanz, Robert and Nettie Letgers, ``Locating the Dropout
Crisis: Which High Schools Produce the Nation's Dropouts? Where are
They Located? Who Attends Them?'' Report 70, Johns Hopkins University,
September 2004.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
In a rapidly shifting global economy, where knowledge and skills
are crucial to good paying jobs, too many of our students are falling
off the track to economic independence and advancement. In turn, the
lack of basic educational attainment unduly consigns millions of our
young people to a life of low earnings and poverty. High school
dropouts are twice as likely to be unemployed as those with diplomas;
working dropouts are far more likely to have low-wage jobs and fewer
health and retirement benefits than others.
It is clear that a high school diploma is the bare minimum
requirement for decent work and economic security in today's world. It
is thus incumbent upon all of us to do more to ensure that our students
stay in school and on the path to greater intellectual achievement and
improved job skills. In a nation with the resources and talent of ours,
graduation should never be a ``fifty-fifty'' proposition for anyone.
In November 2006, the Center for American Progress and Jobs for the
Future originally proposed the Graduation Promise Act as a way for the
Federal Government to support States in their efforts to boost
graduation rates.\2\ In a report entitled, ``Addressing America's
Dropout Challenge,'' Adria Steinberg, Cassius Johnson, and Hilary
Pennington describe a range of successful State programs for improving
school completion rates and propose several policies that serve as the
basis for the exact bill we are discussing today.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
\2\ Steinberg, Adria, Cassius Johnson, and Hilary Pennington,
``Addressing America's Dropout Challenge: State Efforts to Boost
Graduation Rates Require Federal Support,'' Center for American
Progress and Jobs for the Future, November 17, 2006. [http://
www.americanprogress.org/issues/2006/11/graduation.html]
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
The CAP/JFF report highlights how extended learning time, rapid
response and intervention when students fail or fall behind, alongside
intensive focus on language and math skills in the 9th grade, all help
to better prepare students for advancement to sophomore year--a strong
predictor of future on-time graduation. Other research featured in the
report highlights the importance of creating more challenging academic
environments for potential ``off-track'' students, developing more
direct connections between academic standards and college or job
readiness requirements, and making more explicit links between high
school and postsecondary college or job opportunities through greater
college exposure and internships.
Modeled on these and other efforts, the authors of the report
feature a number of current State-level policies and programs to
increase graduation success. For example:
Indiana enacted the Dropout Prevention Act in 2006 to
require schools to identify 9th graders who are falling behind and then
advise them on ways to catch up and get additional tutorial help.
New York City has created a program to increase ``multiple
pathways to graduation,'' by offering students of various ages and
academic achievement different options for getting back on track,
including transfer schools that provide small, targeted aid for at-risk
students. These schools are now graduating two to three times as many
students who have fallen off the normal path than other high schools.
Other school districts in cities from Chicago and Boston
to Milwaukee and Chattanooga have put in place a range of methods for
predicting which students are most likely to dropout and devised
effective strategies for keeping these kids in school and improving
their college and job preparedness. Graduation rates are showing signs
of improvement in all of these cities.
As these State and local efforts have shown, identifying potential
dropouts and then executing strategies for keeping students in school
should not be an episodic process. It requires sustained monitoring,
creativity, and specialized intervention in order to succeed.
Researchers and practitioners know that we can dramatically improve
graduation rates, but they need more support in order for the
strategies to take hold and work over time.
The Graduation Promise Act, therefore, proposes a set of Federal
efforts to assist States in fighting high school attrition in three
primary areas: more directly interrupting the dropout crisis in the
worst performing schools; developing new strategies for improving
graduation rates while maintaining academic standards; and investing
more in proven methods for increasing graduation rates and supporting
State policies in this area.
Since Bob Wise has addressed the general problem of low-performing
high schools that is the core challenge addressed in the first part of
GPA, let me focus on the second and third aspects of the bill.
Title II of the Graduation Promise Act authorizes the Secretary of
Education to award $60 million in competitive, peer-reviewed grants for
the development, execution, and replication of promising and innovative
methods to help schools prevent dropouts. In devising this provision,
the goal was to provide seed money for empirically-driven,
methodologically rigorous pilot programs that will help schools
increase graduation rates without sacrificing their academic standards.
As the authors of the CAP/JFF report describe, there is a useful
precedent for this type of experimentation in the National Science
Foundation's Statewide Systemic Initiatives Program of 1991:
Having determined that it was critical to enable dramatic
changes in the way mathematics, science, and technology were
taught, Congress seeded efforts in 25 States to align policy,
develop new standards and assessments, and set up research and
demonstration schools that would serve as models for statewide
reform. The results: demonstrable improvements in hands-on
school work and small-group work in motivating student
inquiries; better instructional materials; and more standards-
based policies for curriculum improvements, student assessments
and teacher preparations.\3\
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
\3\ Steinberg et al., p. 17.
Like these past efforts, Title II of the Graduation Promise Act
will offer new grants to schools, higher education institutions,
nonprofit organizations, or other partnerships to develop specific ways
to help current dropouts, prospective dropouts, older students, and
those facing English-language barriers better navigate high school
toward a goal of on-time graduation and solid preparedness for college
or a career.
In determining the ultimate viability and success of these
programs, and the potential worthiness for future replication, Congress
and the Secretary of Education will want to explore a number of
important criteria for success. For example:
Does the intervention program lead to improvement in
achievement, graduation rates, and other key school outcomes above and
beyond what would have occurred without the intervention?
Why and how were these effects achieved?
What aspect of the reform drove the effects?
What was the role of enabling conditions (including new
policies)?
Was the cost worth it in terms of outcomes? \4\
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
\4\ Steinberg et al., p. 22.
To help answer these and other questions, any recipient of GPA
grants will be required to collect and analyze relevant data on the
success of various programs and disseminate this information to school
districts and State and local education agencies. The Secretary of
Education will also have the authority to commission outside,
independent evaluations of these programs to measure and assess the
impacts of these programs.
In addition to providing grants for innovative new programs, Title
III of the Graduation Promise Act authorizes another $40 million in
competitive grants to States for devising successful policies for
aligning the twin goals of achieving higher graduation rates and
maintaining high academic standards and college/career readiness.
In order to avoid more ``dropout factories'' in America, title III
requires that each participating State first conduct a so-called gap-
and-impact analysis of the policies, regulations, and laws affecting
the following areas: school funding; data capacity; accountability
systems; interventions in high priority secondary schools; new school
development; and dissemination and implementation of effective local
school improvement activities throughout the State.
Following this analysis, States will then use their grants to
develop policies to align their school systems with the methods that
work best to keep students in school and better prepare them for the
future.
As Indiana, New York, Louisiana, and other States have shown, there
are proven methods for moving ``off-track'' students into alternative
learning environments such as small schools and other recovery models
for struggling students. States are also implementing stronger policies
to align higher graduation rates with better college preparation and
career-readiness targets.
But these efforts require more sustained funding in order to be
given a full chance to work for consecutive generations of students.
Title III of the GPA will allow more States to address the policy gaps
between innovative models for graduation success and the current
structure of their school systems.
Congress set a goal in 1989 that America's schools should have a 90
percent graduation rate. Eighteen years later, roughly 7 in 10
students--and only half of racial and ethnic minority students--
graduate on-time from high school. This is unacceptable and detrimental
to our Nation's long-term economic competitiveness.
Equally important, there is no reason for our Nation's schools to
continually return such paltry graduation numbers. Educators and
policymakers know more than ever about how best to close the
``graduation gap'' and better situate our students in the global
economy. The Graduation Promise Act would provide critical support to
these efforts and would signal a strong Federal commitment to prevent
millions more American students from dropping out of school and
limiting their opportunities in life.
The Graduation Promise Act represents practical, cost-effective,
and reasonable steps toward improving the life expectations of our
young people. I strongly encourage the committee to move this bill
forward.
Thank you, Mr. Chairman and the members of the committee, for
inviting me today. I'd be happy to take any questions you may have.
The Chairman. I want to thank the panel. This has been an
extraordinary, helpful panel. They've outlined the challenges
in a very informed way and have all made a series of very
constructive recommendations about what our roles are in
improving middle and high school education. It's been a very,
very positive, very helpful, tough-minded, but useful.
I want to thank Senator Murray for joining us here. She's
been particularly concerned about these issues as a former
teacher herself, and a school board member. She brings to our
committee a very special insight and has been extremely active
and involved in policy matters, particularly in the areas of
dropouts and education issues. We thank her.
We're joined by Senator Burr, who has been mentioned with
Jeff Bingaman, I was delighted to join with them on this
targeted program to deal with middle schools. Thank Senator
Isakson, who's enormously interested in this issue, these
issues of education.
Senator Bingaman, I know has to go to the floor on the
consideration of the America Competes Act, so I'll ask him if
he'll be our first questioner.
Senator Bingaman. Well, thank you very much, Mr. Chairman.
I don't have questions. I did want to just say a word, though,
and thank you for your leadership, and Senator Burr for his
leadership and, of course, Senator Enzi, and all the others on
this committee that have worked hard to try to focus on this
problem.
I do think around here is, my observation over the time
I've been here is that, you can only take action, significant
legislative action, when you've got a critical mass of
awareness and concern about a problem. I think we are to a
point where there is a critical mass of awareness and concern
about this dropout problem, that we can do something
significant in No Child Left Behind's reauthorization this year
to deal with it.
I think this Graduation Promise Act, which you co-sponsored
with Senator Burr and myself, is a good proposal in that it
would try to target funds on the exact schools Bob Balfanz
talked about and many of the other witnesses talked about.
I do think the other key point is obviously, that we now
know enough to know how to do something significant. I think
for a long time it was just anecdotal and there, everyone had
their story about some school or some principal or some teacher
that was making a very major difference in keeping students
engaged, and in school, and making progress. Now I think we
know enough that, we know enough about where the problem's
concentrated, as you pointed out--50 percent of the dropouts
concentrated in 15 percent of the high schools. Bob mentioned
that statistic as well. That gives us the opportunity to really
concentrate on solving the problem and we do know how to solve
the problem. I hope we will take this great opportunity and do
so this year in the rewrite of No Child Left Behind.
But again, thank you for letting me be here and thanks for
the great hearing.
The Chairman. Good.
We welcome Senator Brown, who was here at the beginning of
the hearing. I thank his long-standing interest in education,
health matters, and we're so grateful that he's been here
through the course of matter.
Senator Enzi, would you like to follow, since Jeff has
spoken for our side. Would you like to be recognized? And then
we'll resume the order, but going back and forth.
Senator Enzi. If you want to ask some questions first, that
would be fine.
The Chairman. Well, I'd just take one, maybe if I could,
please.
We've had very constructive suggestions and ideas.
If the other members have a particular scheduling time, we
try to cooperate and deal with those.
I'm interested in, and some of you have referenced this,
about, what is our responsibility in this whole process? You
know, we can listen to the different witnesses and you can hear
about these responsibilities--the Federal level, State, and
local communities, I mean, it's going to take a combination--we
hear what's going on in North Carolina. You've mentioned it's
had a very proud tradition with a series of Governors going way
back to Terry Sanford. Going back to even before, there has
been long-committment to education issues and having been down,
myself, to the university to listen to things that were
happening 2 or 3 years ago, it was enormously impressive.
We've seen in some of these communities and in Chattanooga
what's been happening there. Governor Wise talks about it at
the State level. Mr. Podesta talks about the hope that's out
there. We listened to Bob Balfanz who told us, very eloquently,
about what keeps happening, particularly in the Baltimore
school systems.
Just very quickly and then we'll move on. I'll recognize
Senator Enzi. If you could apprise me, we've got the
legislation that's there, but there has to be more. We've
talked about how the support we're going to give is going to
help the States to move, and we've got to try and work with the
teachers to get them up to speed. Could you talk a little bit
about what you think is a fair responsibility for us here at
the Federal level to try and, maybe each one will take a quick
crack at it. Then I'll recognize Senator Enzi.
Mr. Balfanz. I'll start. I think a prime role is to be the
steward of the reform for these dropout factories, for lack of
a better word. Right now, we can ask ourselves, why haven't we
brought reforms to scale? Why haven't we brought the successful
things where they need to be? We know some things stand in the
way.
Occasionally, not often, it's a lack of will. That's where
I think No Child Left Behind is important, by saying, ``We're
not going to let you wait 5, 10 years to reform these schools.
Every year you're losing kids, you could do better. Do better
now.''
Second of all, there's uneven resources and know-how at
school levels, district levels, State levels. There's a role to
help even that out, to making sure everyone has access to the
high-quality technical assistance they need, that it's not the
luck of the draw, that you happen to have a good
superintendent, or you happen to live in a progressive State
that's invested in education. That every kids knows that where
they go to high school, there's that support mechanism.
Finally, it's helping to even out the resources, because
many districts have made, sort of, this Hobbesian choice
between investing in early education or secondary education.
What happens is, they put it in the front end, which makes a
lot of sense, but then when the kid drops out, all those
resources and investments walk out the door. Those are some of
the key areas.
The Chairman. Good. Mr. Wise.
Mr. Wise. Senator, I would argue that the Federal role can
continue to be what it is, which is targeted, but recognizing
it's responding to a truly National compelling need. This is a
silent Sputnik. When you see the statistics that are laid as
they are, we're losing, in terms of our international
competitiveness, 80 percent of current jobs require
postsecondary.
What's the Federal role? I would suggest where, since we
know 71 percent of our eighth graders are reading below grade
level, the Striving Readers Authorization targeted--Senator
Murray, thank you very, very much for your leadership in
introducing that here. Data and research, Senator, best bang
for the buck to help everyone make decisions, once again, from
the teacher to the Senator in making sure the States have good
systems.
Finally, as Bob has illustrated, as everyone here has, we
know where these schools are. States don't have the resources
to go in and do the job completely themselves. They need the
assistance of the Federal Government, but having said that,
States must also build the capability, the turn-around teams,
for instance, the administrators, and so on. There's a
partnership there, but it can be targeted, it can be laser-
like, but it meets a National need.
The Chairman. Mr. Habit.
Mr. Habit. Senator, my response would be a little bit
different. I agree with what's been said prior to me, that we
need to be very clear-eyed about the resistance to changes.
Everybody wants change, no one wants to change. And so, as we
think about the structures and the intent of legislation to
affect change within systems, within communities, I think it's
a matter of looking at ways to accommodate the need, to shift
those beliefs, and to expose those beliefs, so that they're
really, quite frankly, is nowhere to hide. I hate to put it in
those terms, but that's the way it occurs to me at this
particular moment.
We see educators who deeply, deeply believe that all
children can not achieve at high levels. When we take them
through a very thoughtful process of looking at what happens in
classrooms, when all children, especially poor children, can do
high-level academic work? It's quite often a very emotional
event. The wall falls, and these individuals are very impacted
by what they see and recognizing that in many ways they've
cheated their children, thinking they were doing what they knew
to be the best. Hard working, committed people who don't have
that first-hand experience. As a result, don't own the process,
the need to make change in their schools.
The Chairman. Ms. Varner.
Ms. Varner. I think the sanctions with No Child Left Behind
have certainly made States figure out ways to comply, but
complying is not living up to the intentions of No Child Left
Behind. I would recommend supporting States to really monitor
and hold their districts accountable for what matters. And
we've laid out some of the things that really matter. To
recognize districts for the growth they're making, even if
they're not there yet, but mostly to help States, help support
States so that they're just not complying to avoid the
sanctions.
The Chairman. Mr. Podesta.
Mr. Podesta. Just a couple of words. I think that, I
mentioned the work we've done with the Chamber, and I think if
you look across the States, what you see is those States that
have sustained the effort, make the biggest improvements, from
Massachusetts to North Carolina. I think one of the roles of
the Federal Government, much as Bob said, is to try to shepherd
and use the Federal resource in partnership with State and
local resources to get them focused on the right set of goals,
to try to create the right kind of systems, that will keep
these States moving forward. And again, focusing on the real
problem of these dropout factories, but giving them the
incentives and the sustained capacity to align their policy, so
that we can make real improvements over time.
The Chairman. Senator Enzi.
Senator Enzi. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
Great testimony, great ideas, even some great phrases that
we'll use and probably credit you with the first time.
[Laughter.]
Mr. Habit, I'm particularly interested in your high
expectations and how you achieve that. In Sheridan, Wyoming we
have an institute for teachers, for Native Americans, Alaskans,
and Hawaiians. It's in conjunction with Stanford University and
it is making some amazing differences for that subgroup. When I
asked them what the key was, they said, ``High expectations.''
There's a little more to it than that. Can you explain a little
bit about how you develop these high expectations?
Mr. Habit. We spend a year in planning with a team before
they launch a new school and the emphasis of that time is to
explore. What does a classroom look like when children are
required to take only the high level courses? We, in North
Carolina, have had a history of tracking children and we have
some courses that, quite frankly, place little demands on
children. In these schools, asking teachers to design their
schools where the default, the default course of study are
these high-level courses. And then, provide teachers with the
training for how to support the students to master that high-
level work.
The experience we have again and again is, as the teachers
move toward opening their schools, they themselves are
surprised to see how students stretch. As one teacher said to
me last week, ``I'm seeing students who are taking physics that
I never would have thought would be suitable for that
particular course.''
Senator Enzi. Thank you.
Ms. Varner, you've successfully built that sense of high
expectations in your schools and you've been able to bridge the
gap of everybody stressing change, but nobody actually wanting
to change. You know, I really commend you on offering one
diploma. At the roundtable we had, you mentioned the career
academies and how that brought relevance to what the kids were
learning. Could you tell us a little bit more about the career
academies and ways they may have affected students in every
grade?
Ms. Varner. Well, as I said, we were looking to do more
than just offer vocational education. We weren't sure how we
should go about it, but one of the smartest things we did was
we started sitting down with members of our business community.
And so, at the table we had people from the business community,
principals, teachers, we had students at the table too, and we
were talking about the kinds of skills students need for the
21st Century. As I said, the first thing we realized is we're
preparing students for jobs we don't even know will exist. And
so, what are the skills they need for any job?
With those conversations, we decided that, when we develop
curriculum, the curriculum for these courses, we need to co-
construct them with our business partners. That's exactly what
we've done. They've been a part of constructing the
curriculums, they have been co-teaching--not violating any
laws--and they have been part of the assessment teams, as part
of the assessment, we have students take the traditional tests
and we're happy to say that our students who are learning math,
for example, through our construction academy are scoring as
well or better than students who are not in that construction
academy.
We are also having them assess those skills we were talking
about, persistence, curiosity, independence, collaboration. I
mean, these are some of the skills--entrepreneurial thinking--
these are the skills we're hearing that students will need in
the 21st century.
Our students are graduating and competing for jobs in
America and some of their competitors don't even live here and
will never have to live here. And so, there's a sense of
urgency around that. We're continuing to read as much as we
can, talk as much as we can to our business partners, and to
make sure that the academies meet the needs of our smartest
students, as well as the needs of our strugglers who are
getting there.
That's another thing that was important to us. We have what
we call ``Circuit Breakers'' and so we are constantly sitting
down looking to see who's enrolling in which academy. And if we
see, for example, that this academy has a disproportionate
number of minority students or special ed students, or gifted
students, that's a ``Circuit Breaker'' for us. We need to do
something, and we need to something with what we're offering.
That each academy has something to attract students with all
their talents, with all their interests, with all their
passions.
Senator Enzi. As I recall, you also said that you found
that some students that go into, for example, the construction
academy wanting to be a carpenter, decide instead that they can
be the architect.
Ms. Varner. Right. Right, I forgot I said that last time.
One of the things we say to students, is the most frustrating
thing is to be working in a company and realize you're smarter
than the people you're working for, but you don't have the
credentials to do that. And so, that's part of our preparation,
to make sure they can offer any opportunities. If they want to
be on the ground floor just laying the bricks, I applaud them.
Some days I wish I were doing that, and didn't have to go home
and do the kind of thinking that I'm demanded to do. Wherever
they want to be in any organization, we're preparing them for
that.
Senator Enzi. Then what you learned from the career academy
you applied to the lower grades some way too, by preparing the
younger students for middle and high school--how does that fit
in?
Ms. Varner. What we're doing with our middle schools,
actually what we did with our, we took our ninth lowest
performing elementary schools and our Foundations helped us to
provide some support there, so that they would enter middle
school with the basics. We, in the networks that we have--
elementary, middle, and high schools meet on a regular basis to
talk about what's needed at the next level or what kind of
preparation the students aren't coming with.
For the academies, our high schools are meeting with our
middle schools and talking about the kinds of skills we want to
begin developing as early as middle school, and the kind of
course work. There was a time where we had students in
Chattanooga who could go all the way through high school with
remedial math and graduate with Algebra I as their highest
math. Now what we're doing to make sure that the students can
excel in what we're offering in the academies is--we want
Algebra I in middle school, so that students have
opportunities, more students are on track for courses like
calculus.
Will they all get there? No, they won't, the good thing is
we don't know who's going to get there so we're pushing
everybody in that direction.
Senator Enzi. Thank you for your passion and your
entrepreneurial skills in school.
Ms. Varner. Thank you.
The Chairman. Senator Murray.
Senator Murray. Mr. Chairman, thank you so much for having
this hearing.
I had an opportunity in my office to hear much of your
testimony and it was very compelling and really excellent, and
I'm delighted that we are focusing on this middle and high
school age level. Obviously with No Child Left Behind, a lot of
focus went into what we were doing in elementary education.
There's no doubt that it is absolutely critical, but looking at
the whole picture of what happens when they get to middle
school and high school is also critical. The dropout rate is
obviously what we all look at as the factor that says how we're
doing there. None of us likes where we are with the dropout
rate.
I started looking at this a number of years ago to find out
why kids are dropping out of school and it is very complex.
There's no simple, single issue we can point to. But it seemed
to me there were a number of factors that we needed to address
and that's why I introduced legislation called the Pass Act for
High School reform and have been working to implement parts of
that since then.
One of the things I heard from many students as I went out
to work on this in high schools was, ``Well, no one ever told
me in seventh grade that I needed 4 years of math to get into
college. No one ever talked to me about the fact that I needed
a foreign language.'' Kids in middle school often don't have a
strong family support. They may be the first person to look at
graduating. They may not have anybody in their own community
that is talking to them about what they need. Part of what I
put into this was academic counselors, to begin to focus our
kids in middle school on making sure they have a plan.
Washington State has a program called Navigation 101 that
really helps parents and students set goals to map their
progress and know what they need to do. I wanted to ask some of
you today, how you think we might be doing better if we started
reaching down into the middle schools to help our kids plan for
what they needed to do, not just to graduate, but to get into
our colleges?
Maybe, Governor Wise, if we could start with you?
Mr. Wise. Sure. Middle schools are a vital part of it and
your Pass Act, led the way, I think, to showing us a lot of it
through the counseling, through the recognition of math and
literacy coaches, through the calculation of graduation rates,
as well. Bob Balfanz can speak, and I won't speak for him,
about the indicators that are already in middle school for
whether or not you're going to succeed in high school.
What I would urge, though, is that, as you have in your
Pass Act, as you have in Striving Readers, that you continue,
as well, to recognize the importance of literacy. That we have,
essentially at the Federal level and most States, stopped doing
literacy, reading instruction by the fourth grade. That's when
children are learning to read in middle, beginning with middle
school and high school, it switches to, they need to read to
learn and they don't have the skills, as Edna Varner so well
described. That's critical.
Now, middle schools are a vital part of it, and once again,
the chart, the air graph I drew, shows that the Federal
contribution and effort in middle schools, it drops off sharply
after about the fifth grade.
Senator Murray. That's correct. The other part of my
legislation really looks at the fact that once a student gets
into middle and high school there is no targeted teacher who's
there to help them with learning how to read or how to do math.
We sort of get them out of sixth grade and say, ``You're on
your own,'' and there's no teacher teaching reading skills.
Mr. Wise. The common elements are here and, Senator Burr,
you attended and spoke at a function with Senator Bingaman
about 6 months ago, where MDRC did an evaluation of programs
such as Talent Development and others. It's the common
elements, and one of them is the personalization. A personal
graduation plan starting at least in the seventh grade for
every student, that recognizes their strengths and their
challenges and maximizes them, to put them on a pathway to
success. Also having a direct relationship with an adult in the
building. What ninth grader raises his or her hand to say, ``I
can't read very well, help me out.'' That's why we need to have
a restructuring, as well as additional resources.
Senator Murray. Other comments from you?
Mr. Podesta. I would just add that the sorting process, as
you alluded to, a center is well established by middle school
and middle school counselors are making important decisions for
and with young people. Training and supporting counselors that
think differently about academic rigor is critically important.
Senator Murray. Yes, and that's one of the things I've
found, is that students themselves identified counselors as the
person you go to if you have a personal problem, not as someone
you would go to who would help you plan your academic career.
That's why, in my bill, I called them academic counselors to
change the focus.
Ms. Varner. Remember also, that in many schools a guidance
counselor has 500 students to see. One of the things we're
trying to do is have our guidance counselors work with teachers
who have small advisory groups of about 15. Those teachers
review the student's instructional plan. As students move on to
high school, they meet with other advisors. Because guidance
counselors can't do it all, but guidance counselors have been
very helpful in helping other teachers build the skills to keep
up with that plan, to revise it each year with parents, and
students, and the school, and the child's records there.
Senator Murray. I think it's important to point out, that
doesn't preclude parents. Guidance counselors are there to give
support.
Ms. Varner. Absolutely.
Senator Murray. Correct? It does take resources to provide
those counselors.
Ms. Varner. Absolutely.
Mr. Podesta. I'd just like to add one thing on the middle
grades connection and that is, in many ways we keep forgetting
about middle schools. This is when students independently
decide to engage or disengage from schooling. You do well in
elementary if you just like to go to school, and you like kids,
and you're good at follow the leader. You do what they tell
you, you do fine. In the middle grades, they start asking you
to think for yourself. I mean, the mathematics gets more
difficult, you have to comprehend what you're reading, and
answer questions. If no one builds that bridge for you, you
start feeling lost, and you start feeling, maybe this isn't for
me. You start disengaging.
On the opposite hand, if somebody reaches out to you, if a
teacher grabs you and pulls you along, you become engaged and
excited about schooling. We sort of just ignore that, and we
sort of leave it up to the kids, believe it or not. And
especially, in high poverty environments, they disengage in
huge numbers. Once they disengage, it's very hard to get them
back.
Senator Murray. I would agree. Well, I think we have a lot
of work that we can move toward.
We've got a lot of good research out there and I hope, Mr.
Chairman, we can really focus on this area and really work to
make sure that all kids can succeed. Thank you.
The Chairman. Senator Isakson, is giving me the long and
distant look. Senator Isakson, you're recognized.
Senator Isakson. I have a staffer back there at the door,
who's telling me I've got to leave.
The Chairman. OK.
Senator Isakson. I want to thank my neighbor from North
Carolina because I wanted to make two points. The Hamilton
County story is a great story. That's a neighboring county to
my State of Georgia, just on the other side of the line from
Dalton and Lookout Mountain. When I chaired the State Board of
Education, I was, from time to time, in some groups that shared
information. If you look at those growth charts and the
improvement they've made, I mean, they've made substantial
improvements and it's because of two things. One, is
intervention, and the other's innovation. So I just wanted to
make a statement.
One, I want to help you with the bill. The biggest mistake
we make is by trying to think that at the high school level
that there's a cookie-cutter solution to what is a complicated
problem. Mr. Podesta made the statement that 70 percent of the
kids graduate, 30 percent don't.
I'll tell you another interesting number. I was with the
head of the Army, recruiting for the last 3 years. General Van
Antwerp, who's now been nominated to head the Corps, he's been
in charge of Army recruiting for the last 3 years. Seventy
percent of the eligible 18- to 24-year-olds to volunteer for
the military can't get in.
They can't get in because of two reasons. One, is half of
them haven't graduated from high school or, this is that 30
percent, and the other is obesity. That tells you what a huge
problem we have in this country, in terms of the effects of the
dropout rate. Not just on the lives of those children as they
hopefully go to some post secondary work, but for our own
country's ability to attract, in a voluntary service, the
people we need for our military.
I commend you on what you've done. I have one suggestion.
One of the things we never do up here enough, is create within
our legislation, a best practices center for the consolidation
of the information so when the grants go out and somebody like
Hamilton County innovates a system that works and there are
other Hamilton Counties in the country but every county's
different. Our Department of Education, should be a best
practices center where--through the web we can post and,
principles and systems can go on that site and say, ``Hey, my
county's like Hamilton County,'' and this worked in Hamilton
County and it can be a catalyst for reform.
Now, I am making a speech and not asking a question. I
apologize. This is a great bill. I want to help you with it,
and I thank my colleague from North Carolina for letting me
interrupt.
Senator Murray. It sounds like we need to put physical
education back into our high schools, too.
Senator Isakson. Oh, absolutely, I'm all for that too,
especially because of the obesity.
Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
The Chairman. Very good. Thanks very much.
Senator Burr.
Senator Burr. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
I want to thank the entire panel for their willingness to
come and to share their knowledge, and I want to particularly
thank John Podesta, who has a tremendous amount of valuable
information and, John, we appreciate that.
To my good friend, Governor Wise--Mr. Chairman, what you
don't know about Governor Wise is he has higher aspirations
than being Governor of West Virginia. He wants to drive for
NASCAR.
[Laughter.]
Mr. Wise. We've been there, Senator.
Senator Burr. It is a very scary thing that I envision, but
that would be true for me, as well.
Bob, it's great to see you and an old colleague, Tony
Habit, to have somebody here who can talk about some of the
things that we're actually getting right in North Carolina. The
fact that we're not arguing about process, we're focused on
outcome. I would tell you that that's at the heart of
everything from what Bob Balfanz said at that end and John
Podesta said at this end.
There's a measurement tool. It's what is the outcome of our
educational system. I think the thing that shocks me the most
about the high school graduation rate is, who in the hell is
outraged? Why is the Nation not screaming about this?
I, you know, Mr. Chairman, I want to make an observation. I
want to thank you because this is a No Child Left Behind
reauthorization hearing, and that we've spent much time talking
about graduation rates. I think we make a real mistake when we
take up NCLB in a vacuum of K-8, because, really the buy-in
when you talk about K-8, is on this side you have parents of
people in K-8 and on this side you have a lot of teachers who
are finding every reason not to like No Child Left Behind.
There is your audience.
When all of a sudden you go to graduation, your audience
becomes every parent in education, every parent who will have
children in education, every employer in the country who's
relying on that funnel for its next generation of the
workforce. All of a sudden you have a nation outraged about the
graduation rate. I truly think this is the start of something
really good. Yes, we've got some good bills, some creative
approaches. Is it the silver bullet? There isn't one.
I want to concentrate on a couple of specific areas and ask
those who would like to comment, to comment on those. You know,
I've had the opportunity to go in some Gates High School
classrooms. I've seen the investment, I've seen the transition
that happens in a year. I've gone to a high school that, to
accomplish the part that wanted to go into Gates and the part
that wanted to stay in traditional Gates, in Camden County. The
Gates kids, for this year's ninth grade and next year's ninth
and tenth grade are actually in trailers. Now, Governor, most
Governors say kids can't learn in trailers. Both of those
classrooms are over 20 kids, and most Governors say they can't
learn if there are that many kids. They have already broken the
mold in 1 year. They've got kids whose attendance went up,
whose involvement went up, whose excitement went up about
education. And it's, in fact, that excitement that will keep
them in when the going gets tough. What do they do? They've
approached things in a different fashion than what they were
used to.
Gates is one example, but I think the unique thing here
that I see is that we've got two private citizens, Bill and
Melinda Gates, who are willing to invest their money in the
reform of high school education in this country.
My first question is this, and I want to pose this to John
Podesta, and anybody else. If we came up with a Federal fund
that is available to match the private sector dollars that
funnel to reform of a high school, but those dollars don't go
just because somebody says they're going to reform. They don't
go just because they wrote a good grant. They go because they
have convinced private entities to invest in the reform. That's
Bill and Melinda Gates, that's any specific instance where you
can find where there's a private investment. That we would turn
around as a Federal Government, we would match the investment
in that school. What do you think of that approach?
Mr. Podesta. Well, Senator, as I said in my oral
presentation, I love the work that the Gates Foundation is
doing, but there's also an important Federal role. I think that
you see across the country now, for exactly the reasons that
you mentioned, employers being interested in schools, adopting
schools, moving money into schools, etc. You're onto something,
in the sense, that it shows that people who can, in the
marketplace, attract money because there's innovation that,
that's an important, one important factor.
The heart of the reform effort really has to be aimed at
understanding what's working, trying to, you know--there's not
going to be one cookie-cutter solution that fits all, but we
can find effective models, research them, try and replicate
them. It goes along with what Senator Isakson said--find those
models that work and try to replicate them across the country.
Some of that will involve foundation support, some of it might
involve business support, some of it should involve, I think,
Federal support. Obviously, the bulk of the money still is
going to come from State and local communities. I think those
things--viewing this, you know, it's maybe an overused word,
but viewing this as a partnership is an important concept.
That's what we should push for.
Senator Burr. Well, we do an awful job up here of
disseminating success, irregardless. It's not limited to
education.
Mr. Podesta. If I could, one more word. Senator Kennedy, at
the beginning, raised the Federal research money. If you think
about it, there is a lot of money being spent, but if you think
of the challenge the country faces, and we think about the
research dollars that are spent on technology, on medical
research, etc.
Then that number seems rather small by comparison, given
the challenge of reforming the educational system. If we're
going to spend research money, it can't be just kind of one
off, it's got to be targeted on what real improvements we need
that are going to begin to reform how we deal with the--
literacy has been mentioned in this program, how much we are
going, how we're going to deal with low performance schools.
When I was in the White House, the President's Committee on
Science and Technology actually focused on this question and
found a lot of the education research that was being done
wasn't double-blind, didn't read the results, wasn't
disseminated. A lot of research dollars were going out, but
there was no strategic focus to it and there was no strategic
focus to improving schools across the board. And that, I think,
is really what needs to happen with the dollars that are being
spent.
Senator Burr. Let me say, in the context that I asked that
question, I'm not talking about substituting this for the money
that's currently going in. I'm talking about--can Federal
dollars leverage private dollars?
If the answer is yes--and I think it is--then the question
is, who determines a genuine commitment to change and reform?
We traditionally have not done that well. Private entities,
corporations, foundations go through a rather extensive review
of whether somebody's serious about really changing something.
It seems like if you're talking about, over and above the
traditional partnerships that we have with Federal dollars and
State and local dollars, if you talk about opening a new door,
then you open a door that allows those private sources to
identify real genuine commitment, and use Federal dollars to
leverage, whether it's business, a foundation, or individual
support of those efforts.
Mr. Podesta. Actually, Senator, in some ways it is a mutual
leveraging going on. Because, I think, and let me just say as a
disclaimer, my organization is also a Gates grantee, but I
believe that the Gates Foundation is helping to leverage local,
State, and Federal dollars. Because they have jumpstarted the
high school by, in the last 10 years, they've probably moved it
30 years because of the number of projects they've started that
we can get best practices from, that we see what works, what
doesn't work. And so, now they've created interest at various
levels of Government.
By the same token, come back around where you are, and now
maybe we can leverage each other to improve best practices. I
can tell you, no State has money for the kind of research
that's necessary to do best practices. And so, to the extent
that this committee can get the Department, work with the U.S.
Department of Education to make it a true repository of good
research and best practices that every school district from
small, 5,000 people in Gilmore County, all the way to New York
City, can access to find what works for them. That would be a
great assistance.
Senator Burr. It shocks me when you look at the national
statistics, 70 percent graduation rate on time, 30 percent are
not making it, 32 percent in North Carolina. Yet, in some of
the underlying statistics, 88 percent of those are not
academically lost.
When I asked Bill Gates if our expectations were too low,
his answer to the HELP Committee was, ``My fear is we lose more
gifted children than we're losing academically challenged
kids.'' Bob, I think you stated it well. Those of us who do
look at the jobs that are being created in West Virginia, in
North Carolina, around this country, realize very quickly--
without a high school diploma, you may fill out an application,
but you will never get invited for an interview. The likelihood
is you won't get picked in the interview if, in fact, you
haven't got some additional higher education.
I can't think of a better investment in higher education
than to begin to fix the high school graduation rate. Because
it puts more kids in the queue, not only to be able to consider
it, but to do it in a way that the value of it is big to them.
Tony, let me turn to you for just 1 second. I thank the
chairman for his indulgence on time.
You stated extremely well that under the New Schools
Project, that when you engage a new high school in this
transition, that this is a secure program. It's 1 year of
planning and 5 years of implementation. I think we all
understand that we probably don't focus enough on the 1-year
planning and we may shorten the implementation over too short a
period of time. Let me ask you what happens at the end of that
6 years?
Mr. Habit. What happens at the end of the 6 years? In terms
of, how is that school different than the conventional school?
Senator Burr. In terms of all the things that you brought
to the table to accomplish that.
Mr. Habit. OK.
Senator Burr. Additional State money, additional local
money, additional Federal money, incentives for teachers,
whatever it is. As Johnny Isakson said, ``Every school's a
little bit different, so every configuration's going to be a
little bit different.'' Does that all go away? Is it no longer
needed now, because you've made this transition? The question
is, at what point do we consider a school a success and we move
on to try to do more and more with others?
Mr. Habit. Certainly, that's an excellent question,
Senator. I think that, first of all there are many different
approaches to redesigning schools and thinking of schools
differently, and--to your earlier comment about an innovation
fund, the notion of being clear about what are those designs
which get markedly different results is an important process in
looking at that.
What we would expect to see in a school that is funded with
external resources and the external capacity of our
organization and our school development team during that 6-year
process, we plan for sustainability from the very beginning, so
the resources that are brought to our team are committed
primarily to teacher training and development and coaching
services and the training and development of that principal.
Every single action we take and every tool we develop is vested
in the idea of sustainability beyond our relationship with that
school.
We would expect, for example, that the State of North
Carolina, their funding would sustain some things we've
initiated in that school through the design process. But at the
tail end of that, let me just mention some of the, kind of, key
elements that should be a part of every single school.
Every school, first of all, should have a focus. It doesn't
matter, necessarily, what that focus is. It could be
biotechnology, it could be entrepreneurship, as we heard from
Edna, it could be many different areas, but that focus gives
the teachers a way to connect the curriculum and to work
together as peers. If they're going to have that kind of
connection, what happens is, they begin to establish norms in
their school for what good teaching means. That focus continues
beyond our relationship.
They should have a relationship with a college or
university so that they have a plan within that school for,
``How am I going to be sure my kids get 12 hours, 15 hours of
college credit before they walk across that stage to get their
high school diploma? ''
They should have, in that school, created deeper
partnerships with their community and institutions in their
community. I know you visited Camden recently, not far from
Camden in Dare County, we're creating a school of maritime
studies. And to use that example in that school, they're
connecting with the research being conducted in Coastal North
Carolina and the Maritime Museum and other sorts of
institutions. Changing relationships with universities, with
the private sector, with resources.
The last two things that I would mention is that, teaching
should look very different in these schools, in every school.
When we talked today, we're talking so much about dropouts and
children who are at risk of failure. Your observation about Mr.
Gates and what he shared earlier, kind of rings true for us. We
know that our most advanced students need a different kind of
teaching. They need teaching that is very active, that's
engaging, that is applying content to real world problems and
needs, so that when they leave high school to go into college
and go into the workforce, they have developed the judgment,
the motivation, the kinds of soft skills Edna talked about in
her comments a few moments ago. Teaching should look really
different.
Then, the last thing that I would mention is that, these
schools would have a system of student support, a design to,
into that campus. We will never, as a country, be able to
afford enough counselors and social workers to provide for the
emotional and affective needs of children. In these schools,
teachers step into that role and they know they're there to
teach and monitor teaching, but they're also there to grow
young people into fully formed adults, prepared for a future
beyond that high school.
Senator Burr. Thank you.
Mr. Chairman, I think all of our witnesses today had a
common thread relative to college preparation. That was the
ability for students to get college-ready courses in high
school. I think one of the biggest challenges that we have is,
how do you make sure that rural America has the teachers that
it needs to teach AP courses. At a time where it's pretty tough
for rural America to attract teachers that meet the
qualifications, much more so for the AP side. I don't ask that
as a question. Mr. Chairman has been awfully kind with the
time.
The Chairman. Thank you. Thanks very much. Maybe we've
covered this, but just to make it somewhat clearer to me, about
the difference between the middle schools and the high schools.
Most of the lessons which you've talked about here, probably,
are generally applicable in terms of a seamless web. Would you
make a distinction? Or do you see what we're doing up in the
high school level all starts in the middle school and carries
on through? Maybe you could just comment.
Mr. Balfanz. I think there's, actually, some very important
commonalities, that at both levels you need to create, sort of,
a strong bond between a subset of teachers and subset of
students, so students know there's a subset of teachers that
really care about them. Teachers know that this is, these are
my 75 students and we--with my colleagues, not on my own--have
got to do what it takes to make them succeed. That creates a
very tight relationship at both the teacher and student level.
You need that at both levels because this is when students
are disengaging. You need a force to draw them back. What draws
them to school is their relationship with their teachers. They
come to school for their teachers, not because they're taking
Spanish. You have to make sure you enable the organization of
the school to give teachers time to do that.
Second of all, you have to have these high standards, but
you have to have the intensive extra help needed to make it
real for everyone. It's fine enough to say, ``Everyone will
learn algebra in eighth grade,'' but many of us in this room
struggled with algebra in eighth, ninth, or tenth grade. It's
just not saying, ``We'll offer it to you, it's there.'' It
often means giving extra time, it often means having extra help
labs, if often means, we found our high school, but I think
this works for middle school, that for certain kids it's almost
social-emotional issues, it's a fear of failure. To solve that
you have to know their story. To know their story, maybe for
that subset of kids, that's just the 10 kids you need a small
class size for, not everybody.
Then finally, I think at common levels, is you have to
realize we are asking teachers and administrators to do more
than just teach a good lesson. You have to have support systems
built up for them.
Also, I think there's this idea that we've found in both
the middle and high school level, that there's key indicators
you have to pay attention to. When a student fails sixth grade,
we found, in a high poverty environment, they do not recover,
absent intervention. If a student is starting to miss a month
of school in sixth grade, they will not miss less school in the
future unless you do something. I think those are some of the
common----
The Chairman. Good.
Mr. Balfanz [continuing]. Elements we find.
Mr. Podesta. Senator, it is a seamless web, and if I could
just, the analogy I've came to grips with as I got into this,
is the importance of building a strong foundation, which is
what we do pre-K to in the elementary grades. I'm not a
carpenter and you can build a strong foundation for me, I can't
finish the house on my own.
The recognition has to be, that as we build that critically
strong foundation, early childhood development for instance,
and then the early grades and reading initiatives and so on, we
have to recognize that in each stage of a child's life, they
have different needs, different learning mechanisms, and that
we're going to have to keep building that house for them. Which
is why, we can't simply say, ``We stop reading in fourth grade,
we stop these programs in fourth grade, if they, by fifth grade
they ought to have it and now they're on their way.''
Clearly, early childhood initiatives provide the foundation
and we have demonstrated results, but what we're also
demonstrating is, if you simply take children that have had a
good early childhood experience and then put them into
dysfunctional middle and high schools, their success is not
going to be anywhere near what it ought to be.
The Chairman. Mr. Habit, is there anything more that you'd
like to add?
Mr. Habit. No, sir.
The Chairman. Good. Then that went well. Well, we want to
thank you all for your very helpful comments and
recommendations. I think what we're going to do is, as we draft
the legislation, we're going to call on you to give us your
reactions and responses to it and hopefully we'll be worthy of
the kind of challenges you've put out there. It's been
enormously helpful and valuable. We're very grateful to all of
you.
Mr. Balfanz. Thank you.
Mr. Wise. Thank you.
Mr. Habit. Thank you, sir.
The Chairman. The committee stands in recess.
[Additional material follows.]
ADDITIONAL MATERIAL
Prepared Statement of the National Middle School Association
National Middle School Association, which represents more than
180,000 educators through individual and institutional memberships, is
committed to making middle grades the pride of the American education
system. As an organization, NMSA has established longstanding
partnerships with national, State, and local groups interested in
improving the lives of young people. But our efforts must be matched
with financial and policy support from all levels of government. We
believe that only by working together can we achieve the ambitious
agenda to provide all young adolescents with a quality education that
develops their skills and talents to the fullest extent.
Thoroughly preparing all American students to succeed in a
demanding and evolving global economy makes the transformation of
middle level education an imperative. Thriving in the 21st century
requires more than a basic understanding of reading, writing, and
mathematics. It requires the ability to apply sophisticated skills in a
variety of settings, solve complex problems individually and
collectively, and learn throughout a lifetime. While effective middle
level schools provide this strong foundation for young adolescents,
most schools serving 10- to 15-year-olds have not implemented the full
range of structures and supports that more than 30 years of research
and practice have shown to work with this age group.
Unless we take action now to change these patterns, millions of
young adolescents will be unable to compete in the world they will
encounter in high school and beyond. For example, while middle level
students steadily improved their mathematics performance on the
National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) in the past decade,
only 29 percent of U.S. eighth graders demonstrated competence with
challenging subject matter in both reading and math, and one-fifth of
those students scored below the basic level. In addition, while U.S.
eighth graders improved their math and science scores on international
assessments from 1995 to 2003, they still compared poorly to students
from other nations. One-fourth of eighth graders lack fundamental
reading skills, according to NAEP. Eighty percent of U.S. eighth
graders say they plan to obtain a bachelor's degree or higher, but many
do not have access to rigorous classes that provide the stepping stones
to higher education. Even when poorly prepared students gain admission
to college, they typically need so much remediation that they fail to
progress.
The national movement to ``leave no child behind'' has largely
bypassed students in the middle. Squeezed between the competing
interests of elementary and secondary education, middle level students
continue to fight for attention, respect, and financial equity. Under
the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB), 57 percent of the students tested
annually are in grades five through eight. Yet only about 15 percent of
all title I funds, the program that drives NCLB, are allocated to both
middle and high schools. Promising Federal programs, such as GEAR UP
and TRIO, which help disadvantaged middle level students prepare for
college, reach only 10 percent to 20 percent of those who are eligible
for assistance (see Addendum #1).
Successfully preparing the next generation of Americans means
significantly improving support for middle level schools. The middle
grades represent the most critical period in education because so many
decisions made during this stage determine whether children will reach
their full potential. Sixth graders who do not attend school regularly,
exhibit poor behavior, or fail math or English are very likely to drop
out before graduation from high school--many as early as ninth grade.
Only 1 in 10 of these students graduate on time and one in five
graduate in 5 years. By the eighth grade, many students have decided
whether they will drop out or graduate from high school, whether they
will take algebra and other ``gatekeeper'' courses that predict success
in college, and whether they will engage in risky behaviors such as
drug use and unprotected sex.
Although we fully support legislation to turn around failing high
schools, we urge you to consider turning around the failing middle
schools that feed into the 2,000 ``dropout factories'' identified in
the Graduation Promise Act. Given that we now know the warning
indicators that can identify [as early as sixth grade] students that
need more support and academic interventions, it is imperative that we
provide the necessary support and interventions immediately. It makes
no sense to wait until ninth grade to make sure that students stay in
school.
The reauthorization of the No Child Left Behind Act presents an
excellent opportunity to establish national middle level policy and
help raise student achievement in the middle grades. While we fully
agree with the basic goal of NCLB, that every child in our Nation
deserves an excellent education that enables him or her to be
successful in college and the workforce, we do not believe the
legislation fully addresses the needs of students in grades five
through eight.
Federal policy affects all aspects of middle level education and
can strengthen or hinder State and local efforts to improve schools. We
urge Congress and the Administration to consider the following
recommendations to strengthen the reauthorization of NCLB and create a
national middle level education policy necessary to help young
adolescents achieve their fullest potential.
The following eight recommendations are supported by NMSA as part
of a coalition of national organizations committed to improving middle
level education. The first five recommendations would establish a
national middle level education policy to help all students succeed.
The next three recommendations are necessary to improve student
achievement across grades K-12 and are critical in supporting student
success at the middle level.
A National Middle Level Education Policy Supported by the Following
Organizations: ACT; Academy for Educational Development; Alliance for
Excellent Education; The College Board; Education Development Center,
Inc.; International Reading Association; Learning Disabilities
Association of America; National Association of Secondary School
Principals; National Council of Teachers of English; National Forum to
Accelerate Middle-Grades Reform; National Middle School Association.
1. Authorize and expand Striving Readers as part of NCLB and fund
it at $200 million in the first year and increasing to $1 billion over
a period of 5 years. The Striving Readers Act (S. 958), new legislation
to help ensure that older students who are struggling can read and
write at grade level, will give students the literacy interventions
they need to succeed in school and graduate from high school with a
meaningful diploma. Every State would receive a grant to help teachers
in the content areas improve reading and writing achievement across the
curriculum in grades 4 through 12.
As educators and policymakers examine the data from their
State and district reading assessments, they are concerned that eighth
grade reading scores remain flat, and twelfth graders on average have
shown no reading improvement in the last 30 years. ACT reports that
over 50 percent of high school graduates in 2005 did not have the
reading skills they needed to succeed in college. Middle school
students who are not on target in reading are significantly more likely
not to be on target in English, Math, and Science. In fact, ACT's
latest research suggests that if students do not achieve a minimum
level of academic preparation by middle school, high school may be too
late to make up for these deficits.
Closing the achievement gap and ensuring that every
student is proficient in reading requires an intense focus on literacy
teaching and learning in the middle grades.
Struggling readers exist in every school. In our inner
cities and rural poor areas, it is not uncommon to find 50 percent of
our eighth graders reading at ``below basic'' levels. Scaling up
effective literacy instruction and support for struggling students in
the middle grades requires a significant investment beyond the funding
currently available under title I.
Federal reading policy essentially stops after third
grade. Students need more intensive reading curricula and support for
the remainder of their primary and secondary education in order to
achieve academically and in a postsecondary world.
2. Include the ``Math Now'' proposal included in the Senate version
of the America Competes bill (S. 761, Title II, Section 3201). This
necessary and important initiative would help strengthen teacher
preparation and professional development in math in the elementary and
middle grades.
Although eighth grade math scores have improved, we are
still far from preparing all students to take algebra by the end of
eighth grade so they can go on to higher level math courses in high
school. In fact, test data show the middle grades as the point when
average student achievement begins to lag. For example, the national
average mathematics score at grade four increased by 3 points from 2003
to 2005. But the score at grade eight showed only a 1-point increase in
that same time period.
The National Academy of Sciences has pointed out that
``students who choose not to or are unable to finish Algebra I before
the ninth grade--which is needed for them to proceed in high school to
geometry, Algebra II, trigonometry, and pre-calculus--effectively shut
themselves out of careers in the sciences.''
A full 86 percent of math and science teachers in the
Nation's highest minority schools are teaching out of field.
3. Amend the definition of Highly Qualified Teacher. Highly
qualified middle level teachers should demonstrate that they are
subject-matter competent by obtaining either a major or its equivalent
in one or more subjects that they teach or by passing a State-approved
competency measure or assessment, as well as demonstrate a solid
understanding of pedagogy for young adolescents.
Ensuring that all young adolescents have highly qualified
teachers and administrators is an essential first step in moving toward
the ultimate goal of ``highly effective'' teachers in every classroom
supported by ``highly effective'' school leaders.
If we expect all middle level students to succeed, we must
eliminate the disparities in their education starting with the quality
of the teachers and administrators hired to work with them. The No
Child Left Behind Act of 2001 left out a specific definition of a
highly qualified teacher at the middle level and did not speak to the
qualifications of school leaders.
Although an increasing number of States offer some type of
middle level certification or endorsement, fewer than half require
specialized, middle level preparation before teachers can work in the
middle grades. Only seven States insist that middle level
administrators know and use research-based leadership and instructional
practices to increase the academic performance and healthy development
of young adolescents.
According to The College Board, 40 percent of middle
school students in the physical sciences (including chemistry, biology
and physics) are taught by unqualified teachers, with the proportion in
biology approaching 30 percent. In math, these numbers exceed 20
percent.
New teachers should be required to obtain a middle level
certification and have a major in their subject area as the first step
to becoming a highly qualified and highly effective teacher. Funding
should be provided so teachers already in the workforce can earn a
middle level certification within 5 years through recertification
course work and/or personalized professional development growth plans
that include work in both content knowledge and pedagogy.
Furthermore, we recommend strengthening and expanding the
incentives for highly qualified administrators and teachers to lead
middle level reforms in our highest-need schools and school districts.
4. Provide adequate funding and support for ongoing, State-
administered technical assistance programs for all middle level schools
identified as ``in need of improvement.'' Funding should be allocated
for the development and implementation of school improvement plans.
According to the Center on Education Policy, about 10
percent of all schools (a majority of which are middle schools) have
been labeled in need of improvement. In the last 2 school years,
however, nearly two-thirds of the States reported receiving
insufficient Federal funds to carry out the NCLB-imposed duty of
assisting schools identified for improvement.
Technical assistance to help low-performing schools is not
widely available, leaving many middle level schools without support.
Funding to implement school improvement plans is critical.
For these plans to succeed, they need the financial resources to
provide supports such as school improvement facilitators, adolescent
literacy programs, professional development, extended learning time and
personal graduation plans.
5. Promote research and dissemination on effective policies and
practices in middle grades education. While there is a growing body of
research on middle grades education, the knowledge base is still
relatively small and not well understood. To ensure that educators make
wise decisions based on the latest scientific evidence, we recommend
that Congress do the following:
Encourage IES and other educational research agencies to
develop a strand of research designed to enhance the performance of
middle grades schools and students, including those who are most at
risk of educational failure. Research could target specific issues such
as effective practices in math, science and literacy; school-
improvement programs; and strategies for closing the achievement gap.
Encourage the Department of Education (through IES or
NCES) to develop a national database at the middle level that will
enable researchers to identify school and classroom factors that
facilitate or impede student achievement.
Establish a National Center on Middle Grades Education,
modeled after the National High School Center, that can synthesize and
disseminate the available research on effective middle grades policies
and practices.
K-12 Recommendations Necessary to Support a National Middle Level
Education Policy.
States should be required to provide ongoing, job-embedded
professional development for principals and teachers that support
school-based collaborative problem-solving and decision-making
activities to improve student achievement. Due to current national
needs, specific professional development in math, science, literacy,
formative and summative assessment practices, and English language
learning must be ongoing, especially in our highest need schools.
The traditional ``one-size-fits-all'' method of
advancing educators' skills by offering professional
development to all the teachers in a school or school district
without regard to individual needs is both inappropriate and
ineffective. Generic staff development does not improve
instruction and learning. We must ensure that all middle grades
teachers, both new and experienced, participate in quality
professional development that includes deep understanding of
their subject areas and sound instructional methods to teach
young adolescent learners.
Data-informed instruction is essential for high
achievement. Research indicates that formative assessment is
one of the strongest interventions schools can make to raise
test scores for all students with the greatest gains occurring
among the lowest performing students. Delivering this staff
development requires a wide range of professional development
opportunities.
In today's achievement-focused atmosphere, it is
imperative that principals be effective instructional leaders
and that they know how to collaborate with staff members to
establish the school's learning goals.
Because some States do not have data management systems in
place to track each student's progress, the Federal Government must
provide incentives and guidance to ensure that all States develop
effective procedures for collecting and analyzing such information.
Further, improving the quality of assessments so that they are both
valid for accountability purposes as well as a tool for improving
instruction is critical for the success of America's students.
The most valuable achievement measures provide
information about each student's development over time. Called
the ``growth model,'' this method uses individual assessments
to determine adequate yearly progress and should become the
standard for determining progress in middle level schools.
These State longitudinal data systems are a
prerequisite for implementation of ``growth models'' and are a
more accurate measure of school quality because they follow
students' academic progress over time.
Once-a-year, norm-referenced tests that focus on
groups of students for school accountability purposes do little
to help teachers diagnose specific learning needs and design
appropriate interventions for individual students. Although
such assessments of learning are important, they must not be
the only criteria by which we evaluate students' achievement.
Formative assessments must be put in place to help teachers
differentiate and improve instruction.
Provide the necessary resources and support for students
who need to accelerate their academic learning through practices that
include extended instructional time during the regular school day, an
extended school day, Saturday and summer classes, and after-school
programs with highly qualified and knowledgeable educators.
Educational standards for our youth in America have
increased substantially over the last two decades, yet we have
not provided students with the additional time or support they
need to achieve those higher standards.
Children in the United States have summers without
school for up to 13 weeks, while most industrialized countries
average only 7 weeks off. Shorter periods of time off can
prevent learning loss by students, particularly those who do
not have access to summer enrichment activities provided by
families.
Extra learning time provides an opportunity to
reinforce the relevance of the subjects students are studying
and to keep them engaged in school.
The addition of high-quality teaching time is of
particular benefit to certain groups of students, such as low-
income students and others who have little opportunity for
learning outside of school.
[Whereupon, at 11:40 a.m., the hearing was adjourned.]