Council of Great City Schools

Introduction: An Influential Audience with Vicki Phillips

People often ask me, "What’s the toughest job in education?" I don’t think anyone’s job is easy. But my response is always the same, and it comes from personal experience: "Without a doubt, urban superintendents and school boards." So I am always honored to be in your presence, and delighted to be among so many friends and colleagues who share common goals and aspirations for this country’s children.

A special thanks to Mike Casserly and the Council of Great City Schools. We are working together to forge a much stronger partnership between the foundation and the council and I cannot thank him enough for giving us that opportunity.

And as you would guess, the city of Portland and the Portland Public Schools hold a special place in my heart, so if I could take a moment of personal privilege, as they say in Congress, I want to offer my fond regards to Superintendent Carol Smith, and the staff and board members of PPS - in particular, Dilafruz Williams who serves on the board of this council. 

Those of you who know me know that I have a lot I want to say, but before you hear from me, I want you to hear from some voices other than mine. (Please view the video to the right of your screen.)

Powerful stuff.

Now, look around and realize the real power: Collectively, you represent 15 percent of our nation’s students, 14 percent of its teachers, and 12 percent of its schools.

Almost one in four of America’s poorest, most at-risk kids attend a school district represented here today.

Their lives – and our country – will be profoundly shaped by the decisions you make and the actions you take.

It’s a simple but daunting reality: If you succeed, our children succeed, and America succeeds. If you don’t, they don’t, and we don’t.

Taking Luck Out of the Equation

I look at all of you and know immediately that there are some things nearly everyone here has in common: a college education and a good job.

But if I asked each of you to tell me how you got to where you are today, I’d get as many stories as there are individuals here.

Some of you know that my own road to college was pretty rough -  that I grew up in a rural place that was aptly, and similarly, named Falls of Rough. It was a place where no one expected me to amount to much, because no one expected anybody to amount to much.

In school, I wasn’t pushed very hard - that would have been cruel. After all, I was too poor to succeed. But I did well enough. And when I was in high school, I became friends with a girl in my business class who pushed me to think about college.

And so I went. My life was changed by a young woman who was unwilling to accept the inequities between us.

On one hand stories like mine are inspirational – after all, that chance friendship put me on the path to where I am now. On the other hand, they’re tragic. Because what about the children just like me, who didn’t find someone who pushed them to go to college?
  
There are a lot of things that go into the equation for a successful education. But here’s one thing we need to take out of the equation – luck.
 
And that’s what I’m here to discuss with you today – what I hope we can be doing together to give young people the opportunity to succeed not by luck, not by chance, but by design.

Education and the Foundation's Philosophy

In one school, we went to the curriculum for each student – and most students were minority or low income – was delivered primarily on-line, at their own pace. The school had really strong support networks – teacher and peer support. And they had to. Students there had to make up for lost time and work harder than they ever had before. In the face of personal stories that would make you cry, they were rising to the challenge.

I joke that they were so sophisticated they managed to do their work while at the same time tracking – via blogs and email – Bill Gates’ progress through the building.

And they were very good at something else: contrasting their old classroom experience with this new one.

Here’s what they told me. School used to be a place where they had to, in their words, "power down." The classroom was where they went to lower their expectations, to ignore their individual learning styles, to turn off the technology they use to communicate. In this new school, they were powered up. And they were thriving.

And I realized I had heard this kind of thing before, and not just from students. We’ve all spoken to great teachers who "power down" because they feel hampered and uninspired by a system that doesn’t bring out the best in them.

We work with leaders who "power down" because they’re tired of reinventing the wheel – spending more and more money on problems that don’t get solved, or that someone else has already solved.

Today, most of what I’m going to talk about is evidence, analysis, and conclusions. But when you go beyond the numbers, it boils down to this: we have to power up education. Because powering up education is the best way to close the opportunity gap and break the cycle of poverty.

The Foundation's Work So Far

For almost a decade, we have tested and invested – and learned as much from the investments that didn’t bear fruit as from those that did.
 
For example, we assumed that structure made a big difference.  So our early investments focused on small schools – and we saw improved attendance, graduation rates, and levels of student engagement. But structure alone didn’t significantly improve academic performance or increase college readiness. We only saw real gains when we intentionally paired the changes in structure with changes in the classroom.

We assumed that a meaningful high-school degree would be sufficient. But we found that while it was necessary, it wasn’t sufficient. To break the cycle of inequity, you need a postsecondary degree with real value in the workplace.

And we thought if we were able to find something that worked, it would be viral. We assumed it would spread by virtue… of its virtue.

And what do all educators know about the word assume?

Today, we can say – with confidence and with evidence – structure is not enough, high school is not high enough, success is not always viral.

Sharing What We've Learned

This is not to say that the last nine years were a lost decade. In fact, partnering with many of you in this room, thousands of students gained ground and we learned a great deal about what works as well as what doesn’t.

We have distilled much of that learning into three publications for education leaders: A guide for superintendents, a guide for senior managers, and a guide for data analysts.

Of course, the most important lesson we’ve learned is that nothing can be truly transformed if solutions aren’t scaled. That’s why we’re making our findings thus far totally, completely, and widely available – including on the Council’s website, and on our own.

Goals Going Forward

Now, what are our efforts going to look like going forward?

We’re working in service of two ambitious goals:

• Ensuring at least 80 percent of students graduate from high school college-ready
• Doubling the number of young people who earn a postsecondary credential

So how are we going to meet those goals? How are we going to help power up education?

It begins by recognizing that policy reform can happen at a foundation, a think tank, or a state capitol. But education reform happens in the classroom.

So with that in mind, we wrestle with three main questions:

• How do we ensure powerful learning for students and teachers?
• How do we empower great teachers?
• How do we bring innovation to the classroom and scale the strategies that get the most dramatic results?

Powerful Learning

When we look at those questions, it’s clear we need a foundation for reform. That foundation is a set of common academic standards.

Not just any old standards. And not the prevailing attitude of "the more, the better." We need:

• Standards that reflect what the evidence shows is most essential. 
• Standards that teachers and students can master with the time and resources they have.
• Standards that foster engagement and innovation; inspire teachers, motivate students, and help parents support their kids at home.
• Standards that demand mastery of what matters; not asking students to learn less and less about more and more.
• Standards that can evolve as we learn what works, and what doesn’t.

I know that the Council of Great City Schools understands this need for common standards because you were one of the first national organizations to endorse this effort.

And we will need your continued voice as we move to the hard work of adoption and implementation.

Common standards allow us to power up learning because of what they make possible – a new generation of supports for teachers and students, with measurable results and the local flexibility on how – or even if – to use them, based on context and need. 

Together, we can spur the creation of many of these supports, including:

• A next generation of assessments aligned to the standards that tell us something worth knowing about what students are actually learning and the progress they are making
• Course designs and teaching tools that strengthen teacher effectiveness and improve student learning
• A next-generation student support system that allows students to give the effort it takes to succeed (academic preparedness, academic tenacity and college knowledge)
• Options for using these tools in traditional or proficiency-based pathways, and
• Innovative models of professional development for teachers that provide immediate feedback and real-time access to effective practices.

Teacher Effectiveness: Empowering Great Teachers

But learning cannot be powered up if teaching remains powered down.

Because if we could distill everything we’ve learned about education into one sentence, it would probably be this: nothing is as important as an effective teacher.

And yet, as you know all too well, the systems currently in place ensure that our students who have the greatest need for great teachers are most likely to get the lowest performing teachers.

Imagine you grouped all the teachers in America by quartile, using whatever metrics their schools currently have in place. If students are taught by a bottom-quartile teacher for three years, they fall behind so significantly that catching up is nearly impossible.

But imagine you took every student who currently has a bottom-quartile teacher and gave them a top-quartile teacher instead. You would close the entire achievement gap in America in just three years.

So this is actually an inspiring statistic. Because it means with great teachers, there’s no limit to what America’s students could achieve.

So we should learn from great teachers. We should study what makes them great. And we should reward and retain them.

We’re unapologetic about the reason for doing those things – we want students to succeed. But that doesn’t mean that incentivizing effective teaching is bad for teachers.

If there’s one thing I hear consistently when I talk to teachers, it’s that they want to be treated like the professionals they are. Evaluating teaching, and rewarding the top performers, professionalizes teaching.

Even so, some teachers and unions will be skeptical – this has been a third rail for a very long time. And they have valid concerns – we share those concerns. If evaluations are poorly designed, if they’re dependent on popularity contests among the faculty or perfunctory judgments from supervisors – they won’t be fair to teachers or to students.

But we can do this the right way. We can study multiple measures – observations, student perceptions, student work, student growth. We can create evaluations that honor the art and complexity of teaching.

Over the next five years, our foundation plans to figure out which qualities great teachers have in common, and how to measure those qualities in the classroom. We’re calling this project: Measures of Effective Teaching. And because it’s unquestionably evidence-based, we’re seeing real union support for our investment.

Let me give you an example of what we’re doing. We’re going to video 4,000 teachers in classrooms in New York City, Charlotte-Mecklenburg, and elsewhere.

Experts will watch those videos and evaluate them against the observation frameworks many district currently use.

Those observations will be supplemented by information from students about what they felt was most helpful and by examples of student work.

Then, after the first year, teachers will be randomly assigned to new classrooms with similar students, the pedagogical equivalent of a double-blind study.

After the second year, we will compare student-achievement results.

This is a huge undertaking. But when we’re done, we’ll have real, evidence-based findings about what constitutes effective teaching.

We’re also in the process of creating partnerships for effective teaching with a number of school districts across the country and a set of Charter Management Organizations. In some of those districts we will fund bold comprehensive plans. In other districts we will fund a courageous strand of work already underway. We are inspired by the work in each of these districts, many of whom belong to this council – districts like: Memphis; Pittsburgh, Hillsboro, Atlanta, Denver, Prince Georges County. 

These districts have agreed to put in place comprehensive, courageous plans or bold strands of work that challenge virtually every aspect of how we recruit, develop, assign, retain and compensate teachers. In just 30 weeks – the length of the proposal process- many of these districts overturned 30 years of policies that flew in the face of evidence. And they did it with collaboration between superintendents, boards, and union leadership and in collaboration with each other.

Teachers in these school systems will see real changes:

• Evaluations based on a variety of factors, with measurable student achievement the most important factor.
• Pay, tenure, and career paths tied to performance.
• Professional development and training based on their specific needs.
• Rewards – both money and responsibility – for improving student performance, for teaching in high-needs areas, and for staying in the classroom instead of moving into administration.
• Principals will be evaluated as well, and he or she will be trained to lead, not to micro-manage or to punish.
• Chronically ineffective teachers will be replaced.

Through the work of these districts and our research sites, we will learn a lot about what makes a teacher great, and how we can retain the best teachers and put them in front of the students who need them most.

In a few weeks when we announce the final grants, this will be the biggest single philanthropic investment ever made in our most powerful resource – our teachers.  

Innovation: Powering Up Classroom Experiences

The third major area we’re focused on is innovation – powering up classroom experiences by finding the next generation of learning tools, the next generation of school models, and then finding a way to bring what works to scale.

We cannot make a leap in performance without a leap in innovation. We can’t improve learning without improving instructional tools.

How do we improve those tools? Bill Gates said it best: "Doctors aren’t left alone in their offices to try to design and test new medicines. They’re supported by a huge medical research industry. Teachers need the same kind of support."

So our goal is to help get that support network off the ground – to help develop new tools and new school models, and then to help build the infrastructure for testing, evaluating, and bringing those models to scale.

Some innovations – like collaborative learning games that run on the Nintendo DS platform – will accelerate learning by engaging students using familiar technology.

Other innovations will support teachers by giving them the ability to video lessons, capture the entire set of student responses, and receive strategic feedback related to their day-to-day classroom practice.

If you believe that every student can learn – and we do – then it’s our responsibility to provide the teaching and the tools to make sure that every student does learn.

Conclusion

I began by talking about how our children can succeed by design… not by chance.

But I’m more hopeful today than ever before that we can achieve that goal. Because in many ways, the stars are aligning for reform.

Yes, the challenges I’ve outlined have been your challenges for a long time.

But more and more – policymakers, business leaders, concerned citizens, and philanthropists like Bill and Melinda Gates – are realizing that your challenges are our challenges.

Take the Race to the Top. Reformers helped develop the concept. The federal government is funding the program. Our foundation is helping states apply for the funds. And the states themselves – aided by their district superintendents, I hope – have to actually create and implement those plans.

You know, in a lot of speeches, I would end by saying: Work with us.

But the truth is, I’m asking something different this time.

I’m asking for you to let us work for you.

Because no matter how much money policymakers spend, no matter how much the foundation does, it will always come back to the work you do.

So today, we are asking you to step beyond your comfort zone, to provide uncommon and courageous leadership… to marshal the public and political will to bring down long-standing barriers.

We are asking you to take on tough issues that prevent us from moving back to the head of the global class.

We are asking you to power up education, and, in so doing, to power up America.

So let me end where I began….with the words of the voices you heard on the video:

Young people dream about what they’ll be when they grow up.
 
But there’s a gap today between where high school ends and dreams begin.
A gap fewer and fewer are able to leap.

Hard work and determination are not enough.
High school itself is not enough.
Students need more.
 
If I only get a high school diploma, I’ll only make half as much as I would if I had a college degree.

Today, a high school diploma isn’t the end of learning. It’s only the beginning.
The first step to opportunity.
 
We want students to graduate ready for college, ready to master the skills they’ll need to compete in the global marketplace,
Ready to take this next step in their education, confident that they can succeed.

We believe that the heart of the learning experience is the magic between teachers and students.
When inspiration takes the place of memorization and young minds rise to the challenge of understanding.
 
We believe in teachers.
In their talent, their dedication.
That we need to give them the support and tools they need to make a difference every time they step into the classroom.
And that teachers, like doctors, lawyers and other professionals,
should be held to a high standard.
Excellence is the goal.
Transforming lives, the reward.

And we believe in students and their families.
That regardless of zip code or economy, neighborhood or obstacle, race or gender, every kid genuinely wants to learn.
And when students show up ready to learn, they deserve to be taught.
We believe we can…and must…make high schools reach higher.
To open the door to opportunity
To give everyone a chance to leave their mark upon the world.

Because everyone has a right to their dream.