We expect schools to transmit from one generation to the next, the knowledge, the values, the mores, the institutions, the belief system from one generation to the next. No other public entity is so charged. There are entities that do parts of those things, some but not others. But there is no other public entity charged by this society of literally perpetuating itself. Now, if you add to those two things, what Chauncey Veach said about teaching. He is the 2002 National Teacher of the Year and Chauncey is a retired, highly decorated Colonel from the Army. And after he completed his military duties, he was looking for some other way to serve his country and he decided he wanted to teach. This highly decorated, retired serviceman says that, “Teaching is one of the highest forms of patriotism.” So as you put all three of those things together, you get really some sense of just how important this business of teaching and learning is.

For a moment I want you to imagine with me the possibilities of schooling. And I want you to imagine a school where every teacher is knowledgeable of and skilled in producing instructional strategies that ensure intellectual development and conceptual understanding in each student. Further, imagine a school district where every principal PAO is knowledgeable of and skilled in instructional leadership that leads to the removal of barriers to teacher success and improved student learning outcomes. Further, imagine a state where every local superintendent is an instructional leader who establishes the environment, creates the resources so that every principal is successful and every teacher is successful. And further, imagine a nation where each and every state level educational leadership has the capacity to improve schools so that every teacher, student, and administrator enjoys intellectual development and success. If this imaginary picture and when this imaginary picture becomes reality, we will in fact, have realized the dream behind No Child Left Behind.

I am very optimistic about the potential for education in this country because we know how to do these things. No child encourages vigor and accountability. It is not the first effort to do that. There were some states already along that journey. It is the first effort on a national scale to focus on vigor for all and accountability for achieving the vigorous standards. When you look at national assessment of education progress data, one sees an encouraging picture.
No Child Left Behind is working. Let me give you just a couple of examples. In the latest No Child reports, scores continued to improve across the board in mathematics. Overall, fourth grade reading scores matched an all-time high. For African–American fourth graders, there was a posting of the highest reading and math scores in the history of the test. For Hispanic fourth graders, it was the highest math reading in scores ever. For African-American eighth graders, they had the best math scores in history. Same applies to Hispanic students. The achievement gap between black and white students is at its narrowest since 1990. The achievement gap between white and Hispanic students in reading is lowest since 1998. More progress has been made between 2000 and 2005 that’s up six points than from 1992 to 2000, which went down four points. And it’s about as much progress in math between 2000 and 2005 up twelve points as between 1990 and 2000, that ten-year span. So about in about half the time, there was essentially the same amount of growth. That is an encouraging picture, but more needs to be done.

A picture is very positive, very rosy and in some circumstances, it’s not a perfect picture. Middle school performance, it’s up marginally. But not as impressive as it needs to be. High school performance is static and in some cases, actually getting worse. So we’ve got our challenges when it comes to student learning outcomes. When we look at student learning of American students compared to students in the other industrialized countries, you see a similar picture.
First of all, we are about in the middle of the pack. In other words, mediocre in most cases. We look pretty good at the elementary level and not good at all at middle and high schools. So we have work to do. What to do? Well, do what works. What do we know about schooling that can be instructive as we work through the problems that have been identified on both test scores and international measures.

When I think about the issue of schooling, I group things into four categories. These are what I call factors that impact on school learning outcomes. There are schooling factors. There are family factors. There are community factors. There are factors that deal with the individual. Of those four sets of factors, schools have control of what? Only one set. The bureaucracy of education controls schooling factors. Now we can impact on the other factors, but we only control the schooling factors. The nature of the curriculum. How vigorous it is. How integrated it is. How aligned to other important things the curriculum is. So if the curriculum is not appropriately vigorous and relevant, there’s nobody else to blame. We have to take that responsibility.

We control the quality of teaching - who gets in, what they know, and what they can do. The bureaucracy controls that, or can and should. We control assessments. What we know about the kids and how we use the information from those assessments. All that good stuff the bureaucracy controls.

We don’t control family factors. Parents send us their best kids. They send us the only kids they have. But we can, in fact, impact on family factors to some extent. For example, we can make sure that the custodial adults in the child’s life know the importance of talk, particularly for young kids. The nature of talk that goes on in the home, particularly preschool kids, is really important and there is a whole body of research about that. Whether it is negative talk or positive talk and the nature of how often the conversation occurs. Really important things to help develop language skills, but beyond that, we can help parents understand the importance of questioning the child once the child comes home from school. Example, “What did you do at school today?” Now for those of you who are parents probably have asked that question and a lot of times you get “I don’t know” or you get “Nothing much”, but it goes beyond that. “Explain what you did”. “Tell me about it”. A slightly different level.

There’s a saying that you learn things twice. Once when it is taught to you and the second time when you teach it to somebody else. Well think about the mental processes that occur when a child is actually trying to conceptualize how do I say this, how do I explain this. It requires the ability to analyze, evaluate, synthesize, and articulate. There are parents who say, “I can’t help my kid with algebra. I don’t know any algebra”. That may be true, but simply asking the right kinds of questions can help generate in their child a more significant learning experience. Setting aside dedicated time for school activities, for homework. It’s real important.

There have been all sorts of studies to link the amount of TV-watching and student grades and test scores and all that. And we in the educational arena tell parents those things and in some cases, they resonate with parents and in other cases, they don’t. But when we can give parents some very specific things that they can do, it tends to personalize it and make it more doable.

What about community? What are the community factors? Again, I won’t try to portray all of those factors. But let me give you a little personal history. I know that better than anything else. I grew up in Salisbury, North Carolina and I didn’t realize it at the time, only upon reflection did I realize just how significant the community was in helping to create the ambiance as it were, the climate of the community. I actually attended; my alma mater is Living Stone College, which is a historically black school in Salisbury. Well there is Catalpa College, a historically white school in that city. In the early 60’s, mid 60’s, those two colleges had kind of an exchange program going on. It was not widely done across the country. I remember as a young child college teachers, college students coming over to my schools and interacting with us, by way of sometimes programs, band presentations, sometimes giving lectures. Those kinds of things have tremendous long-term implications.

Another example, what are civic and fraternal and even religious organizations doing or not doing to foster public schools? Again, while the bureaucracy doesn’t control those things, the bureaucracy can certainly influence. And a found set of factors, the individual factors. In the one sense, we have probably less control over that than others, but in another sense, if we can unlock the key, we probably can do more to help improve learning outcomes in boys and girls than anything else.

I was an Assistant Superintendent in a little place called Johnston County Schools, which is just outside of Raleigh, North Carolina. After I left that job to go work at the State Department again, I got invited back. It was February, I was the Black History Month Speaker. I long for the day that there is no need for a Black History Month - that it is all throughout the year, but that is another story. So I went back to this middle school and I was talking about how to plan for your future and things like that and I noticed that in the very back, there was a group of young males, about four or five and the leader had on a cap. Now how do I know he was a leader? Because he was in the middle of everybody else. All the other folk kind of crowded around him. And you tell by the look on his face and his posse’s face that they would have rather been anyplace else, but they had to be there. And so they weren’t really attentive, but just enough that they didn’t get trouble. And somebody would have him remove his hat and when they’d go away, he’d put his cap back on. And this is middle school remember. And I started talking about if you want better results from your schooling experience, make the teacher teach you. And I saw this guy sit up straight and lean forward. Now I caught his attention because that notion intrigued him. How am I gonna make somebody teach me? And so I started talking about how what teachers do really matter and all of that and then I said, the way to make the teacher teach you is to ask questions. And if you are gonna ask questions, what do you have to do? And one little enterprising student in the front said, “You have to prepare, you have got to read”. And so we had a little conversation about that. We ended up talking about the power of the individual in controlling his or her own destiny and when my little friend in the back who had the hat on, but didn’t have it on anymore, started paying attention, his friends paid attention and actually, he came up to me afterwards and wanted to talk a little bit more about that.

Now I don’t have any greater wisdom than anybody else. I just happened to luck up on something that caught his attention, but my sense is that he bought into the notion that maybe I can control some of this, that it’s not all in somebody else’s hands. You know there is some research that indicates that particularly for African-American students, when surveyed about what is the factor most likely to determine your schooling success, of all students, the ones who say the teacher more than any other factor are African-American students. That’s a pretty heavy weight for teachers, but it’s a welcome weight and it is a doable weight. The kids got to bring something to the table, but we can help even with that in helping to shape some of what goes on in schools.

So we’ve got schooling factors, family factors, community factors, and individual factors. Just focusing on those schooling factors, what are some of the things that can be done? Talked a little bit about them, but I want to speak a little bit more. I group those sets of factors into what I call macro and micro, in other words, large-scale kind of things and smaller or more discreet things. What are the laws or the policies that govern schools? Those are examples of macro level things.
Is there vigorous curriculum standards? Partially due to No Child, largely due to No Child, more and more states have adopted more vigorous curriculum content standards. The federal government does not directly dictate curriculum standards. We encourage vigorous standards for all, but it’s the state’s responsibility and in some places, even the local responsibility to develop those curriculum standards. But that is an example of a macro-level strategy. What about at the micro-level? Those specific behaviors that folk who toil in the classroom and in school building that actually demonstrate, that are related to improve learning outcomes for kids.

When I was a grad student working on a Master’s Degree, I ran across some research by a guy named Ned Flanders and his grad students at Michigan State and they did maybe even seminal work on student-teacher interaction analysis. They actually went in the classrooms and observed what teachers were doing. And they found some interesting things. This whole notion of talk time, how much talk various individuals in the classrooms do and the notion of wait time. Those things I think were generated at least in part by what Flanders and his grad students did. But it was interesting that based on teacher perception of student ability, there was differential interaction. There was a difference in both quantity and quality of interaction.

A whole body of research, called Effective Schools Research, has pointed this out. If the student is perceived to be less bright, the predominant mode of interaction is direct teacher talk and it’s who, what, when, where. Those are the primary kinds of questions kids get asked. On the other hand, if the perceived ability of the student is high, in addition to some of those questions, students get asked why and how and what if and how might and questions of that sort. Now think about the intellectual requirements of responding to each of those sets of questions. And again, this is not a valued-judgment on the questions because all of those are good questions. But who, what, when, where questions force what is called conversion thinking. Somehow you have got that answer. You read it someplace. Somebody told it to you or whatever way you might know. That force is pulling this one answer and it is very legitimate.

We want students to know some things. Very specific information, but that other set of questions, elicits a different kind of mental operation. Students can pull from all sorts of things and put things together in ways that the first set of questions doesn’t allow. Now in addition to that, it seems that students who are perceived less bright got actually less time in which to formulate an answer than the kids perceived to be more bright. Are we and should we be about forming the intellect for all of our students? I submit to you the answer is yes. It has to be yes. If it was ever any doubt that the answer should be yes, look at the economic and security implications of not adequately educating all of our citizens to a high level of vigor.

That is my challenge I submit. It’s your challenge and together, I think it is doable to meet that challenge. Thank you.