(00:00:01) This father been quite a few people coming through Minnesota talking about various aspects of Education reform during this hour of. Midday. You'll hear some of their views the speaker's today. John chub, Robert Maddox Nelson Smith and Ray Marshall many of the arguments about education reform have centered on whether the current system of public education can be changed or if it's necessary to throw out the current model and find something altogether new some people say making the Sewell school system more market-driven that is requiring both public and private schools to compete with each other for students will make all the schools better the center of the American experiment a conservative Twin Cities Think Tank sponsored an education reform conference last week. One of the speaker's was John chub senior fellow in government studies at the Brookings institution chub has written a new book called politics markets and American schools, and he argues that the system Public education in this country is so dysfunctional that we need to start all over again. Here is John (00:01:06) Chubb our book addresses two questions. The first one is why do kids achieve or fail to achieve in schools? What makes one school better than another? It's a straightforward question. The second question we ask is. Why is it that the efforts of our federal government state government local governments over the years since the launching a Sputnik back in the 1950s right through the school reforms the 1980s. Why have the various efforts of our governments to make the schools better places for learning to make the school's more successful. Why have these efforts often fallen so short of expectations if not failed. That's the second question and our overall answer to both of these questions is simply this we found that the government the government's efforts to transform. The schools have basically not worked out. Because they don't Focus they don't focus on what is the essence of the problem the essence of the problem as we see it is the government's very structure for controlling the school's what we found is that the system of public education that we have today, which gives a great deal of authority to politicians and to administrators their bureaucratic underlings to run the schools from the top down that the system run in this way with these influences tends to create an environment in which effective schools simply have a great deal of difficulty developing. It's really that simple in our view and therefore since most of the reform efforts have been efforts at school reform. They have missed their mark because the problem isn't the school's themselves, but rather the system that creates the schools and therefore if we want to have better schools. We have to think about the system which gives us these schools. In other words. If we want to if we want to be successful, we have to move Beyond School Reform and think about reform of the system as a whole and since reforming the system is not what government is about since government is the system. It's often fallen short what we recommend therefore is a new system of public education based not on principles of politics and bureaucracy, but based on principles that represent the only logical alternative to them which are principles of bottom-up control relying more on competition between schools and more on Parental Choice The three principal findings in this study the study by the way was not a look at a couple of schools here and there was a massive study 500 high schools randomly sampled Nationwide 22,000 teachers students and principals more data than you know than you could possibly know what to do with it was a mass of analysis. Hi. Course, what are we find? Three simple find us first finding is this? good schools and bad schools those that were successful or unsuccessful promoting student achievement were not distinguished by how much money they were spending per pupil what their class sizes were what their teachers salaries were what their graduation requirements were they weren't distinguished by economic variables they weren't distinguished by requirements rather. They were distinguished. by qualities of organization good schools had such things as a clear sense of purpose the people in the school knew what they were trying to accomplish. They shared the same values. They agreed on educational philosophy. They agreed on the educational mission of the school. They all had a passion for the same kind of thing. They had a clear sense of purpose in addition. The schools had very different principles. To put it simply the good schools had leaders the bad schools had managers in essence what you have are people who are interested in management following rules and regulations getting the school to comply with what the district likes running the unsuccessful schools. Whereas a successful schools are headed by people who are really leaders teachers also matter and teachers. We found are treated very very differently in the successful and the unsuccessful schools. Teachers and successful schools are really treated like professionals. They are treated like people who have the expertise and the knowledge and the proximity to the problem that they are trying to address that is the education of children that they should be given a lot of latitude to make decisions. And so we found the teachers were far more involved in making policy at this as in the schools that were succeeding. They were given more freedom within their classrooms. They viewed one another as colleagues as equals. They cooperated with one another they coordinated with one another they work together as a team. And when you put that together with strong leadership and a clear sense of mission, it provided tremendous support for the kids in these schools. okay second finding We wanted to know why you find these schools and some places and you don't and others in other words, what are the conditions that seemed to bring these schools into being if you understand those conditions, then you got a chance to create more of them. We looked at all kinds of explanations. What kind of kids are you dealing with? What kind of families are you dealing with again? What are the resources that are available to you? And what we found is this and it comes as a surprise, I think to most people and it even came as somewhat of a surprise to us because just how important it was. We found that the key determinant to whether or not you get schools that are organized in this fashion for Success the key determinant of this was a degree of autonomy or Freedom that the school enjoyed from external control by bureaucracy rules and regulations promulgated by School Board State legislatures unions. The Freer that schools were to hire defier to establish curriculum to choose their own instructional methods to set their disciplinary policy. The Freer schools were to do these things the more likely they were to develop into effective organizations. That's a fact that's what we found and as much as we try to see if we can make that go away by looking at alternative explanations. It didn't it really matters bureaucracy rules and regulations constraints are a problem for schools a serious problem. All right, the final finding and this is what leads us to choice. We asked ourselves. All right, if your Aqua see such a problem how have some schools been able to get around it? What is the key to getting around bureaucracy? Is there some general antidote to bureaucracy or is it just gotten round because people in certain schools are willing to do it and break the rules and don't care. Is there something systemic going on here? And we found that there is in fact, we found that it turned out to be really quite simple that there were two reliable paths to autonomy in this country one pretty reliable path exists in the public sector we found that when you get outside of big cities in a district governed by a school board and superintendent and a district office in the whole usual setup that we get out of the big city into a system like that. If you have able kids and you have interested educated parents that the system tends to work in a fairly decentralized fashion with the school board not being burdened by lots of problems without the political conflict. There aren't lots of rules and regulations being imposed on superintendents a lot of Education occurs down to the school level the schools tend to interact more with parents to make policy and the public system works pretty well and in those districts while we ought to still be looking for ways to bring about Improvement the public system works pretty well. It's so happens. However that there is another path to autonomy in this country that is not just confined to the idyllic suburbs because we found that if you look outside of the public sector you look at the private sector you look at large Catholic Diocese e Diocesan schools, you look at other kinds of private schools other kinds of private education around the country something very interesting happens. We found that in the private setting regardless of whether you were dealing with a big system regardless, whether you're dealing with disadvantaged kids or Advantage kids regardless of the caliber of the parents regardless of everything that we looked at that affected the autonomy of the school in the private setting. Schools were remarkably autonomous and remarkably. Well organized even in situations that suggested that they would have a great deal of difficulty being so We found. Whether we were talking about a Catholic school as part of a large diocese. Or an independent school was a remarkable amount of decentralization. Now, why is that? Why is that it's basically because of markets just as politics leads the public system under difficult circumstances to be overly bureaucratized the market encourages private schools under any situation to be decentralized. The market has the following effect. And this is really crucial to understand it has the following powerful effect on school organization in a Marketplace schools regardless of whatever their mission is and Catholic schools and other private schools definitely have missions very centralized Notions of what they're trying to accomplish. However private schools in a Marketplace have to worry for most about whether parents and children are satisfied with what they're doing because parents and children can leave And so to be successful the schools have to be responsive very responsive to parents and students parents are not just another interest group in the system. They have additional leverage on a system. They can leave our conclusion is that the current system of public education cannot free the school's up sufficiently for them to develop into better performers, hence. We recommend a new system of public education one that does not depend on politics and bureaucracy to make the schools run but rather depends on Market forces the kinds of forces that naturally encourage autonomy and effective school organization to develop what we recommend Is a new system of public education. It's based on four principles. There are many ways in which a public education system can be organized around Choice. You've been pursuing one way here in Minnesota. We can talk about that. There are many many ways that this could be done but the four principles that we think are crucial or basically these number one the state needs to Charter a new a new population of public schools that permits alternative suppliers into the marketplace the supply cannot be monopolized by existing public school districts. The state has to find some way to authorize alternative suppliers of public education without alternative suppliers in the market place. You're basically dealing with a monopoly and monopolies. Do not generate competition. Second the schools should be given far greater Authority by the state to make decisions about hiring firing curriculum instruction organization and governance. The schools should more or less be running themselves or if you're talking about a district that districts should more or less be running themselves without State regulation. Third parent should be given the authority to choose freely among any state approved school that they like with their Public Funding local funding State funding and federal funding following them to the school schools. Then we'll be funded based on Parental choices not based on. Where the school's reside in the government system of schools final principle is this the state should Finance the system supervise the admissions process and provide parents with information to guarantee that the system operates equitably. Because after all there are really two serious problems in this country's educational system one is mediocrity, and the other problem is inequality. And we don't want to try to solve one problem and not solve the other. Excellence and equality have to be pursued simultaneously and this system can do that. Now. I know proposing throwing out a system of political control and a system of bureaucracy and a system. In fact that's been around for so long that we can't even imagine alternative to it. I know that all of this sounds very very radical, but it doesn't strike me as highly radical. In fact for all the reasons that I've just laid out strikes me as reasonable, but The thing that really does strike me as radical. In fact, I think probably the most radical talk that I hear in the country today. Is the talk that would have you believe. That after Decades of trying to turn the schools around. The systems of public education that have failed to do so will in the near future succeed that strikes me as radical talk indeed. Thank (00:14:36) you. That was John chub of the Brookings institution. He's the author of a recently published book called politics markets and American schools chub spoke last week at a conference sponsored by the center of the American experiment in the Twin Cities. Not everyone believes that public education will be improved by adopting ideas such as school choice vouchers or tuition tax credits. In fact, there are those who insist that these programs many others are merely a subtle way to resegregate our schools others. Say vouchers are simply unconstitutional in the taxpayers should not be required to support specific religious values and beliefs as they are conveyed through parochial schools. Robert Maddox is our next speaker. He's executive director of a national organization called Americans United for separation of church and state a group that opposes using vouchers as a tool for school reform here is Robert Maddox the concern that we're dealing with (00:15:36) right now. The night that I was asked to talk about is this whole idea of vouchers, but I thought I might try to set it in some kind of context is a way to think about it and relate to it to see the problem of vouchers and all of the various spin-offs. That are kind of coming out of that whole concept as a threat to religious liberty and to public education. I grew up in an enterprising family back in Georgia. My father always had an eye for a way to advance his own career and also for a way to earn extra money to provide for the family my mother and the four of us boys and kind of picking up on that enterprising mentality. I suppose while I was in graduate school trying to keep my own family going and pay tuition costs and all of that I cast around for ways to pick up some extra money. I was scanning the newspaper one day and saw one of those ads that said earn extra money at home with little investment and I immediately answered the ad and a few days later got a thick envelope full of promotional materials. I can hardly wait to tear into that envelope and and begin making my fortune at home. Guess what product was going to make me Rich? mink roses little pieces of mink shaped to look like a rose every housewife and America would want at least one. If not a dozen of those make roses to put in vases on the mantle or on the coffee table or on the lampstand. Forces from a number of quarters in American society are trying to sell us a bunch of mink roses if you please. Their pitch might sound good at first hearing but it's sort of like mint roses. We like mink and we like roses but make roses better look again. Clever people glib people are attempting to reduce the demanding often frustrating problems and opportunities of Education to something like mink roses that is to sound bites and clever cliches. They banned the around such phrases as Choice competition excellence in education vouchers tuition tax credits and the like I fear that many in our society are carelessly accepting those cute seats as a substitute for struggling with sound educational policy. Many seem tempted to accept these quick. He's rather than grapple with the serious problems confronting us as we attempt to educate millions of American Youth let some of the look at some of these mink roses some of these sound bites that people are trying to push off on us. One of them is choice. Something there is American about the idea of choice. We do not like to be told emphatically no two ways about it. This is the way that you have to do it. We chose the new world over the old world and dependents rather than colonialism and openly competitive market freedom to go to live to study to work to think like we want to Choice then is a concept deeply embedded in the National mind but choices must be made carefully on the basis of informed judgment not willy-nilly lest Anarchy insu. What could be wrong with choice in education? Well, maybe by and large nothing but we must exercise care and good judgment as we examine the concept and the choices themselves many school system. In fact your own Minnesota school system has a very broad concept of choice moving the ability to move from one school district or school system to another a lot of school systems across the country are experimenting with various configurations of that what kinds of schools magnet mainstream so forth parents opted for private over public education public versus church-related education certainly the right to choose. But choices must not be a cover for educational Anarchy some order and system must absolutely be maintained and the taxpayer should not have to pay for both public and private education. We my wife and I send our children to Public Schools. I might have wanted them to go to Westminster or st. Albans. We could not afford it or really more to the point. We made the choice not to make that kind of schooling a priority for our three children. Now as you well know people are going around the country trying to sell us on the idea that the taxpayer ought to be compelled to provide not only choices among Public Schools, but to pay the costs when parents choose expensive private schooling including church-related education over free public education a long time ago. We the people established a national policy that we would provide Public Schools open to everyone. We appreciated the work of private schools. But we made the decision that we did not have to pay for that type of education from the public treasury Choice. Let's look at the idea more closely. Actually the notion of choice of public versus private church related education is a myth. Very little Choice really finally exists private and parochial schools have have selection standards. The school's pick and choose who can attend they pick and choose who stays in the school and who gets expelled at a you we encounter episodes all the time about children kicked out of religious schools because of things our parents did. What stories like this prove is that religious schools particularly remain under the control of the sponsoring denominations in the face of this fact the choice argument means almost nothing at all when it comes to religious schools. The only choice lies with the denominational officials who run the schools religious leaders choose who will attend the school's who will be expelled and under a voucher system. The same religious leaders would choose which vouchers to accept and which to reject. In the light of this then educational Choice parochial versus public is is a meaningless concept. It is a fiction. It does not exist at the private school level and it cannot exist unless the state imposes a series of intrusive regulations on private schools that make them more or less extensions of the public school system. And at any rate pushes us back to square one. So whatever we do, let's rethink choice. Choice coming from parochial school 8 boosters is a word co-opted to Cloud the issue and to wrap their rhetoric in an appealing package. The issue is not choice. The issue is parochial school aid. Another make rose that we need to look at is excellence in education as perhaps. You can tell from the way I talk I grew up in the South spent most of my life in the South. I started my Ministry and Deep South Georgia in the era of the civil rights movement in the era of desegregation and as the Supreme Court decision trickled out of Washington and finally made its way to do Lee (00:24:26) County (00:24:28) rather than integrate the public schools angry racist parents created segregation Academies. These Quonset hut School sprang up everywhere touting excellence in education. Bah humbug that translated of course segregated schools the schools. I know firsthand off with very little excellence in education. They did offer Lily white students and (00:24:59) teachers. (00:25:00) The language of Excellence is a rules for enrollment discrimination. It is a political switch to nettle State legislatures into pouring even more money into parochial (00:25:13) schools and (00:25:16) vouchers. Vouchers are the most seductive of the mink roses on the market today. The myth of the desirability of the private sector is the carrot voucher proponents are dangling before the American people often salad too. Sad to say many have fallen for too many people have bought the LIE really and believe that education can be made can be put on the market just like any other product in the marketplace like breakfast cereal and it is quite true that that the free market is giving us a lot of breakfast (00:25:55) cereals, but it should be obvious to (00:25:58) anyone that there's a world of difference between breakfast cereals (00:26:01) and schools for our children. (00:26:04) The fact is that no voucher no choice plan. No tuition tax credit or deduction is going to solve the problems that exist in in our educational system both public and private when we fund parochial schools with tax dollars. We find we fund much more than just a school. (00:26:23) We fund an entire worldview in these cases. (00:26:28) Can you imagine your tax dollars being used to pay a religious (00:26:32) group to (00:26:34) teach children that the freedoms guaranteed to you by the Bill of Rights (00:26:37) or evil and should be rescinded under a voucher system these (00:26:43) situations (00:26:44) will occur. You can just put it down. (00:26:47) We'll even find ourselves supporting schools that preach racial segregation and anti-Semitism all over again. I really don't think that we want to extend State funding to all of these various religious groups that come along (00:27:04) one religion (00:27:05) scholar has said we have (00:27:06) 1400 different religions in this country can government possibly fund them all. (00:27:15) Do we want our public schools to reform? We want to achieve that goal by turning our backs on (00:27:20) them as boosters of the voucher system would have us do (00:27:25) all their plan would do is funnel scarce tax dollars into the (00:27:29) schools of the privileged leaving (00:27:32) less behind for everybody else. We must all also realize that we are making progress (00:27:41) teaching is no longer a scorned profession. It is (00:27:44) developing the major professional respected. It is always deserved. (00:27:49) Schools are looking and achieving new looking for and achieving new strategies to improve student (00:27:56) performance (00:27:58) parental input is being (00:27:59) sought and vitally needed. (00:28:02) It would be more than a (00:28:03) shame to stop now to give up. It would be nothing short of a moral felony. Now my background is in the ministry not education. But through my work at Americans United and just my own experience as a parent. I have come to learn that the cause I stand for separation of church and state shares vital links with the cause that all of you Champion the public (00:28:30) schools these twins concept Stand Together. It's two great American achievements because of their (00:28:39) inextricable links. Both are now facing their toughest challenge. They will stand or fall (00:28:46) together beware of make roses. Thank you very much. That's Robert Maddox executive director of Americans United for separation of church and state before him. You heard John Chubb of the Brookings institution listening to a variety of speakers offer several perspectives on education reform during this hour of midday. At the conference sponsored by the center of the American experiment last week. One of the sessions involved a discussion of the social problems such as fatherless households drugs and poverty that some people think prevent the school system from meeting the educational needs of all children Nelson Smith is one of the speakers he's director of programs for the Improvement of practice in the US Department of Education (00:29:34) as I look at the topic of this session can American Education get adequately better as long as fatherless households poverty drugs and other social disaster stand in the way my attention focuses on that word adequately we can interpret that any number of different ways and if we're willing to accept something that is merely adequate we can probably do well enough for some portions of the student population. We can overcome some of the pathologies that that are mentioned in that title. But if we mean by adequately something that corresponds to the level that we must attain in the world then I think we have to come up with some very different answers. Now as we've addressed the condition of schools of the last eight years, it seems to me that we've gone through many different kinds of Reform. We have tried to push reform from the top. We have raised standards and demanded more course taking and and stronger course requirements for graduation. We've increased spending to the point where we are now spending three hundred eighty billion dollars a year on education in this country. That's an increase after inflation of almost 40% since (00:30:33) 1980, (00:30:36) but I think the system may be overheating in a sense the kinds of changes that we are looking for now to serve the needs of all students requires much more intractable and harder to do structural change on the one hand. We have to keep pushing towards structural change while acknowledging that that is a very long term process. On the other hand though. We have to begin looking at the root causes of some of their problems, which I think we are not frankly facing right now. Right. Now we are pushing the school to solve some of the problems that students are bringing to them. We are extending days because of the needs of Working Families. We are having early opening hours, but there is one big push that I see on the horizon now which suggests to me a radical redefinition of what we think school is about and the relationship between that school and that individual child and that is the notion that schools should somehow be the hosts for an integrated system of service deliveries. Now, the premise of this idea is quite logical and quite understandable. There was a report published about a year ago called all one client which made the unexceptionable point that students in poor families face a multiplicity of services and a fragmentation among those services so that they have to go one place for housing one place for welfare one place for legal services, and then they go to school where they spend a lot of time during the day. What is not recognized in the current system is that the student has to be at the center? The child has to be at the center of all these Services because they all serve the same client. Well, that is an understandable point and I think we have to do a much better job of making that those kinds of systems coherent for the students who need those services. But I drove back a little bit from it could because it seems to me that proposals like this are in effect an attempt simply to recreate the family with public funds with a series of public facilities with a series of public bureaucracies. Now The Advocates of proposals such as integration of services will tell you, you know, you can't depend on families these days the the families in which these children are growing up to provide all these services and I know that I understand that in the short-term, obviously we have to integrate Services we have to make them available to children as they need them. But in the longer term we have to do what I think we are led to do if we listen to Michael Novak who said that the family is the original department of health education and Welfare. In the longer term, I think we have to work directly at the idea of trying to recreate strong families. Now what puzzles me right at the moment is that we are going about this piecemeal everybody kind of recognizes that there is a problem in the American Family. It manifests itself different ways in different kinds of families, but I think there is annoying Sensation that the family is not in fact doing its job outside the school door and therefore cannot fulfill its responsibilities to the school and yet when the question of creating strong families comes up, I think a lot of people tend to think of it as a sort of quaint preoccupation of the Reagan Era. It's something that we tried to do in the 1980s and there was a lot of rhetoric about it and it didn't work. So let's now go ahead and provide services and indeed. Let's go integrate those Services. I find this tremendously ironic because right at the moment we are in the midst of a new wave of evidence that the strong two-parent family. The nucleus of the social system around which the school revolves Emmy Werner in her book. All Against All Odds Against the odds rather which was published about a year and a half ago found in a longitudinal study that she can say that she conducted that for children who succeeded against the odds in other words who grew up amid poverty and amid chaos that if they were able to latch onto a significant older person and if there was a consistent adult involvement in the life of that child that the odds of that child succeeding staying in school finishing school and doing well were much much higher. Well, she's just published a new finding which I think is an interesting complement to that that in fact the children who grew up in two-parent households in the cohort that she studied they had a much better chance of surviving episodes of delinquency or mental or emotional health problems. In other words. If you take the conclusion that you could draw from the first study That some adult had to be present there and call that adult a parent and indeed have two parents there that the chances of those children surviving the periods of Chaos in their lives are much stronger Nicholas Davidson recently published a review of the literature and policy review in which he looked at the chances of one parent children as opposed to to parent children for surviving a series of Social pathologies, and he found the children growing up in one-parent families had a whole list of problems. They in fact have they test lower for IQ. It's not pleasant to talk about that. But in fact we know from a host of educational research that that remains the largest and most consistent predictor of academic performance in school having said all this I think There are many ways in which we want to ask families to play a stronger role in the lives of their children and as a consequence of that to be able to be the bulwark against the social pathologies that we've talked about here. We have allowed values into the school's now I think and that's a good thing but too often the only real value that is really accepted in schools is toleration of diversity. Now teachers have a tremendously difficult task in dealing with kids from all kinds of families and all kinds of backgrounds. The teacher doesn't want to give offense by suggesting that the child's family is inferior to another family. It's a terribly difficult situation. But as a matter of broad social policy, I think we must have a place in which we can candidly admit that some kinds of family organization work better on behalf of those very children than others and we must somehow find a way to permit the notion of the ideal to come back into our discourse. About social policy. I am not by the way saying that we have to have uniformity and that word diversity can be taken many ways. I think we have to celebrate the cultural diversity that we have in schools today. We're not talking about Ozzie and Harriet. We're not talking about Ward and June Cleaver. There are all sorts of children in our schools today and we have to celebrate the the different cultures and the different strains they bring to us but in their own best interest. I also think we have to be able to have a safe place for a candid discussion about the kinds of family organizations that do and do not work. Another point is that demography is not Destiny. I think there has been too much predicting of catastrophe because certain quote problem populations unquote are coming in greater numbers to our schools. If we see a population where there is a certain difficulty now, whether it be drugs or be dropping out or be low educational achievement to say that we will have an overwhelming of the schools because more of those type of people are coming to schools I think is an implicitly racist position. I think we can create change and if you look at some of the progress that we've made in certain specific areas because of concerted effort that we took such as the fact that young black men are not dropping out of school nearly in the numbers they used to or that their skills have increased in a tremendous rate over the last 15 years because of certain policies that we adopted then you understand that we can create change and finally I say we should learn from success. One of the questions we are asked to address here at is can American Education get better when drugs and other social disaster stand in the way? Well, let's look at the question of drugs. Let's turn that around except for crack which is a disaster which is new and which has not yet proven susceptible to some change in Attitude the record on the on the use of other drugs by young people actually constitutes a success and we ought to recognize that the rate of student use of marijuana and cocaine has plummeted over the last six or seven years and that is a large social policy success in which we have successfully turned around the attitude of the country and the behaviors that are consequences of it and schools have actually LED in that success schools have not simply been acted upon by drugs. They have been able to lead the move away from them. The change in social attitudes about smoking. Tobacco since 1964 is another social policy success. We ought to look at these episodes and realize that we can create massive social change. We should not give up on the family because things are as they are now if we learn to identify the right question, and then be emboldened by successes like that that we've experienced in the last 25 years, then I think we can begin to see progress against this list of problems that were asked to face. (00:39:57) Thanks. That was Nelson Smith of the US Department of Education. He spoke at the education reform conference sponsored by the center of the American experiment last week in the Twin Cities. Ray Marshall was Secretary of Labor in the Carter Administration. He's now a professor at the LBJ School of public affairs at the University of Texas at Austin earlier this year Marshall worked on a special project on minority education. He says the future of our country depends on what we do to improve education for minority students and Marshall argues that the United States will only be able to compete internationally if we make sure that all the countries children are well educated here is re Marshall. How do we stack up in the world now in terms of quality of our work force the answer is nobody knows because the important is that is we have no good measures of Workforce skills a good orienting hypothesis about it is that we've got quality at the top and a lot of problems in the rest of the system. Why do we have quality? The top first is our colleges and universities are still world class. I say still because a good or eating appositives about that is that they're world-class like General Motors was a 1970s because they're Big and Rich not because they're good. And therefore if they don't pay attention they have the hubris that you can detect and make the best sign that anybody is getting ready to go down his hubris. And I think we can detect that in abundance in American colleges universities and therefore while we're still world-class. We got to worry about being able to do all those things to use our resources efficiently second reason that we're in good shape at the top is because of immigration legal immigrants United States are better educated than native-born Americans. And therefore we have enriched our human capital pool through immigration when we were a relatively High income country third many of our companies our world-class learning systems and they pay much more attention to learning on the job that almost any other thing they do. Why do we have so much trouble in the rest of the system first? Our schools are not world-class by almost any measure Now it one of the myths involved in our school system. You hear people say, well we spent more on our schools than any other country and we still have great trouble. That's a myth we spend less on our schools K through 12 than almost any other major industrial country according to good study recently by the economic policy Institute in Washington where we believe that we spend we spend more is because we spend more on higher education. But that's not our problem. Our problem is K through 12. And that's where we have very serious trouble yet shortest school year. We have more tracking we have three times the dropout rate of any of our major industrial competitors. Another serious problem is the school to work transition are non transition with the United States. We're almost unique in paying almost no attention to what happens to dropouts and what happens to people who graduate from high school, but are not college-bound every other country has an important system to put people into new learning systems before they gave the workforce poverty is more serious United States than any other industrial country and we have twice as large proportion of our children in poverty as any European Western European country are Japan. Poor families ordinarily are not good Learning Systems. We have been more concerned about the quality of jobs and the quality of jobs. We have no policy in this country about the quality of jobs. So we take great pride in having accumulate a lot of jobs that other countries wouldn't have And we'd be glad to see disappear and have policies to cause to disappear. What jobs where you can only compete with wages. If you're only going to try to compete with wages you lose it. You're not going to compete with a third world and wages. So if you had a proper policy you see to it that those marginal low-wage jobs left the country and then you do what to do in other countries educate and train people so they can do the high wage work. We also have more illegal immigration than most other countries and while legal immigration enriches our pool illegal immigration tends to contribute to the division in the pool. And we also have I don't know whether we have more sexism and race discrimination than the rest of the world, but we got our share of it and is no doubt in my mind that that contributes to the problem that we face now. What is what are the implications of all that from an already education? I think it's fairly straightforward. But let me make a few points about where we stand if the country is in trouble with education. Generally we are in trouble in Spades with minority education it much more serious than education. Generally the way you can kind of summarize what's been happening is that we've made a fair amount of progress, but the Gap remains very large between minorities and white in educational achievement in the other reality. If you look at all the numbers is that we have serious problems in the area where we have the greatest strengths that we have serious problems in colleges universities. Well, we get declining enrollments among minority meals especially will get Bernard fighting enrollment among white males to but the decline has been much more serious from Minority male since 1980. The other reality is that minorities tend to fall farther and farther behind the longer. They're in the education system. Now if all of this is as important, as I said, it is not naturally believe that why don't we do more about it? You know, why do we seem not to be able to generate a sense of urgency about all this? I think there are two main reasons one is that we need to have National leadership to focus on these attentions and we don't have it. We're getting it may be President Bush says he wants to be education president. I think that's the most important thing he could do and I applaud that Lord what they've done. I regret the distance they have to go In order to really do that. We need a thousand points of light, but we also need some batteries and you're not likely to be able. You're not going to be able to deal with this problem with money alone, but you're not likely to be able to solve it without the second problem is that we found in our work a lot of myths in the country about minority education. Let me just list those I think you recognize them as Miss as I as I go through first this maybe it's almost a uniquely American Myth and that is that learning is mainly due to innate ability. Now if you believe that that's got to be one of the most elitist Concepts I've ever heard of. And one with the least scientific evidence of any that I've ever heard of. If you believe that learning is mainly due to innate ability. Then you generate a fair amount of apathy. About the problem and fatalism about it the work shows though that learning is mainly due to hard work supportive Learning Systems not innate ability. If you believe it's innate ability you get tracking of young kids early and we do get tracking of young kids early and we make it a self-fulfilling prophecy that they will not be able to learn and that has been well documented second myth is that we can make it with a two-tier system that we don't have to have quality education for everybody. The reality is that people are either going to be assets or liabilities. From an economic point of view it cost us a direct cost of keeping somebody in prison in the United States about $20,000 a year. If you add it all up. It's more than that 82% of prison inmates United States or high school dropout. The correlation between imprisonment in high school dropouts is higher than the correlation between cigarette smoking and cancer. The final one of these which is also kind of a uniquely American Myth. Is it anybody in this country with any ability who's ready to work hard can make it? And therefore we don't need any kind of special interventions. We'll all you got to do is look at the evidence race makes a difference income makes a difference. And just it's not just hard work that's going to make it possible for kids to make it. It's going to be hard work in a supportive system that makes it possible for them to learn now. There are a lot of other problems that young minorities face in schools low expectations from their teachers teachers who are in the wrong place. We assign the best teachers where they're not needed and we don't get the best teachers where they are needed. We need to pay some attention to that. We tend to disregard the language and cultural diversity of young people and therefore take make the bureaucratic assumption that everybody learns the same way and everybody needs to know the same thing and that's just absolutely wrong and therefore that tends to create a fair amount of trouble Forest. What do we need to do about all that one? Is that We need to restructure our schools to make them responsible for the learning of young people. Just as any professionals would be responsible. Nothing probably would be is more important for minorities than that. Because if the school's really do take responsibility for the education of young people minorities will benefit more than anybody else will be able to attract the teachers that we need, which we're not doing now and are not likely to without substantial restructuring of the schools and the schools are more important to minorities as I've mentioned now other recommendations, we make I think fairly obvious, I won't spend any time on it one is that you've got to intervene early in this process. It's kind of a guiding principle. You need to find out what if something is succeeding and if it is go with that and experiment with other things you particularly have to respect and value the culture and backgrounds of students. And teachers have to be able to understand that if they're going to teach and you need to put the best teachers where they're needed the goals that we have for this project followed up by recommendations. Let me clue conclude by just staying the goes first. We believe that every kid should start school ready to learn. And we believe they can that means strengthening programs like WIC in head start preschool programs. We believe that every kid should graduate fully prepared for college of work. And that means don't ever let them fall behind as they go through the process third. We should significantly increase minority participation higher education, especially in science technology and Mathematics fourth. We need to make a almost an emergency move to try to increase the number of minority teachers at every level. And we certainly need to see to it that he ought since all teachers are going to be teaching more minorities that they are sensitive to the learning needs and culture and background of the minority youngsters themselves. And then finally we need to do a great deal to strengthen the school to work transition in the United States. We have costed out these things and in a report you can see how much it cost. It'll cost between 20 and 30 billion dollars a year do everything we've recommended Now is that too much? You're not considered to be one of the best investments. This country could possibly make we've even given you some priorities if you just restore the cuts and get us back say the six or seven billion that we've lost since 1980 we could do some things some good things that need to be done in the most important thing is to recognize that these are high yield Investments that have a lot to do with what kind of country we're going to be and therefore it's going to cost us a lot not to make them. Thank you. (00:53:19) Ray Marshall the former Secretary of Labor in the Carter Administration and now a professor at the LBJ School of public (00:53:26) affairs at the University of Texas at Austin earlier this hour you heard from John Chubb of the Brookings institution and Robert Maddox of the Americans United for separation of church and state the third speaker was Nelson Smith from the US Department of Education this hour of midday was produced today by Kate Smith and we thank her for that.