A r c h i v e d  I n f o r m a t i o n

EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR: As we know, we each had the benefit of one of the provocateurs during the session, but we indicated to each one of them we'd like to give them time, if they would like to take it, to talk to the group generally, and then, we can open the discussion more broadly.

I know, at least Dick Elmore, who was in the group that I had the privilege of sitting in with, said he had some comments, so I'm going to turn to him first.

DR. RICHARD ELMORE: Well, I took the charge of provocateur seriously, and actually prepared to provoke -- partly because that's my style and partly because that's what I was invited to do.

And so, I want to spent a little bit of time talking about my reading of draft recommendations, my gloss on the discussion, and then, today, and then my -- I want to follow Deborah's cue and try to walk you through a specific example of the kind of -- the kind of recommendation.

I'm not proposing this as a Commission recommendation, but the kind of recommendation that might distinguish this Commission and its report from the vast collection of prior reports on and around this topic.

In doing so, I want to characterize the problem in a way that's somewhat different from the way the report characterizes it, and the way I heard people characterizing it today. And I'm not suggesting that you should use this characterization in your report, but I am suggesting that you should be aware of it because, frankly, many people are deeply offended by this characterization of the problem.

But I think it is important for us to be honest about, on some dimensions, about how we got ourselves into this situation, and that, often, what we get in commission reports is a kind of sanitized version of the problem that's been argued out and negotiated out and that has made to sort of -- crafted as much to appeal to the need to mobilize public support as it is based on any really deep and serious diagnosis of the fundamental problems of the institutions we're dealing with.

So I want to talk turkey with you, first about the nature of the problem as I see it, and then walk you through this example and encourage you to think in the ways that I think Deborah just walked us through for the group that she was part of.

First, my interpretation of my first reading of the draft recommendations of the report. I think they go primarily to the question of what I would call qualified teachers, in a much less-well-defined -- one might even say sketchy way -- toward the issue of the qualifications and skill and knowledge of the existing teaching force, and in doing so, tend to do what most policy level discourse does, what most commissions do, is to rely heavily on kind of structural fixes. Let's invent a new organization, put a new name on it, and let the world fill it up with content and we will assume that we will succeed where other people have failed.

And I want to try to talk you into keeping the language about the supply of highly qualified teachers, to stay with the language about sustained improvement of practice among teachers who are in the teaching force. I'm not trying to talk you out of any of the recommendations you're making, but to -- but on the latter part, that is the improvement of practice, to get much more specific and here's why and here's how I would characterize the problem.

I want to say that we are producing exactly the kind of learning that this institutional structure is designed to produce, that is, we're doing the job that this organization is designed to do extremely well.

This is an organization that has been fine-tuned over 100 years to produce exactly the kind of instruction it's producing, and exactly the kind of performance it's producing. This is not a mistake. This is not inadvertent. This is failure by design.

And unless you understand that the failures are designed into the institutional structure, and unless you go straight at the sources of these failures in the institutional structure, you're just throwing water over the top of -- well, at the ed school at Harvard, we have a phrase called "painting the elephant."

You invite the elephant into the room. The elephant sits down. You call it a dog. You call it a cat. You paint it pink. You paint it blue. It's still is an elephant. It looks like an elephant. It smells like an elephant. It is as large as an elephant.

A lot of the characterizations of the problems and the structural reforms we pursue, are essentially, painting the elephant. We're sort of trying desperately to make this elephant into something else. And it continues to be an elephant.

The dimensions of the problem are as follows. We have a curriculum that is exactly tailored to the qualities and qualifications of the teaching force that we have recruited and put in place. It's shallow. It's superficial. It's highly fragmented. People have been socialized through their teacher preparation, for the most part, and through their early induction, and through their teaching experience to be acclimated to this fragmented and shallow curriculum. And to disturb that curriculum is to cause enormous reverberations in the organization.

The standards movement, which is now pretty prominent, is more or less up for grabs on this subject. It can go either way. Right now, I would say that the standards movement in most states is reinforcing the shallowness and the fragmentation of the curriculum, largely because the standards have been set by a pluralist political model in which, sort of, everybody, every conceivable interest group gets their standard and the standards proliferate at about the proportion of fractional interests that operate on the process. And as guidance for instruction, they're severely limited, and they are mirroring exactly the political and institutional forces that create the fragmentation and shallowness of the curriculum.

I don't think this condition is necessarily inherent in the notion of standards. In fact, I think standards carry with them the idea of actually working against the shallowness and fragmentation, but I think right now I see the standards movement as having been largely captured by the existing institutional structure.

When you say that we need to teach in greater depth, fewer things to larger numbers of students, with higher measurable performance, you are essentially asking teachers to do something most of them do not know how to do. There is absolutely no reason why they should know how to do it. There is nothing in their background or training that would prepare them to do it. There's absolutely nothing in the workplace of their organization day to day that would help them learn how to do it. I think you need to face this fact squarely.

What happens in this structure is that we do get a number, a certain proportion, of exceptional teachers who are extraordinary performers. They perform against the grain of the institutional structure. That proportion hardly ever exceeds, you know, 15 to 25 percent under the best of circumstances.

I want to say this to you with no disrespect to these exceptional teachers. I think they are absolutely essential to the sector. These teachers are not the basis upon which this institutional structure will be rebuilt.

The other 75 percent of the teachers, or 85 percent of the teachers, are the basis upon which this institutional structure will be rebuilt. If your theory is a sort of charismatic theory of teaching that a bolt of lightning comes down out of the sky and touches some teachers and not others, those teachers can teach at high levels and the others can't, the game is over for us. Disband the Commission. Go home.

You have to believe that this is a fundamental problem of the development of skill and knowledge of the vast proportion of teachers in this sector, who have not received the kind of treatment in the work place or the level of skill and knowledge that they require to do the work that we're asking them to do.

The second part of this institutional structure is an extraordinarily weak professional culture.

I'm not sure whether Linda Darling-Hammond and I agree on our diagnosis of this problem, but I think we like to talk about the same fundamental issue. And that is that education as a profession in the United States, teaching as a profession in the United States, in comparison to all other teaching in all other countries, has a very peculiar pathology.

It is the only profession in this country in which autonomy is equated with professionalism, and teaching in this country is the only formulation of teaching as a profession in which autonomy is characterized as a professional prerequisite of teaching, as compared with other societies.

In other words, teaching is an isolated atypical profession in which we define professionalism as the capacity to make one's own decisions about what happens in the classroom. In no other country is professionalism around teaching defined in this way. In no other profession is professionalism defined in this way.

I would ask you just to consider the possibility of being wheeled into the operating room for open heart surgery, and to have, just as you're going down under the anesthetic, the surgeon say to you, "Today, I'm going to use a surgical protocol that we once used in 1972. I woke up this morning. I feel like doing it. "It just -- it's a kind of nostalgia thing for me so I think we'll roll the new technology out of the operating room. We'll bring back in the old stuff, and we'll have a trip down memory lane here and my professional autonomy allows me to do this."

Right?

No, actually. If you don't perform that surgery according to a particular protocol, within a relatively narrow range of practice, you not only are in great danger of being sued, you're in danger of losing your license. And yes, in fact, it does -- despite our opinion -- frequently happen that people lose their license to practice for performing outside the protocols, or at least are chastised for it.

So, part of the weakness of this institutional structure is the equation of autonomy with professionalism. It's a sign of a weak professional culture when professionalism is not defined as subscribing to a common code of practice, to operating within a relatively narrow range of practice, and to subjecting one's practice to empirical validation.

Finally, the last, I think, teacher of the institutional structure is this incredibly weak infrastructure for the support of development of curriculum and teaching and teacher skills.

It goes with a view of teaching as essentially a charismatic activity. It goes with weak professionalism. And it goes with the shallow and highly fragmented curriculum.

The thing I want to stress about the Commission's findings is that if you, quote-unquote, "solve the problem" of getting highly qualified mathematics and science teachers into the classroom, there is a good chance that you will only marginally improve student learning or won't improve it at all. And I think that is because you're sending highly qualified people into an institutional structure which is not designed to make use of their skills.

They will teach -- they will tend to teach toward the norms of that structure or they will become part of the 25 percent who are always the exceptional performers and get stuck in their own part of the distribution.

So I think this is my rationale for joining the pipeline and the credentialing and the quality issues with the continuous improvement issues that you just heard from the last group. Now, just let me briefly walk you through an example -- and I want to use Deborah's overhead just to summarize. [see slide 1]

What I'd like you to think about is, suppose that we took the vast supply of curriculum and practice materials around mathematics and science that have already been developed. We could even develop some new ones, but I think the problem here is not supply, it's utilization and demand.

So, I'm going to focus -- just suppose we did that and suppose we took and elaborated version of one of the things on Deborah's list, which I would just call -- you'd have to sanitize this because it's too Japanese. And Americans don't like anything that's Japanese.

I will call it lesson study. And let's assume that we create a large inventory of highly developed lessons. Now, what do I mean by a lesson? I mean a curriculum unit. I mean some evidence of instructional practice, either on videotape or live. I mean some questions and some evidence about inquiry about the practice, questions you would ask about the application of practice in your classroom, and some documentation of live applications of these lessons in real classrooms - teachers' self reports, journal entries, videotaped interviews, whatever.

Suppose you made, as part of the common currency of this institutional structure that you're proposing to create through centers, suppose you made the lesson study a piece of this, part of the stuff that goes inside those institutions. And suppose over time, your objective was to aggregate these, not necessarily into a national curriculum, but into a vast inventory of high-level teaching and learning materials and technologies and access to information that teachers could use at the elementary and secondary level.

And suppose that you stayed with this long enough so that, as a process of circulating many teachers through whatever institutional structure you create through these centers, some very large proportion, let's say 25, 30, let's say 50 percent of the teachers, actually are exposed to some sustained use of lesson study in their work.

The point I want to make about this is, because lesson study -- and I wanted to say that part of the issue here is that lesson study has to involve students, that is, you actually have to be in the presence of students while you're doing this stuff and the visual evidence of it that you produce on videotape or videodisk has to include students so that you're not just talking about the curriculum materials. You're talking about the actual instructional process.

What you're doing is you are, you're entering Deborah's model, essentially through the content corner, and you're trying to reach teachers and you're encouraging them to think of instruction as the connection between students and content.

And you're creating a high-level, highly dense, high-powered discourse which can be done at the preservice level. It could be done at the novice level. It could be done at the expert level. It can be done with -- by experts working with novices, novices working with preservice teachers, the works. In other words, you're setting up a social relationship around what somebody earlier called "the stuff," which is the point I want to conclude with, which is, if you want to break this institutional culture of shallow content, professionalism as autonomy, and a weak infrastructure for supporting the improvement of practice, you have to create -- you have to participate in the creation of an alternative culture.

You do not improve the quality of teaching in the classroom by putting highly qualified people into the existing culture. It simply won't work.

To change a culture in the United States, you have to be both persistent and smart because this institution - I'll tell you - has outwitted smarter people than you for 100 years. Okay? This institution has the weight of democratic pluralism behind it. It is not just dysfunctional. It's highly effective in its dysfunctionality. Okay?

So that, if you propose to change the culture, you have to propose an alternative culture. The alternative culture I'm suggesting that you think about is a culture which is fundamentally based on the "stuff" or the work and which sends, by the way you model the process of learning about teaching and learning, a message that the institutional structure can work in different ways to support student and teacher learning.

Thanks.

EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR: Thank you.

Any questions to direct to Dick? Or should we keep going here?

Barbara -- oh, I'm sorry. I didn't, who was it?

Oh, Anne.

MEMBER: I have one question.

I read -- I forgot how many years ago, I read something called "The Upper Limit Hypothesis," a paper which puts forth your same idea that we have done as much as we can do with the current model. So, just clarify this for me. So you're suggesting that the lesson study group model or however we might Americanize that would be a way of approaching a cultural change in -

DR. ELMORE: Right.

MEMBER: Okay.

DR. ELMORE: And I would actually take any of the items on Deborah's list or any others that you might develop, I mean, it's not -- I'm not suggesting this is the only way to do it. But what I'm suggesting is that the practices you are modeling -- right? -- in the doing of lesson study or in the doing of summer institutes or whatever, the practices you are modeling have to be deliberately counter-cultural. They have to go at those assumptions that I laid out, and they have to take them on at the level at which the work is done.

They have to get teachers to think about sharing practice and working together and limiting the scope of their practice as a professional activity, not as an anti-professional thing. They have to get teachers and administrators to think about improvement as the purpose of the organization, rather than as an anomaly that occurs in 25 percent of the organization. Okay? So, in other words, the behaviors you engage in have to model the alternative culture you are trying to produce.

Telling people to do things differently, and I'm telling you I think even supplying people with different qualifications to this sector -- are not going to change the institutional structure.

EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR: Diane.

MEMBER: Given that part of our institutional structure is also the instructional materials that exist in many places, and we know there are some new high-quality materials out, but the bulk of the school districts are still using very traditional materials, and the prevalent model of teaching, which is teaching is telling and dispensing information, say more about how you would see or if you would see lesson study as a model even able to work within that kind of a setting or what else it would take.

DR. ELMORE: Yes. There are two ways to think about this problem.

One is district-level improvement processes, which I am doing a lot of work on. I mean, I am doing a lot of research on it. I am doing a lot of writing about leadership models that accord with this view. I'm trying to focus on this.

And that is using the school district as the unit of improvement and actually taking a district, working that scale with a number of schools on given content across a lot of settings using mechanisms like this to change the culture. You can think of that.

I would also propose another thing, which might be even more appropriate to the Commission. It's very subversive and you'll have to word it carefully to get under the radar. But to actually create an entirely different infrastructure, which is more professional and more fluid, and which travels across jurisdictional boundaries by creating teacher study groups around centered, content-based working groups that develop lesson models that compile the videotape and videodisk examples of the teaching, and that actually use professional associations and networks to disseminate effective practice independently of government structure.

I would argue that we have to do both because I think it's going to be necessary to have both improvement-oriented districts and schools and broadly-based professional networks. And the broadly-based professional networks are basically just designed to keep the existing government structure honest, and to be brutally frank with you, to supply high-quality instructional materials and teaching to the increasingly large number of entrepreneurial schools which are going to grow up outside the existing government structure, and may in fact drive the existing government structure out of business.

EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR: Could we, for the moment, turn to Barbara, who just leaned over to say she has a plane to catch.

So I know that there were still some questions, but if we could turn the mike over for a few moments.

DR. BARBARA CERVONE: I think this one's working.

This will be absolutely brief, given the urgency of my leaving to catch a plane to California.

It's always a challenge at moments like this to try and both integrate the many, many different ideas that have come forward and finding that there's so much to build on. And so, I'm actually going to not do that, given both the time and the difficulty of doing that, and instead, just speak really briefly to what I see as the challenges for a commission like this and its work.

And one of the -- given that we all sit here and we say we know there have been a million commissions, we know that the language and rhetoric about the kinds of things that we are talking about here -- we're not the only ones to be saying that. They're said in many different places.

So I think one of the struggles is always how to make a compelling case through your work, and then who is really the audience for that.

And as I've sat here today, and as I've been reading, I've been trying again and again to think what is the case that we're trying to make here. Deborah, earlier, you talked about what is the "it" and I think connected to what is the "it", is why should people care about the work of this Commission? Why should they care enough to move mountains in their own life elsewhere to act on this?

And I feel that one of the beauties of the "Nation at Risk" report was that, somehow, it did in fact create that sense of urgency and some kind of an appetite for change, although as we look back, we see that that, in and of itself, was certainly not enough.

But I feel like one of the challenges still in front of this Commission is having a very clear and compelling statement about what it is that it's trying to do and to create an appetite for its work because, without that, the energy that you need to make things happen is not going to be there.

Focus, I think, is another difficulty that faces commissions like this. It faces all of us who are working in and outside schools these days because there is such a competition for people's attention.

At the same time that we're meeting here, there are people probably meeting somewhere else talking about the importance of literacy. I have a whole crew of folks that I'm connected to through the Annenberg Challenge that are talking about arts. They feel they should be up here alongside math and science.

So the question is, first, how do you place yourself within really a cacophonous and clamorous, competitive world of schools? And then, within that, what of the many things that you want to do can you do?

I think the danger in commissions like these is that they always cut off much more than they can chew, bite off much more than they can chew, and then it becomes hard for people to even know what the mission or the focus is. And without focus, it's very hard for people to figure out what to do today, tomorrow, down the line.

So I would encourage modesty in what you promise, and encourage focus amongst the many things that we've talked about -- where are the best places to focus.

And I think that, just in the conversation the past few minutes, some interesting ideas have been brought forward in terms of breadth versus depth, focusing in a few places and doing that well.

I think Dick's comments about do you focus on the 25 percent of the teachers, your Glenn fellows, your leader teachers, or do you focus on the 75 percent? And typically with so many of our efforts is that we develop programs for the best teachers.

Even in our own incentive and reward systems for schools these days, it's often that the schools that are doing the best, that are producing the best results, that get the incentives, that get the rewards, as opposed to those who need them most.

So, in addition to focusing on what few things you can do well, I think it's important to think of what people you need to focus on to make this happen.

The third issue that I've seen, certainly through my work with the Annenberg Challenge, but I think faces our efforts like this, is a very good clear definition and identification of the barriers to the work. If you don't go into this having a clear sense of what those barriers are, and having some kind of a strategy for addressing them, then you'll find yourself in the same places that we've been so many times before.

In our discussion group, I suggested that one of those barriers that I've seen again and again in the work that I've been doing is time. And time is not built in adequately enough into the efforts that we do at every single level.

If you're talking about people learning new -- the demands are huge when you're talking about people making a commitment in their life to teaching. You're talking about their learning new skills. You're talking about partnerships. You're talking about collaboration. All that takes time, and there's so little in the way schools are structured and the way our work is structured that allows for that. So if you don't identify time along with many other barriers to making this happen, then again, you may find yourself in the same place we've been before.

Finally, the other part of that is opportunities or leverage points. And this is something that we talked about a bit in our small group.

But again, efforts like these so often come out feeling that they are the only one or that they are the ultimate one in the world and that there's a need to create new structures, there's a need to create new opportunities without taking a good, hard look around at what's already there, what you can build on, what are those opportunities to add value to the work that is currently going on, and what are the alliances that can be made.

So I think those would be my four points that I would want to leave in terms of the larger challenge to this Commission.

Again, (1) is being really clear what the case is that you are making and making it in compelling enough fashion that people will have the energy and the appetite to get behind it; (2) that there's focus to what you do, that the aims are doable and that it's clear who are the folks and what are the strategies that are most promising; (3) that you take a good, hard look at the barriers and then have a way to address them; and (4) that you do everything you can to find opportunities for leverage.

EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR: Thanks.

Before she runs out, anyone have a question?

We thank you very much.

Don, can I turn to you?

DR. LANGENBERG: Sure. Let me try to make three points that I've tried to make with my breakout group this morning.

The most important, I think, is that, as I read through the blue material and the yellow material, I found lots of ideas that I like. It's a wonderful compendium of things that I would agree need to be done.

But I did not find something that I would dearly love to see in the Commission's final report. The scale of the challenge that you are addressing is vast and it's critical that that be understood: 2 million teachers to be replaced in the next decade; 200,000 math and science teachers that we need; 15,000 school districts; and 15,000 school boards; on and on.

And as it notes in, I think, the blue material, tinkering around the edges ain't going to cut it.

As it also notes, in the mathematics of school reform, a little plus a little adds up to nothing.

And so it seems to me that the greatest service that this Commission could perform is to present a convincing, motivating system design, a design for a system that will accomplish all the goals you've laid forth, do all the things that you said need to be done.

The organizational structure, the governmental structures, the economic structures, the social structures that we are going to deal with this challenge -- using -- if we do are pretty much those in existence. They are very complex.

There is the federal government, the state governments, local governments, school districts, school superintendents, school principles, PTAs, families, the business community and all of its complex glory, and on and on and on.

And so, in a sense, that system design has to set forth a set of structures, perhaps of organizations, new ones perhaps, or perhaps reform old ones that can work within that organizational structure and get done what needs to be done. There might be a little innovation.

I'm much taken by Professor Elmore's notion of a subversive infrastructure that might be created to work somewhere underneath the underpinnings of the existing structure. But it seems to me a clear picture of what this system needs to be would be very, very useful.

Another thing that I'd like, along with that, is what might be called a business plan. That is to say we all need to understand very clearly what it is going to cost us in money, and person power, how long it is going to take us to do this, where all of those resources are going to come from. My own guess, for example, is that about 1 percent of the gross domestic product, in addition to what we're already spending, which is to say somewhere between $100 and $200 billion a year, is about what it will take to do the job adequately.

We need to understand that. We need to know where that -- where those resources are going to come from, who is going to provide them, and how are we going to persuade people to prove them.

That's what I would like to see in this report. And if it contains lots of neat ideas about what specifically we need to do, that's all to the better, but a blueprint, a map that actually motivates and compels all of those stakeholders would be, I think, the most useful service that this Commission could provide to this country.

Second point -- a good friend of mine, a school teacher, a science teacher in a high school in the Middle West once rather passionately said to me, "You know, education is the only profession in which facts don't matter." There is far too much truth in that than there ought to be - far more truth in that than there ought to be.

And what I think that should lead us to is an understanding that we have got to find out a lot more in a truly scientific, scientifically credible way about what works, what doesn't work, about the teaching and the learning of math and science or anything else for that matter than we now know, and we have to find ways to force -- yes, to force that into educational practices in precisely the manner that Professor Elmore specified for surgical practices.

Our physicians are not autonomous in just the way that he described. They must use best practices and those best practices, the drugs they prescribe, the methodologies they use, must have been tested under pain of federal law. Nothing like that exists in education and I think something like that ought to.

Finally, you have got to motivate your audiences -- the American people -- when it comes to that, and their representatives of various kinds. What will motivate them?

The thing that motivates me most successfully and most often is fear. And I must tell you that I am frightened, seriously frightened by what I see as I contemplate this issue.

And I simply would remind you that some long time ago now -- it must be 20 years -- in a report called "A Nation at Risk," with the famous line about what a hostile power might do if they wished to undermine, to destroy this country, design an education system much like the one we've got.

I think that's at least as true now as it was then and we're 20 years or so down the pike, and I think we should have every reason to be frightened and I think our fellow citizens ought to be frightened. And I wouldn't mind at all if you used that motivation to convince them that they ought to do something about what your report finds and recommends.

Thank you.

EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR: Why don't we take -- oh, maybe the next 10 minutes for some questions to our provocateurs and then we'll take a short break, just for everyone to stretch their legs before we regroup.

I know, Rush, you had your hand up before.

MEMBER: Okay.

After those three, I'm not quite sure where to start, but let me point out something that's been troubling me all along, and seems to be in sharper focus for me now.

I think part of our problem is we don't know what our problem is, that we -- the best we've done so far in stating what we're trying to address is a low TIMSS score and a shortage of skilled workers. And those may be troubling but, you know, I think we'll find at least as compelling a case out there that our workers don't read well and that we should be doing something about reading. And so I think we still haven't addressed the question of what is special about this content that we are teaching and, if we are going to approach it through the content door, we'd better figure out what that is.

And we decided early on we weren't going to get into curriculum. And maybe that's because other people had done it or because it was too big a job and we didn't know where to start. I'm not sure. But I think approaching it through the curriculum door might make sense, as Dick says.

But we don't know what curriculum we're talking about, what's so special about - I think each of us, particularly the scientists and engineers in the room, have some sense of what's not in the curriculum and how we'd love to see our favorite subjects in there. But we haven't -- You know, I actually go to schools a lot and I say to science teachers, you know, maybe the best measure of whether we're doing things right is whether each year in grades one through 12, students at the end of the year could give a better explanation of the difference between astronomy and astrology.

And that what we're trying to do is help students learn how to frame questions in a way that they can be answered empirically. That's essentially what science is, I think. I can't think of a better definition of what science is.

And I don't know whether this is the sort of thing that will stir souls, whether this will answer Barbara's question of, you know, what's so special about science, or whether it will do what Don is calling for, which is a business plan, cost, schedule and marshaling of resources.

But, well anyway, that's my comment and then my question is, and maybe somebody wants to elaborate on that, but my question is -- in any of these things, what Barbara talked about or what Dick's talked about, where do we find the time? You know, to be mundane about this, are we talking about summer? Are we talking about evenings? Are we talking about after school?

You know, where are we going to find time for the -- for whatever it is that we're asking the teachers and the administrators to do?

EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR: Both of them moved forward, so...

DR. ELMORE: First of all, I think you have to ask what's different and what's similar about the content area.

What's similar about it is -- and I think you're going to do yourself and others a disservice if you don't observe this -- is that math and science are core academic content areas. They're areas in which we expect every single student to be proficient at a relatively high level. Period. Full stop. We expect that of literacy. We expect that of history and social studies. They're core academic content areas. So they're similar in that respect.

They are different in both the nature of the content and in the problems they pose for improvement of teaching and of teachers' teaching and teaching practices for all the reasons you've developed here, which is elementary school teachers don't just naturally rise to the occasion of teaching math and science necessarily in ways that you can often engage them in literacy, although I have to tell you teaching real literacy is a lot like teaching real math and science. It's an incredibly highly skilled form of teaching practice that the average parent has no conception, I think, of the level of sophistication and difficulty.

But -- so, I would say similarities and differences. And to be honest about how the Commission's work fits into the overall education of reform and improvement agenda, I think is terribly important.

On the time issue -- you know, I was saying in the small group, if you just look at the data on the proportion of time that teachers in service spend working on their own learning and skill, it pretty much predicts the level of scoring on international comparisons.

And that is because systems that engage in relatively sophisticated forms of improvement design the job in such a way that it provides the opportunity to continue to learn the skill. That happens also to be true if you examine the way American school districts that are engaged in high levels of improvement activity and that can demonstrate the connection between changes in instructional practice and student performance -- it happens also to be the way they do business.

Community School District Number 2 in New York went from spending about what most school districts spend on professional development, around 1 percent, in the space of about five or six years, to spending somewhere in the neighborhood of 12 percent, which is a huge amount of money.

Now here's where I lose most of the educational establishment. That money is in the budget. That money is there to be spent. That is not new money being spent on professional development. That's a reallocation of existing resources to pay for the conditions of work. Right?

And that was painful. That was difficult. That was hard to do, but they did it. And I would submit that most districts which are going through this process right now are doing roughly the same thing.

What does the money pay for? Well, a very large proportion of it pays for time in one way or another. It pays for extra time that teachers spend and it pays for the people who support or substitute for teachers when they're doing activities outside of the classroom that relate to the improvement of their own practice.

And so the bulk of that money is not spent trucking people around from one place to the other. It's actually spent on time, people's time. That translates into actual activities that are related to specific improvements in practice.

So, I would say -- I mean, the good news is -- yes, it does take time and that -- and there are lots of examples of systems that are doing this. And the bad news is that most of the time comes from reallocation.

And I would add that putting more money on top of an already ineffective and inefficient allocation of resources is not going to buy you improvement. It's going to buy you a different shade of paint on the elephant.

EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR: Don.

DR. LANGENBERG: There is a recent report entitled "Teaching Reading Is Rocket Science".

As an experimental physicist, I spend a large part of my life doing things roughly akin to rocket science, but also, in the last couple of years, I chaired the National Reading Panel, which addressed the question given to us by Congress -- what is known with real reliability about the teaching and learning of reading?

And I'm here to tell you that teaching reading is a whole lot more difficult and complicated than rocket science. I would say it's a whole lot more complicated than teaching either math or science.

But on the question of time, we are stuck with a system that, in part, puts time constraints on teachers because it was necessary to fit education, and therefore teaching, into that part of the calendar that was left over after harvest and before spring planting. And we're still stuck with it. That's an unnecessary constraint. There is absolutely no reason why teaching and learning can't be a year-round activity. So I would suggest that's one place we can get teachers a little time.

Another place we can get teachers a little time is by redesigning their jobs so that we don't view the function of a teacher as being standing in a classroom teaching children and nothing but. Teachers have to think. Teachers have to plan. Teachers have to analyze curricula. Teachers have to do all kinds of things that have nothing to do with standing in a classroom and dealing with students. And we've got to find them the time to do that.

The third place, I think, to find teachers some time is in the same source where many of us -- or at least many of the people we know -- are. It's a world in which Internet time is the controlling time, in which 24 by 7 has become a well-understood phrase. It's a world in which the constraints that are otherwise imposed by things like semesters, weeks, workdays and also by geographical necessity -- the necessity of being someplace at particular times -- all of those constraints can now be done away with more or less by technology. And I think we can find teachers more time in that world just as many of us have found more time in that world.

EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR: Neal.

Welcome, by the way.

MEMBER: Thank you very much.

Since the physicists had the floor, I thought it might be an opportunity for me to comment.

I really have learned a lot just in the discussion in the last hour or so. But I simply want to address one point. And Don's raised it. It has to do with technology.

Technology is addressed to some extent in here, but my question is the following.

Given how rapidly technology is changing and changing essentially everything it touches, and given how rapidly we are putting technology into the classroom through a whole variety of efforts, some federal, some at the state level, shouldn't we make clear that we think it's important to understand what the technology is good for and ensure that, at least this time, we put in place some system of study, call them clinical trials, or just say research, or however we're comfortable describing it, to ensure that, in real time, as we're running this experiment anyway, that we're doing it in such a way that we learn what the effectiveness of the technology really is so that Don's point, that technology really ought to buy us some of this time, I think I feel the same way.

I'm not sure we truly understand how that might work. And I recognize we're dealing with a crisis here and there is urgency in dealing with it, and I'm not suggesting we consider any of this less urgent. But while we're getting the attention of the people we want to reach, let's don't miss the opportunity to ensure that we understand what the impact of technology is, and of course, try to make it as good as it can be.

But it's going to be a -- it's going to take us some time, I think, to fully understand the implications and my guess is it's an increasingly interesting research question for people who may heretofore not been drawn into pedagogy. And so there might be a real capacity out there to work. And if we could just stimulate that kind of -- encourage that sort of activity and point to its importance, then I think we would be doing something good.

EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR: I think this might be the right time for us just to take a short break.

Great thanks to our two provocateurs. I understand that Dick will be leaving us shortly. I haven't managed to ask that of Don. So you might grab them on your way out for the next couple of minutes.

But if we could reconvene very promptly in 15 minutes. Thank you.

This page last modified June 28, 2000 (gkp)