Mind the Gap: Race and School achievement in the US

to suggest to all of you that are joining us or leaving us that we're very very thrilled to work with the Atlantic who's been our partner and the Aspen ideas festival from the beginning between their website the Atlantic calm and our website AI festival org you'll be able to track everything that we're doing online and I hope you'll join us in the conversation and share these with your friends I'd also like to take a moment to thank our sponsors whom without we would not be able to produce the Aspen ideas festival and thankfully in a time of great recession there's such an enthusiasm for deep conversation that sponsorship is welcome here and very very much on board with us and we're indebted to these organizations for helping us and these are all state Altria Applied Materials Booz Allen Hamilton Ernst & Young Hewlett Packard mercedes-benz shall Thomson Reuters and us trust if we could give them a hand they've been making this possible across the last several days we've been talking about a number of subjects one of them is education and the other is race in America and you'll find if you've not been on online yet or if you were in these conversations that they are very related and we decided that we would bring two individuals to ask them to discuss the achievement gap one many of you may have seen last night have been introduced to who is the most remarkable educator and advocate for children I think that maybe lives in the United States mr. Geoffrey Canada who is the CEO and the head of a Harlem Children's Zone and the second is the youngest african-american ever to get tenure at Harvard University can I introduce you please to Roland fryer professor of economics I really don't like being on panels with Jeff because as you heard she says he's the most remarkable person in the world Jeff Canada here's some nerd from Harvard Roland fryer so let me let me just get us started about I know everyone here understands the importance of education but let me just give you a few facts that you might not know if you just look at racial inequality in America that's something I'm very interested in blacks earn about 39 percent less full-time workers than whites if you look at things like incarceration two times more likely to be incarcerated on any given day if you look at health life expectancy six-year difference in life expectancy between different racial groups now I don't want to depress you because it's too early in the day but here's the wonderful thing about it here's what gives us hope if you just look at eighth grade test scores ok just eighth grade test scores that 39% difference and wages goes down to about 10% that doubling of incarceration goes down as well the six years and life expectancy goes down to two years so it won't get rid of all the social ills that we have in America of course but if there was one bullet education certainly would be in that's what got me interested in education and with the issue as you all know is that we haven't been able to close the racial achievement gap it doesn't exist when kids are nine months old but it you know quickly the trajectories of black and white children quickly diverge after that and by the time that kids are thirteen there's a one standard deviation difference one standard deviation is a big number between racial groups in terms of how well they can do math and how well they can read if you look at places like Washington DC four and a half percent of those kids can read at grade level four and a half percent according to the National Association of Education progress in Detroit is three percent I'm not making this up three percent so I got involved in education got depressed like everyone else and then discovered the Harlem Children's Zone and I heard a lot about this guy Jeff Canada and people said man Jeff is so amazing he is so he's so wonderful you just have to meet Jeff and I met Jeff and Jeff gave me his data and I told Jeff I said you know if you're not working and you just a smooth guy I'm gonna tell everybody he did say that I told him I said cuz I care about kids much more than I care about you because we just met you can see I have a good effect on people I'm more of an acquired taste Jeff is not so when we analyzed Jeff's data here's what we found I don't know how he does it Jeff's gonna tell you that but in three short years kids who came in to his sixth grade he erased the racial achievement gap in New York City in three years so kids who were coming in reading at second grade level third grade level in sixth grade by the time they were eighth graders he had erased the achievement gap with kids with other racial groups in New York City and that was in math he did something very similar in English language arts and for kids he has that are younger they've not only erased the achievement gap they're passing the average kids in New York City when he actually gets them younger I have no idea how he does it but I guess today he's gonna tell us a little bit about what's going on in the home thank you I was introduced to Roland fryer and they told me that he was a boy genius actually Roland told me that but but the thing the thing that I found intriguing was that they said that Roman was searching for the truth and he didn't care where that led and so that all of the politically correct stuff none of it mattered to him at all he was really looking for the truth and he did come up to me and say I heard your stuff was good I hope it's true but you know I'm gonna tell the truth no matter what I found and I told if it doesn't work I actually want to know about I've been looking at this achievement gap issue literally my whole life and I mean that when I was in elementary school in the 50s people didn't pretend that all kids could learn you were trapped starting and I found out about it started about the second grade and you went and it was very obvious you went to - one or two - or two and everybody understood what those numbers meant and we kids understood what it meant and once you were in then you stayed it and we would lose one or two kids a year and one or two kids would move from one - one - two - and it just stayed like that and I was amazed that they could be so wrong I have an older brother Dan and this is one of the issues in education people thought I was smart because I answered any question that you asked me immediately right yeah they asked me something I would say my brother Dan used to think about it people said he was slow right this is no I'm being but you see I'm being honest right you would ask Dan a question he'd think oh no no no that boy put him in the 65 class because he's slow now my brother happens to you know be a nuclear engineer today but it this is true but that is despite that is despite what the teachers believed about him and so in the seventh grade we went from special progress classes to 720 - you have to understand what this does now if you were in 75 there was already doubt that you would graduate high school 710 we knew you weren't gonna graduate high school 718 720 I just never and it was the majority of children were in those classes somewhere people found out that that was a bad thing for kids at least to tell them right so we changed all the things so you can't tell even though we do exactly the same thing that people have the same beliefs when we I didn't want to do schools when I came in to do the zone we did all the other supports and services but I always felt the answer was to reform public schools that that was the only answer that's what all the kids all right right so after doing everything I couldn't get the schools in my zone to listen to me I would go in and say look you guys come on if you get earlier and you work with the neighbors say Jeff you don't understand what it's like to run a school in Harlem and I kept here you don't understand so I finally I went to Joel Klein was chancellor I said Joel look I want to do a management with you where we manage schools together we we get 50% of the vote and you get 50% and I went through this long elaborate thing and Joel just started laughing at me right he says Jeff by the time we get that legislation passed to do that we will both be old and retired do a charter school and I didn't want to do a charter school because I had done schools and doing schools is no fun it's a lot of work but there was no other way for me to answer the question when people said but you don't know how hard it is or why this is impossible because you don't run schools now I would love to say that I was a genius in figuring out how to close this achievement gap and believe me if I was I would admit it to you all my closest friends I wouldn't tell everybody but I would certainly tell you all in here if I was a genius no you know what the sad thing is that what we did in my opinion was so simple that when I think of the decades of kids I'm 58 there have been schools failing since I was a kid 50 60 years when I think about the the damage that has done to children it's really very sad to me so so what was the big secret the first thing was we thought if kids are behind they probably need a longer day I call it the physics of Education meaning that if your kid is two years behind it's not like all the other middle class kids say let's wait here for Jeff's kids to catch up right they're learning and we're trying to get kids to learn I tell people to help people understand this you ever learned something in school that you say I'll never use this if a train left Denver at seven o'clock in the morning traveling east right and another train left Denver at 12 o'clock in the afternoon traveling east both trains are traveling 30 miles an hour I lose the train would be can't strain they never the physics doesn't work in education how is it now that you don't have to be a genius to figure that out how is it if I have a school that I know 70% of my kids are two years behind I think in the same school year the same amount of time I'm gonna solve that equation it has never worked and you know what the answer is all over America when people can't do it they fire the superintendent's the superintendent's if you look at superintendent their job expectancy is about 18 months because after a while people figure they can't do it and and I thought because I'm from New York City and we think that's the center of the world that when we fired him in New York City that that was the end of their career nope they went from New York the Pittsburgh for Pittsburgh out to Florida I mean they just travel around the same people they're still in the business they're still great the problem is we won't talk about this issue of the time right how much time does it take to catch a kid up now I'll ask you this question you have a kid who's a year behind in math what are you gonna do I mean this is not like rocket science that we figure this out why won't schools do it the other issue we did was we decided that some teachers and this gets me in trouble i'ma get in trouble some teachers can't teach I know that's like a radical I know look people hate me all over America for saying that it's a radical thought that some teachers and and my son my oldest son who's a lawyer called me up one day he said dad all my friends are mad at you I said why your friends mad at me he said because you said we should send all the lousy teachers to the upper middle-class neighborhoods now of course all of his friends are upper-middle class I said well they didn't get the whole quote correct what I said was if we can't fire them then we should send them to the upper middle-class neighborhoods right because those kids can afford a year of a lousy teacher poor kids can't afford it so why would we do that to them so this issue of do you hold yourself accountable we hold ourselves accountable if the kids don't learn and this is a given now this is Harlow so let me give you all the Givens single parents that's a given poverty that's a given crime given substance abuse is a given dysfunctional family that's a given all of those are given so when you come to interview with me for a job I say do you know this community you say yes I said you know this what's funny thing Jeff crime drugs can you educate children despite that yes well then that's it and I don't want to hear anything in four months when you come in I say look at the score these kids aren't doing so well Oh Jeff you've been to their homes oh wait wait wait wait we had that discussion you said you knew about that right if you allow excuses in this business you will fail I will tell you there is a whole science really designed around why you can't educate these kids here's a very simple thing if you fire everybody who doesn't succeed with the kids you either end up with no one working for you or a program that works right we ended up with a program that works everybody in the end understands failure is not an option so what happens if you're gonna fail in your job right you have a job you fail you don't work weekends you have a job that you could fail and take three months off just like look I know I know I didn't do a good job but I'm not coming back to like September right I mean that's like crazy only in education can you have those kind of things so look I would work rolling our work is in a small small charter schools the real challenge in America is can we reform public education can we get the same things that we've learned in charter schools and public schools and the only person I know who's really attempting to do that in America is Rowland and he's I thought he was smarter than this because he's decided not just to be a professor at Harvard but to now take over some schools and actually do what no one else has been able to do so you may want to say something about that road sure now I thought that's what tenure was for man on the job retirement that's what I call it you know let me just back up just right this is exactly what we're doing trying to figure out how to take programs like the Harlem Children's Zone Kipp yes aspire and take them to scale in normal in regular traditional public schools and that's hard I told Jeff's wife the first time I met I said what I really like to do is boil Jeff down to pill form so we can transport him around and that boy got problems um so here's kind of what we did when I first got involved in education the facts I told you about before we're interesting to me and when I realized education was so important for those social ills and so what I want to get involved the craziest thing about education to me I mean and you've said a lot about a lot of it is frankly the lack of rigor that we hold ourselves to when we try to understand what's actually working and what's not I was trained as I'm sure you how really nerdy I am is an undergraduate as a mathematician and I'm got a PhD in economics but it wasn't until I got involved in education till I heard about the cardiac test have you heard about this now I've heard of t-tests I've heard of separating hyperplane theorem but I've never heard of the cardiac test until I got involved in education I would go around all these schools and I would say wow this is an interesting after-school program and they would say oh yeah it's working I said well is it really working they said oh yeah it's really work and I say well how do you know and they'd say we can feel in our heart and I mean that might be alright for your children but for my kids I want some numbers you know I mean could you imagine going to a doctor and I said you know well you know a little fever here's some pills my buddy gave me I think they were right you'd run out of there for an education that's okay so we created this lab to say okay we want to you know put science into education do everything as it's pilot programs and rigorously measure what they're doing after we met Jeff we said well we don't want to do that anymore right I think it was Gauss the famous mathematician who said once you have two examples you basically have a proof and with Jeff's work with Kip's work with other people's work we have a series of examples the question is how can we boil down these wonderful things that are going on in charter schools and try to figure out how to scale them in public schools and so we've started down that path and I'll tell you about it and then Jeff's been intimately involved he's really been an advisor on this project to me from day one and the first thing we did was we went and started videotaping people in schools in highly successful and not so successful charters because there's some charters that are fantastic and others should be closed and what we wanted to do was look at the variance if you will in charter success and figure out if there are a few things that could predict that success okay so longer school days how you use data to drive instruction etc and the preliminary evidence is that they're essentially four or five things that kind of come out of this that can predict a lot of the success in charters one is more time in school Jeff's kids spend a whole lot of time in school in fact when I was visiting in his elementary school I told the Prince of Lies I'd like you to buy me lunch he said why would I buy you lunch I said because if you don't I'm gonna tell your kindergarteners that the other kids aren't spending this much I'm in school you come on man don't tell me that for time in school very very important the second thing is obviously the human capital piece right getting great teachers in the classroom I mean that's just you know that's just obvious the third thing though which Jeff didn't touch upon is how he uses data to drive instruction and other high-performing charter schools as well okay assessing kids every three weeks or so with soft-touch assessments breaking the assessments down by skill so he knows or I know if a certain kid doesn't understand linear equations with one unknown and then reteaching when you don't know and a lot of public schools you just kind of go and go and go and then we give you a test in March you get the results in June and then school's out right so this is frequent assessments low touch using the data to actually drive instruction and make sure that kids get mastering the fourth thing is essentially how do you differentiate instruction some people do it because they have phenomenal teachers and if you have a phone if you've really seen a phenomenal teacher it is a work of art I mean they are amazing right I mean the kids start slouching this is eyes on me and they're just going and going and and they can teach the five different levels in a classroom or thirty and everybody is on task that's what Jeff one two percent of teachers it's a wooden one of those teachers in every classroom is drop so you know the Harlem Children's Zone schools and other schools use other ways of differentiated instruction by putting kids and small groups etc and the last piece really is the wraparound services that Jeff gives and other types of investments and the culture and the expectations that a lot of folks have and the culture and expectations really have to be baked in to every single thing the school does right I mean you can't it's not like the 1980s when we had like quality departments right the Department of quality you can't have just a bucket that says hey at some point we're gonna think about culture culture has to be in bed in every single thing so here's what we're doing we found from these charters that these are kind of things that are correlated with achievement I think the next step is to try to translate that into public so we are taking 20 public schools because I'm a nerd they've been randomly chosen in a large city and we're taking these four or five things and we're putting those things in the actual public schools so we've linked in the school day school now in these schools starts from 7:30 and ends at 4:30 okay they go half days on Saturday right we've got data-driven instruction they've got tutors every kid in this school is going to get a period where there's two on one tutoring to be able to differentiate the instruction for those who we don't tutor we're going to double dose them if they're behind grade level so you get more time in school but more effective time in school and we're working hard to define leaders for these schools and to train the principals and get great teachers etc and when I went into the schools I asked the teacher you know all the teachers I try to do my best Geoff Canada impression which I'm not very good at we don't do this stuff at home that he's doing I try to do that my grandmother was an educator for 37 years now say stuff like grandma we got to kick out these teachers his bra that's what Jeff said so we're going in and we've gone into the school we interviewed all the teachers and I really was blown away because you know I mean I know you guys think I'm like this ivory tower academic but you know in my world I'd like the most apply a guy around so you know I'm in the schools and I'm talking to the teachers and you know I said what do you need to turn this school around you've got 29 percent of kids scoring at grade level and just a footnote here what does it mean to score a grade level that means you got to get 28 percent of the questions right now if you just put down a that's about 25 percent of so that means the marginal value of this teacher is not about three percent okay I'm back up to the main test make you furious I mean you could just put down a i'm a doberman with a pencil could get twenty three percent so I asked the teacher I said what do you need I said because we're thinking of longer school days we're thinking about differentiating instruction through tutoring we're thinking about data-driven instruction what do you need you know a lot of teachers told me smarter kids I was blowing away but we absolutely not only can do this we have to do this if this were cancer research and you realize that 12 cancer facilities one in the Harlem Children's Zone want to keep one at yes etc had found cures to cancer the whole field would ascend on those centers and figure out what they're doing so that they can help everybody else out because they're dying of cancer in education it's weird to me that we've now got these examples we're trying to scale them up in the city Geoff not a lot of other folks are trying this stuff and people are still saying well I don't know Rolla you might be able to take those four things but I don't know I kind of like computers we're not working together we're not figuring out if we do this thing right we can take what jeff has done we can take what Kipp has done we can create don't run out on me we can create a vaccine for education if you want to get this right yeah I I don't I don't think we have a choice and the thing that frustrates me the most I think rolling in our work is the absolute unwillingness of I think a lot of folk in this business to try innovation you know you just had bill gates up here and I heard the question about devices and he began to talk about they have no choice but to innovate you will be I mean you know just as blackberry right I mean you you you'll just be toast in almost any other place except in education an education when someone innovates everybody piles on to say it's no good even if it doesn't work we should be trying something and a lot of stuff doesn't work when people do it but we should be trying something saying in the end we do know these kids can learn we just have to be smart enough about figuring out the answers and so I think that that we're on right now the forefront of a movement in this country which says something very simple if children don't learn it's our fault it is not the children's fault it's not the family's fault it's not the community's fault it's those of us in the business and we've got to be smarter about doing our job when you ask people what does it take right to educate a child you don't want the answer smarter kids because people really believe they know this is but I know Roland's not joking because people really believe this and they say to me were here cause we we if we were down below 96th Street we'd be able to do that too right so what is that saying what we think the kids down there somehow different then the kids we have right here instead of you know what we need to do a better job I know we've got our only two minutes they've already given me to sign he gave he gave me the sign they had a sign it was like a black power thing rolling and I say don't get that wrong right we might say some good you might come out leaving the state so here's here's what I think here's what I think that we have to do as a nation we have to decide that education is a civil right that it really is a civil right that everyone in this country deserves an opportunity to get an education and that those of us who are in the field that you have to hold us accountable for that I think they absolutely have the right not not only to to an education to but to be educated and and and the other thing I would say is we also have to just get rid of the excuses well we can't educate this person because they come from poverty or the mother's not with them or their father's not with them or whatever you know or the parents that I hear that all the time even though excuses people say well I don't have any excuses Road but have you seen their parents and I tell them look the parents sending you the best kid they got they're not hiding the good ones at home we're homeschool you you got us going so we're gonna have to not only decide but get a little upset about it and if we put these things together the things that are going on in charter schools which are the biggest developments in education in the last 50 years and we get serious about our methods and say if it's good enough for the medical folks is good enough for our children I have zero doubt when we come back in five ten years we would have solved this problem well I I couldn't agree with Roland more let me just say three things that I think people get confused Rowland and I both understand how difficult and wondrous teaching is this is really not an anti teacher issue this just really says that we need to have teachers prepared and capable and committed to do the job that's the first thing the second thing is this is not about charters versus no charters we want great schools for all American kids and we just think charters allow more innovation but public schools in any other business public schools would be looking and saying if they've got an iPad we're going to invite min and iPad we're going to get one better instead they're like take the iPad let's get rid of that thing right we really need to have public schools accept the fact that we're not against public school this is not an anti public school win this is like we all have to get on top of our jobs and then the third thing is that we have to remove the people whose job it is to keep education from changing there is jobs involved in making sure nothing changes and that has to be eliminated so that we can bring education to a change by the way we think that Rowland and I can do all that we can on this issue and we will do that Rowland will be doing it a lot longer than I will go sees a lot younger than me but in the end if you all don't raise a stink about this everything we do is not going to matter so let's all do this together and thank you all very much

Channel: The Aspen Institute

Views: 11,233

Keywords: education, aspen, aspen institute, aspen ideas festival, United States Of America (Country), learning, race, equal, school system, educational system, opportunity, Geoffrey Canada, Roland Fryer Jr.

Id: 0V3PLg8dddA

Length: 30min 35sec (1835 seconds)

Published: Sat Jul 10 2010