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MR. GREGORY: And look at a snapshot from our new NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll on the question of education in terms of the public view of how education is. Seventy-seven percent in our poll give our public schools a C grade or lower. And in terms of the state of public schools, 58 percent in our poll, if we look at the next screen, 58 percent believe that major changes or complete overhaul is needed.
And, indeed, Secretary Duncan, an overhaul is in the works. Where are we right now in terms of reform?
SEC'Y ARNE DUNCAN: We've made tremendous progress. But let me be clear, David, as a country, we have a long, long way to go. We have to educate our way to a better economy. Education is an economic strategy. When you see us being 20th in, you know, math and science, we've fallen in one generation from first to ninth in college graduates. That's unacceptable. And we're paying a terrible price today with a tough economy because we've lost our way educationally. That's why we're pushing so hard for reform.
MR. GREGORY: It's important to point out, as well, there's a lot of money in the reform movement right now. You got most of it. You got billions of dollars as Education secretary to give as part of Race to the Top. President Bush, who started No Child Left Behind, that will be reauthorized, you hope, certainly. Where are we with those? Because you're giving money, but there's a lot more conditions to really drive accountability.
SEC'Y DUNCAN: Well, to be clear, we're not investing in the status quo. So with Race to the Top, which actually represents less than 1, less than 1 percent of total K to 12 spending nationally, you see 36 states raising standards, not dumbing down things, not lying to children anymore because of political pressure. You see most states removing barriers to innovative schools. We've seen every single state eliminate the linking of teacher evaluation and student achievement. It's remarkable, remarkable progress encouraged at the local level. That's what we're investing in, great leadership, great courage at the local level.
MR. GREGORY: I, I want to talk throughout this about, not just raising problems, but talking about solutions, because I feel like we dwell on the problems so often it's not always constructive.
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Michelle Rhee, there's a political storm in Washington about education and about the mayor losing his primary, and I'll get to that in just a minute. But I want to start with you and ask you what's working since you've been chancellor? What's the good news?
MS. MICHELLE RHEE: Well, the good news is what we've shown over the last three and a half years in Washington, D.C., is that if you prioritize education, if you make it the number one issue in the city, if you have the political leadership and the courage to make tough decisions, that you can see tremendous progress in a short period of time. Over the last three years we've gone from being, you know, worst, you know, amongst all urban jurisdictions in the country to actually leading the nation in gains in our progress of students on the NAEP examination in both reading and math. So, I think, it basically shows that if you have, if you have a, a, a singular focus and you really are prioritizing, making those tough decisions, that, that progress can, can result.
MR. GREGORY: And, Mr. Robb, what are you finding in Detroit about what's working right now?
MR. ROBERT BOBB: Well, a lot of things that are working in Detroit. I think I'd like to go back to what Secretary Duncan mentioned, and that is, although our state did not win in the Race to the Top competition, considerable reforms were advanced by the governor and the state legislature and the secretary of--I mean the, the superintendent of public instructions. And so we are implementing those programs, although we do not have the, the funding in place. In particular, more time spent with, with our teachers and, and, and, an additional expanded day for our students, and much more rigor that we're putting in our classrooms so that we can, we can compete in the 21st century.
MR. GREGORY: Randi Weingarten, I want to go back, all the way back to 2002 and No Child Left Behind and President Bush and listen again to how he framed what has become the major driver in the reform movement, and that is accountability. Watch this.
(Videotape, January 8, 2002)
PRES. GEORGE W. BUSH: I understand taking tests aren't fun. Too bad. We need to know in America. We need to know whether or not children have got the basic education.
No longer is it acceptable to hide poor performance. No longer is it acceptable to keep results away from parents.
(End videotape)
MR. GREGORY: And President Bush isn't often given credit for driving accountability because No Child Left Behind became unpopular. And yet, indeed, that accountability is what the Obama administration has built on. As--is accountability, at the core of this, working?
MS. RANDI WEINGARTEN: So, you know, President Bush was right. Tests aren't fun, but they're absolutely imperative to do. But what happened when No Child Left Behind was, it all, it became all about the tests as opposed to about teaching and learning. So accountability is essential as a tool, not as a goal. The goal is, how do help 50 million school children in the United States of America get a great education. And so, ultimately, we need to have a couple of other tools like engaged, robust curriculum, like a real focus on teacher development, like a real overhauling of the teacher evaluation system. And if we look at what the countries that have outcompete--that outcompete us do, is that there's a huge investment in teachers as well as looking at accountability. Accountability, absolutely essential; top to bottom accountability as well as bottom to top. But it's not the whole story.
MR. GREGORY: All right, but let's be specific then. Michelle Rhee, in Washington, D.C., you closed schools, you fired teachers. There was a lot of controversy around that. Randi, if you believe in accountability, what happened in Washington--Michelle, you start--when you did fire teachers and close down schools that weren't performing?
MS. RHEE: Well, we certainly got a tremendous amount of pushback. And I think that Superintendent Bobb knows this as well. You know, people are uncomfortable when you change what is currently in place. And so what we looked at over the last three and a half years, for example, we closed 23 schools in the first year, we've closed several schools after that because we cannot continue to pour the same amount of resources into a faulty system. We, we were shrinking in terms of the number of students that were coming to school every day in DCPS, but we never downsized the number of schools that we had. The result of that is that we were spreading our resources way too thin and the, the--we were--the, the citizens and the students weren't feeling the amount of money that we were spending every single day.
You know, in terms of the teacher accountability, yes, we've been--we've held a very, very high bar. We've said it's no longer going to be acceptable for teachers who are ineffective to stay in the classroom. And, you know, we've gotten a tremendous amount of pushback about that. And I think--I mean, you said we were going to talk about the election. But if you talk about the mayor's election, a lot of what you heard from citizens was, "Well, they fire teachers." And what you, unfortunately, didn't hear about that was we didn't fire teachers to be mean, because were callous or didn't care. We wanted to remove ineffective teachers from the classroom simply because we think our children deserve better.
MR. GREGORY: And you talk about accountability, and yet the teachers unions, you say they don't--you shouldn't be demonized, but you just, you sue the district when, when there is accountability, when teachers get fired. Is that, is that the constructive response?
MS. WEINGARTEN: Actually, you know, the last suit that we did was actually about trying to find out the basis upon why--which some of the teachers were fired. And, ultimately, we're still waiting to get the FOIL request and things like that, the Freedom of Information request. But at the bottom of this, David and Michelle, we changed the contract to make it more transparent and cohesive, to give Michelle and the district more tools on teacher quality. We gave the teachers more tools, we gave the district more tools.
The issue in terms of us is to make sure that teachers get the tools and conditions they need to be effective and to make sure that there's fairness. We know the teacher tenure system is broken, and we want to fix it. There are different ways we fixed it in Detroit, working with the district there; different ways we fixed it in, in Washington; different ways we fixed it throughout the country. So the issue is how do we make teachers effective? And also, with all due respect, how do we give the good teachers--there's three million teachers in the United States of America and 133,000 schools. How do we give those quiet, unsung heroes the tools and conditions they need to help all children?
MS. RHEE: But with all due respect, let me say that we, you know, in addition to identifying the ineffective teachers who needed to be terminated, we also identified 16 percent of the teachers in D.C. who we rated as highly effective, and we said to them, "We are going to recognize and reward your work. We're going to compensate you at the level that you deserve to be compensated at." So, with our new contract now, we will be able to pay the most effective teachers who are teaching in high poverty areas and in high need subject areas nearly double the amount that they were previously making. So we are going to use the approach of making sure that the best people are rewarded. But we also have to have the flip side of that, which is, "If you are not effective, then you can no longer be in the classroom."
MR. GREGORY: Secretary Duncan, what happened in Washington, D.C., that concerns you? Mayor Fenty did not win for re-election in his primary.
SEC'Y DUNCAN: Right.
MR. GREGORY: There's a real question--and I guess, Michelle, I should ask you, are you going to stay as chancellor of D.C. schools?
MS. RHEE: Well, I think that's something that we still have to determine. And I have to talk to Vincent Gray, who is the, the, the presumptive mayor. But I think the important thing to realize is that education reform can continue in D.C., regardless of whether I'm there or not. It can continue as long as the leadership is willing to continue to make the incredibly tough decisions that we've made over the last three years.
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MR. GREGORY: It's--but, Secretary Duncan, this is a political question, but it's germane. You didn't campaign at all for Mary--for Adrian Fenty, the mayor. You said you don't do politics. And yet this past week, you said you would campaign for congressional Democrats in the midterm election. Why didn't you campaign for Fenty when the blowback against teacher accountability can be so severe in some of these local districts?
SEC'Y DUNCAN: Right. Well, I'm, I'm a huge fan of what he and Michelle have done. By any measure, the public schools in D.C. are dramatically better today than when they started. I stood with Mayor Fenty multiple times. I invested $75 million in the district because of its leadership. And he can walk out with his head held high. When the story of D.C.'s school reform is written, a huge part is going to be around his courage and his leadership. There are thousands of local primaries around the country, I can't weigh in on every single one. There are national candidates that I need to support who are going to drive school reform. But Mayor, Mayor Fenty did, I think, a remarkable job of dramatically improving the quality of education in D.C.
MR. GREGORY: But let me just stop you.
Mr. Bobb, this is one of the issues that, that reformers talk about. You can't denationalize this, this effort. I mean, what happened in Washington, D.C.--and the unions were a part of this in terms of opposing what the mayor and, and Michelle Rhee did--if you--if we make it about individual jurisdictions, the unions are very powerful. Those who, who oppose some of these reforms in the status quo are powerful. Is it good enough for national leaders to step back and allow the individual districts to have at it themselves? Can you prevail and reform when it's this tough? You know what it's like in the school district.
MR. BOBB: It's very tough. I think that national leaders have to be involved and engaged at the local level as well. I mean, the reform movement, what we're doing in Detroit cannot take place without very strong support from, let's say, Governor Granholm, Mike Flanagan; in Michelle's case, Adrian Fenty. Every major decision that I have made, I have been sued either by local leaders, school board members. And there is a sense of urgency in these urban school districts. You cannot sit back and let children--and not take care of what, what's needed for children, particularly more rigor in the classrooms, more effective leaders--not just teachers effective leaders. I mean, I, I moved 51 principals this year alone. The school leadership at the building is significantly as important as the teachers that we put before our children in the classrooms.
I mean, I know that Michelle went through the process of closing schools in, in Washington, D.C. We--in 2000, we had 167,000 students in the Detroit public schools. Today we're educating about 84,000, 85,000 students. In the two years that I've been the emergency financial manager, we've closed 59 schools. It is very difficult politically, it's hard on a community, and it's also challenging for parents and students.
MR. GREGORY: All right, and we're going to take a quick break here. We're--and then we're going to come back and I want to talk specifically about what is really at the core of this debate, which is how do we make sure we get the very best teachers in front of our students, and how does accountability achieve that? We'll talk about both sides of that when we're back with our panel right after this brief station break.
(Announcements)
MR. GREGORY: And we're back, live from 30 Rockefeller Plaza in New York, to continue our discussion about public school education.
Randi Weingarten, I want to get to this issue of how we get the best teachers in front of our students. And let's get right to this point. I'm a parent, I have three young kids. If I go into my child's classroom and I'm basically told, "Look, this teacher's really not doing that well, but we want to give them another year, see how they do this year. We want to try to develop them a little bit, so maybe by, you know, maybe not in this year, but maybe next year, things will get better." That's not good enough for me as a parent.
MS. WEINGARTEN: Right.
MR. GREGORY: So show me--tell me specifically what you representing teachers across the country have done to avoid that reality when it appears that, in fact, the unions have said to people like Michelle Rhee, you can't get rid of these people, you can't just fire them willy-nilly if you don't have the right results. You're demonizing the teachers.
MS. WEINGARTEN: So that result, when an administrator says that to a parent, is not good for anyone. Teachers don't want it, parents don't want it. And, ultimately, what we need to do is we need to invest in teachers from the moment that they go into teacher preparation until every single day that they're in a classroom. Most of us--I don't know, you know, Michelle has told these stories about when she started to teach, I've told these stories of when I started to teach, I wasn't a very good teacher my first year. I was a better teacher my second and third years. So there's going to be some investment lag that happens in terms of teachers.
MR. GREGORY: But, Randi, we're not talking about a learning curve here. We're not talking about starting out teachers, Michelle. We're talking about teachers who have been in the system for a long time...
MS. WEINGARTEN: Sure.
MR. GREGORY: ...who have failed to perform year after year, and yet, frankly, removing them is the hardest part.
SEC'Y DUNCAN: Right.
MS. WEINGARTEN: So let me, let me just go right to that. No one wants a bad teacher, David. Not teachers, not parents. When I asked our members this question, overwhelmingly they want us to find the tools and conditions to help teachers do better. And what we've tried to do now, what we've realized, is that the evaluation system is totally and completely broken in the United States. So our union has tried to invest in creating a new evaluation system. There's about 50 or 60 districts that are trying to do that. We've tried to figure out who is good, who is not. If they're not good, we help them. If we can't help them, we have to weed them out of the profession. You're absolutely right...
MR. GREGORY: But is that happening, is my question.
MS. WEINGARTEN: It is now starting--you know, it is now starting to happen in the last two years in a greater rate than we've ever seen before.
MR. GREGORY: But I want to give Michelle a chance to respond. Is that happening from the--you've been head of schools, is that how you see it?
MS. RHEE: I mean, let's be honest that, first of all, our new evaluation system where we actually use student achievement data, how much a student progresses, to determine whether or not a, a, a teacher is, is effective or not, we implemented that because we have the power within the district to implement whatever evaluation tool we want. So we, we got a lot of pushback, and we still get, get tremendous pushback from the, from the unions. So, for example, we just identified about 241 educators of this last summer who were, were not effective or did not have the proper certification, etc. And when we did that and then said, for the ineffective teachers, people who got that on their evaluation, through a robust evaluation, looking at multiple things, "You are now being terminated," then we get slapped with this, you know, huge class-action grievance, basically, saying, you know, "We're grieving the way that you did this." But the bottom line is that if these people are ineffective, and if, as President Weingarten says, nobody wants ineffective teachers in the classroom, then you can't fight us every step of the way when we're moving in that direction.
MR. GREGORY: What...
MS. WEINGARTEN: But, David, we are not...
MR. GREGORY: Well, let me, let me, Secretary Duncan, let's, let's--what do you see...
SEC'Y DUNCAN: Right.
MR. GREGORY: ...in the sense of the overall here? Because this is really the core, isn't this?
SEC'Y DUNCAN: That's right. It is the core. And let's just take a step back. The status quo isn't working for children, and it's not working for the country. And what the president fundamentally gets is we have to educate our way to a better economy. What do we do? We have to reward excellence in, in education, we have to reward great teachers, and we have to be much more strategic in how we get great principals and great teachers to go to historically underserved communities. We have to provide much better support for teachers who are trying to become world class; and those teachers where it's simply not working, we have to be much more swift in how we move them out. So it's not working at any levels. It's not working for the stars, it's not working for those in the middle, it's not working for those on the bottom. If it's not working for any adults, it's definitely not working for the children in this country.
MR. GREGORY: Mr. Bobb, this is in part a policy question, in part a political question. As you've looked at, say, what Michelle Rhee has done in Washington with Mayor Fenty, how can they better implement accountability in a way that keeps in mind that there are a lot of teachers, a lot of communities like Detroit, like Washington, D.C., that rely upon those jobs? We're in a severe economic recession. How do administrators go about accountability in a way that doesn't create the political blowback, whether it's lawsuits or whether it's political blowback at the polls?
MR. BOBB: Well, definitely you have to have--you have to be able to communicate these issues. What it is what you're doing has to be communicated, how you're doing it has to be communicated, and then what processes you're going to put in place to help individuals succeed. And those who do not succeed, they have to leave the system immediately.
SEC'Y DUNCAN: David...
MS. WEINGARTEN: But, David...
MR. BOBB: I mean, we just--in Detroit public schools, we just--we have a new teacher contract. And this year, for the first time, we actually have a new teacher evaluation system that's being put in place.
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MR. GREGORY: Mm-hmm.
MR. BOBB: We're, we're borrowing from what's being done in D.C., we're borrowing from what's being done in, in Denver. And those--we have to have an effective way in which we can evaluate teachers. But you know what...
SEC'Y DUNCAN: David...
MS. WEINGARTEN: David, let...
MR. BOBB: ...it's not just the evaluation of teachers.
MS. WEINGARTEN: Right.
MR. GREGORY: OK.
MR. BOBB: We have to look at the entire system.
MS. WEINGARTEN: Right.
MR. GREGORY: Right.
MS. WEINGARTEN: Yes. David...
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MR. BOBB: We have to look from principals to everyone through that whole school.
MS. WEINGARTEN: That...
MR. GREGORY: Secretary Duncan.
SEC'Y DUNCAN: We need dramatic change. Let's, let's be real honest here. What was going on in Washington for decades was an absolute disgrace for children. What's been going on in Detroit for far too long is a disgrace. Those children in both cities had been desperately, desperately underserved. Change is hard. There is going to be blowback. When you challenge the status quo, that is difficult, but we have to have the moral courage to do the right thing by our children, and we have to give the children of Detroit a chance. Detroit's going in a much better direction, thanks to, to Superintendent Bobb's leadership. Washington's going the right direction. Change is going to continue to be hard. We'll continue to get pushback...
MS. WEINGARTEN: And...
SEC'Y DUNCAN: ...but we have to keep going forward.
MR. GREGORY: And so...
MS. WEINGARTEN: And in most...
MR. GREGORY: Yeah.
MS. WEINGARTEN: And in both of those places, David, in both of those places, even though it was hard, the union stepped up and did a contract with Robert Bobb. The union stepped up and did a contract with Michelle Rhee. The union sometimes asks to make sure that things are not arbitrary and capricious, but let me ask, let me ask--say this as well, there are many other districts like the ABC District in Los Angeles, like the New Haven District, where the union has stepped up with managers who want to work with us, where we are making that kind of change. So the issue is, for us, about insuring that we do the some--some of the things that the secretary said, because it's not just about the issue of looking at a snapshot of whether a teacher is bad or good. It's about developing teachers. It's about not spending the $7 billion that we spend right now...
MR. GREGORY: Right. But let's just...
MS. WEINGARTEN: ...in teacher turnover. We have to do things that help kids every single day in classrooms, which means investing in teachers like they do in the countries that outpace us.
MR. GREGORY: All right. Hold on. I want to bring up the Colorado law about evaluation of teachers. And really the crux of it is it's a tough law. You supported it.
MS. WEINGARTEN: Correct.
MR. GREGORY: Of course, you don't represent a lot of teachers out there, so the political stakes were not, frankly, as high for you.
MS. WEINGARTEN: Actually...
MR. GREGORY: Hold on one a second. That's a reality, because you represent a lot more teachers in other districts, and we all know that. But what they did there is have tougher evaluations and said, "After two years, you could be removed." Do you support that as a national model?
MS. WEINGARTEN: We support--if you help teachers be the best they can be and evaluate them fairly, then if they have to be removed, they have to be removed. The one thing we want is to not throw the baby out with the bath water. Ultimately, we have to fix the due process system to make sure that it's not glacial process. We have to fix the evaluation system, but more importantly, we have to give teachers and kids the supports they need so that they can grow, and that's what happens in the countries that out compete us.
SEC'Y DUNCAN: David...
MR. GREGORY: I want to ask one question. Mr. Secretary, you can make your point, too, I want to address what Mark Zuckerberg has done with Facebook, $100 million to the Newark City schools. It's tremendous, but what is the role of that private money? Because I've talked to business leaders who say, you know, "Look, we're only operating on the fringes here, a lot of money. You can't deal with some of the core problems." And money, as we've talked about, is really not the big issue here.
SEC'Y DUNCAN: Change is the issue.
MR. GREGORY: Right.
SEC'Y DUNCAN: And we're seeing whether it's Mark in Silicon Valley or the phenomenal movie "Waiting for `Superman'" from Hollywood, the country is starting to take notice. The country. You guys, a couple days summit on education. This has become the national topic. People know we have to educate our way to a better economy. That money invested in the status quo is throwing good money after bad. That money to drive fundamental change and reform, just like Race to the Top, it's going to lead the country where we need to go. So that generosity, that investment from a private sector, it might not seem like a lot of money. Our Race to the Top, $4 billion sounds like a lot. We spend $650 billion a year on K to 12 education. Less than 1 percent is changing the country. Mark's money in Newark, other money in Detroit, Washington, Chicago, right here in New York, L.A., that private money, all of us have to invest. The parents, the business community, philanthropy, all of us need to be investing in public education.
MR. GREGORY: I've, I've got a minute 30, and, Michelle, I'll come to you first on this. I walked out of the film "Waiting for `Superman,'" and my first reaction was as a parent. And I ask myself, not as the moderator of this program but as a parent, what am I going to do to help? What can the individual who is moved by this do to make some a difference, so we're not just scratching our head and saying, "Gosh, this is so hard"?
MS. RHEE: Yeah. That, I think, is the fundamental question. People have been asking me that, you know, since, since they've been viewing the movie. And I think what we need, quite frankly, is a national movement around this, so that people, it doesn't matter if they live in, in Idaho or New York or, or California, who want--who, who are watching the movie and saying, "This is absolutely wrong. We're doing an injustice to our kids. How can we do better?" We actually need a national movement of people, you know, whether it's giving $10 or whether it's Mark Zuckerberg who's giving $100 million. I mean, the money that we got from our external funders really did leverage--provide us with the leverage that we needed to sign this revolutionary contract. And now it's having reverberations across the country. And I think that people can't underestimate how much a phone call to a politician, you know, dollars invested can really help to see some major changing.
MR. GREGORY: All right. We're going to have to leave it there. The other piece of advice I got is, you know, if you drive by a public school, even if your kids don't go there, walk in and ask how you can help, whether you can tutor or provide resources to a teacher.
MS. RHEE: Absolutely.
MR. GREGORY: I think there's a lot we can do just on that baseline level.
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