MR. MICHAEL MEYERS:
I am executive director of the New York Civil Rights Coalition. I want to follow up on Gail Badillo's question. My question addresses the so-called at-risk teacher, because teachers aren't what they used to be. I know teachers who believe in such things as Ebonics, which they actually teach.

So how do we know that teachers know how to read? How do we know that teachers can teach reading skills? What are the specific assessment instruments for teachers?

MR. LYON:
We have studied teachers for a long time. Teachers ought to be good readers. In reality, it depends on whether you're looking at inner-city districts. I don't want to paint with too broad a brush here, but on average, teachers in inner-city districts are much less fluent. We do have teachers who are reading between the sixth- and the twelfth-grade levels. When we measure their phonemic awareness—that is, how they understand the sounds within the language—my colleague Louisa Motes and her team have found that phonemic awareness is a difficulty. Can adults learn to do all of that? Absolutely. But remember, all of us are products of where we've come from. It's not the teachers' faults. It's the system that was in place where they were taught.

To answer your question, teaching capabilities are among the strongest predictors of student learning and achievement. If we don't ensure that teachers have the proper capabilities in the field that they're teaching, we're going to see that in the results.

Everybody hates tight, scripted reading programs, but a lot of them are very good, for two reasons: they've been through experimental trials and come out looking pretty good; and they train the teachers as they're teaching the kids. The programs are so scripted in requiring the teachers to present the information that, through teaching, they actually learn a good deal.

MR. NELSON:
Let me just add a teacher's perspective on that. The teachers I know who have been in very good reading programs have complained that they should have learned this stuff in college and in the education schools. In Virginia, we now have a test to see if the education schools are teaching science-based reading instruction. The test is good, but it's been slow to be implemented, partly because under No Child Left Behind, the education schools face no penalties if they don't teach reading. They keep getting hundreds of millions of dollars in federal aid. There ought to be some accountability there.

- Luncheon Address -

MR. HERMAN BADILLO:
Margaret Spellings was sworn in as secretary of education on January 20, 2005. Prior to that, she was an assistant to President Bush on domestic policy, including areas such as education and immigration. Prior to that, she worked for George Bush when he was governor of Texas. She also worked on education reform committees throughout the state.

But since we're talking about No Child Left Behind, the important thing today is that Margaret Spellings was the prime mover behind the No Child Left Behind Act and has been responsible for implementing its provisions. When I was in Congress in the 1970s, Congress did not want to get involved with education because it felt that education was a local matter. It was difficult to get anything approved that would regulate the states and localities in any way. Therefore, No Child Left Behind is a tremendous achievement, because it forces the states and the localities to do things that they haven't done before.

For example, today, the New York City Department of Education says that the graduation rate from high school is 60 percent. But two weeks ago, it said that the graduation rate for Latinos was 45 percent. That is tragic. The No Child Left Behind Act compels states and localities to break down the results not just by general category, but by ethnic groups as well.

It's very important that No Child Left Behind and Secretary Spellings be supported, because I believe that education is going to be the most important domestic policy for the next generation. Take the Latinos—we have a population that is now 15 percent of the country, the largest minority ethnic group, going up to 25 percent. And the kids are not performing. That is a national disaster.

No Child Left Behind can help to change that. And that's why I'm delighted to present Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings.

SEC. MARGARET SPELLINGS:
Thank you very much, Herman. I appreciate that great endorsement. Not much has changed in Congress since the 1970s; lots of people still feel that way, I'm sorry to say. But with your help, we will get No Child Left Behind reauthorized this year. I very much appreciate the opportunity to talk with you about something near and dear to all our hearts.

Sol Stern, senior fellow, thank you for your participation today. And my friends Reid Lyon and Diane Ravitch: I'm sure your panel was spectacular. Thank you not only for your participation today but for all the good work that you're doing with regard to reading. I believe that if we get reading right, we are on our way; and if we don't, we ought to just close shop. The good news is that we have a lot of great results to talk about in reading, and that's in no small part due to you and your good work.

We continue to hear critics of No Child Left Behind say that our focus on these basic skills of reading and math distracts from teaching other subjects—that we're narrowing the curriculum. But how are students going to master history or science without being able to read or to decipher? This is as obvious and commonsensical as anything. We all know that reading and math are the subjects that are the gateways to every other area of learning. That's why I was so pleased, and I'm sure you all were, that the new NAEP data show that our young students are making very good strides in both history and civics.

The report on U.S. history that was released last week shows increased scores across the board and a narrowing achievement gap among our fourth-graders. Similarly, in civics, fourth-grade students showed improved scores and a narrowing gap between white and Hispanic students. These reports confirm what we all know: if you can't read, you can't read the history test, the history curriculum, or the history book. The reports also affirm to me that this "narrowing and teaching to the test" stuff is a lot of baloney as well.

As you all know, I've been working with President Bush on education issues for a long time. A lot has changed, of course, since our days in Texas, when we were one of the incubators for some of the policies of No Child Left Behind. But he and I continue to be guided by the same principles that were at work then.

One of the president's first stops on the campaign trail was here at the Manhattan Institute: in 1999, he came to talk about his core philosophy and how, as a different kind of Republican, he was going to talk a lot about education. He sometimes reminisces about the days that Herman talked about, when lots of people were talking about abolishing the Department of Education, and he often says that people just hear "abolish education." That's not where we want to be.

So I'm proud and pleased that the president has worked to change the national conversation on education. Sometimes we get bogged down in mythology, which I want to confront, but I do think that it's a very different discussion today, in no small part because of No Child Left Behind and the president's ability to frame the issue of education.

The first thing I want to talk about is some of the core beliefs that have informed our policies. We know for sure, as you do, if you heard the panel that preceded me, that there is such a thing as scientific research—or data-driven decision making, as we now call it—when it comes to education policy. We have to use that research to inform our policies and our investments, just as we do in every other endeavor. We also know that the federal government is only about a 9 percent investor in K-12 education. But our experience has shown that it's a very important 9 percent, and we need research to focus our policies and resources where they will be used to maximum effect.

Reid Lyon has done great work to transform scientific insights from the laboratory—the things we've learned about the brain—into practical tools for our reading teachers. The Reading First program that my department runs grew out of twenty years of research that now is helping more than 2 million schoolchildren make gains in fluency and comprehension. We have proof in Reading First. So where research shows what works, let's do it, as we do in medicine and other fields.

The second thing is that parents do know what is best for their children—I know that this is sometimes belied—especially now that they are armed with data and information about their schools. I'm saying this not only as the secretary of education but as a mother of schoolchildren. We believe that the wisdom of parents and families must be brought to bear on education reform. In particular, it's helpful when we look at school choice options.

Thanks to the president, if I may say so modestly, we have done more to expand choice and opportunity in education than any other administration has. Exhibit A is the first ever federally funded Opportunity Scholarship Program in the District of Columbia, a program that is now helping 1,800 students from economically disadvantaged backgrounds attend fifty-eight private schools.

We've also been huge supporters of the charter movement, providing significant resources for school facilities and for start-up funds. The charter movement, which just last week celebrated its fifteenth anniversary, is helping to dispel the myth that some children can't learn. Charter schools act as great laboratories for some of the best practices. I met some of the people who are involved in KIPP (Knowledge Is Power Program) here in New York City. Alternative public schools are great examples of this, and we're all learning a lot about these innovation laboratories.

The third thing is that we need high standards, and people at the state and local levels are in the best place to set them. Since we're a 9 percent investor, it's right and righteous for those who are paying the bills to set the standards. We don't need to establish federal standards; No Child Left Behind doesn't call for that. But I do think that we have some genius in the policy, with the NAEP data being made more widely available. Meaningful accountability, of course, must include deadlines and consequences—just as we have with No Child Left Behind and the year 2014—along with the flexibility to achieve those goals.

Thanks to No Child Left Behind, the NAEP has become more accurate and more informative, because now every single state is required to participate in that national report card. It's a much better report card than it was when we had states coming in and out of it annually. It is the only national assessment that tells us with accuracy how we're doing. Now that local policymakers have this information, they can act on it; and I can tell you, having served at the state level, that people look at it closely. They don't want to be dead last but still paying the bills. I do think we can do a better job, in reauthorizing No Child Left Behind, of ensuring that parents have the NAEP data so that they'll be armed with even more information than they have now.

The fourth thing that we know for sure is that teachers make the single biggest difference in enhancing student achievement. So we have to do everything we can to get our best teachers in our most challenging educational settings. We need qualified teachers to deliver a rigorous curriculum that challenges students. No Child Left Behind is a floor, not a ceiling. It is necessary, but not sufficient.

The old solution to education challenges, of course, was to spend money and cross our fingers, or simply hope for the best. Now we can actually find out what works, because we measure with regularity. One of my mottos is, "What gets measured gets done." You all see that in your work; it guides every other endeavor in American life. Certainly, it's a welcome principle in education.

The basic premise behind No Child Left Behind is that we expect results from our federal investments. That's a smart and wise thing to do as taxpayers, not to mention that it's good for kids. For a long time, children—especially our neediest kids—were shuffled through the system, as the president says, and were left to just move on through, without the necessary skills, until they either dropped out or were given a diploma that didn't mean a lot. I have yet to meet a parent who says, "Count my child out—I don't want my kid on grade level by 2014." Mostly, they say, "I'd like my kid on grade level today." I'm pretty sure that the parents in this room feel this way, irrespective of their neighborhood, color, or income level.

We are already seeing some very promising results from No Child Left Behind, among our young readers. We have made more progress with our young readers over five years than in the previous twenty-eight years of our national education report card. It tells us that this policy recipe is working. But it also shows us where we need to continue to work.

Similarly, we have seen little progress among our high school students over that same period of time, nearly thirty years. We know that we have to be smarter about targeting resources and strategies in our chronically underperforming schools so that we can know specifically where we are. Those are some of the key issues that will be before us as we renew and reauthorize No Child Left Behind.

In addressing our lowest performers, those chronic underachievers who for more than five years have missed No Child Left Behind targets—that's about 2,000 of 95,000 schools across our country—we simply have to bring more vigorous tools to bear. We have to give superintendents the opportunity to staff those schools with our best teachers. We have to give local officials the opportunity to charter those schools, notwithstanding arbitrary caps that might be set. And we have to give parents, who have waited too long for options, the opportunity to get additional help or scholarships to send their children to private schools or to obtain additional enriched supplemental services. That will be a key issue in the No Child Left Behind reauthorization.

Another key frontier will be, of course, strengthening our high schools. We have to change the fact that, as Herman Badillo noted, about half of our Hispanic kids get out of high school on time. It is a national crisis. Here in New York City, the graduation rate at about ninety high schools is worse than 50 percent. Our high schools, I think, are often failing to prepare our kids adequately, not only for the workplace, but for college as well. We simply have to do more to expand access to rigorous course work, such as advanced placement classes, and train more good teachers to teach those classes.

We also need to do more to link high school standards with the expectations of the workplace and of higher education. We have to be honest about dropout rates. And as we continue the fight to empower parents and promote choice and turn around failing schools, we must stay focused on this great goal of getting every child on grade level by 2014.

As I'm sure you all are aware, recently some conservative members of Congress have suggested overhauling No Child Left Behind by basically reverting to the old days of sending resources without demanding accountability. We cannot fix education, or pick up the pace, without accountability and without the deadline of 2014. Flexibility without accountability is an absolute recipe for failure. We cannot afford to go back to the ways of the past. We tried that, and we know that it doesn't work.

So if you are committed to turning around our chronically underperforming schools and to making sure that this country remains the world's innovator, then No Child Left Behind must be reauthorized this year. If you are committed to more flexibility, and to preserving momentum for school choice and local control, No Child Left Behind has to be reauthorized this year.
We have a moral responsibility to give every single student a chance for success. Only education builds the skills, the habits of mind, and the knowledge for our children as well as for our country. This idea goes back to what we Americans believe in. It goes back to our founding. And it is the key to the American dream.

I look forward to working with you this year and for your continued strong support for this very important law. Thank you.

MR. SOL STERN:
Secretary Spellings, how can we possibly meet the goal of a qualified teacher in every classroom by 2014 if the federal government is completely agnostic about the education schools that are supposedly going to train these qualified teachers? How can we continue to certify education schools that don't even teach the science of reading?

SEC. SPELLINGS:
The law requires that we have highly qualified teachers long before 2014; in fact, we're supposed to have them now. One of the conversations that we're having in Washington is about how we can go from an input-driven system to one that talks about efficacy and highly qualified and effective teachers, where we start to use data. I'm talking about student achievement results, to more accurately reflect who our best teachers are.

I think we're changing the conversation from inputs, training, course hours, and so forth to talking about who's doing the best job in the classroom. I think that change will clearly be debated in Washington, but it certainly makes a lot of sense to me.

MR. SOL STERN:
You spoke about the imperative of 2014, and I certainly agree that we need accountability and results. But we all know that eliminating the achievement gap—reaching proficiency for all by 2014—is an impossible goal. I also know that in 2001, when you and the Democrats worked out the coalition for No Child Left Behind, there was a feeling that we needed this 100 percent proficiency as a motivator and that it would make people pay attention.
I think that has worked. But now that we're five years down the road, isn't it time to say that we have to come up with a more realistic output measure? If we go down this road, we're calibrating Annual Yearly Progress (AYP) standards to an impossible standard. More and more schools are going to be listed as needing improvement. And it seems to me that this whole effort is going to implode upon itself.

SEC. SPELLINGS:
No, the effort won't implode upon itself, and here's why. On any given day, in any given state, there are kids outside of the accountability system. We've provided the flexibility to have it that way. One percent of the student population is profoundly handicapped, and, as such, these students are obviously not part of the accountability system.

We published the new rules following the reauthorization of the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA), which said that there were an additional 2 percent of students outside of the accountability system. Remember, special-education numbers are growing; this is a large number of kids. These students are going to take more time, different strategies, and different kinds of assessments. Now we're up to 3 percent. We have limited-English students who are allowed to be exempted from the system for one full academic year—or more, if they've come in the middle of an academic year.

Also, the states decide the sample size necessary to have a valid and reliable group of students to be counted.

Accommodations have been made to reflect the reality of this organic system called public education, and I think that's appropriate. But I also think that we have established an achievable goal. What parents want to say that their kids aren't going to be on grade level?

MR. NELSON:
Madame Secretary, my home county and yours kept all their eligible schools out of Reading First. As a teacher, I know that many things in my classroom happen because of decisions made at the central office level. Yet in No Child Left Behind, almost all the penalties fall at the school level and on the school staff, for decisions made by the central office that tie our hands.

Governor Spitzer in New York has proposed that, as part of the state accountability system, school boards and superintendents be held accountable. That's something that's missing in No Child Left Behind. Can we add it for the reauthorization?

SEC. SPELLINGS:
That's an interesting question. As you mentioned, I'm also a resident of that school district—Fairfax County, Virginia. We've had some issues about the assessment of limited-English students there. Nationally, two-thirds of our limited-English students are United States citizens, 80 percent of whom have been here for five years or longer. So as we read these stories that say, "So-and-so got here six months ago, and now that mean old secretary is expecting him to be proficient in English," let's be mindful that lots of these kids were born here. Can we make some distinctions about arrivals? Sure.

With respect to accountability for school boards, superintendents, and others who are making decisions, one of the most profound things about this law is the information about results that enables people like you to say, "Well, how come there's $1 billion of federal aid flowing toward needy readers and we're not getting any?" I think that the power of sunshine is an important dimension. Whether there will be specific tools for me to enforce requirements on school boards and superintendents, I don't know.

MS. DOROTHY WILNER:
I'm from the Women's City Club. I think that you put up a straw man when you spoke about children who have been here five years or longer. I come from Queens, which has the largest number of new immigrants in the whole city. Every one of our schools is going to be considered a failing school because your law says that if a student is here for one year or longer, he has to show the same results as other students on the test.
This is ludicrous. We do not have failing schools; we have wonderful schools. They are going to be called failing because of your law.

SEC. SPELLINGS:
Let me clarify on the two-thirds, 80 percent calculation. That, of course, is a national calculation. There will be community anomalies in any given place. I'm not asserting that two-thirds of the students in your schools are United States citizens. But nationally, that is the figure.

With respect to the transition issues, clearly, that's what I'm speaking about when I talk about the need to build nuances into the accountability system. No Child Left Behind, as you know, is largely a pass-fail system. We need to start making distinctions between schools that are within range and those that are chronic underperformers, with five or more years of not meeting AYP. And I think we'll certainly do that as part of No Child Left Behind.

But I think there is a right balance between intensity of effort and throwing our hands up and saying, "You know, we don't think that this majority-minority population in Texas or California can read on grade level." That balance is what we'll discuss in Congress.

MR. BOB WEISSBERG:
Since the 1960s, we've been throwing hundreds of millions of dollars at Title I, Head Start, and all those things to boost the bottom, and we're still not up to par.

Meanwhile, money for gifted programs has virtually dried up. As you well know, the Javits Program, which I think was the only federally funded program for the gifted, was canceled this year. Even so, there was not much in it to begin with; it was a few million dollars. Most of that, actually, was directed toward kids at risk, so it wasn't truly a program for the gifted. In many states, money that was normally going to the gifted has now been pushed over to satisfying the demands of No Child Left Behind.

It's my opinion that our gifted program in the United States has become the H1B Visa Program. Every year, we import perhaps 100,000 gifted people, maybe more, to fill the positions that we cannot supply ourselves.

What is the Department of Education doing for gifted children—the people who are the future Bill Gateses and Larry Ellisons—aside from pursuing a strategy that has proved ineffective for forty-five years or longer, namely, pouring money into the bottom?

SEC. SPELLINGS:
Let me start with the Javits comment. It's a $1–2 million program, and Congress has made the judgment that it's hard to have a nationally scalable program for fifty states, plus the territories, for $1 or 2 million. You probably agree with that.

Just as a point of evidence—and if you have more, please share it with me—we are not seeing that bringing up the bottom means that we are keeping the top down. It just doesn't bear out in the data. We do have more of a rising-tide-lifts-all-boats phenomenon. We're seeing gains across the board. That's the second point I would make.

Third, I would say that what is different about No Child Left Behind is that it is a game-changer away from the thesis that you first laid out. We are about results in exchange for resources. This is the first time we've done that. It's not true, frankly, of Head Start. That program is not run by the Department of Education; it's at Health and Human Services.

This is the first time we've said that we have some expectations for a particular goal. There's more accountability here for federal tax dollars than ever in the history of the forty-year commitment to education.

MALE VOICE:
What do you do about districts, particularly urban districts, that are living with No Child Left Behind and yet somehow life goes on just the way it did before the statute was passed?

SEC. SPELLINGS:
I would just say that we passed the best law we could five years ago, when about half the states did annual measurement and we didn't know a lot about certain things. Have we learned things in the last five years that we ought to be mindful of and be guided by in the reauthorization? Of course we have. That's why the president's reauthorization proposals speak about some of the things that you're talking about—the need for a growth model, for instance. That would help on your issue of being able to chart progress more accurately over time.

But when we were trying to take a snapshot of the accountability system in half the places around the country, half the states waited until the 2005–06 school year to do annual assessment for the first time.

Can we be smarter and more precise about doing that now? Yes, we can. I've given five states waivers—and I'm actually going to do a couple more this week— for this growth model notion. Are there things that we can do to fix and be watchful of the unintended consequences? Yes; that's why we have reauthorizations in Washington.

MR. MEYERS:
Madame Secretary, fifty-three years after Brown v. Board of Education, which outlawed racial segregation in the public schools, there are school districts in this nation that are trying to show that segregation by race will work to raise the academic achievement level of black male students, despite Title VI regulations.

What are the Office of Civil Rights and the Department of Education doing to counteract this racial idiocy?

SEC. SPELLINGS:
If you have the specifics of that particular assertion, I would obviously like for my Office of Civil Rights to look at those. Obviously, that assertion is not in keeping with the law that I took an oath of office to uphold.

What I see and talk about now—and this is why looking at our high schools is so important—is a rationing of opportunity, if you will. Forty percent of our high schools have no advanced placement classes. I use the example of our neighborhood. In Fairfax County, Virginia, Langley High School has twenty-eight advanced placement classes. Ballou High School in inner-city Washington, D.C., has maybe three or four.

We all know that our most experienced, most degreed, and often most effective teachers are at Cream Puff High, while our least supported, brand-new, unmentored, lowest-paid teachers are in our most challenging educational settings. We have to do something to reverse that, such as rewarding teachers through pay systems for doing the hard and challenging work. Clearly, I worry about the issue that you raise, but I also worry about what undergirds that, which is the rationing of rigor and personnel that we often see.

MALE VOICE:
Coming from the sciences, I'm always astonished that discussions like this happen on a national level, because in the sciences everything is transnational and relatively border-free. With that as a context, what is your response to the OECD (Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development) Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) studies of international comparisons of national educational systems?

SEC. SPELLINGS:
I think that it shows us that we have work to do in focusing on math and science. You are all scholars, and you know all the issues surrounding the use of PISA data to rate our schools or to make comparisons. But there certainly are some takeaways there, among them the need to focus on our high schools and on math and science more intensively than we have.

MR. HENRY STERN:
A great deal of emphasis earlier today was on Reading First and on the virtues of phonics programs as compared with whole language. These things are supposed to have been scientifically proved. Yet we are told that they are not required by the Department of Education in funding local programs. What is your view on that? If phonics is better, as is widely asserted, shouldn't the Department of Education reflect that policy judgment in giving out all this money?

SEC. SPELLINGS:
The law says that there are certain criteria—research-based principles that ought to exist to teach youngsters how to read. There are a myriad of products, programs, plans, and approaches that meet those criteria. Can we do a better and more appropriate job of overseeing the program? Yes. That's why I adopted every recommendation that the inspector general said that I should to improve the oversight and stewardship of that program.

We can take this core set of principles, however, and ask states to develop plans that meet those criteria while still allowing them to employ many different approaches, strategies, or products. It's a combination of national core principles with flexibility and local control. These things are not in disharmony; and that's how we ought to do it.

MS. DEE ALPERT:
I'm from specialeducationmuckraker.com. With respect to Reading First, your inspector general said basically that the New York State Education Department shouldn't have received a grant. Your inspector general's subsequent look-see has shown that the state Department of Education gave out money to districts under Reading First in accordance with some agreements or arrangements that really had nothing to do with Reading First. We've also had similar audits with respect to Title I.

I find it hard to support these federal programs when your agency is not requiring that strict requirements be met in this state. So I'd like to know what you're going to do about the New York State Education Department and its handling of Reading First and Title I.

SEC. SPELLINGS:
Clearly, Congress is going to provide additional guidance with respect to conflict of interest provisions and such things. I'm not going to get into the specifics of particular state grant approvals. But as I said, the good stewardship of very large grant programs and the integrity of those programs are of paramount importance to me, particularly when they're proving to get such great results for kids.

MS. KRISTA DUNBAR:
I'm from the Cahn Fellows Program for New York City distinguished principals. You mentioned that No Child Left Behind is a floor, not a ceiling. You also said that what gets measured gets done, typically. If No Child Left Behind is how schools are measured, I'm assuming that it's what the schools are going to shoot for. Many schools, we know, do fall short. But what's the incentive for reaching the ceiling—or even the light fixtures—in striving for success on the AP exams, the SATs, the ACTs, true graduation rates, and other things that would promote innovation through education?

SEC. SPELLINGS:
The federal commitment to education has been directed to our nation's neediest students—poor kids, special-education kids. That is how we've engaged for the last forty years, pre–No Child Left Behind.

This is why the NAEP is important; when you have this kind of information, the federal government has a role to play. And that role is to see that every child is performing at grade level by 2014. But I can tell you, having worked for two governors, that it's also incumbent upon governors. There are certainly no state impediments. If I were still working for the governor of Texas, I'd say, "Let's have an accountability system that expands the subjects that are taught. Let's measure social studies. Let's measure history. Let's measure these other dimensions. And let's ask ourselves how well we are doing across the spectrum."

Now we have the highway in place. We have the infrastructure. We can ask ourselves how many students are on grade level. We can also ask ourselves how many students are at the top. I would recommend that those of you who are in this arena talk to your state legislators and your governors about filling out your accountability system now that No Child Left Behind has brought this infrastructure to bear. These are knowable values that state and local policymakers ought to be looking at.

APPENDIX
(Figrues supplied by Maria Casby Allen and Rick Nelson, Fairfax County, Virginia.)

Figure A

Figure B

Figure C

Figure D

Figure E