Question:  What has been your greatest success and failure as Chancellor?

Transcript: Let me put it this way, I do think we have moved the ball forward, I think the Mayor has basically driven reform very, very hard and successfully here in New York.  We have a lot more to go, I mean if you ask me, you know, sort of in the process we are still in the early stages I guess, you know, if you think of Churchill’s words, “This is not the beginning of the end but the end of the beginning” and that’s where I think we are but a lot more work has to be done.  I think the basic things that have changed the system is we conceptualize the model that we’re now implementing based on leadership, accountability and empowerment, which is very different from the typical models that have permeated public education, what do I mean by that?  The first thing which I thought was our most successful conception was we stopped talking about a great school system and started talking about a system made up of great schools because school is where the action is and if you don’t get that and you talk about systems, systems are political, systems are managerial but they’re not where service is delivered to kids and so then we started to focus heavily on the human resource equation, getting great principals, making sure principals could hire the teachers they want.  In the past before I got here, 3500, 3,000 teachers would show up each year at a different school and say I have a legal right to be here and if the principal or the other teachers said well, you’re not the right fit for this school, it didn’t matter, that’s all changed. We’re now using incentives to help principals in high need schools attract talent.  So fundamentally what we’ve tried to do is create a system where schools become the unit and the schools are empowered to make decisions.  By the same token, we put a letter grade on every school, we hold our schools accountable for progress.  Not for what the kid brings to the school, but what the school does for the kid, so we compare similarly situated schools and I think that those three pillars, leadership, empowerment and accountability have really changed the fundamental paradigm in our city.  There are certain things that we have done, some things we didn’t implement well that I wish we had a better shot at.  If you ask me, the lesson that I wish I had learned sooner is I don’t think we’ve been as effective in engaging our community and making sure that people in the city knew what the changes were about.  We’ve let other people characterize changes in a way that I think is both inaccurate and harmful and I think we could have done a better job engaging parents in the school system, making them feel like they were strongly allied with what we’re doing, believe in the work we’re doing because I think most of the parents in our city understand the schools are getting better.  Recent surveys show that in every income group, poor, near poor and moderate and high income, in all three of those groups an independent survey showed that the number of parents who say their kids are in an A or a B school has gone up and in the poor and near poor it went up very significantly and even moderate and middle it went up about 8 points.  But in poor it went from 24 to 64% of the parents over the course of the Mayor’s term.  So that’s huge, but I think we did not do as good a job as we should have in engaging them and if you will the politics of educational transformation.

Question: Would you consider running for Mayor yourself to keep this campaign going?

Transcript: What I’d like to see is a Mayor who will keep the campaign going, I’ve always said I serve in appointed positions as to where I am most comfortable.  But I’d look forward to the opportunity to work with another Mayor in keeping, moving forward public education in the city of New York.

Recorded on: 3/30/08

Transcript: I think private philanthropy which has really increased dramatically in the last decade in public education can be enormously valuable.  Let me give you some sense of the dimensions, I mean my budget annually is 20 billion dollars operating so private philanthropy is only gonna be a small part, no matter how much it expands.  On the other hand private philanthropy is typically the R&D money, the innovation money, right the venture money that can enable you to do new and different things.  So one of the things I believe from day one is in the absence of great school leadership, particularly in our most challenged schools that it wouldn’t work.  That no matter what you do, if you don’t have a principal who’s aligned and who was the fortitude and the coverage and the intellectual stamina to do transformative work, to do instruction work, it won’t happen.  So we raise 70 million dollars, the business community, several key foundations to create this leadership training program and it’s getting real results.  By the same token the Gates Foundation invested heavily with us in a restructuring, they believed and they were correct that high schools which had a lot of struggling students and were generally getting a graduation rate of 30 or 32% really need to be restructured much smaller, much more personalize with a different dynamic, a different sense of student/teacher relationship and so forth and we’ve basically done over 200 of those in New York City and those schools are getting very different results.  Under Mayor Bloomberg in the almost 6 years we’ve been at this, we’ve raised to our city about 400 million dollars of private philanthropy and as I say, almost always it’s been venture money.  When we needed to restructure our human resource department, several foundations, Brode, Tiger Foundation, with Julian Robertson and others were there for us and throughout our efforts our basic R&D venture money has come from private philanthropy.  It’s very hard to take money at of your year to year school budgets to siphon it off.  Our accountability initiative was heavily funded by the Dell Foundation, so we’ve been very fortunate in that regard and when I speak to my colleagues throughout the country, they too are now looking for ways to engage philanthropy to help them do some of the things that are not your day to day costs of your arts program or your physical education or your math or your English and philanthropy’s not gonna play on those things, they are gonna play on the transformative things that need to be done.

Recorded on: 3/30/08

Question: What role should universities play in reforming primary and secondary education?

Transcript: We have partnered with a number of universities here in the city, we have a strong partnership with CUNY, with NYU, with Columbia, we’re now opening a math science school on the New Columbia campus with Columbia in which their professors are gonna be working with our kids and a lotta kids from Harlem and from Northern Manhattan who will be going to this school as well as kids throughout the city.  So I think there are real partnerships.  The other thing that I’ve been saying and we’re getting some success on is you gotta transform our educational schools, our educational schools have gotta do a much better job in two areas, one is in a whole area of classroom management and the challenges that teachers will face in high needs communities.  The issues we talked about before of kids who come to school with very challenged backgrounds and difficult circumstances and our teachers need to learn as part of their ed school experience how to deal with that, it’s gotta be much more clinical and much more hands on and second of all we’ve gotta create partnerships between the ed schools and the schools of arts and sciences so that content becomes a big part of your educational training.  Pedagogic matters, how you teach, what the methodology is that matters but content also matters.  A great pedagogue who doesn’t know math cannot teach math and we’ve gotta get real partnerships going on.  We recently started a program actually with KIPP, Achievement First and Uncommon schools and Hunter and they have a new ed school dean there who is really terrific in my view, willing to reconfigure the way teacher preparation is done, those are valuable, valuable years that we need to rethink and rework on.  The other thing I think that the institution of higher education need to be doing is again helping us get kids on track for science, technology earlier on and they could be doing things with summer internships and programs and getting kids into the campus at an earlier age.

Recorded on: 3/30/08

Question: Are you satisfied with the political discourse on education in this election year?

Transcript: I’m not satisfied with the current discussion on public education, whether you wanna call it a marshal plan, the fact of the matter is we have racial and ethnic achievement gaps that have bedeviled this country for as far back as anybody can remember and small bore reforms are not gonna remediate that, feel good proposals won’t change that.  We’d had those for a long time, what it’s gonna take is some very serious restructuring, rethinking and real leadership. Second of all we have an increasing challenge vis a vis the global environment.  I was on a group that came out with a book called “Tough choices for Tough Times” and that did the kind of global comparison, the competitiveness challenges that we face.  If you look at just recently there was a test of 15 year olds throughout the world and in math and in science and America came in like 21st and 25th out of 30 OECD countries and that’s not a place where we can be comfortable.  In math, in science, in engineering, in technology we are not doing the kinda work that we need to do and in transforming the educational process to a 21st century process we’re not doing the work we need and so for a whole host of reasons, I would like to see a debate that started to focus in a much, much more aggressive way with the nature of the challenges, they make us uncomfortable but focus on the real nature of the challenges, why is it that our K-12 education system has not doing the work that everybody thinks we need to do and come up with robust, meaningful, if difficult and challenging and sometimes even costly new measures to address the nature of the problem that I think is out there.

Question: Would that come in the form of massive spending?

Transcript: I think it’s gotta be policy and then coming in behind policy is appropriate resources but I for example would put a lot of federal money into creating incentives to get many more science and math teachers to come into the system and particularly to teach in our most challenging schools.  We know there’s a shortage of science and math teachers and we know that in the absence of good science and math teachers, our kids won’t learn science and math.  I would create many more programs, externships for those

kids, they should be working in labs in the summer, so on and so forth.  I would use incentives to reward excellence, I believe in performance based pay and the federal government should be doing things like that.  I would support far more innovation, I think there’s too much blocking of charters, that doesn’t mean all charters will succeed but I think we need to tolerate the risk that some charters won’t succeed because we know many public schools haven’t succeeded.  I think we need to experiment with new models, everybody’s got this model of one teacher in a classroom of 25 kids or something like that, but I don’t think that’s a model, I think we need to think about models in which kids cluster together, do more enquiry based learning, team based learning, why can’t we use lectures that are delivered through distance learning, so you get, you know, I always think about the lecture I heard at Harvard by Steven J. Gould, you know, it was such a brilliant-- I can remember how brilliant it was and not everybody is Steven J. Gould and not everybody can lecture like he can.  If you look at Richard Fine and the work he did at Cal Tech in his lectures of physics, now there’s no reason that we can’t use that followed up by a real world in the classroom teacher, now talking about some of those things and differentiating, so that some classes could be quite small like they are in college, particularly in high school, they could be almost tutorials.  On the other hand it could be some large lecture classes, so these are all areas where we need to be much more dynamic and innovative and when people say “Well we don’t know for sure that this one or that one will work.”  The answer is we don’t, but we’ll never find out if we’re afraid to try and if we continue with the same kind of stereotype thinking, homogenous, everybody’s gonna be 1 to 25 and that kind of model that won’t work.

Recorded on: 3/30/08

Transcript: Well there are people who face different challenges and have different things going for 'em certainly and I’ve looked at work.  Right now we’re doing some work on meaningful career and technical education as a part of the kind of analysis that I think we need to do so that not everybody is on a four year academic college track, some people want a career in technical and so if you look in Northern Europe in the Scandinavian countries, Denmark in particular has done some work on that.  If you look at Korea, Finland, those are countries that are doing quite well on global tests, among other reasons is because they attract very high quality teachers as the research says.  Michael Barber who I mentioned doing this work for Tony Blair who’s now at Mackenzie has just come out with his book and also a global analysis of the four or five things that really matter throughout the globe and looking for commonalities, it’s the same process of knowledge management that you talked about at the school system that we’re not trying to talk about nationally, but you can also do it globally and we’ll create platforms where we learn from each other in that respect.

Recorded on: 3/30/08

Transcript: So I think assessment is critical, it’s not the only thing, but let’s be candid about it, there are two or three critical things in an education, one is knowledge acquisition and that’s important, make no mistake about it, if you don’t understand what happens in history, if you can’t do fundamental mathematics, if you don’t know how to add, subtract, divide, multiply, if you don’t know what basic algebraic formulas are about, if you don’t understand how to read and know what Ethan Frome or the Iliad is about, that’s knowledge and skills acquisition and it’s really important, it’s not the only thing but it’s important and we shouldn’t forgo it.  I don’t want kids who are creative but can’t read to graduate from a public school system because they won’t do well.  By the same token, I don’t want kids who don’t have basic knowledge about core subjects, art, music, science, math, social studies, history, what have you.  We also wanna foster an environment which encourages creativity, encourages dynamic thinking, encourages people working together on problem solving and we need ways to measure that, good exams have good essays.  When I taught federal courts and federal jurisdiction at Georgetown at the Law School, you know, the exams were a key part of the work we did.  But the exams tested whether people could analyze a problem, think it through logically, rationally as part of any assessment.  If all you’re doing is knowledge acquisition then you’re not assessing the full range.  But we can assess the full range, but don’t fall into the trap which I think a lot of people fall into, is people don’t want accountability, people don’t want a test knowledge acquisition and skills acquisition and so they walk away from testing and I’d be the first to say we need to do a much better job on testing.  A lot of our tests are not good tests and one of the reasons I would support national standards and national testing is to make sure that the tests were rigorous, meaningful, engage people in problem solving.  I would even as part of one’s assessment, have a group work together because group problem solving is gonna become more and more a skill in the 21st century as we work together in small groups to figure out dynamic enquiry based learning, all of that can be incorporated.  But if you don’t test whether people are getting it, then you can live under the illusion that they got it without the proof that they’re getting it and so to me the challenge is to make sure the tests are rigorous that they test the full range of things, but don’t walk away from assessment.  When I went to public school, every Friday we got tested on vocabulary and you know what, it was a way to make sure you know what assiduous meant and that’s very important and we got tested on math and if I got things wrong, then I went back to try to learn 'em and my teacher went back to try to help me understand them.  Now if all you do at the end of a block is move onto the next block, what happens is what happens in many public schools, people move through the system without acquiring the knowledge and the skills they need and when they get to the end, they drop out or fail out or don’t succeed and so assessment is an absolutely essential, it’s not the only part, it’s an absolutely essential part of the educational equation.

Recorded on: 3/30/08

Question:  What have learned works and doesn’t work with charter schools?

Transcript: I’m a big supporter of charters, fundamentally for two reasons, one for innovation and two for competition and I think the system needs both, we need choices in high needs communities.  The people you know, they have choices in their kids’ education, they can move to a different neighborhood, they can go to a different school but charters are the choices for people in our high poverty neighborhoods and that kinda competition does put pressure on the system so that you hope a rising tide will basically lift the boats.  But the other thing it does is it provides for innovation, so different models that you can learn from and then the trick is to look at those models, see which ones are working and why and try to replicate 'em.  One of my friends who is a very successful business executive told me that the education system like much of the business system suffers from NIH, I said “What’s NIH?” and he said “Not Invented Here” and every culture thinks that’s indigenous to itself.  But in fact the way you succeed and learn is by looking at things that succeed elsewhere and then you incorporate them into your culture which strengthens your culture.  Now what are some of the things we learned from charters, we’ve learned for example that they need flexibility in hiring and firing, that they’d be the first to admit, sometimes they make mistakes, just like any of us and they need the flexibility to be able to address those mistakes.  Second they work very, very rigorously on mentoring their people, so if you’re a young rookie teacher and they have a good senior teacher that they think is compatible with you, you watch that person, this is the way I learned to do when I was a practicing lawyer, the way I learned to argue cases.  I would spend as much time as I could looking at the top advocates in the nation, learning from them, asking them to watch me and critique me and brutally critique me, honestly and then watch me the second time to see did I learn from their critique.  Well that’s the same kinda thing a lot of charters do, what they do is high expectations are indispensable, if they sense that you’re part of a culture in which you don’t support high expectations, they won’t tolerate it.  They have extended day, a lot of the kids that we’ve been talking about who face a lot of challenges, they need more time in school.  They have extended year, they don’t spend a lot on bureaucracy, they welcome assessment, they wanna know what their kids know and what their kids don’t know because only by knowing what each kid knows and doesn’t know can you address how to teach that kid with differentiated instruction and they work with their teachers to differentiate so that if some kid is very good at long division but doesn’t get fractions, you need to work with the kid of fractions, keep doing long division with them ain’t gonna do it.  But on the other hand another kid could be really good at fractions but not at long division.  So you’ve gotta be able to differentiate and charters that work, use the data. Our accountability system we learned a great deal for example from the accountability system that Achievement First had and even their red dot, yellow dot, green dot, to indicate on which of the skills; for example in English language arts, which of the skills the kids have mastered, which they’re okay in, which they’re not getting and how you differentiate and using assessment and embracing a culture in which you understand that kids need to perform and that tests are not the only measure but a measure of performance.  When people tell me “Well you’re teaching to the test” if the test tests the right skills, you wanna make sure the kids learn 'em and my kids in New York who are not passing basic tests, it’s not because somehow they get it but they can’t pass the test.  It’s because they can’t read, they can’t do elementary math, they don’t understand scientific principles, they don’t know history and if that happens, that’s a kid who’s not gonna be successfully educated. 

Question: How do we nationalize best practices from charter schools?

Transcript: So in New York what we’re doing is something we call knowledge management, creating a platform in which the system can disseminate best practices.  So if you’re working with a lot of kids who are recent immigrants and they’re 14 years old and they present a lot of challenges, language challenges, sometimes interrupted education challenges, what schools are doing different things and how do you learn about that.  We’ve created this platform it’s called AROS, which is fundamentally an achievement reporting and innovation system, so that people can access information, we can share what we know at central, but schools can share with each other, it becomes an amazing peer to peer platform and if you think about the internet, think about how empowering that has been on knowledge management and knowledge sharing right.  Well the schools oughta be a part of that, now how you take that national, I think there’s gotta be a combination of either a real public commitment to that at the national government or some public/private partnership.  I was recently asked by the New York Times in an interview if I had a billion dollars in philanthropy and education, how would I spend it.  I would spend a considerable chunk of that investing in sophisticated research and knowledge management so that you could create a national platform so that we didn’t have to argue about urban legends and urban myths but really argue about a knowledge based system of transforming information so that people could access it, learn from it and improve it and that’s generally the kinda thing you can do through this sort of platforms that we have in New York, but you need a centralized system and rigorous academic research standards so that people can really measure and hold variables constant.  There’s so many urban myths in education and you need people who are willing to challenge those myths.

Recorded on: 3/30/08

Transcript: The first thing I wanna say is I know it can be done, those children that you’re talking about who come from the most challenging backgrounds, I’ve seen those kids in schools succeeding in education.  I’m not saying it’s easy and I’m not saying there aren’t enormous complexities in the system.  The way you do it is a combination in my view of three things and you gotta get all of them right.  The first thing is you’ve gotta have an environment in which you set high expectations.  I’m gonna come back and tell you a story about that but if the adults in the building don’t believe that the kids, no matter what their family circumstance that the kids are going on to do great things, the kids will internalize the message.  If they believe that family circumstance is the kinda handicap that makes it impossible for them to succeed, they’ll internalize that and they won’t succeed.  So in the absence of high expectations that are felt, I don’t mean articulated but deeply felt it won’t happen.  Second thing is you need high quality teachers, teachers who understand math, if you don’t understand math, you cannot teach math and we have far too many people in the system who aren’t sufficiently familiar with content.  I’ve been in schools where people are teaching the Civil War and it’s superficial and the level they’re teaching the Civil War and if you don’t have people who are teaching at a sophisticated level, the kids won’t learn and the third thing you need is the kinda partnerships to bring in the psychosocial disciplinary supports.  We have programs in New York, a program like Turn Around for Children that’s working with our schools to address at multiple levels those kinda issues that you articulated about, the fact that some kids come with lots of disciplinary issues, depravations.  But if you can mix together expectations, excellence and support in an environment, you can make it work.  Let me give you an example because people don’t believe, a lot of my friends say “Well it’s not gonna happen” for just the reason you said, they say “Well kids start with too many disadvantages.”  There’s a school in Bedford Stuyvesant called Excellence Academy, I went there to-- it’s an all boy’s school and it’s overwhelmingly African American with some Latino boys, it’s a school that you would expect would not be performing very well if you used traditional demographic analysis.  I went to the school and I happened to bump into a kid, just by happenstance as I walked in and the kid says to me “Good morning Chancellor” now the mere fact that he knew who I was, he was in kindergarten was surprising and I said “Good morning, what’s your name young man?” and he said “My name is Jamal.”  And I said “Jamal, what do you do at Excellence Academy?” and he said “Chancellor” he said “I’m in a University of Pennsylvania Program” so right, your eyes just opened up wide right, so I had the exact same.  I said “Jamal” I said “What are you talking about, you’re in kindergarten, what do you mean you’re in a University of Pennsylvania Program?”  Jamal says to me, he said  “Well you know, Chancellor” he says “I’m going to college; it’s never too young to think about it.”  Now you see in fact he will soon visit colleges, they will become now-- I admit his family may have never taken him to college, when I grew up my parents never took me to visit a college but the school became the shoulders on which this kid can now stand to see a different world and so from the day he arrived at Excellence, he’s thinking “I’ve got a different vision from the vision that I once knew about” and they’re making it happen and they’re not making excuses.  The number of kids when they’re at Excellence who show up every day, who when they’re sick wanna go to school, which is not a common phenomenon, reflects the fact that those kids not only have high expectations set for them, but they’ve internalized it and then I went back and checked because they got their first results last year in the third grade and you would have figured they’d maybe have 55, 60% proficient in the third grade for a school like that and they had a 100% proficient in math and 92% in English, that outperforms almost any school in the city, those proficiency levels.  So this can be done, now Excellence is a school that chose very carefully that has a very strong leader and we have others like it, but it’s that combination and even when you’re doing it, you constantly perfect it.  Just like when you do the work you’re doing here at Big Think, if you don’t get better and better and better, it won’t work, no matter how good you start, you gotta get better, the same thing is true in a school that faces the kinda challenges we’re talking about.

Recorded on: 3/30/08

Transcript:  I think it’s an accurate perception and I think it’s a tragic fact which is I think teachers should be the most revered people in our society.  As you say they and parents are the transformative people in all of our lives and I just today talking at a meeting about there is gonna be a world science festival here in New York and I was talking about my high school physics teacher who really, a guy named Sidney Harris, transformed my life.  So we all know that, why do I think it’s happened, I think a combination of the perception that K to 12 education is not rising in America.  There’s a sense that we’re not on a successful trajectory and second of all I think the system really hasn’t encouraged the kind of dynamism and innovation that would attract the excitement.  So when I see the kinda work that’s starting to take place in various cities throughout the country, I think what you’ll see is more and more people getting excited about it and what you wanna build is an arc towards success.  If people really thought that the cure for poverty was education and believe that would happen, then it would be an excitement, it would attract people into the field and that’s one of the things that’s happening now and if you look throughout the world, in those countries that do really well in educating their kids, those countries attract the greatest talent from their colleges, from the top of their college classes and there’s a real sense of those people are respected, they’re revered, people are passionate about the work and I think that’s part of the transformation that we need to have so that young folks throughout this country say to themselves, you know, being a teacher is something that really is one of life’s great achievements and I think we can do that but it’s gonna take changing and part of what we gotta change is low expectations.  If people come into the school system saying these kids are poor and what I always like to say, so many people have told me, you’ll never fix education til you fix poverty.  If you believe that, you’ll never fix education, I believe just the opposite, I believe we’ll never fix poverty until we fix education in America and I believe we can fix education, I don’t again say how difficult it is to educate kids who come from very challenged backgrounds.  Many of my kids come with families that are not fully engaged in their education and in their lives.  So the challenges are enormous but this is doable, the question is do we have the political will and the leadership, the kind of people like the Mayor of the city of New York who are willing to do the tough transformative work and if you do that, you will build what in the world you’re familiar with a positive feedback loop, right and when you get in a positive feedback loop, then success breeds success, people wanna be a part of it, be excited about it.  Why has David Levin been able to attract so many talented people to KIPP, because they think they’re part of a successful operation; Dacia Toll, why has she brought people to Achievement First; why has Norm Atkins brought people to Uncommon Schools and I could go on and on and on.  I’ve got a principal up in the Bronx, Teach for America principal, came to us after he graduated from Princeton, taught for America, went to Harvard, he got a degree, a joint degree in business and education, just the two things I told you, had to meld, he melded them together himself.  He’s a principal in a school called Bronx Lab, his name’s Mark Sternberg, he’s doing extraordinary work, over a 90% graduation rate with a school that’s overwhelmingly African American, Latino and high poverty.  Right next door to him in a similar situation, I have a former Army Colonel, a Air Force Colonel who Barbara Kirkwick, who’s got an Air Force ROTC program, again high poverty, all minority kids, getting entirely different results.  You go to those schools, those teachers are revered and that’s part of the positive feedback loop we need to create

Recorded on: 3/30/08

Question: Is there a role for educators in running school systems?

Transcript: I think the answer is there is a need for educators at both levels, at the highest level, you need somebody who understands academic standards, who make sure that they’re rigorous, somebody who understands pedagogic and how it’s done.  But you also need managers and if you try to do this either/or you’re gonna get it wrong and the problem with the educational establishment is they want all people who are reading from the same hymnal and my view is the way you create an environment for robust and dynamic change is you bring together people who are reading from different tracks and you integrate those efforts to make sure that you’ve got educational pedagogical expertise but that you also have managerial expertise that you have leadership.  Michael Barber who did a lot of this work for Tony Blair when Blair was Prime Minister in the UK, he’s written a book recently called “Instruction to Deliver” and he lays this out in chapter and verse and I haven’t read anything that better addresses the set of issues that you’re talking about which is fundamentally it’s not an either/or equation and we’ve gotta stop presenting it that way.  By the same token there’s real resistance in the educational establishment to bringing in people who have the managerial and leadership and other qualities that are gonna be necessary to do the transformative work.  If you thought the status quo was okay, you wouldn’t worry about it, but I submit to you anybody who looks at the numbers, looks at our racial and ethnic achievement gap, looks at the growing achievement gap between America and our global competitors.  If you look at all of those things, the recent tests that came out, America versus the OECD countries where we did not perform well.  If you look at college graduates, if you look at engineers, if you look at mathematics, in India and China, if you look at all of those metrics, you cannot remotely think the status quo is where we need to be in K-12 education and if you get purveyors or worshippers as the status quo or small bore incremental change, you’ll get the status quo or small bore incremental change.  It takes a visionary like Michael Bloomberg who’s really willing to do transformative leadership with all the noise and all the heat that attends that in order to really change a system that has fundamentally been stultified, non innovative, non aligned in terms of the traditional meritocracy and incentives that effective organizations always have.

Question: What role will the teachers’ unions play in reform?

Transcript: Well I think the union has a somewhat different job and you have to create an environment in which you can work productively but the union’s job is to protect its workers and the school system’s job is to maximize the outcomes for our students, number of kids graduating, kids performing at grade, so on and so forth and what Al Shanker saw and wrote about who was probably the most prominent labor leader ever in America, teacher labor leader.  He started the United Federation of Teachers, the American Federation of Teachers and he understood that you would have to move from a trade union model to a professional model and that’s happening, it’s happening here in New York, it’s happening in other cities.  Is it happening as fast as I’d like, no, but it’s certainly happening and over time what I think you need to do is to convince teachers of several things that they will find increasingly congenial, one being part of a successful enterprise.  There’s an enormous amount of reward to that, some of my schools today, particularly schools in high needs neighborhoods that are doing incredible work, the teachers who are a part of that feel the psychic benefits and rewards of succeeding with populations that a lot of people say you can’t succeed with.  Second thing you need to do is create rational economic incentives, those teachers take on the tougher jobs, they have to be rewarded, those teachers who really have the expertise in science and math, which is so valuable to our country, in which there are always shortages in the school system, they have to be rewarded differently and I think over time we need to create an alternative pay structure in which we front load, so the young talented people who may not stay 25 years, but they may stay 5 or 10 or 15 years in the system and they get rewarded in the earlier years.  So I think you need a whole series of rational human resource policies that will support people and over time they will move.  As I said I would always like to see it happen more quickly but, you know, you have an established work force, grown up under certain rules and the union its job is to protect that workforce.  My job is to create opportunities so that the union and its workforce sees that there could be a better, brighter, more exciting future and that’s a kind of almost a Galion dialectic right, I mean if you think about it it’s, you know, you got a thesis antithesis and then you try to find a synthesis that moves you forward.  But what it will take, it will require is bold thinking and strong union leadership.  So recently we put together a school based pay for performance program here in New York that we’re now implementing in 200 of our highest needs schools.  When I started 5½ years ago that would have been impossible.  Now it’s possible and I believe in 5 years from now, much bolder, much more innovative structures will come into play.  Just recently in the New York Times we’re opening a charter in this city and the starting salary for teacher’s is gonna be $125,000, that’s like radical, that’s entirely different, will it work, we don’t know, should it be tried, you bet it should be tried and maybe you attract a different breed of cat with different set of incentives whose willing to tackle this in a different way and maybe the results that come out of that is that you have somewhat fewer teachers, but that you have teachers who view their job differently and whose commitment and whose talents are different and that’s the kind of thing you wouldn’t have seen when I started this job 6 years ago.  Just that kind of innovation wasn’t part of the equation, now it’s happening and it’s happening in a variety of ways throughout the nation.

Recorded on: 3/30/08

Question:  How do you see the state of public education in the U.S.?

Transcript: So you can look at this from so many different points of entry, let’s take an obvious one right.  If a doctor went to sleep 50 years ago and woke up today, nobody would allow that doctor in a hospital to do surgery right.  But if a teacher went to sleep 50 years and woke up today and she were a good teacher, people would be excited to have her in the classroom.  Education is a kind of area that really lacks innovation, lacks entrepreneurship, and lacks dynamic thinking, its very homogonous.  The debates are so arid, how long are we gonna have the same debates about, you know, you gotta find the perfect curriculum, you’ve gotta be able to have this class size versus that class size; you need to invest more in this or a little less in that.  Those are important debates, don’t get me wrong.  But those debates are absolutely inconclusive and aren’t gonna get to the issues that I’ve been hoping to be able to effectively communicate here which is that if you reward mediocrity, if you pay people whether they do a great job or they do a poor job.  If longevity of service is the most important factor in divvying up the benefits in this system, then the system won’t work.  You don’t know systems that work and which aren’t built on meritocracy in which excellence isn’t really the thing that people are searching for and which excellence is rewarded and which the toughest assignments are often times the assignments you want your most talented people to go to.  All of those things are misaligned in public education and they’ve been for a long time, in large measure public education is built on a civil service, trade union industrial model and we need to move it to a professional model in which excellence is rewarded, incompetence is properly dealt with.  The toughest jobs attract highly talented people so that our poorest kids get a fair shot at a great education and those kinds of phenomena have to be addressed and addressed meaningfully.  They’re very painful to address because they will require a rethinking of the way we deliver educational services in the United States.  But unless and until we get serious about that, I don’t think we’re gonna really see the kind of shifts that we wanna see, you know, it’s 54 years after Brown versus Board when the Supreme Court not only outlawed segregation but promised every kid in America an equal educational opportunity.  It’s 25 years after a nation at risk in which all the problems we’re talking about today were identified and yet today in America education is not equitably distributed, where you grow up, what your family background is, affects the quality of the education you get and that’s in large measure because we haven’t really come to grips with the issue of the equitable distribution of adult talent in a system and until we get to address that, things that we’re doing here in New York that are addressed and until we address that, we’re gonna continue to have the same kind of in my view arid discussion about yesterday’s policies and yesterday’s programs.

Question: What do you think is the right balance between public and private oversight of education?

Transcript: That’s a great question and I’m not sure anybody has the perfect formula but let me say first of all, you need to bring in far more entrepreneurial, innovative people.  One of the things, Wendy Cop and Teach for America has done and done well, they’ve brought an entrepreneurial group of people into the educational equation.  So you’ve got people who are running things like KIPP, which is one of our great charter groups running things like the New Teacher Project and so forth and so on.  These are groups that are bringing big and different ideas and any field that thrives is a field that has an innovate engine and public education quite frankly doesn’t.  It is a very homogenous field, so one of the things we’ve done in New York is we’ve got some incredible educators, my deputy for teaching and learning, Marci Lyles, my deputy who runs the empowerment zone, Eric Nadelstern, these are career educators.  Between the two of them they probably have 70 plus years in the New York City Public School system.  By the same token I’ve brought in some incredible people from the Harvard Business School.  Some people from the legal profession, my Chief Accountability Officer was just a lawyer for the NAACP Legal Defense Fund and then a law professor at Columbia and one of the great minds in America today.  If you mix those people, what you get is a combination of institutional knowledge, educational expertise, but much more innovation, managerial talent, managerial skills.  If you don’t manage a service delivery system like education, a 20 billion dollar one in New York, if you don’t manage it well, it’s not gonna get good results and good outcomes.  So the mix has got to be sort of from both halves of the equation, in the end education is a government service and the government has gotta be responsible, it cannot outsource it, it cannot decide that third parties will do it, although you can bring in third parties as we’ve done in New York City, you can bring in competitive principles, you can bring in accountability and you can bring in innovation.  All of those things are critical to the transformation, but in the end the government has gotta be accountable and that’s why ____________, if you think about it, it’s so weird, we’ve have school boards basically running education and they’ve been guided by the politics of paralysis and if you read Matt Miller who I’m sure is one of the real powerful thinkers in this area, he’s got a piece in the Atlantic Magazine in January in which he says “The first thing we do is kill all the school boards” because what you need is the leadership of a Mayor in a city and the Mayor is the single most important government official in the city and you want the Mayor out there, responsible, accountable, aligning the budget with the mission and standing before the city and saying “Education is our number one priority.”  So that to me is the right governmental structure and then the group of people you wanna bring in to do the work, it’s gotta be a group of people that has the mix of talent and if you choose them all from one side, if you have all managerial types with no educational expertise that won’t work.  By the same token if you have all educators with no managerial expertise, who don’t get innovation, don’t get differentiation and talent, don’t get the use of incentives to reward excellence and to make sure that incompetence, is dealt with.  If those things aren’t a part of the equation you’ll continue to get the results we’re now getting 54 years after Brown.

Recorded on: 3/30/08

Question: Explain your career trajectory, from lawyer to educator…

Transcript: Well I started out as a lawyer, I mean that was sort of what I wanted to do and was very fortunate early on, had a clerkship on the Supreme Court with Lewis Powell who affected the way I think about public service, my career and basically after a number of years in private sector, I was asked by President Clinton to be his deputy counsel and then from there went to the NHS Division of the Justice Department and that really had a profound impact on me in terms of public service and in terms of government and in terms of bureaucracy and thinking about how do you make bureaucracy’s much, much more effective managed well and so forth.  And when I left at the end of the Clinton Administration, I decided that my career would be at the intersection of media and technology, not dissimilar to where you’re putting your career these days and I went to Bertelsmann, a German media company and I was basically running the corporate aspects in the United States for Thomas Middelhoff and it was in the middle of all of that that the mayor got elected, Mike Bloomberg and he asked me whether I’d like to be considered for Chancellor.  I had done a fair amount of work in the district of Columbia, in fact was thinking of going on the school board when Mayor Anthony Williams got some appointments there and I was part of a group that was kind of advising Tony Williams.  And, you know, given my background and my passion about education and my sense that education is not working well, particularly for poor kids in the United States.  When the Mayor asked me after he had just gotten control from the legislature in Albany, I decided this is where my heart and whatever talents I have should be and it’s been almost 6 years now.

Question: As an outsider, what did you bring to the job of chancellor?

Transcript: Well I had a meager background but yes he did have to apply for an exemption.  I think for me what I think is that fundamentally the system is a service delivery system and it’s broken, it’s incentives are misaligned, it’s managed poorly, it basically tolerates mediocrity, rewards failure and I think if you’re a change agent then some of the very same principles apply in the Justice Department.  If you’re fundamentally a transformative leader, which I’ve considered myself to be, I thought this was as important an opportunity and quite frankly an opportunity I trained for, for much of my adult life.  I mean I believe so deeply that education is the great leveler and if you get that wrong in almost a Rawlsian sense, you get the preconditions to what it means to grow up in America, you get those wrong and so I had a sense that this was gonna take a systems transformation.  It’s always hard to speak for the mayor on what motivated him but I suppose a combination of his sense that somebody who is outside the system was beholden to the structures that existed, the players that existed, somebody who had a fair amount of managerial experience which I had had in the Justice Department and at Bertelsmann and somebody I hope this mattered to and I had my passion for making sure that education was equitable and that whether you were rich or poor, black or white, you got a fair shot at the American dream.  Something that’s not happening in our country and I hope those are the things that resonated with the mayor.

Recorded on: 3/30/08

Transcript: I was actually born in the Bronx right after the Second World War; my father had just come back from the war and married my mother.  Then before I remember, we moved to Brooklyn, right across the street from my mother’s parents and when I was about 7 or 8 we moved to Queens which is really where I consider having grown up.  I grew up in public housing in Queens and grew up in the streets of New York, I always like to think of myself as a kid from the streets and education changed my life.  I mean my father had dropped out of high school in the 10th grade during the great depression; my mother graduated from high school and never went to college.  But education in Astoria really changed my life.  I like to describe it that basically I stood on the shoulders of teachers to see a world that I couldn’t have seen growing up in the family that I grew up in.

Recorded on: 3/30/08

Transcript:  Let me put it this way, I do think we have moved the ball forward, I think the Mayor has basically driven reform very, very hard and successfully here in New York.  We have a lot more to go, I mean if you ask me, you know, sort of in the process we are still in the early stages I guess, you know, if you think of Churchill’s words, “This is not the beginning of the end but the end of the beginning” and that’s where I think we are but a lot more work has to be done.  I think the basic things that have changed the system is we conceptualize the model that we’re now implementing based on leadership, accountability and empowerment, which is very different from the typical models that have permeated public education, what do I mean by that?  The first thing which I thought was our most successful conception was we stopped talking about a great school system and started talking about a system made up of great schools because school is where the action is and if you don’t get that and you talk about systems,systems are political, systems are managerial but they’re not where service is delivered to kids and so then we started to focus heavily on the human resource equation, getting great principals, making sure principals could hire the teachers they want.  In the past before I got here, 3500, 3,000 teachers would show up each year at a different school and say I have a legal right to be here and if the principal or the other teachers said well, you’re not the right fit for this school, it didn’t matter, that’s all changed. We’re now using incentives to help principals in high need schools attract talent.  So fundamentally what we’ve tried to do is create a system where schools become the unit and the schools are empowered to make decisions.  By the same token, we put a letter grade on every school, we hold our schools accountable for progress.  Not for what the kid brings to the school, but what the school does for the kid, so we compare similarly situated schools and I think that those three pillars, leadership, empowerment and accountability have really changed the fundamental paradigm in our city.  There are certain things that we have done, some things we didn’t implement well that I wish we had a better shot at.  If you ask me, the lesson that I wish I had learned sooner is I don’t think we’ve been as effective in engaging our community and making sure that people in the city knew what the changes were about.  We’ve let other people characterize changes in a way that I think is both inaccurate and harmful and I think we could have done a better job engaging parents in the school system, making them feel like they were strongly allied with what we’re doing, believe in the work we’re doing because I think most of the parents in our city understand the schools are getting better.  Recent surveys show that in every income group, poor, near poor and moderate and high income, in all three of those groups an independent survey showed that the number of parents who say their kids are in an A or a B school has gone up and in the poor and near poor it went up very significantly and even moderate and middle it went up about 8 points.  But in poor it went from 24 to 64% of the parents over the course of the Mayor’s term.  So that’s huge, but I think we did not do as good a job as we should have in engaging them and if you will the politics of educational transformation.

Recorded on: 3/30/08

Transcript:  I think private philanthropy which has really increased dramatically in the last decade in public education can be enormously valuable.  Let me give you some sense of the dimensions, I mean my budget annually is 20 billion dollars operating so private philanthropy is only gonna be a small part, no matter how much it expands.  On the other hand private philanthropy is typically the R&D money, the innovation money, right the venture money that can enable you to do new and different things.  So one of the things I believe from day one is in the absence of great school leadership, particularly in our most challenged schools that it wouldn’t work.  That no matter what you do, if you don’t have a principal who’s aligned and who was the fortitude and the coverage and the intellectual stamina to do transformative work, to do instruction work, it won’t happen.  So we raise 70 million dollars, the business community, several key foundations to create this leadership training program and it’s getting real results.  By the same token the Gates Foundation invested heavily with us in a restructuring, they believed and they were correct that high schools which had a lot of struggling students and were generally getting a graduation rate of 30 or 32% really need to be restructured much smaller, much more personalize with a different dynamic, a different sense of student/teacher relationship and so forth and we’ve basically done over 200 of those in New York City and those schools are getting very different results.  Under Mayor Bloomberg in the almost 6 years we’ve been at this, we’ve raised to our city about 400 million dollars of private philanthropy and as I say, almost always it’s been venture money.  When we needed to restructure our human resource department, several foundations, Brode, Tiger Foundation, with Julian Robertson and others were there for us and throughout our efforts our basic R&D venture money has come from private philanthropy.  It’s very hard to take money at of your year to year school budgets to siphon it off.  Our accountability initiative was heavily funded by the Dell Foundation, so we’ve been very fortunate in that regard and when I speak to my colleagues throughout the country, they too are now looking for ways to engage philanthropy to help them do some of the things that are not your day to day costs of your arts program or your physical education or your math or your English and philanthropy’s not gonna play on those things, they are gonna play on the transformative things that need to be done.

Recorded on: 3/30/08

Transcript:  So I think assessment is critical, it’s not the only thing, but let’s be candid about it, there are two or three critical things in an education, one is knowledge acquisition and that’s important, make no mistake about it, if you don’t understand what happens in history, if you can’t do fundamental mathematics, if you don’t know how to add, subtract, divide, multiply, if you don’t know what basic algebraic formulas are about, if you don’t understand how to read and know what Ethan Frome or The Iliad is about, that’s knowledge and skills acquisition and it’s really important, it’s not the only thing but it’s important and we shouldn’t forgo it.  I don’t want kids who are creative but can’t read to graduate from a public school system because they won’t do well.  By the same token, I don’t want kids who don’t have basic knowledge about core subjects, art, music, science, math, social studies, history, what have you.  We also wanna foster an environment which encourages creativity, encourages dynamic thinking, encourages people working together on problem solving and we need ways to measure that, good exams have good essays.  When I taught federal courts and federal jurisdiction at Georgetown at the Law School, you know, the exams were a key part of the work we did.  But the exams tested whether people could analyze a problem, think it through logically, rationally as part of any assessment.  If all you’re doing is knowledge acquisition then you’re not assessing the full range.  But we can assess the full range, but don’t fall into the trap which I think a lot of people fall into, is people don’t want accountability, people don’t want a test knowledge acquisition and skills acquisition and so they walk away from testing and I’d be the first to say we need to do a much better job on testing.  A lot of our tests are not good tests and one of the reasons I would support national standards and national testing is to make sure that the tests were rigorous, meaningful, engage people in problem solving.  I would even as part of one’s assessment, have a group work together because group problem solving is gonna become more and more a skill in the 21st century as we work together in small groups to figure out dynamic enquiry based learning, all of that can be incorporated.  But if you don’t test whether people are getting it, then you can live under the illusion that they got it without the proof that they’re getting it and so to me the challenge is to make sure the tests are rigorous that they test the full range of things, but don’t walk away from assessment.  When I went to public school, every Friday we got tested on vocabulary and you know what, it was a way to make sure you know what assiduous meant and that’s very important and we got tested on math and if I got things wrong, then I went back to try to learn 'em and my teacher went back to try to help me understand them.  Now if all you do at the end of a block is move onto the next block, what happens is what happens in many public schools, people move through the system without acquiring the knowledge and the skills they need and when they get to the end, they drop out or fail out or don’t succeed and so assessment is an absolutely essential, it’s not the only part, it’s an absolutely essential part of the educational equation.

Recorded on: 3/30/08

Transcript:  I think for me what I think is that fundamentally the system is a service delivery system and it’s broken, it’s incentives are misaligned, it’s managed poorly, it basically tolerates mediocrity, rewards failure and I think if you’re a change agent then some of the very same principles apply in the Justice Department.  If you’re fundamentally a transformative leader, which I’ve considered myself to be, I thought this was as important an opportunity and quite frankly an opportunity I trained for, for much of my adult life.  I mean I believe so deeply that education is the great leveler and if you get that wrong in almost a Rawlsian sense, you get the preconditions to what it means to grow up in America, you get those wrong and so I had a sense that this was gonna take a systems transformation.  It’s always hard to speak for the mayor on what motivated him but I suppose a combination of his sense that somebody who is outside the system was beholden to the structures that existed, the players that existed, somebody who had a fair amount of managerial experience which I had had in the Justice Department and at Bertelsmann and somebody I hope this mattered to and I had my passion for making sure that education was equitable and that whether you were rich or poor, black or white, you got a fair shot at the American dream.  Something that’s not happening in our country and I hope those are the things that resonated with the mayor.

Recorded on: 3/30/08