<html><body><P>American Enterprise Institute</P> <P>June 5, 2008</P> <P>[Edited transcript from audio tapes]</P> <P><BR> <TABLE cellSpacing=1 cellPadding=1 width="100%" border=0> <TBODY> <TR> <TD> <DIV class=BodyText>4:30 p.m. </DIV></TD> <TD> <DIV class=BodyText>Registration</DIV></TD> <TD> <DIV class=BodyText> </DIV></TD></TR> <TR> <TD> <DIV class=BodyText> </DIV></TD> <TD> <DIV class=BodyText> </DIV></TD> <TD> <DIV class=BodyText> </DIV></TD></TR> <TR> <TD> <DIV class=BodyText>4:45    </DIV></TD> <TD> <DIV class=BodyText><EM>Introduction</EM>: </DIV></TD> <TD> <DIV class=BodyText><A class=eResources href="http://www.aei.org/scholars/scholarID.30/scholar.asp">Frederick M. Hess</A>, AEI</DIV></TD></TR> <TR> <TD> <DIV class=BodyText> </DIV></TD> <TD> <DIV class=BodyText> </DIV></TD> <TD> <DIV class=BodyText> </DIV></TD></TR> <TR> <TD> <DIV class=BodyText> </DIV></TD> <TD> <DIV class=BodyText><EM>Speaker</EM>:  </DIV></TD> <TD> <DIV class=BodyText>Joel I. Klein, New York City Schools Chancellor</DIV></TD></TR> <TR> <TD> <DIV class=BodyText> </DIV></TD> <TD> <DIV class=BodyText> </DIV></TD> <TD> <DIV class=BodyText> </DIV></TD></TR> <TR> <TD> <DIV class=BodyText>6:00  </DIV></TD> <TD> <DIV class=BodyText> <DIV class=BodyText>Adjournment and Reception</DIV></DIV></TD> <TD> <DIV class=BodyText> </DIV></TD></TR></TBODY></TABLE></P> <P> </P> <P>Proceedings:<BR></P> <P>Frederick Hess: Good afternoon. I d like to welcome all of you to AEI today. I m Rick Hess, director of Education Policy Studies at the American Enterprise Institute. I m delighted that all of you have been able to join us for remarks by Chancellor Joel Klein, chancellor of the New York City Public Schools on the topic of The Challenge of Reforming Urban Schooling. </P> <P>As many of you know as, in fact, just about all of you know, Chancellor Klein was appointed New York City Schools chancellor in 2002 by Mayor Michael Bloomberg, after serving in the highest levels of government and business. As chancellor, on a day-to-day basis, Chancellor Klein oversees more than 1,400 schools enrolling over 1.1 million students, more than 130,000 employees and a $15 billion operating budget. We re not talking small potatoes here.  </P> <P>Prior to becoming chancellor of New York City schools, Joel Klein had served as chairman and CEO of Bertelsmann, Inc. and prior to that, he had served as assistant attorney general in charge of the U.S. Department Justice s antitrust division and is deputy counsel to President Bill Clinton. He brings to the job of chancellor both a familiarity of the worlds of business and politics that is essential in that job. Chancellor Klein s tenure has been heralded as a model of effective school reform and also critiqued as a problematic example of school reform. </P> <P>Today, we re giving him an opportunity to have the discussion about both the high points and the more challenging aspects of his record in New York. He is going to start by offering some broader thoughts on the challenges of school reform in urban education and on the work they have tackled in New York. We will then open it up for conversation and for questions from the audience. And, the Chancellor welcomes friendly questions, challenging questions whatever folks in the audience choose to throw at him. He s seen it all and I don t think any of it fazes him. </P> <P>New York City is one of the more interesting school reform efforts of our time. Most recently, it was capped by winning the Broad Prize for Urban Education as a 2007 recipient. And as somebody who s been in the saddle in New York for seven years, the Chancellor is someone who has ridden this road longer and more aggressively than many. So I for one welcome him here and I m looking forward to what you have to share with us today, sir. </P> <P>Joel Klein: Thank you, Rick. Thank you for the opportunity to be here, I thank all of you for coming. My real reason in being here today is to figure out how the forking road led to two outcomes I could never figure; Rick, running the educational policy piece today at AEI and me being the chancellor. It was meant to be exactly the opposite, Rick, and I m here to remedy that problem. I also love the way you said, basically, For all his criticism, just washes right off. So you know today you re listening to a man who s extraordinarily insensitive. And I plan to proceed in that vein. </P> <P>In all seriousness, this was a very different career and life challenge for me. I left the law to work in business. Then the mayor, after he got control of the city school system, basically decided, for reasons that escape me, that I was the right person to be his schools chancellor. And everybody predicted -- which was the recent history -- that I would survive for about a couple of years and move on. </P> <P>And indeed, my wife made that same prediction because we signed up to buy a house about the time we started this job. And in fact, I ve now become the longest serving chancellor and have been involved in -- whether you agree with every aspect or not -- certainly if not the most, one of the most dynamic aggressive school reform efforts in the United States. And what I want to do is walk you through both the concepts and the results. But I want to start with a couple of caveats and then read something that was provoked by a recent Tom Freedman column that I think frames the debate well. </P> <P>First caveat is that this is very much a work in progress. There are no quick fixes in public education. And when you re dealing with a 13-year educational delivery system, you re already talking about many people who are far along in the process whenever you start and many changes that won t begin to bear fruit. </P> <P>I was thinking about Tom Payzant, who had a wonderful run in Boston. He would ve talked about his first four years, when he got very few positive results. In his last several years, he won the Broad Prize, got some very good results on the national tests as well.</P> <P>Second thing, I get asked all the time about what the role of the educator versus the role of the leader manager is. And let me make my biases clear on this. Educational issues matter and I didn t come to this as an educational expert. But I believe you can hire educational talent. I believe one of the great challenges in public education is that people don t understand it s a service delivery challenge that requires leadership and management in the public sector as it does in the private sector. And putting a label on it isn t going to answer the question. </P> <P>Understanding that the quality of the education that a kid receives is a service delivery challenge requiring you to understand and analyze the incentives in the system, the rewards, the consequences. Analyzing what are the units that matter, what are the units that don t matter? Those kinds of questions may sound almost bureaucratic in description, but they are indeed the essence of anti-bureaucratic reform. </P> <P>The best book I ve ever read on it is a book by Michael Barber who was Tony Blair s education adviser. Came out about a year ago. It s called Instruction to Deliver. And that critical piece is virtually absent from the debate. So you hear a lot about curriculum and curriculum matters and you ll hear about class size and class size is not unimportant. And you ll hear a lot about pre-K and after school and all these other things. </P> <P>Well, what you will not hear about, what has to infuse this debate is about the service delivery challenges of 135,000 people and now over $20 billion budget making sure that every kid, those in the South Bronx in Northern Manhattan, those in Central Brooklyn, that every kid gets an education that gives him or her a shot at the American Dream. That s not happening and it s not going to happen if the discussion stays on only one of the key elements in the overall discussion. </P> <P>Now to frame it, if you read Tom s piece on the SEED Program, it provoked two letters to The New York Times that reminded me almost of what I hear every single day. And I wanted to frame it in this way. One of my teachers, in fact, wrote in and said that the schools alone cannot hope to level the playing field for those who most need it. Teachers and principals cannot provide supportive homes for all students. We cannot ensure safe neighborhoods with great peer and adult role models. We can ensure excellent pre-school opportunities, et cetera, et cetera. </P> <P>Then a professor from one of our colleges weighs in with the next letter, saying, Even sadder the outcomes we re getting don t need to be that way. We have a strong body of research and what it takes to be a school that beats the odds. What is required is strong leadership, commitment to high standards, knowledgeable teachers, continuing assessment, and commitment to professional development. If some schools can beat the odds, we need to figure out a way to replicate the results in all schools. </P> <P>And that is essentially the frame that we operate in. We understand the challenges that poverty, dysfunctional families and everything else bring to the educational equation but I m going to put my cards on the table. Those challenges can be met because they are being met. They re being met on far too small a scale but they can be met and as long as the school system is imbued with the rationale that it s exogenous factors that are defeating success, then we will continue not to have success. </P> <P>I m not suggesting that how a child is raised and what family issues are don t have an impact, we don t remotely know how capable schools are of transforming lives. Unless and until we transform our schools, and the way I like to put it is, everyone I know when I took this job, said, You will never fix education in America until you fix poverty. In my view, that s exactly backwards. You will never fix poverty in America unless and until we fix education. </P> <P>And that is the zeitgeist that led the mayor to take control of the system. It was not, as I said, a politically astute decision. And that is the zeitgeist that imbues everything we do. We ve made mistakes, we ve corrected mistakes; we ve instituted things that didn t work as well as we had hoped. But the underlying view is that you can transform this educational delivery system and get entirely different outcomes. And what I mean by outcomes are students graduating from high school, prepared and ready for the rigors of a college education. And you can get very different outcomes if you transform education. </P> <P>Now, let me give you what I think is the first chapter of what I hope will be a multi-chapter book that we get to write in New York City. </P> <P>This is the school system we inherited and basically you see here, there were these 32 different school districts and a few that weren t on the map. They re each run by a school board, they did their own thing, their accountability was fundamentally political, no responsibility for results, there was the central board but that central board basically had limited powers over the various districts. The mayor appointed two people on the board, the borough presidents appointed five and when things didn t work, there was lots of finger pointing, the mayor controlled the budget but didn t control who the chancellor was. And not surprisingly, our results were stagnant and I ll show you some of that in a little bit. </P> <P>This was a highly politicized dysfunctional service delivery system. As I said, students were failing, 50 percent of fourth graders were meeting standards in math and reading, 30 percent of eighth graders were meeting those standards, graduation rates were low and stagnant, there s been virtually no movement, the city kept graduation rates I think from 86 to 2002 with no movement, resources were not sufficient, principals had virtually no discretion over their budgets, and there were no choices. Too many of our parents who couldn t move from the neighborhood that they were in had to take the schools that the neighborhood served up. </P> <P>We did this in two phases and again, people, a lot of people in the press in particular, tried to make a big deal. They said, Well, you moved from Phase I to Phase II, so Phase I must not have worked. But we moved from Phase I to Phase II precisely, you know, one of the wonderful things about being able to report on things like this, you can argue around the flag all day long. We talked about the first phase and the second phase early into the first phase, the Gates Foundation funded money for us to start the R&D on the second phase. </P> <P>But the first phase, and I would recommend this to anyone, the first phase is to get control of the system to bring coherence and to start to think about capacity building. Now, those words coherence, capacity building, those words are critical managerial issues and fundamentally, that s Phase I of what we call Children First. </P> <P>Now, the most important thing we did and this is going to sound less important and I think it is instead of making our vision about a grade school system, our vision was a system comprised of grade schools. And why that is critical is because in politics, things like districts and other things are important units. In education delivery, the school is the unit that matters. And in New York City, which a lot of people say is a troubled school system, I ve got some of the best schools in the world. But overall, most of my schools are schools which people in this room would not choose to send their own children to. And I have a simple view, if it s not good enough for your kids, I don t know whose kids it s good enough for. </P> <P>So our vision was about the school. And indispensable to that vision was we created a new management structure to get control of it. We took those various districts, rolled them into ten regions and each region basically had ten supervisors that directly interfaced with ten schools and it was very top down, designed to be that way because we had to depoliticize, we had to bring coherence and we had to create capacity. This could never be a desirable end state. Michael Barber describes in his book: This approach can lead you from awful to adequate but it won t get you from adequate to good or much more importantly, from good to great. </P> <P>We focused on school leadership and I still think this is right. The politics of public education doesn t allow you to focus on school leadership because leadership is not a major political piece. They don t have the large numbers; they don t have the political clout, and so on. But the fact is, if the school is a unit that matters, the indispensable thing in that is you got to have the right leadership, otherwise, it won t work. Teachers don t want to work for a poor leader; transforming culture doesn t happen under a poor leader; expectations are set by leadership. And if in fact, you don t have a great leader in every school, and particularly in our most challenging schools, everything else you do will fail. </P> <P>We enhanced the curriculum. I m sure we ll get some questions about the particular curriculums we chose. In the end, we implemented a standardized curriculum and we re now expanding that into social studies, science, and the arts but basically we tried to get people on the same page. We put math and English coaches in all our schools. Again, very top down, very standardized. </P> <P>We engaged families; we put a parent coordinator in every school. We try to move the locus away from the politics of education to the educational needs of families so that s why we have an initiative of over $15 million of parent coordinators. Obviously, you have to tackle safety and we did that. We ve had a lot of initiatives, overall crime is down, incidents are down. And throughout the first phase, we cut about $200 million from the bureaucracy, moved money to the schools. There reaches a point where it gets too thin but I guarantee in virtually every school system in America, you can cut bureaucracy and move that money to the schools. </P> <P>Quality of teachers, right? This is the issue and how you get here is challenging. But the issue that all the research shows is that the most important thing in a kid s education is the quality of our teachers. More important than anything else, and as to that most important thing, there are massive inequities in America today. We have worked on this; it is still very much a work in progress. </P> <P>I m going to talk about some of the bolder things we ve been able to do. But we came in with about 86 percent certified, they re now all certified. The mayor, God bless him, increased teachers salaries by 43 percent. It s enabled us to attract more talent and to keep more talent in the system. This was a big deal and Michelle Rhee worked with us when she was on the New Teacher Project. </P> <P>In public education throughout this country, teachers move involuntarily through the system. They have a legal right to a position under the contract, they can bump out another teachers, the school has nothing to say about it. We put an end to that. We have one of the few open markets and that has changed both the teachers attitudes and the schools attitudes, not only in terms of human capital, but in terms of accountability, overall. Well, principals used to say to me, If I can t pick my teachers, how can you hold me accountable? </P> <P>We continue to work on this and I wish we had a lot more, but we re trying to use resources to deal with the inequities that I ve been talking about. We have a Lead Teacher Program where we pay $10,000 extra if you re highly qualified and perform well; we send in a team or two to a school. That s worked throughout the city. We have quite a few of those and we started what we call Housing Incentives which are really signing bonuses. And we re always short in math, science and special ed teachers, we pay you $15,000 if you give us a three-year commitment and that has attracted talent. </P> <P>We now have more teachers, class size is lowered, and we have at least five applicants for every vacancy. So we re now able to choose and overall, there s little doubt that the quality of our teaching force has improved, not just in terms of credentials but in terms of passing the requisite tests in SAT scores and a whole bunch of other variables. </P> <P>Choice matters. And as I said before, when it comes to your kids education, you exercise choice. If you don t like the neighborhood school, you ll find another school. If you have to move, you will move but you will not simply assign your child to a school. People who have fewer choices in life often don t have that. One of the things we did was to build a robust choice system that we continue to expand. We ve opened up 286 new schools. That s more schools than most large school districts have. We did that to create new choices and opportunities. Most of those we did working with the Gates Foundation in our high schools and we re getting really good results. </P> <P>There was a piece on one of them in last week s Newsweek. There ve been quite a few articles talking about those new small high schools -- which were hard to do. We did them a year at a time. So you d start with the ninth grade class and a tenth grade class, eleventh grade class. Last year, we got our first round of results from 43 of those schools and they basically doubled the graduation rates and 90 plus percent of the students in those schools were African-American and Latinos. So those were not schools that were cherry-picking students. This is 45, next year we re opening up about another 20. We will now have 80 charter schools. </P> <P>Before we got there, they had about 16, and the six years we ve been here even with legislative resistance. And we re going to continue to move on this. The mayor and I have said we want New York City, which is atypical for a public school superintendent or chancellor to say, We want New York City to be the Silicon Valley of charter schools. And you know what s happened? That s what s going on. The people like Achievement First and Uncommon Schools and KIPP and a whole bunch of others are not only there but they are growing and expanding and I expect by the end of next year, we ll have somewhere in the neighborhood of 100 charter schools. </P> <P>We opened up transfer schools, very intense programs for kids for whom their first high school choice just wasn t working. Strong community partnerships that work with us to give them the emotional and the other supports that they need, these schools are getting good results. </P> <P>We opened up basically afternoon-evening centers for kids who are over-aged and under-credited, who are working or have a family. And through this recovery program, we re getting more kids who graduate. Tied to that whole effort is this Learning-to-Work Program. We re actually teaching them job skills, getting them apprenticeships, all on our nickel and it s re-engaging kids. </P> <P>Our high schools are a 100 percent choice system. Every kid lists up to 12 choices, we put it in almost like a medical residency program, we put it into a match program. Schools choose, kids choose with a few exceptions which are we have admissions programs based on test scores for a few of our schools but everything else is choice. And I m pleased to tell you that over 50 percent, which is about 50 percent this year of our high school students got their first choice and about three-quarters to 80 percent got one of their first three or four choices. </P> <P>So there s a tremendous amount of choice in the city. We re now looking at issues like middle school choice as well. We ve increased our high-end exam takers so 5,000 more AP, 8,000 more SAT, and 75,000 or 80,000 more PSAT test takers. This number will impact this number over time. We pay for every kid s SAT and we administer it during the school day and that s how we went from 30,000 to 110,000. </P> <P>All right, now Phase II. This was the phase which I think can move us from the stability we created to the dynamism we need. And as I said at the outset, we started with the thing that the Gates Foundation funded which was called an autonomy zone. We wanted to shift the entire management focus and the mayor, after he got re-elected, in his second inaugural speech said and you ll hear this no place else, The three pillars of school reform in New York City are leadership, empowerment, and accountability. Or as the acronym people like to call it EAL. </P> <P>Now, that s a fundamental paradigm shift in our service delivery system. It is an exchange with our school leaders for far greater authority, in return for far more rigorous accountability. And this is an outcomes-driven focused determination. </P> <P>So now, the premise of this is that I m not going to sit around and decide exactly what the class size ought to be for every school because when you decide that, you re making budget allocation decisions. I m not going to decide whether they re better off with a Saturday Academy, a lower class size, an after school program, more arts, more physical education -- those are all important things competing for scarce dollars. </P> <P>In most school districts, those decisions are made centrally and the schools fall in line. Our philosophy is different schools have different needs and more importantly or as importantly, it s critical for us to learn from each other and a homogenated approach undermines that. </P> <P>We created something that doesn t exist anywhere else. We took $230 million above the other $200 million out of our bureaucracy, really downsizing massively. And we gave each school, on average, it varied depending on size, $150,000 new dollars. And we created 13 new entities; I call it a Rent-a-Bureaucracy Program. Instead of having a single bureaucracy, we have 13, four internal that we created, one that was this empowerment zone that we had started with the Gates money, and then eight externals, groups like Fordham School of Education, New Visions, CEI, PEA, that basically put together a package of services and go to the schools and say, At this price point, you can get this service from us. And with these 13 different organizations is a true robust competition, a real market. </P> <P>Principals call me from time to time. They want to change, they re unhappy. The cheapest of these is about $30,000, the highest about $65,000 or $70,000, so price point matters to our schools and new entrants into this market are knocking on our door all the time. </P> <P>In addition to that, they have more money and discretion over budgets, staffing, and so forth. And we have a per student funding formula. Robert Gordon, who is at CAP and is now back there, but he came to us for over a year. He put this together. We basically create a public school voucher type system where each student carries with him or her certain dollars. Obviously, if you re high poverty, if you re a poor performing student, you get extra dollars but the dollars follow the students through the system. We also put in some hold harmless and other provisions as we implemented that. </P> <P>So this is a very different school and will attract, I believe, very different leadership because the leader has a chance to affect what goes on in his school far more and many of you may know Belucci out in California, he s at the business school there, he s been studying education and he s written a lot about this issue and what New York s doing on empowerment. </P> <P>But empowerment without accountability is a prescription for failure. And so we ve developed, again, certainly one of the most rigorous accountability systems, it goes way beyond where NCLB is right now. But the first thing we did is get the schools into the accountability mode, if you will. We developed this thing called ARIS ; it s an Achievement Reporting and Information System. We re still in the process of rolling it out. It s a multi-level information system so that schools, not the regulators, but the schools will have the performance data necessary to do the inquiry work that they need to do to change what s going on in the schools. And so, they now can see how a kid did in the third grade. When he s in the eighth grade, they can see which skills he mastered earlier or she mastered later and so forth. </P> <P>To supplement that, we developed our periodic assessments so that you can assess student weakness early in the term before you give the major exams. We have predictive exams, and this information pumps into ARIS. You then identify student strengths, student weaknesses. </P> <P>And the last thing we did is put together massive professional development built around an inquiry team model in which using these tools people focus on why is it that Klein is learning these six critical reading skills but can t figure out context clues or main ideas or other things and how can we intervene. </P> <P>If a kid knows math and knows fractions and doesn t know long division, if you keep teaching him fractions and you don t teach him long division, you re wasting your time. And unless you do this kind of work, you ll never get the kind of effective differentiated instruction we need. But make no mistake about it, we hold schools accountable for their results. Every school in New York now gets a letter grade, A to F. Are these metrics perfect? No, they re not perfect. But they re important, we ll constantly improve them. And they re pretty good indicators.</P> <P>The progress report is based largely, not exclusively, on the progress schools make. We cluster schools in what we call sort of their peer group, 20 schools right above them, 20 right below them in terms of performance. And based on that, we look at how the cohort moves. Some schools are moving up while others are moving down. So it s an apples-and-apples comparison, that s the principal but not the only ingredient in the score. And what you find is some high performing schools, schools that are thought of as doing well, actually are not moving their students forward compared to other similar schools, while some schools that are not considered high performing actually are moving forward at a rapid pace and they re getting much better results than their peer group. </P> <P>As part of that, we do something that is just massive in its undertaking. Last year, we had some 600,000 people: students, teachers, and families fill out surveys. About 26 percent of our families and this year, we ll increase that number, and our students and so forth with real feedback on what s working, what s not working at the schools. That becomes part of the progress report; we publish it online. Anybody who wants to see the results can find them and now we re going to start to compare year-to-year results. </P> <P>We brought in an outside group, sort of modeled on but a little less informal than the British Inspectorate. And each of our schools goes through a quality review to see, fundamentally, whether they are doing this, how they are bringing new teachers in and mentoring them and tutoring them, whether they have the systems in place. And we publish all of that for analysis and review by everybody. </P> <P>And then, there are real rewards and consequences based on results. Something that s gotten little attention but I think deserves a lot more is every principal in the City of New York signed a performance agreement with us, embodying these accountability and empowerment principles and agreeing, fundamentally, that if their school gets an F or a D two years in a row, we have the right to terminate them and after multiple years to shut the school, and we do shut schools. And I think that s absolutely essential even though it s always controversial. </P> <P>As I said before, incentives, rewards, and consequences matter. We re in the early stages but a lot of important stuff has happened. Our principals base salary is about $135,000 to $153,000, but on top of that, they can earn up to $25,000 based on their progress report. So if they really do well in terms of their progress report, that s 25k. We also have hardship pay so to speak, another 25k. If we think you re a true transformational leader and you re willing to commit three years or more to us, we ll give you $25,000 for the three-year commitment to go take over our high needs-schools or in some instances, start a school where we shut one down.</P> <P>One of the things I m most proud of that we accomplished was about six months ago, an historic deal with the UFT. As I was saying before, it s really patterned on a speech that Al Shanker made at the PIU forum in 1994. It was where for the first time, we identified 200 high need schools. If those schools meet their targets, on their progress report, the teachers will get $3,000 per teacher. You take that, let s say you have 100 teachers, they get $300,000. </P> <P>You form a compensation committee. Compensation committee has two teachers that the teachers select and has the principal and administrator. The four of them decide how to divvy up that $300,000. They can do it based on any factors they think are relevant. They can base it on seniority. They can give everybody the same, they can differentiate; that whole notion of injecting the compensation committee, bringing in performance pay into the system, tying it to the progress reports and the results we re getting on standardized tests. That is a big and significant cultural change in the system. </P> <P>We didn t impose it on any of those 200 schools. We said if the teachers didn t want it, they didn t have to participate. I m thrilled to tell you 90 percent of our schools, in spite a lot of naysaying, 90 percent of our schools signed up for that program. It s going to be next year; we re going to get the results this school year. They re supposed to come out in the next couple of weeks and then we ll start to actually distribute the rewards and I ll have more data on how the money was actually distributed. </P> <P>There are consequences as I said before. Leadership changes, restructuring, we ve closed more than dozens. I think we ve closed about 80 schools. That is not a noiseless process. We re implementing a more rigorous 10-year process. Unfortunately, when we tried to use teacher value-added metrics as part of that, the unions introduced a budget amendment in the middle of the night and the legislature put a clamp on that. </P> <P>But even in the absence of value-added metrics, I don t think you can just make a life commitment to everyone that shows up. And yet, that s what we in most school districts were doing and we re going to have a rigorous 10-year review process. And we re also providing from our offices additional support to remove incompetent educators. It s very hard to do once they re in tenure but we owe it to our students to do everything in our power to try to make that happen. </P> <P>So those are the two phases. The second phase is really in its complete implementation, this year, for the first time. Now I want to just walk through some of the results and I put in a variety of different numbers, some of them are better than others, some of them I obviously wish were better than they were. But I want to give you some sense of where we started and where we are right now. </P> <P>City graduation rates, this unfortunately has caused noise because the city started keeping its rate, as I said, four-year rate in 1986. The state didn t start until basically two years ago. So we had no baseline, the city rate takes into effect certain things it shouldn t. But these are apples-to-apples comparison. From 86 to 2002, it went up four points. From 2002 to 2006, and we re going to get 2007 pretty soon, it s gone up nine points. So that s more than twice in a quarter of the time and that trajectory will continue upward. </P> <P>A better metric, because I think it properly measures it, the city took into account GED, they didn t take into account special ed cohorts. The state takes into account special ed and only looks at what we call Regents and local diplomas which are academic diplomas. </P> <P>The state started doing this two years ago, and in two years we ve taken it up six points under that metric. I like to compare us to other large cities, not that they re exactly comparable but it gives you some baseline. Those large cities which are Buffalo, Rochester, Syracuse and Yonkers, they went down during that phase and the rest of the State went down without.</P> <P>Then I looked at five-year rates that the state has and again, these are just early numbers, this is one year s worth of data, but five-year rate, we re up 10 percent, big four is six, rest of the state, four. You re starting to see gap closing here in the fifth year, even in the fourth year, but you re starting to see a gap closing and further gap closing in the sixth year. Sixth year, we re up 12 points, 7 points, 4 points. You start to aggregate that if I could keep those trends going, sixth grade, four-year, five-year and six-year, what you start to see is in five or six years, certainly in the fifth and sixth year, maybe in the fourth year, we would start to close our graduation rate up to the overall state rate. </P> <P>Now what we have is this change recently but we had fourth and eighth grade state tests and we have fourth and eighth grade federal tests. You all know the difference but let me put them there because some people like to focus on the state test, other people say they are no good, they want to focus on the federal test. Oftentimes, what you want to focus on may depend which you re doing better on or what you re doing worse on. </P> <P>But let me at least explain the state test. Fourth and eighth, math and English language, everybody takes them, they re perceived to be and they are high stakes test, a lot of promotion decisions depend on your score on this in New York City and they re tailored to our curriculum. Federal test is a sample than a test and so they re not high stakes tests and in fact, they re national so they re obviously not in the same way tailored. All that said I think they re an important indicator. </P> <P>Just to give you some baseline comparison. We started in 2002, here s where we were, the orange, here s where the state was so you re talking about somewhere in the neighborhood of 36 percent, 37 point difference in fourth grade scores on proficiency and here s the big four that s at cohort and as I said similar to us. If you look at this over the course of our time, basically these people have been relatively flat, they re up five points, we have gone up 22 points while the rest of the state has gone up six points. So what it means now is our fourth graders are about 10 points behind the rest of the state. So that is real gap closing in fourth grade math and that is quite frankly one of our really big success stories. </P> <P>And it s echoed in the NAEP, the Federal NAEP. So, again, what I look at is three cohorts, I try to look at our cohort, the large central city, and then the nation. 2003 was the first time the cities took this test and in 2003, we were at 67, four points above large central cities and nine points below the nation. Today, our fourth grade math students are basically equal to the nation, something that wouldn t have been expected and almost 10 points ahead of large central cities. </P> <P>Fourth grade reading scores, this is a challenge and I ll explain why. I talk about English proficient because the state changed which people took the English language arts test. So the number of students that went from 05 to 06 in our city that took the test, went up dramatically from number of English language learners from 4.5 percent to 13.5 percent to the cohort. As a result of that, if you look at all students would have been depressed because of this additional, 8,000 9,000 students who took the fourth grade test. </P> <P>To compare apples-to-apples, we took the English language learners out from all the samples and basically looked at how we did in English because the rest of the state has virtually no English language learners and this cohort, the big four has very few. And if you look at it that way, not as a strong story as math but a good story, we re up 13.3 points as of last year, big four up 4 points, rest of the state 5 points. That gap s closing and in New York City, when you re talking about gap closing, 72 percent of our students are African-American, Latino and about three quarters are Title 1 students. So you re talking about real progress by our African-American and Latino students. </P> <P>Similar picture in NAEP fourth grade, in the fourth grade we had a 2002 scores. I used English proficient students which NAEP allows you to use. We went from being tied with large central cities up to 63 and basically, the rest of the country went up 4 points. That s a 14-point increase for us and a 10-point gap closing for our English proficient students in the fourth grade. Obviously I d like to see that number higher and closer but that s real gap closing for somewhere in the neighborhood of a 10-point gap.</P> <P>And then I point this out because this is a way to deal in a different model with what I call the English language learner challenge. Our African-Americans, they re not English language learners -- a small number are but not a significant number. And if you looked at our African-American fourth graders and compare them to all the other cities, what you see is they went from 54 percent to 63 percent in math. Well, this is not even English language. This is all math. They went up to the point where there are 14, we are number 2 for African-Americans plus and close behind us, but you get a sense of African-Americans in DC at 45 percent, Cleveland, Chicago, and L.A. So those are big spreads. Charlotte is the only city on top of us. </P> <P>Here s what I was talking about in reading. Again, we start in 02 in reading and we had the NAEP that year, but we didn t have the math NAEP. Our African-American students, I m proud to say, are number 1 of all the districts in that test. They ve gone up 14, while the rest of the nation, blacks have gone up seven percent and we are now 20 points higher than Cleveland. </P> <P>Eighth grade is not as good a picture, but let s start with the math scores. If you look at the three cohorts, we re up, as of last year, 16 points, the rest of the state 9 points, big four up 4 points. So that s a good story in real gap closing. Eighth grade NAEP, we re up slightly, the rest of the country is up the same; that s not gap closing but small positive not significant movement in NAEP. Eighth grade English scores we re up, basically paralleling the state and the big four, we re not closing the gap there, that s the challenge that we need to look at and we re working at. We re looking at a whole middle school set of initiatives to implement there. I m happy we re up but I like to see that gap close. And eighth grade NAEP scores were down 3 points, again not significant but certainly not a good number.</P> <P>All of this led to the Broad Prize, which Rick mentioned when he introduced me, basically an independent group looking at the top 100 districts. We won this in our fourth based on our third to fifth year scores, say it was three years. We re a finalist one of five in the two preceding years. Largest school district and I will submit the most complicated school district in the country. Basically number 1 on the data which they crunch as a Broad Prize winner. And in a weird way, a survey that was taken by an independent group that came out this summer which I think really says something about what s happened in perception by parents of kids in the school system. </P> <P>This group is called The Community Service Society. It s a poverty group in New York. They, each year, long before we got here, survey each of these three income groups. They ask them about city services, they ask them about everything, not just schools. But on schools, when we started in 02, 24 percent that of poor, 47 percent that are near poor, 59 percent of the moderate to higher income people gave the schools a grade A or a grade B. Not surprising, right? More affluent people in better schools, greater satisfaction with the system. And don t believe that everyone s happy with their schools, twenty four percent of our poor people in 2002. Today, every one went up but we ve not only achieved the rising type, we ve achieved equity. Where two thirds of parents responded to the survey gave their schools an A or a B.</P> <P>Overall, that is the story. As I say it s a work in progress. There are a lot of things that we ve learned in the course of these things that I think we would do differently. We ll continue to strive to do those better. But it has been dynamic and it has been in many ways a culture changer in New York City. </P> <P>Frederick Hess:  Thank you, Joel.  And for anybody who suggests the data has not permeated the role of education, I think if nothing else, that is a stirring rebuttal. Chancellor, I d like to thank you so much for taking the time to speak with us today. </P> <P>Joel Klein:  Thank you very much.</P> <P>[Applause]</P> <P>[End of The Challenge of Reforming Urban Schools] </P> <P> </P></body></html>