**Archived Information**

**U.S. DEPARTMENT OF EDUCATION**

**NATIONAL COMMISSION ON MATHEMATICS AND SCIENCE TEACHING FOR THE 21^ST^
CENTURY**

**PANEL PRESENTATION:**

**BARBARA CERVONE, RICHARD ELMORE, AND DONALD LANGENBERG**

**MAY 9, 2000**

**TRANSCRIPT OF TAPES 8-9**

*Transcript of:*

*Federal News Service*

*Washington, D.C.*

EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR: As we know, we each had the benefit of one of the
provocateurs during the session, but we indicated to each one of them
we\'d like to give them time, if they would like to take it, to talk to
the group generally, and then, we can open the discussion more broadly.

I know, at least Dick Elmore, who was in the group that I had the
privilege of sitting in with, said he had some comments, so I\'m going
to turn to him first.

DR. RICHARD ELMORE: Well, I took the charge of provocateur seriously,
and actually prepared to provoke \-- partly because that\'s my style and
partly because that\'s what I was invited to do.

And so, I want to spent a little bit of time talking about my reading of
draft recommendations, my gloss on the discussion, and then, today, and
then my \-- I want to follow Deborah\'s cue and try to walk you through
a specific example of the kind of \-- the kind of recommendation.

I\'m not proposing this as a Commission recommendation, but the kind of
recommendation that might distinguish this Commission and its report
from the vast collection of prior reports on and around this topic.

In doing so, I want to characterize the problem in a way that\'s
somewhat different from the way the report characterizes it, and the way
I heard people characterizing it today. And I\'m not suggesting that you
should use this characterization in your report, but I am suggesting
that you should be aware of it because, frankly, many people are deeply
offended by this characterization of the problem.

But I think it is important for us to be honest about, on some
dimensions, about how we got ourselves into this situation, and that,
often, what we get in commission reports is a kind of sanitized version
of the problem that\'s been argued out and negotiated out and that has
made to sort of \-- crafted as much to appeal to the need to mobilize
public support as it is based on any really deep and serious diagnosis
of the fundamental problems of the institutions we\'re dealing with.

So I want to talk turkey with you, first about the nature of the problem
as I see it, and then walk you through this example and encourage you to
think in the ways that I think Deborah just walked us through for the
group that she was part of.

First, my interpretation of my first reading of the draft
recommendations of the report. I think they go primarily to the question
of what I would call qualified teachers, in a much less-well-defined \--
one might even say sketchy way \-- toward the issue of the
qualifications and skill and knowledge of the existing teaching force,
and in doing so, tend to do what most policy level discourse does, what
most commissions do, is to rely heavily on kind of structural fixes.
Let\'s invent a new organization, put a new name on it, and let the
world fill it up with content and we will assume that we will succeed
where other people have failed.

And I want to try to talk you into keeping the language about the supply
of highly qualified teachers, to stay with the language about sustained
improvement of practice among teachers who are in the teaching force.
I\'m not trying to talk you out of any of the recommendations you\'re
making, but to \-- but on the latter part, that is the improvement of
practice, to get much more specific and here\'s why and here\'s how I
would characterize the problem.

I want to say that we are producing exactly the kind of learning that
this institutional structure is designed to produce, that is, we\'re
doing the job that this organization is designed to do extremely well.

This is an organization that has been fine-tuned over 100 years to
produce exactly the kind of instruction it\'s producing, and exactly the
kind of performance it\'s producing. This is not a mistake. This is not
inadvertent. This is failure by design.

And unless you understand that the failures are designed into the
institutional structure, and unless you go straight at the sources of
these failures in the institutional structure, you\'re just throwing
water over the top of \-- well, at the ed school at Harvard, we have a
phrase called \"painting the elephant.\"

You invite the elephant into the room. The elephant sits down. You call
it a dog. You call it a cat. You paint it pink. You paint it blue. It\'s
still is an elephant. It looks like an elephant. It smells like an
elephant. It is as large as an elephant.

A lot of the characterizations of the problems and the structural
reforms we pursue, are essentially, painting the elephant. We\'re sort
of trying desperately to make this elephant into something else. And it
continues to be an elephant.

The dimensions of the problem are as follows. We have a curriculum that
is exactly tailored to the qualities and qualifications of the teaching
force that we have recruited and put in place. It\'s shallow. It\'s
superficial. It\'s highly fragmented. People have been socialized
through their teacher preparation, for the most part, and through their
early induction, and through their teaching experience to be acclimated
to this fragmented and shallow curriculum. And to disturb that
curriculum is to cause enormous reverberations in the organization.

The standards movement, which is now pretty prominent, is more or less
up for grabs on this subject. It can go either way. Right now, I would
say that the standards movement in most states is reinforcing the
shallowness and the fragmentation of the curriculum, largely because the
standards have been set by a pluralist political model in which, sort
of, everybody, every conceivable interest group gets their standard and
the standards proliferate at about the proportion of fractional
interests that operate on the process. And as guidance for instruction,
they\'re severely limited, and they are mirroring exactly the political
and institutional forces that create the fragmentation and shallowness
of the curriculum.

I don\'t think this condition is necessarily inherent in the notion of
standards. In fact, I think standards carry with them the idea of
actually working against the shallowness and fragmentation, but I think
right now I see the standards movement as having been largely captured
by the existing institutional structure.

When you say that we need to teach in greater depth, fewer things to
larger numbers of students, with higher measurable performance, you are
essentially asking teachers to do something most of them do not know how
to do. There is absolutely no reason why they should know how to do it.
There is nothing in their background or training that would prepare them
to do it. There\'s absolutely nothing in the workplace of their
organization day to day that would help them learn how to do it. I think
you need to face this fact squarely.

What happens in this structure is that we do get a number, a certain
proportion, of exceptional teachers who are extraordinary performers.
They perform against the grain of the institutional structure. That
proportion hardly ever exceeds, you know, 15 to 25 percent under the
best of circumstances.

I want to say this to you with no disrespect to these exceptional
teachers. I think they are absolutely essential to the sector. These
teachers are not the basis upon which this institutional structure will
be rebuilt.

The other 75 percent of the teachers, or 85 percent of the teachers, are
the basis upon which this institutional structure will be rebuilt. If
your theory is a sort of charismatic theory of teaching that a bolt of
lightning comes down out of the sky and touches some teachers and not
others, those teachers can teach at high levels and the others can\'t,
the game is over for us. Disband the Commission. Go home.

You have to believe that this is a fundamental problem of the
development of skill and knowledge of the vast proportion of teachers in
this sector, who have not received the kind of treatment in the work
place or the level of skill and knowledge that they require to do the
work that we\'re asking them to do.

The second part of this institutional structure is an extraordinarily
weak professional culture.

I\'m not sure whether Linda Darling-Hammond and I agree on our diagnosis
of this problem, but I think we like to talk about the same fundamental
issue. And that is that education as a profession in the United States,
teaching as a profession in the United States, in comparison to all
other teaching in all other countries, has a very peculiar pathology.

It is the only profession in this country in which autonomy is equated
with professionalism, and teaching in this country is the only
formulation of teaching as a profession in which autonomy is
characterized as a professional prerequisite of teaching, as compared
with other societies.

In other words, teaching is an isolated atypical profession in which we
define professionalism as the capacity to make one\'s own decisions
about what happens in the classroom. In no other country is
professionalism around teaching defined in this way. In no other
profession is professionalism defined in this way.

I would ask you just to consider the possibility of being wheeled into
the operating room for open heart surgery, and to have, just as you\'re
going down under the anesthetic, the surgeon say to you, \"Today, I\'m
going to use a surgical protocol that we once used in 1972. I woke up
this morning. I feel like doing it. \"It just \-- it\'s a kind of
nostalgia thing for me so I think we\'ll roll the new technology out of
the operating room. We\'ll bring back in the old stuff, and we\'ll have
a trip down memory lane here and my professional autonomy allows me to
do this.\"

Right?

No, actually. If you don\'t perform that surgery according to a
particular protocol, within a relatively narrow range of practice, you
not only are in great danger of being sued, you\'re in danger of losing
your license. And yes, in fact, it does \-- despite our opinion \--
frequently happen that people lose their license to practice for
performing outside the protocols, or at least are chastised for it.

So, part of the weakness of this institutional structure is the equation
of autonomy with professionalism. It\'s a sign of a weak professional
culture when professionalism is not defined as subscribing to a common
code of practice, to operating within a relatively narrow range of
practice, and to subjecting one\'s practice to empirical validation.

Finally, the last, I think, teacher of the institutional structure is
this incredibly weak infrastructure for the support of development of
curriculum and teaching and teacher skills.

It goes with a view of teaching as essentially a charismatic activity.
It goes with weak professionalism. And it goes with the shallow and
highly fragmented curriculum.

The thing I want to stress about the Commission\'s findings is that if
you, quote-unquote, \"solve the problem\" of getting highly qualified
mathematics and science teachers into the classroom, there is a good
chance that you will only marginally improve student learning or won\'t
improve it at all. And I think that is because you\'re sending highly
qualified people into an institutional structure which is not designed
to make use of their skills.

They will teach \-- they will tend to teach toward the norms of that
structure or they will become part of the 25 percent who are always the
exceptional performers and get stuck in their own part of the
distribution.

So I think this is my rationale for joining the pipeline and the
credentialing and the quality issues with the continuous improvement
issues that you just heard from the last group. Now, just let me briefly
walk you through an example \-- and I want to use Deborah\'s overhead
just to summarize. \[**see slide 1**\]

What I\'d like you to think about is, suppose that we took the vast
supply of curriculum and practice materials around mathematics and
science that have already been developed. We could even develop some new
ones, but I think the problem here is not supply, it\'s utilization and
demand.

So, I\'m going to focus \-- just suppose we did that and suppose we took
and elaborated version of one of the things on Deborah\'s list, which I
would just call \-- you\'d have to sanitize this because it\'s too
Japanese. And Americans don\'t like anything that\'s Japanese.

I will call it lesson study. And let\'s assume that we create a large
inventory of highly developed lessons. Now, what do I mean by a lesson?
I mean a curriculum unit. I mean some evidence of instructional
practice, either on videotape or live. I mean some questions and some
evidence about inquiry about the practice, questions you would ask about
the application of practice in your classroom, and some documentation of
live applications of these lessons in real classrooms - teachers\' self
reports, journal entries, videotaped interviews, whatever.

Suppose you made, as part of the common currency of this institutional
structure that you\'re proposing to create through centers, suppose you
made the lesson study a piece of this, part of the stuff that goes
inside those institutions. And suppose over time, your objective was to
aggregate these, not necessarily into a national curriculum, but into a
vast inventory of high-level teaching and learning materials and
technologies and access to information that teachers could use at the
elementary and secondary level.

And suppose that you stayed with this long enough so that, as a process
of circulating many teachers through whatever institutional structure
you create through these centers, some very large proportion, let\'s say
25, 30, let\'s say 50 percent of the teachers, actually are exposed to
some sustained use of lesson study in their work.

The point I want to make about this is, because lesson study \-- and I
wanted to say that part of the issue here is that lesson study has to
involve students, that is, you actually have to be in the presence of
students while you\'re doing this stuff and the visual evidence of it
that you produce on videotape or videodisk has to include students so
that you\'re not just talking about the curriculum materials. You\'re
talking about the actual instructional process.

What you\'re doing is you are, you\'re entering Deborah\'s model,
essentially through the content corner, and you\'re trying to reach
teachers and you\'re encouraging them to think of instruction as the
connection between students and content.

And you\'re creating a high-level, highly dense, high-powered discourse
which can be done at the preservice level. It could be done at the
novice level. It could be done at the expert level. It can be done with
\-- by experts working with novices, novices working with preservice
teachers, the works. In other words, you\'re setting up a social
relationship around what somebody earlier called \"the stuff,\" which is
the point I want to conclude with, which is, if you want to break this
institutional culture of shallow content, professionalism as autonomy,
and a weak infrastructure for supporting the improvement of practice,
you have to create \-- you have to participate in the creation of an
alternative culture.

You do not improve the quality of teaching in the classroom by putting
highly qualified people into the existing culture. It simply won\'t
work.

To change a culture in the United States, you have to be both persistent
and smart because this institution - I\'ll tell you - has outwitted
smarter people than you for 100 years. Okay? This institution has the
weight of democratic pluralism behind it. It is not just dysfunctional.
It\'s highly effective in its dysfunctionality. Okay?

So that, if you propose to change the culture, you have to propose an
alternative culture. The alternative culture I\'m suggesting that you
think about is a culture which is fundamentally based on the "stuff" or
the work and which sends, by the way you model the process of learning
about teaching and learning, a message that the institutional structure
can work in different ways to support student and teacher learning.

Thanks.

EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR: Thank you.

Any questions to direct to Dick? Or should we keep going here?

Barbara \-- oh, I\'m sorry. I didn't, who was it?

Oh, Anne.

MEMBER: I have one question.

I read \-- I forgot how many years ago, I read something called \"The
Upper Limit Hypothesis,\" a paper which puts forth your same idea that
we have done as much as we can do with the current model. So, just
clarify this for me. So you\'re suggesting that the lesson study group
model or however we might Americanize that would be a way of approaching
a cultural change in -

DR. ELMORE: Right.

MEMBER: Okay.

DR. ELMORE: And I would actually take any of the items on Deborah\'s
list or any others that you might develop, I mean, it\'s not \-- I\'m
not suggesting this is the only way to do it. But what I\'m suggesting
is that the practices you are modeling \-- right? \-- in the doing of
lesson study or in the doing of summer institutes or whatever, the
practices you are modeling have to be deliberately counter-cultural.
They have to go at those assumptions that I laid out, and they have to
take them on at the level at which the work is done.

They have to get teachers to think about sharing practice and working
together and limiting the scope of their practice as a professional
activity, not as an anti-professional thing. They have to get teachers
and administrators to think about improvement as the purpose of the
organization, rather than as an anomaly that occurs in 25 percent of the
organization. Okay? So, in other words, the behaviors you engage in have
to model the alternative culture you are trying to produce.

Telling people to do things differently, and I\'m telling you I think
even supplying people with different qualifications to this sector \--
are not going to change the institutional structure.

EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR: Diane.

MEMBER: Given that part of our institutional structure is also the
instructional materials that exist in many places, and we know there are
some new high-quality materials out, but the bulk of the school
districts are still using very traditional materials, and the prevalent
model of teaching, which is teaching is telling and dispensing
information, say more about how you would see or if you would see lesson
study as a model even able to work within that kind of a setting or what
else it would take.

DR. ELMORE: Yes. There are two ways to think about this problem.

One is district-level improvement processes, which I am doing a lot of
work on. I mean, I am doing a lot of research on it. I am doing a lot of
writing about leadership models that accord with this view. I\'m trying
to focus on this.

And that is using the school district as the unit of improvement and
actually taking a district, working that scale with a number of schools
on given content across a lot of settings using mechanisms like this to
change the culture. You can think of that.

I would also propose another thing, which might be even more appropriate
to the Commission. It\'s very subversive and you\'ll have to word it
carefully to get under the radar. But to actually create an entirely
different infrastructure, which is more professional and more fluid, and
which travels across jurisdictional boundaries by creating teacher study
groups around centered, content-based working groups that develop lesson
models that compile the videotape and videodisk examples of the
teaching, and that actually use professional associations and networks
to disseminate effective practice independently of government structure.

I would argue that we have to do both because I think it\'s going to be
necessary to have both improvement-oriented districts and schools and
broadly-based professional networks. And the broadly-based professional
networks are basically just designed to keep the existing government
structure honest, and to be brutally frank with you, to supply
high-quality instructional materials and teaching to the increasingly
large number of entrepreneurial schools which are going to grow up
outside the existing government structure, and may in fact drive the
existing government structure out of business.

EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR: Could we, for the moment, turn to Barbara, who just
leaned over to say she has a plane to catch.

So I know that there were still some questions, but if we could turn the
mike over for a few moments.

DR. BARBARA CERVONE: I think this one\'s working.

This will be absolutely brief, given the urgency of my leaving to catch
a plane to California.

It\'s always a challenge at moments like this to try and both integrate
the many, many different ideas that have come forward and finding that
there\'s so much to build on. And so, I\'m actually going to not do
that, given both the time and the difficulty of doing that, and instead,
just speak really briefly to what I see as the challenges for a
commission like this and its work.

And one of the \-- given that we all sit here and we say we know there
have been a million commissions, we know that the language and rhetoric
about the kinds of things that we are talking about here \-- we\'re not
the only ones to be saying that. They\'re said in many different places.

So I think one of the struggles is always how to make a compelling case
through your work, and then who is really the audience for that.

And as I\'ve sat here today, and as I\'ve been reading, I\'ve been
trying again and again to think what is the case that we\'re trying to
make here. Deborah, earlier, you talked about what is the \"it\" and I
think connected to what is the \"it\", is why should people care about
the work of this Commission? Why should they care enough to move
mountains in their own life elsewhere to act on this?

And I feel that one of the beauties of the \"Nation at Risk\" report was
that, somehow, it did in fact create that sense of urgency and some kind
of an appetite for change, although as we look back, we see that that,
in and of itself, was certainly not enough.

But I feel like one of the challenges still in front of this Commission
is having a very clear and compelling statement about what it is that
it\'s trying to do and to create an appetite for its work because,
without that, the energy that you need to make things happen is not
going to be there.

Focus, I think, is another difficulty that faces commissions like this.
It faces all of us who are working in and outside schools these days
because there is such a competition for people\'s attention.

At the same time that we\'re meeting here, there are people probably
meeting somewhere else talking about the importance of literacy. I have
a whole crew of folks that I\'m connected to through the Annenberg
Challenge that are talking about arts. They feel they should be up here
alongside math and science.

So the question is, first, how do you place yourself within really a
cacophonous and clamorous, competitive world of schools? And then,
within that, what of the many things that you want to do can you do?

I think the danger in commissions like these is that they always cut off
much more than they can chew, bite off much more than they can chew, and
then it becomes hard for people to even know what the mission or the
focus is. And without focus, it\'s very hard for people to figure out
what to do today, tomorrow, down the line.

So I would encourage modesty in what you promise, and encourage focus
amongst the many things that we\'ve talked about \-- where are the best
places to focus.

And I think that, just in the conversation the past few minutes, some
interesting ideas have been brought forward in terms of breadth versus
depth, focusing in a few places and doing that well.

I think Dick's comments about do you focus on the 25 percent of the
teachers, your Glenn fellows, your leader teachers, or do you focus on
the 75 percent? And typically with so many of our efforts is that we
develop programs for the best teachers.

Even in our own incentive and reward systems for schools these days,
it's often that the schools that are doing the best, that are producing
the best results, that get the incentives, that get the rewards, as
opposed to those who need them most.

So, in addition to focusing on what few things you can do well, I think
it\'s important to think of what people you need to focus on to make
this happen.

The third issue that I\'ve seen, certainly through my work with the
Annenberg Challenge, but I think faces our efforts like this, is a very
good clear definition and identification of the barriers to the work. If
you don\'t go into this having a clear sense of what those barriers are,
and having some kind of a strategy for addressing them, then you\'ll
find yourself in the same places that we\'ve been so many times before.

In our discussion group, I suggested that one of those barriers that
I\'ve seen again and again in the work that I\'ve been doing is time.
And time is not built in adequately enough into the efforts that we do
at every single level.

If you\'re talking about people learning new \-- the demands are huge
when you\'re talking about people making a commitment in their life to
teaching. You\'re talking about their learning new skills. You\'re
talking about partnerships. You\'re talking about collaboration. All
that takes time, and there\'s so little in the way schools are
structured and the way our work is structured that allows for that. So
if you don\'t identify time along with many other barriers to making
this happen, then again, you may find yourself in the same place we\'ve
been before.

Finally, the other part of that is opportunities or leverage points. And
this is something that we talked about a bit in our small group.

But again, efforts like these so often come out feeling that they are
the only one or that they are the ultimate one in the world and that
there\'s a need to create new structures, there\'s a need to create new
opportunities without taking a good, hard look around at what\'s already
there, what you can build on, what are those opportunities to add value
to the work that is currently going on, and what are the alliances that
can be made.

So I think those would be my four points that I would want to leave in
terms of the larger challenge to this Commission.

Again, (1) is being really clear what the case is that you are making
and making it in compelling enough fashion that people will have the
energy and the appetite to get behind it; (2) that there\'s focus to
what you do, that the aims are doable and that it\'s clear who are the
folks and what are the strategies that are most promising; (3) that you
take a good, hard look at the barriers and then have a way to address
them; and (4) that you do everything you can to find opportunities for
leverage.

EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR: Thanks.

Before she runs out, anyone have a question?

We thank you very much.

Don, can I turn to you?

DR. LANGENBERG: Sure. Let me try to make three points that I've tried to
make with my breakout group this morning.

The most important, I think, is that, as I read through the blue
material and the yellow material, I found lots of ideas that I like.
It\'s a wonderful compendium of things that I would agree need to be
done.

But I did not find something that I would dearly love to see in the
Commission\'s final report. The scale of the challenge that you are
addressing is vast and it\'s critical that that be understood: 2 million
teachers to be replaced in the next decade; 200,000 math and science
teachers that we need; 15,000 school districts; and 15,000 school
boards; on and on.

And as it notes in, I think, the blue material, tinkering around the
edges ain\'t going to cut it.

As it also notes, in the mathematics of school reform, a little plus a
little adds up to nothing.

And so it seems to me that the greatest service that this Commission
could perform is to present a convincing, motivating system design, a
design for a system that will accomplish all the goals you\'ve laid
forth, do all the things that you said need to be done.

The organizational structure, the governmental structures, the economic
structures, the social structures that we are going to deal with this
challenge \-- using \-- if we do are pretty much those in existence.
They are very complex.

There is the federal government, the state governments, local
governments, school districts, school superintendents, school
principles, PTAs, families, the business community and all of its
complex glory, and on and on and on.

And so, in a sense, that system design has to set forth a set of
structures, perhaps of organizations, new ones perhaps, or perhaps
reform old ones that can work within that organizational structure and
get done what needs to be done. There might be a little innovation.

I\'m much taken by Professor Elmore\'s notion of a subversive
infrastructure that might be created to work somewhere underneath the
underpinnings of the existing structure. But it seems to me a clear
picture of what this system needs to be would be very, very useful.

Another thing that I\'d like, along with that, is what might be called a
business plan. That is to say we all need to understand very clearly
what it is going to cost us in money, and person power, how long it is
going to take us to do this, where all of those resources are going to
come from. My own guess, for example, is that about 1 percent of the
gross domestic product, in addition to what we\'re already spending,
which is to say somewhere between \$100 and \$200 billion a year, is
about what it will take to do the job adequately.

We need to understand that. We need to know where that \-- where those
resources are going to come from, who is going to provide them, and how
are we going to persuade people to prove them.

That\'s what I would like to see in this report. And if it contains lots
of neat ideas about what specifically we need to do, that\'s all to the
better, but a blueprint, a map that actually motivates and compels all
of those stakeholders would be, I think, the most useful service that
this Commission could provide to this country.

Second point \-- a good friend of mine, a school teacher, a science
teacher in a high school in the Middle West once rather passionately
said to me, \"You know, education is the only profession in which facts
don\'t matter.\" There is far too much truth in that than there ought to
be - far more truth in that than there ought to be.

And what I think that should lead us to is an understanding that we have
got to find out a lot more in a truly scientific, scientifically
credible way about what works, what doesn\'t work, about the teaching
and the learning of math and science or anything else for that matter
than we now know, and we have to find ways to force \-- yes, to force
that into educational practices in precisely the manner that Professor
Elmore specified for surgical practices.

Our physicians are not autonomous in just the way that he described.
They must use best practices and those best practices, the drugs they
prescribe, the methodologies they use, must have been tested under pain
of federal law. Nothing like that exists in education and I think
something like that ought to.

Finally, you have got to motivate your audiences \-- the American people
\-- when it comes to that, and their representatives of various kinds.
What will motivate them?

The thing that motivates me most successfully and most often is fear.
And I must tell you that I am frightened, seriously frightened by what I
see as I contemplate this issue.

And I simply would remind you that some long time ago now \-- it must be
20 years \-- in a report called \"A Nation at Risk,\" with the famous
line about what a hostile power might do if they wished to undermine, to
destroy this country, design an education system much like the one
we\'ve got.

I think that\'s at least as true now as it was then and we\'re 20 years
or so down the pike, and I think we should have every reason to be
frightened and I think our fellow citizens ought to be frightened. And I
wouldn\'t mind at all if you used that motivation to convince them that
they ought to do something about what your report finds and recommends.

Thank you.

EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR: Why don\'t we take \-- oh, maybe the next 10 minutes
for some questions to our provocateurs and then we\'ll take a short
break, just for everyone to stretch their legs before we regroup.

I know, Rush, you had your hand up before.

MEMBER: Okay.

After those three, I\'m not quite sure where to start, but let me point
out something that\'s been troubling me all along, and seems to be in
sharper focus for me now.

I think part of our problem is we don\'t know what our problem is, that
we \-- the best we\'ve done so far in stating what we\'re trying to
address is a low TIMSS score and a shortage of skilled workers. And
those may be troubling but, you know, I think we\'ll find at least as
compelling a case out there that our workers don\'t read well and that
we should be doing something about reading. And so I think we still
haven\'t addressed the question of what is special about this content
that we are teaching and, if we are going to approach it through the
content door, we\'d better figure out what that is.

And we decided early on we weren\'t going to get into curriculum. And
maybe that\'s because other people had done it or because it was too big
a job and we didn\'t know where to start. I\'m not sure. But I think
approaching it through the curriculum door might make sense, as Dick
says.

But we don\'t know what curriculum we\'re talking about, what\'s so
special about - I think each of us, particularly the scientists and
engineers in the room, have some sense of what\'s not in the curriculum
and how we\'d love to see our favorite subjects in there. But we
haven\'t \-- You know, I actually go to schools a lot and I say to
science teachers, you know, maybe the best measure of whether we\'re
doing things right is whether each year in grades one through 12,
students at the end of the year could give a better explanation of the
difference between astronomy and astrology.

And that what we\'re trying to do is help students learn how to frame
questions in a way that they can be answered empirically. That\'s
essentially what science is, I think. I can\'t think of a better
definition of what science is.

And I don\'t know whether this is the sort of thing that will stir
souls, whether this will answer Barbara\'s question of, you know,
what\'s so special about science, or whether it will do what Don is
calling for, which is a business plan, cost, schedule and marshaling of
resources.

But, well anyway, that\'s my comment and then my question is, and maybe
somebody wants to elaborate on that, but my question is \-- in any of
these things, what Barbara talked about or what Dick\'s talked about,
where do we find the time? You know, to be mundane about this, are we
talking about summer? Are we talking about evenings? Are we talking
about after school?

You know, where are we going to find time for the \-- for whatever it is
that we\'re asking the teachers and the administrators to do?

EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR: Both of them moved forward, so\...

DR. ELMORE: First of all, I think you have to ask what\'s different and
what\'s similar about the content area.

What\'s similar about it is \-- and I think you\'re going to do yourself
and others a disservice if you don\'t observe this \-- is that math and
science are core academic content areas. They\'re areas in which we
expect every single student to be proficient at a relatively high level.
Period. Full stop. We expect that of literacy. We expect that of history
and social studies. They\'re core academic content areas. So they\'re
similar in that respect.

They are different in both the nature of the content and in the problems
they pose for improvement of teaching and of teachers\' teaching and
teaching practices for all the reasons you\'ve developed here, which is
elementary school teachers don\'t just naturally rise to the occasion of
teaching math and science necessarily in ways that you can often engage
them in literacy, although I have to tell you teaching real literacy is
a lot like teaching real math and science. It\'s an incredibly highly
skilled form of teaching practice that the average parent has no
conception, I think, of the level of sophistication and difficulty.

But \-- so, I would say similarities and differences. And to be honest
about how the Commission\'s work fits into the overall education of
reform and improvement agenda, I think is terribly important.

On the time issue \-- you know, I was saying in the small group, if you
just look at the data on the proportion of time that teachers in service
spend working on their own learning and skill, it pretty much predicts
the level of scoring on international comparisons.

And that is because systems that engage in relatively sophisticated
forms of improvement design the job in such a way that it provides the
opportunity to continue to learn the skill. That happens also to be true
if you examine the way American school districts that are engaged in
high levels of improvement activity and that can demonstrate the
connection between changes in instructional practice and student
performance \-- it happens also to be the way they do business.

Community School District Number 2 in New York went from spending about
what most school districts spend on professional development, around 1
percent, in the space of about five or six years, to spending somewhere
in the neighborhood of 12 percent, which is a huge amount of money.

Now here\'s where I lose most of the educational establishment. That
money is in the budget. That money is there to be spent. That is not new
money being spent on professional development. That\'s a reallocation of
existing resources to pay for the conditions of work. Right?

And that was painful. That was difficult. That was hard to do, but they
did it. And I would submit that most districts which are going through
this process right now are doing roughly the same thing.

What does the money pay for? Well, a very large proportion of it pays
for time in one way or another. It pays for extra time that teachers
spend and it pays for the people who support or substitute for teachers
when they\'re doing activities outside of the classroom that relate to
the improvement of their own practice.

And so the bulk of that money is not spent trucking people around from
one place to the other. It\'s actually spent on time, people\'s time.
That translates into actual activities that are related to specific
improvements in practice.

So, I would say \-- I mean, the good news is \-- yes, it does take time
and that \-- and there are lots of examples of systems that are doing
this. And the bad news is that most of the time comes from reallocation.

And I would add that putting more money on top of an already ineffective
and inefficient allocation of resources is not going to buy you
improvement. It\'s going to buy you a different shade of paint on the
elephant.

EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR: Don.

DR. LANGENBERG: There is a recent report entitled \"Teaching Reading Is
Rocket Science\".

As an experimental physicist, I spend a large part of my life doing
things roughly akin to rocket science, but also, in the last couple of
years, I chaired the National Reading Panel, which addressed the
question given to us by Congress \-- what is known with real reliability
about the teaching and learning of reading?

And I\'m here to tell you that teaching reading is a whole lot more
difficult and complicated than rocket science. I would say it\'s a whole
lot more complicated than teaching either math or science.

But on the question of time, we are stuck with a system that, in part,
puts time constraints on teachers because it was necessary to fit
education, and therefore teaching, into that part of the calendar that
was left over after harvest and before spring planting. And we\'re still
stuck with it. That\'s an unnecessary constraint. There is absolutely no
reason why teaching and learning can\'t be a year-round activity. So I
would suggest that\'s one place we can get teachers a little time.

Another place we can get teachers a little time is by redesigning their
jobs so that we don\'t view the function of a teacher as being standing
in a classroom teaching children and nothing but. Teachers have to
think. Teachers have to plan. Teachers have to analyze curricula.
Teachers have to do all kinds of things that have nothing to do with
standing in a classroom and dealing with students. And we\'ve got to
find them the time to do that.

The third place, I think, to find teachers some time is in the same
source where many of us

\-- or at least many of the people we know \-- are. It\'s a world in
which Internet time is the controlling time, in which 24 by 7 has become
a well-understood phrase. It\'s a world in which the constraints that
are otherwise imposed by things like semesters, weeks, workdays and also
by geographical necessity \-- the necessity of being someplace at
particular times \-- all of those constraints can now be done away with
more or less by technology. And I think we can find teachers more time
in that world just as many of us have found more time in that world.

EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR: Neal.

Welcome, by the way.

MEMBER: Thank you very much.

Since the physicists had the floor, I thought it might be an opportunity
for me to comment.

I really have learned a lot just in the discussion in the last hour or
so. But I simply want to address one point. And Don\'s raised it. It has
to do with technology.

Technology is addressed to some extent in here, but my question is the
following.

Given how rapidly technology is changing and changing essentially
everything it touches, and given how rapidly we are putting technology
into the classroom through a whole variety of efforts, some federal,
some at the state level, shouldn\'t we make clear that we think it\'s
important to understand what the technology is good for and ensure that,
at least this time, we put in place some system of study, call them
clinical trials, or just say research, or however we\'re comfortable
describing it, to ensure that, in real time, as we\'re running this
experiment anyway, that we\'re doing it in such a way that we learn what
the effectiveness of the technology really is so that Don\'s point, that
technology really ought to buy us some of this time, I think I feel the
same way.

I\'m not sure we truly understand how that might work. And I recognize
we\'re dealing with a crisis here and there is urgency in dealing with
it, and I\'m not suggesting we consider any of this less urgent. But
while we\'re getting the attention of the people we want to reach,
let\'s don\'t miss the opportunity to ensure that we understand what the
impact of technology is, and of course, try to make it as good as it can
be.

But it\'s going to be a \-- it\'s going to take us some time, I think,
to fully understand the implications and my guess is it\'s an
increasingly interesting research question for people who may heretofore
not been drawn into pedagogy. And so there might be a real capacity out
there to work. And if we could just stimulate that kind of \-- encourage
that sort of activity and point to its importance, then I think we would
be doing something good.

EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR: I think this might be the right time for us just to
take a short break.

Great thanks to our two provocateurs. I understand that Dick will be
leaving us shortly. I haven\'t managed to ask that of Don. So you might
grab them on your way out for the next couple of minutes.

But if we could reconvene very promptly in 15 minutes. Thank you.