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U.S. DEPARTMENT OF EDUCATION

\"Capacity Building of School Reform Models\"

Public Meeting\
March 4, 1999

**MS. CHELEMER:** My name is Carol Chelemer, and I\'m going to be
working along with a number of other people on this procurement that
we\'re here to discuss today, the idea of building the capacity of
technical assistance providers model developers to increase their
ability to offer services and assistance to schools that interested in
undertaking comprehensive school reform. We\'re mainly here to listen to
your comments. I hope that everyone signed in as they came in and picked
up copies of the various documents including an issue paper that I\'ll
spend a few minutes going through when my time on the agenda appears
again.

First of all please know that this is a public meeting and we\'re making
a recording of it and we\'ll have a transcript of the meeting which we
plan to post on the Internet for others who weren\'t able to attend. To
that end and to help our reporter, he suggested it would be very helpful
if we went around and gave our names so that he could then pin our
discussion to the names of people. So, Terry, should I start and we\'ll
just go around the room? Okay, so my name is Carol CHELEMER and I\'m
with OERI.

**DR. MCGUIRE:** My name is Kent McGuire and I\'m with OERI.

**MR. RHODES:** I\'m Doug Rhodes with ETS.

**MS. NIYOGI:** I\'m Shilpi Niyogi with ETS.

**MR. GOMEZ:** I\'m Joel Gomez with George Washington University.

**MR. HUIE:** David Huie, George Washington University.

**MS. MARIA FERGUSON:** Maria Ferguson, New American Schools.

**MS. CASTEEL:** Joy Casteel, Corporation for Business Work, and
Learning, Boston, Massachusetts.

**MS. RICHMOND:** Rita Richmond, Micro Society.

**MR. RICHMOND:** George Richmond, Micro Society.

**MS. STRINGFIELD:** Kathleen Stringfield, Success For All.

**MS. BERFIELD:** Amy Berfield, the Galef Institute.

**MR. BARNES:** Everett Barnes, RMC Research.

**MR. HAGANS:** Rex Hagans, Northwest Lab.

**MR. FITZPATRICK:** Jerry Fitzpatrick of Northwest Lab.

**MS. STONEHILL:** Harriet Stonehill, MegaSkills School Education Center
of The Home and School Institute.

**MS. BIRMAN:** Bea Birman, American Institutes for Research.

**MS. DESIMONE:** Laura Desimone, also American Institutes for Research.

**MR. DAVIS:** Charles Davis, Educational Testing Service.

**MR. NYRE:** Glenn Nyre, Academy for Educational Development.

**MR. FRASER:** Elvis Fraser, the Academy for Educational Development.

**MR. MCPARTLAND:** Jim McPartland, Johns Hopkins University.

**MR. HERSHMAN:** Rich Hershman, National Education Knowledge Industry
Association.

**MS. CHANG:** Helen Chang from the Department of Education.

**MS. CHELEMER:** Now, if we could go\...

**MR. STONEHILL:** And me, Robert Stonehill from the OERI.

**MS. CHELEMER:** You switched to my other side. Bill.

**MR. KINCAID:** Bill Kincaid, Office of Elementary and Secondary
Education.

**MR. SLAVIN:** Bob Slavin from Johns Hopkins University and Success For
All.

**MS. CAMPBELL:** Kimberly Campbell, Counselor to State School Officers.

**MR. STINE:** Alex Stine, Elementary and Secondary Education.

**MR. SOBOL:** Frank Sobol, Elementary and Secondary Education.

**MR. DONIK:** Monford Donik, OERI.

**MS. TAYLOR:** Sue Taylor, Academy for Educational Development.

**MR. HALSTED:** Jeff Halsted, Department of Education.

**MS. REBECCA FERGUSON:** Rebecca Ferguson, Department of Education.

**MR. GARCIA:** Gil Garcia, OERI.

**MR. DENNIS:** Gregory Dennis, OERI.

**MR. GLENNAN:** Tom Glennan, Rand.

**MS. STEED:** Sandra Steed, OERI.

**MS. TALLY:** Susan Tally, OERI.

**MS. HARWARTH:** Irene Harwarth, OERI.

**MR. HANLON:** Curtis Hanlon, OERI.

**MS. CHELEMER:** Okay, this count may change as we proceed. I\'d like
to open the meeting then by introducing Helen Chang, who is our
contracts officer.

**MS. CHANG:** Hi, again, I\'m really excited that you are all here
today. As I said, I\'m Helen Chang and I\'m from the contracts office
here at the Department, and basically I have the legal responsibility to
see that the Department\'s procurements are handled in a fair, full and
open manner in accordance with the Federal Acquisition Regulations,
which some of you may know as FAR. Because of that there\'s several
things that I really want to make you aware of today.

As of today, as of our announcement, we here at the Department
anticipate that we\'re going to enter into one or more contracts with
the work associated with increasing the capacity of the school reform
model developers. Because this may be a procurement, we want to make
sure that we maximize communications to everybody that might be
involved. Normally, our specific procurement requirements are not
discussed publicly, but we just normally announce that a request for
proposals is available in the Commerce Business Daily. But the
government also has a requirement to conduct market research, and for
this particular procurement we felt that a public meeting such as this
would be a great way to conduct that market research. That\'s one of the
reasons for our meeting today. I want to make sure that you all
understand that here at the Department we do follow all of the practices
to conduct our procurements in a fair manner, and we want to maximize
competition. We want to strive to provide the maximum information to
everybody, and you\'re all potential bidders, and we are really excited
that you are all here. You can see we do have a court reporter and we
are taping these discussions today. I\'ll remind you again please
introduce yourself when you talk, and we do anticipate that the
transcript from today will be placed on the web. We want to make sure
that that gives everybody who is here or not here the advantage of
knowing the discussions and how it went today. We are also at this time
contemplating putting a draft Statement of Work on the web, and we would
hope that once you saw that, it\'ll be announced in the CBD, that you
would comment on that, also. In all these ways the contracts office
hopes it will be doing good market research for the public dollar, and
also enhancing our competition. If you have any questions about the
procurement portion of this I should like to have you ask it now so that
we can go more into the technical portion of our meeting today. Okay,
then let me introduce Dr. Kent McGuire, who is the Assistant Secretary
of OERI, and he has some remarks on the total technical capacity
building.

**DR. MCGUIRE:** Thank you all for coming. That\'s the most important
thing I wanted to say. It was important to me to be able to have a set
of meetings and it makes me nervous when I wake up in the morning and
sometimes wonder whether anybody will come. So, I\'m really pleased. I
know I can take it as an expression of how important you think this work
is, if not concern about how we get into it. Let me just tell you really
quickly if I can what I think needs to happen. Two or three things that
I\'m really hopeful about with respect to this conversation. One is that
we can get clear and specific input from you with respect to this
challenge of meeting this kind of budding and emerging demand. So, I am
interested in knowing what you see from your vantage point in terms of
what\'s going on out there in the field. Two, we don\'t have all the
time in the world to really figure ourselves out. The solutions here are
not black and white. There are choices for us to make, so, we could
really use some insight from you about the capacities to be developed in
your organizations and organizations like yours. What is it that you
need to be more able to do to meet that demand. I can\'t imagine our
coming up with a sensible strategy in spite of how smart Bob and Carol
and their colleagues are, if we don\'t have a really good feel for the
capacities that you are trying to develop and believe you need to have
in order to meet that demand. As clear and specific as you can be about
that, the more helpful that\'s going to be to us, all right. To the
extent that there are strategies sitting around in your hip pockets that
you are willing to share, really strong hypotheses about what kind of
federal leadership is most likely to give rise to the kind of outcome we
all hold dear, that\'d be worth talking about some, too. What we don\'t
need today is an argument about any of this. That wouldn\'t be helpful.
What we need is a rich and thorough discussion about the work and the
possibilities to living up to it. There are two things that I\'m trying
to make sure we do on the basis of this conversation, and I just want to
say what they are. One, I want our approach to be highly sensitive to
the reality out there in the field. What we do ought to really make
sense. It ought to map onto what\'s really going on out there. I don\'t
want to be out of sync, so that\'s very important to me. Two, I want to
make sure that whatever we do can be sustained over time. It\'s very
important to me that we set people up to succeed and have impacts over
time. It\'s very easy to help people in the short run and I\'m not
saying that we shouldn\'t be doing that, I just want to do it in a way
that can be sustained over time, because I think it is over time that we
really have a shot at changing the odds where the kids are concerned.
So, I just want you to understand that that\'s why we are trying to take
our time, as little time as we have, to try to get this right. Bob and
Carol have put a discussion paper together. I\'ve looked at it, and it
pleases me, there are a set of questions in there, you don\'t need to
agree with all of them, but we sure would like some answers to the ones
that are there. You can put some new ones on the table, and I have time
for a question or two if anyone really has one, but then I\'m going to
get out of the way. Great.

**MS. CHELEMER:** Well, that was easy for you. Okay, why don\'t we get
started. I want to remind us of the ground rules and also there is a
seat now at the table and it really would be a lot easier to pick up
your voice. So, I\'d invite someone who has come as a discussant to join
us at the table, in fact, there are two chairs available, to come and
take those places. Ground rules include no fighting, one speaker at a
time, and please do remember to identify yourself, so, this is Carol
CHELEMER speaking, as you offer your comments, that will help us with
the transcript. I wanted to remind you of the fact that there were four
handouts available to you when you entered the room. Two of them are
related to today\'s meeting, one a copy of the CBD notice, one the issue
paper that we\'re going to walk through before we open for discussion.
Another piece deals with the announcement of an upcoming procurement for
a clearing house on school reform, and the fourth item is the Broad
Agency Announcement for an upcoming competition dealing with creating
some new reform model designs. If there were not copies available, I
believe there are now. So, make sure you pick up a copy of anything you
may have missed as you leave. Let me start by outlining, I think, what
we have here as a way to get into this. There is a large goal, I think,
surrounding this procurement and it relates to the fact that we would
like as many schools, on behalf of as many students as possible to be
able to engage in comprehensive research based reform that really is
going to improve teaching and learning for all students. So, that\'s the
ultimate goal. The specific objective we\'re talking about here is a
realization on the part of Congress that there seemed to be a situation
where school reform models and technical assisters lack the capacity to
provide services to all of the schools that were interested in their
services to help them with the reform movement. The specific strategy
then we\'re proposing is the subject of this issue paper, and at this
point if Bob wants me to, I can walk through the issue paper.

**MR. STONEHILL:** Yes, I think we should walk through the issue paper,
and I\'d also like to acknowledge that Kent suggested Carol and I had
developed this, and we worked on it, but a lot of the thinking
originated with Tom Glennan, and I just want to acknowledge that, too.

**MS. CHELEMER:** Okay, so the document that I\'m working off of is this
three page issue paper that hopefully you picked up a copy of. We\'re
responding then to a directive of Congress in the 1999 appropriations
bill that made available \$15 million to improve the national
dissemination of information. What we\'re planning to do is to have a
procurement to establish a Clearinghouse on school reform, and there\'s
information about that, and then a procurement to make awards to one or
more of what we\'re calling intermediary organizations whose purpose
would be to help model designers develop certain capacities and
capabilities to enable them to reach out to more, a larger client base.
On page two then we\'ve outlined what some of those capacities that the
intermediary that would work with various models might include,
including marketing capacity, assistance delivery mechanisms,
administrative capabilities. In some cases the model designers don\'t
think of themselves as businesses particularly and they\'re not at a
point where they think in large scale. So, that is what some of this has
to do with. Quality assurance that as an organization grows and is
serving more clients, not to let the quality suffer as a result, staff
development and support, most of these models the delivery of assistance
is based on having facilitators working with schools. So, this is
related to staff development and support. Cash flow management,
sometimes it\'s a matter of having a good cash flow situation in terms
of development of product being able to provide facilitators to the
field in advance of when the compensation is coming in. And then support
for revision of services and products in response to the market and the
needs of scaling up an operation. So, again our strategy that we are
putting on the table for discussion today is to support intermediary
organizations that will be working with a number of models to help them
increase their capacity to deliver technical assistance. We have a set
of questions here. I know that this is not a linear group, and so I
can\'t imagine that if I said we should focus on one question at a time
that\'s going to work. Rex is smiling at me. But, let\'s review what we
think some of the important questions are and as Kent said we can go
ahead and put a lot more topics on the table than these. What are the
best sources of current support to developers related to capacity
enhancement? Do organizations already exist or can we create
organizations to provide the services that are contemplated above in the
paper? Are there additional services that ought to be provided to model
developers to enhance their capacity? Are existing developers likely and
willing to make use of such assistance if the government were to provide
such assistance? What are realistic expectations concerning the rate at
which one can increase capacity while maintaining quality? What major
issues should the Statement of Work address? I think that is in the line
of having a fair and open competition and a competition that\'s going to
yield us what we\'re looking for here. Then what are possible criteria
for selecting the developers to be served by the intermediary
organizations funded through this procurement? So, having put that set
of questions on the table, I think at this point what we really want to
do is invite your comments and your discussion, and at this point the
floor is open. Again, if you can remember to please identify yourself
before you speak. So, who would like to open on any of these questions
or anything else related to this procurement? Okay.

**MR. SLAVIN:** I guess I\'d like to know what the ground rules are on,
I\'m Bob Slavin from Johns Hopkins University. I guess to state an
opening position, which is that this is the wrong conversation to be
having, that if there has already been a decision made that this \$15
million is going to go into intermediary organizations whose role would
be to provide advice, then this is of no value whatsoever to the design
teams. There may be other purposes that it serves, but as far as design
teams are concerned, I mean, I\'m speaking from my own, but I think I
understand others well enough to be able to say that this is of no value
to be thinking along these lines. If there has been a decision already
made, tell us and we can go home. But, I just think you need to know
that we\'re hoping that we can change the conversation to open it back
up to how can you support the ability of design teams to do the job that
they\'re out trying to do rather than to focus immediately on the idea
of intermediary organizations that are providing advice.

**MR. STONEHILL:** Are you going to offer some counter suggestions then,
or some other constructive suggestions about how a Statement of Work
could be structured that would attain the goals that we\'re talking
about?

**MR. SLAVIN:** Yes, I could. In my understanding of all the design
teams, the problem is that we\'re trying to operate within the not for
profit world, and we desperately lack capital. We lack access to loans,
to lines of credit for things that any business would have ready access
to. If we had capital, we could deal with our own cash flow problems, we
could hire our own consultants if we felt as though we needed them, we
could deal with the scale up issues which really involve hiring more
trainers, training trainers, instituting quality control mechanisms, all
the things we know very well we have to do, but they cost money. I guess
it was my hope that when this was originally passed by Congress that
that was the intention. Whether there are intermediate agencies that
might help with direct loans, or grants, or whether those loans or
grants might come directly from OERI, I think is less consequential, and
you could discuss that. The general concept that the key thing that\'s
lacking is advice about how to structure a business organization, I
think that that\'s so far wrong as to say that it\'s recklessly wrong.
That\'s not the problem. I don\'t think it\'s a problem across the board
certainly, I don\'t think it\'s a problem even of the great majority of
organizations that are providing services, their problem is capital, and
I think, I can see other developers here and I\'m sure that they would
support that.

**MR. STONEHILL:** Were capital made available, are the capacity issues
that are itemized right, wrong, sort of right, as the ones that we would
work on to enhance capacity, whether it\'s through intermediaries or
directly to developers?

**MR. SLAVIN:** Well, all of us need advice, I suppose, of various kinds
and we know how to get that advice. I\'m not sure that there\'s any
advantage to having a single agency that provides all of these different
kinds of services. But, yes, I mean it\'s a reasonable list, but if I
want to know how to deal with cash flow, first off I need to deal with
cash flow, and it\'s much more important to have the money to deal with
the cash flow than to have somebody who can tell me how to deal with
money if I theoretically had it. You know, the issues of quality
assurance and staff development, they\'re all key issues, but they\'re
issues on which every design team has already done a good deal of
thinking, knows how to get sources of advice and assistance, and
particularly if they can pay for it. But, what\'s going to kill the
design teams, and I mean kill in the real sense of dead, is going to be
a lack of capital, not a lack of advice.

**MR. RICHMOND:** I would second that. I\'m a model developer of Micro
Society\...

**MR. STONEHILL:** You have to name yourself.

**MR. RICHMOND:** George Richmond, and there are four areas that I need,
one is for training, another is to deepen my model and then scaling up,
and a third party evaluation. Those are the four things that I\'m trying
to raise 3 or \$4 million to do, and resources of funding our
foundations, we\'re a non-profit and we\'re considering becoming a for
profit to receive capital market.

**MS. CHELEMER:** Yes?

**MR. MCPARTLAND:** I\'m Jim McPartland from the Talent Development High
School Program at Hopkins. Let me tell you why, also, I think
intermediaries is problematic from a point of view of a design team
that\'s still in an early stage. We only have a handful of high schools
working with us. That is our main need is for these facilitators, and
what I want to impress on people is the level of expertise and
experience that\'s needed. It\'s not like you can put an ad out in The
Washington Post and say we\'d like a few English, experienced English
high school teachers. They have to be, these facilitators when you\'re
working to change instruction in a classroom, they have to be the very
best teachers, the highest level of expertise in their subject, number
one. Secondly, then they have to be deeply ingrained with what the
innovation is. We\'re trying a new way of teaching reading
comprehension, the writing process, remedial reading for non reading
ninth graders, and so on. We have some very definite approaches we\'ve
developed over the years. Even when we find an expert, it takes us
weeks, if not months, before that person is, shadowing our existing
facilitators and so on, before that person is really useful in schools.
We\'ve tried some intermediaries at more general things that have been
good professionals, experts in organizational development, and so on,
but they just didn\'t know enough to be useful to these interested
schools. So, of course that\'s money, also. But, I\'m saying the level
of staff expertise, and particularly in the model elements, is very,
very high and it\'s doubtful that, we\'re going to have to train them
ourselves and if they work for somebody else, whether you get the level
that you need to begin with, and somehow who\'s working for who and what
do I really have to know. So, again the human capacity of scale up is a
very key one and it\'s very hard to think through how somebody else\'s
staff could do that for you.

**MS. CHELEMER:** Yes?

**MS. BERFIELD:** Hi, I\'m Amy Berfield from the Galef Institute. I also
agree with the three statements made, the problem statement shifted by
Slavin, and also, the two areas in which we need help. We also need help
as you are stating in the piece about personnel, training folks who are
qualified to do the work. Part of what we\'re thinking is that over time
if we also had support to create some tools that translate the model
more readily, that that apprenticeship, as you called it shadowing
process may be facilitated more quickly and efficiently. I also second
the idea about needing money for evaluation to continue to research and
develop and enhance the work. In all these things we\'ve been thinking
hard about, we\'re an institution that was created by a businessman, and
so he\'s been guiding our work. We actually now are in the throes of an
organizational development process ourselves because we\'ve realized
before CSRDP that scaling up required rethinking how we operate. So,
we\'re already doing that work ourselves and really need the support in
the areas that have been mentioned.

**MS. MARIA FERGUSON:** I have a process question, Maria Ferguson from
New American Schools. This goes to Bob\'s first point about where in
this process are we, I mean, we have a lot of very knowledgeable people
here who can offer great insight on this whole idea, and I\'m just not
sure at what stage you\'re at at the Department. Is there room for
discussion, is there room for this to be restructured, I just don\'t
have a sense of where you are in the process. Is it a done deal or is
there room to go back now and restructure something that, we\'ve only
heard from four people here, but they all seem to be pretty much on the
same wave length about what kind of systems they may need. So, I\'m just
asking for more clarity on that.

**MR. STONEHILL:** Well, I think it would be pretty disingenuous of us
to invite the world to come here and advise us if we weren\'t open to
taking into account what people have to say about this process and about
this procurement, and what people believe is the right way to go forward
with it. So, we have until 4:00 o\'clock today to hear all that you care
to tell us about your best sense of how capacity building for TA
organizations and developers could be supported by OERI. Then we\'ll
decide how best to proceed.

**MS. CHELEMER:** Yes?

**MS. STRINGFIELD:** I have a technical question, and then a comment.
I\'m Kathleen Stringfield. In the conference report the language refers
to technical assistance providers. Now, is that limited to labs or does
that also imply developers of the program?

**MS. CHELEMER:** We\'ve actually approached this thinking that it
applies to developers.

**MS. STRINGFIELD:** My comments would also be in support of what
you\'ve heard before, but in terms of some specifics is that over the, I
come from a business background working with Success For All and there
has been quite a bit of advice available to us over time, and it
includes things like hire adequate management, get the technology in
place. I\'ve found over our time that it is critical for us to be more
organized than the schools in the districts, because we really need to
be in the position of providing very professional service provider to
the schools and districts that aren\'t necessarily equipped to purchase
from programs such as this. This is a different kind of effort that
they\'re undertaking. But, to give you a couple of examples of that,
what it takes to scale up just simply in administrative mechanisms is
accounting. A \$400 Quicken package is not going to work. What it\'s
going to take is a \$40,000 Great Plains package. Now, you know, we have
the advice, we can get that advice from a Small Business Administration
person, but having the capital to make that \$39,600 purchase price
difference is something else. In these days of technology and more and
more schools are getting web sites, we want to be able to communicate
with all our schools, via e-mail, via web sites, be able to enable them
to get back to us with feedback on a web site. We have one that\'s kind
of grown up over time, but it needs to be worked, it needs to be scaled
up to make scheduling information available to our trainers across the
field, and available to schools to know where they stand in fulfillment
of the contract that they\'ve made with us. The initial bid for Phase I
of that reworking of the web site is \$28,000 out of three phases. So,
those are just a couple of examples of why the capital need, aside from
the time it takes to train new trainers and everything else, is a direct
one.

**MS. CHELEMER:** Tom?

**MR. GLENNAN:** Tom Glennan with Rand, and since Bob was coming up to
give me some credit in all of this, I\'d like to sort of sharpen things
where my mind is anyway in hopes of maybe it will help in this
conversation. Bob Slavin, I think, is just absolutely correct that the
issue is capital, a major issue is capital. As I look at the issue paper
in which I had a fair share in shaping, I believe that it\'s not shaped
very well. The point about these intermediaries that is sort of
suggested there as I had envisioned it, this isn\'t as OERI necessarily
has envisioned it, is that they are intermediaries, and in fact are
going to be largely funders. They are largely going to be making
investments, loans, what have you. But, I\'ve been very much influenced
over the last couple of years by discussions with Allen Grossman in a
new book, which many of you may have seen about high performance
non-profit organizations, and his ideas about virtuous venture
investing, which in the second to last chapter of this, but was also in
the Harvard Business Review several years ago. The idea that non-profits
such as I think most, if not all of you are, need a great deal of
nurturing and funding, and he puts a great deal of emphasis on funding.
For building capacity, the kind of capacity Kathleen was just talking
about, that is, a web site that costs \$28,000, or the kinds of building
of staff competence that requires hiring people and training them ahead
of the time that you\'ve got any chance of billing. Well, that\'s a very
important part of what just has to happen with anything that comes out
of this program in my view. But, what I think also is the case is that
the capacity of, at least drawing back on my past experience, the
capacity of institutions who have gone about doing the R&D , and mostly
the R that starts you off towards building a capability to help, in this
instance whole schools to change, does not often include a whole set of
other kinds of skills that for any investor, whether it be the
government or be a private sector, to make investments, so skills ought
to be part of the enterprise. In fact, in some sense Kathleen was hired
to be part of the skills that are necessary to make this enterprise
work. I used that just because I happen to know that example, spent a
little time with them. The idea here then was to think about these
intermediaries as being a kind of an analog of a venture capitalist.
Presumably a program from one of the labs or any one of you around this
table would approach that intermediary in my particular vision, and seek
funding with plans. If those plans were satisfactory then you\'d make
some kind of an investment, loans, contracts, or grants, or whatever. I
mean, I think that\'s one of the issues that\'s got to be talked about
here. If they aren\'t satisfactory then you don\'t just get turned away
for being inadequate, but there\'s a set of consultants, or expertise
that could be made available to deal with places that seem to be
deficient. So, that\'s what these intermediaries that we\'re talking
about here are, they are investors of sorts, they\'re making social
investments not private investments, they are interested in the success
of the enterprises they are investing in, and they\'re interested, as
Allan and his colleagues emphasized here, in building the capacity of
organizations that are going to serve schools and kids. As I look at
that issue paper, the part of it that is missing, there is the capital
part that Bob started this off on, I think with the right point. So, to
the extent that I\'m responsible for having set things off in a slightly
wrong direction, I apologize for that, but the issues are all still
there, and any concerns about whether such intermediaries exist, can
perform this function, whether the government should, could better
perform the function, and so forth, should be, it seems to me what
should be talked about.

**MS. CHELEMER:** Thank you, Tom. With that clarification, any
additional comments?

**MR. SLAVIN:** Well, I think that if we were thinking of this, and
maybe you can clarify what your intention was, if we were thinking of
this as an intermediary organization that with ultimate control over
\$15 million that might spend a half million on its own operations and
advice, and 14.5 on grants and loans to developers, then I would think
quite differently about this. The way this is written it sounds like
14.5 on the advice and its own operations and 500,000 in grants and
loans.

**MR. GLENNAN:** Well, let\'s be\...

**MR. SLAVIN:** That\'s what you meant was the other one?

**MR. GLENNAN:** The 14, the five to run the operation, the 14 in
capital is much closer. I\'m not sure that\'s the right one. But,
that\'s where I think the paper that got written does not convey that
point at all. At least for me, I\'m speaking now for myself, it is not
that there\'s a lot more special pieces of assistance that\'s needed,
it\'s capital that\'s needed. But, it\'s capital that is invested with
realism and help to people who would use that capital.

**MR. RHODES:** Doug Rhodes, I always learn something whenever Tom
speaks, so I\'m thoughtful about what he had to say. The thing that
keeps coming to my mind about the matter of capital, which I think is
quite on point is that as you, as we all think about going to scale and
reach back for those additional or external funds, we find ourselves
continually writing the proposals and then the reports back to the
funders, those sorts of things to keep our organizations or projects
moving. But, with those also are the variety of strings, as you might
call them, or expectations, and suddenly a developer, of which I am not,
does find him or herself going in a variety of directions. The message
starts getting blurred as you tend to try to address the parochial or
proper interest of the various funders. I\'m wondering as we think about
capital development or management or delivery, which is a little beyond,
I think, what you\'re talking about, how those sorts, how the mission of
the various projects can go forward, that is, not totally strained by
the expectations of a variety of funders that may pull you in a variety
of directions.

**MR. RICHMOND:** George Richmond, Micro Society. Years ago I made an
application to the American University of Schools Development Project,
and we even finished in the top 11, but one of the issues there was the
intellectual property, who owns it. At the time the grantor organization
stipulated that it would own the intellectual property, and I think
there were various contractors who cut their own deals with that group.
I think one of the things that I would be concerned about is that if you
set up a corporation like this and yet you\'ve not tied intellectual
property into the getting of the grants, that\'s the bread and butter,
that\'s the future of what the developer needs to, this is a sort of a
profit and non-profit setting, that\'s a ready in source you can use to
generate improvements in your product. So, I just think that\'s an
important future\...

**MS. STONEHILL:** I\'m Harriet Stonehill. I need a little clarification
as to the organizations. I\'m with MegaSkills Education, we do training
and materials for school systems and communities all across the country.
What I\'m hearing is that the intermediary acts the same way that when
we apply to a foundation for a grant. They have certain stipulations and
requirements for us to proceed, we provide timelines and so on, and they
in turn give us funding to do this over a two or three year period with
benchmarks and so on. I\'m not quite sure that that definition is any
different than the term I hear as intermediary, because the foundation
may say, but we really want this as our end product, and it is up to us
to decide whether we can live with this, or say we will not go to you
for funding. It\'s complex, but it\'s no different than seeking support
from the foundation, and what their construct is and what their demands
are. So, I see that kind of being the same way an intermediary would
serve. It is, is it so, is really what I want to hear clarified and how
much structure\...

**MR. STONEHILL:** You\'re talking about an operating foundation? New
York funds and\...

**MS. STONEHILL:** Mm-hmm, whatever, we have several, you know, and we
are responsible to them.

**MR. STONEHILL:** There would be possible entities that OERI might work
with that this is the path that we could go down.

**MS. STONEHILL:** It\'s similar and so it\'s the way foundations are
moving.

**MR. HERSHMAN:** Rich Hershman, National Education Knowledge Industry
Association. I think what\'s discussed in the legislation is different
than foundations, because there\'s a public accountability to the
intermediate agents that are listed in legislation. Some of the
institutions have local and state governing boards, but there\'s a whole
line of public accountability that just doesn\'t exist in foundations to
the level that they do with intermediate providers that are mentioned in
the legislation.

**MS. CHELEMER:** Carol CHELEMER. I think Harriet\'s point, if I\'m
understanding it correctly, relates to a couple of the questions that we
have in the issue paper. First of all, if we have these intermediary
organizations on the one hand, as Tom Glennan was saying, and they\'re
like venture capital organizations, and we\'re looking for developers
that they want to invest in because the payoff is this enhanced capacity
to provide technical assistance. How do they look at developers in
deciding which ones become their clientele? On the other hand, the
developers coming to the intermediary organization, what services, if
there are services other than give us cash, thank you, what are those
services, that the model is coming to the intermediary organization to
get. I would like to have more discussion related to those two issues,
and maybe the first one. What should that venture capital, that
intermediary be looking at when it looks to take on models as clients?

**MR. FLEISCHMAN:** I\'m Steve Fleischman, I work with the American
Federation of Teachers. So, my views are going to represent those who
are kind of the end, some of the end consumers of this product that
you\'re trying to scale up. So, I wanted to just deal with some
fundamentals, not with the mechanisms of how we get there. But, for us
it\'s not just that our members are interested in having more choices,
but want more good choices. That is, we\'re not interested in seeing 50
more models that are available if we have no idea of whether they\'re
any good or not, or whether they\'re worth putting into a school. So,
the issue about determining quality and where the investment should be
made, I think is the paramount one, which leads to how you demonstrate
that, and the place where I think there can be some contributions,
because it may be possible that there are some programs out there that
for whatever reason have not developed good third party, strong third
party evaluation, which I think is what would lend somebody confidence,
the end consumer, would lend them confidence that they are indeed
adopting some good product, if we just want to think of it kind of in
market terms. So, I think the challenges would be to create some
mechanism that gives funding support to quality programs for the quality
programs to be able to achieve whatever ends and needs that they
currently have identified, whether it\'s the creation of the web site,
whether it\'s the improvement of the training for the facilitators. But,
prior to giving out those funds to make sure that it\'s only quality
providers that are getting that money, we have no interest in spreading
the wealth. We have an interest in building good programs. The one
caveat, however, the one consideration, is not to exclude those programs
which may be quality programs, but because of whatever current
limitations exist have not been able to demonstrate that. I think that
would be the important consideration. I think for us that\'s what we\'ve
been trying to get at is how out of the vast array of programs that are
now being adopted around the nation, when we look at that list, there
are some very good things being adopted, and there\'s some things that
have no evidence of success, and yet are being adopted under a program
that\'s supposed to be funding research proven models. So, you know, if,
I don\'t want just because some folks are adopting those, I don\'t want
to see them get further support, or we don\'t want to see them get
further support.

**MR. BARNES:** Everett Barnes, RMC Research, a for profit corporation.
I\'d like to make a couple of comments, and ask for a little
clarification, and offer an observation. The first comment is that I
think the issue about capitalization, whether you\'re talking about it
in a non-profit environment, or a for profit environment is identical
for any start up organization. It isn\'t determined by whether you are
or are not for profit. At some point, however, if you\'re providing
services and products, regardless of whether you\'re for profit or not
for profit, capitalization becomes part of your internal operating
structure. If you are not operating like a business, which is what I
think the book said that, I read it, too, if you\'re not profit, you\'re
going to go out of business. So, there is the whole concept of start up,
and that also links to venture capitalists. Not to sound crass in this,
but in addition to the social benefit that I might contribute as a
venture capitalist, why would I want to get involved with this other
than that philanthropic reward? So, I think you need to take that into
consideration as you\'re thinking about intermediate agencies as
potential venture capitalists. So, that\'s one comment. The
clarification, I guess, is at the beginning I thought part of the
conversation in the issue paper had to do with would these intermediate
agencies form some type of relationship or collaboration with some
models to provide technical assistance. Not just to offer advice, or for
general counsel, but to actually be a collaborator. That\'s the piece I
guess I\'d like somebody to react to in a second. The other observation
is that in looking at these models, they\'re all over the board, there
are some that are more businesslike than others, there are some that
have greater capacity for training additional field facilitators for
doing the technology pieces. There are others who clearly do not. It
doesn\'t mean that they\'re not good models and aren\'t worth
disseminating, it simply means that organizationally they\'re not
structured. So, to what degree are you going to underwrite the models
that needed more of that kind of assistance? The evaluation piece I
would agree with, I think what you were saying about AFT. I would not
want to use these funds as a source for a model proving itself to be
effective. You\'ll feed the engine for four or five years and maybe find
out it is or is not effective. The idea was there was evidence in the
first place whether they were effective. The last comment is that if the
issue here is really how do we collectively help good models that are
powerful comprehensive reform interventions for schools scale up and
sustain what they\'re doing, then I think we also have to talk about
that strategy reflecting organizational change theory and what the
research says about what works as we approach it. That may not be an
external facilitator who visits a site someplace. We have to look at
that change literature and use that to inform our decisions about how
these intermediate agencies operate, and what their relationship is with
the models.

**MR. STONEHILL:** What sort of other type of relationship do you think
that suggests, Everett? What does the change literature as it\'s
modernizing suggest would be an appropriate relationship, then?

**MR. BARNES:** Well, OERI has got research studies on this. Thirty
years of technical assistance, one of the issues is that if you\'re
really going to bring about complex change, you need to be close to the
client, you need to be fair, it needs to be sustained, it needs to be
focused, it needs to be value added, it needs to be value added, it has
to have some technical merit associated with it. We also tend to, I
think, present ourselves as key elements, and sometimes exclusive
elements in trying to change schools and districts. There are whole
layers of technical assistance that exists there. Part of your law talks
about changing the role of the district office. You\'ve got intermediate
agencies and states, you\'ve got teacher centers in the case of New York
that are very competent technical assistance providers. So, how do you
engage them in this? Because their engagement, I think, is critical to
the success of what you\'re trying to accomplish.

**MR. HAGANS:** Rex Hagans from the Northwest Lab. I\'d like to pretty
much second what I think I hear my colleague from RMC saying here, that
part of this, certainly I agree with Jim McPartland and Bob that
there\'s a huge need, I believe, to the human capital investment in
people that can really provide the help in specific models. But,
there\'s also this concomitant need for human resources that can help
connect a number of models perhaps with the field. Is there anybody here
from a state or a local school district? I didn\'t hear anybody when we
went around. So, I think somehow, and if I could tell you how to do this
I would, but I think somehow we have to connect those two elements of
help on the whole enterprise in which we are now mutually embarked. I
think what you come out of this with, while I would tend to agree that
for some kind of capitalization of human resources is critical, I think
that it also needs to be connected to the ongoing technical assistance
systems including the local, including the intermediary agencies that
are part of the educational scene out in the field. I really don\'t, as
some people at this table know, we\'ve talked with some of the model
developers, and struggled with that. Amy and I have had some
conversations about that, for instance, and others. But, I think that\'s
got to be part of the overall mix, whether it\'s part of this particular
competition or not. But, I would urge you to look at that issue in what
you come up with final guidelines, is some kind of, some way to
guarantee partnerships with those, I would call them state and local
providers, quite frankly.

**MR. MCPARTLAND:** Jim McPartland, again. Let me ask you about the
distance learning in rural, or service to rural locations, since that\'s
a part of what Congress had in mind. What is going on now, is the agency
trying to figure out things, because there really is an unfulfilled
need. I\'ve just been talking this week to a South Dakota BIA Indian
school that there\'s just no way I can figure out how to service, and
they understand the model, they really want to do it. It just is really,
really, it hurts you not to be able to proceed with them. So, are there
things going on to investigate rural schools and distance learning
opportunities, and so on. Or is that part of what would be bought with
this legislation?

**MS. CHELEMER:** This is Carol CHELEMER. I think our intention is to
weave that into this Statement of Work. That part of the emphasis on
enhancing the capacity of models to serve schools is to pay attention to
the needs of rural schools, and to suggest that there can be advances in
the uses of technology to help that happen. But, not just restricted
simply to using technology, but to definitely put a focus on serving
rural schools. That\'s been pointed out to us on many occasions. Bea,
did you\...

**MS. BIRMAN:** Bea Birman, AIR. I had sort of a question and a comment
building on Mr. Fleischman\'s point he made earlier about the need to
provide support to models that we know have a track record. It seems to
me that there might be some more fine grained or fine tuning with regard
to different kinds or developers that have different track records. It
seems like the ones, there seems to be sort of an undifferentiated tone
to this document that all developers need the same kind of assistance.
It seems to me that the ones that actually have some research evidence
are sort of ready for this kind of dissemination or spread kind of
assistance. Then there are the other, there are others that might
require more assistance in doing the kinds of work, the kinds of
evaluation, the kinds of research that will get them to that point. I
just wonder whether you might think about structuring a Statement of
Work that would have different types of assistance for different, for
developers that are at different stages in the process? That\'s sort of
one thought. I had another question, too, while I\'m talking which is,
I\'m still somewhat confused about what these intermediary units, or
these intermediary organizations are. I don\'t have an image in my mind
of like an example. Do you have some idea of, or does any organization
exist now that you have in your minds that would sort of help me think
about what an intermediary organization is? That\'s number one, and
number two, why do you need intermediary organizations, why doesn\'t
OERI have a grant, you know, have a, set up panels or whatever you might
do to do this kind of thing.

**MS. CHELEMER:** This is Carol CHELEMER. Question number two says, do
organizations exist to provide such services? We\'re hoping several of
them would be in this room this afternoon, so those of you who represent
these intermediary organizations, would you please stand up and identify
yourselves to us?

**MS. CASTEEL:** I\'m Joy Casteel with CBWL, and I\'d like to suggest
that we are interested in your statement about partnerships between
State and local school districts, and we have a non-corporate /
corporate face in the sense that we have strong ties to the Department
of Education on the State level, but also our organization does what we
will call intermediary work, in terms of putting forth our effort to
help with our State Level School Reform Act. So, our goal is, our
process involves actually identifying what we call entrepreneurs who
work very closely, who are tied to six cities in the State and our
purpose is to head those school districts, beginning with middle school
into high school, in a school to work effort, and then to secondary into
career pathways. So, I\'m really curious about, I know myself, I\'m
coming from an implementation place, less so what might be a policy
level place. But our effort is to continue to further the school to work
reform effort in our state.

**MR. STONEHILL:** I see Maria and John Anderson here. They don\'t, you
don\'t consider your organization\...

**MS. MARIA FERGUSON:** I was about to speak up. I was waiting to be
called on. Clearly New American Schools is an organization that touches
upon almost all of the areas that we talked about today. We provide
funding and assistance to eight design teams that fall under the New
American Schools umbrella and have been with them for a number of years,
and all of the comments that have been made today are so on point and so
much reflect New American Schools\' research and experience in this
area, especially what you said before, Ms. Birman, about the designs all
being at different levels, requiring different kinds of technical
assistance. We have a family of eight designs and they\'re as different
as if you were a parent and had eight children. All of their needs are
different in every different way. But one consistent need however is
capital. I think one of the interesting forks in the road here is the
notion of whether there\'s one organization that provides capital, and
the kind of advice that we lay out in those eight points, which really
do reflect, I think a lot of what most design teams go in. I don\'t
think there are a lot of organizations out there that do both, that
provide capital or provide any kind of investment funding, and also can
provide the kind of technical assistance and business assistance that a
lot of developing organizations need. NAS is somewhat unique in that
regard. We have a lot of external consultants that help us to do that,
that help design teams form business plans and increase their capacity
in a wide number of ways. So, it\'s really a complex problem that
you\'re trying to get at. I think in terms of, one of the most important
things is, the designs at least as they\'ve been developed by New
American Schools are very fundamental designs. They\'re not like what
was done before and it\'s very important for them to have the autonomy
to select the kind of assistance that they need. I think capital gives
them the freedom to do that. Most of them are very sophisticated in
terms of what they need. A lot of them have business roots and business
organizations that work on their committees or work on their boards, to
give them the kind of advice that they need. They just need the money to
do it. I don\'t mean to over simplify it, but I do think that they have
access to a lot of advice, it\'s just paying for it that is really the
challenge.

**MR. SLAVIN:** Let me build on what Maria has said. I think that New
American Schools really is the best model of what this intermediary
organization might be expected to do, in the sense of being very tough
minded about what the different designs need and providing money very
strategically I think to help the designs to scale themselves up and to
complete their development and to carry out internal evaluations and
things of that kind. But in a way, I\'m wondering whether any other
organization will ever be able to combine those two functions. Maybe it
would be better to think along these lines, that somebody really would
set up a development bank, and that the model would be a bank, in the
sense that, I mean a bank, sort of a social capital bank though, that
might give loans, it might give grants, but it would have also very
tough minded ideas about what are programs that are likely to make the
largest possible difference, with the largest possible number of
children, within the shortest period of time. You could put those
standards essentially into formal language, but I think that\'s what
we\'re after, is that they decide that there\'s something that\'s just
on the cusp of getting adequate evidence. That might\'ve been an
investment in evidence, creation might be best. If it\'s already got the
evidence, and it needs to go to the, it\'s operating on a very small
scale and needs to go to an intermediate scale, maybe that\'s where the
investment should be. So, that that organization might, but it would
essentially be in the business of handing out, let\'s say 14.8 of the 15
million dollars. Then \$200,000 for car fare. Then as a bank does, I
mean we\'ve gotten an actual line of credit, which is not sufficient.
We\'ve got a line of credit from an actual bank, and that\'s a sobering
process. The bank says, do you have a business plan? You say yeah, and
then they look at it and they say, well, that\'s not up to the standard
of a business business plan. But they don\'t then come and send out
their own bank employees to help you write a business plan, they say
here\'s consultants that can help you write a better business plan. Or
if they say, you know, we\'re not willing to put money into you, until
you have a better strategy for dealing with your organizational
development or your staff development or your technology or what have
you. Then they would not have to be the people, the only people to
provide that consulting, but could say, here\'s money, go and find this
advice from any number of different people, who are more suited to your
particular needs, that would enable you to then come back with a plan,
that would be an acceptable plan, in the sense, in a business sense,
where unlike a business, instead of dollars we\'re talking about how
many children benefitted by how much in how many different parts of the
country.

**MR. RHODES:** Doug Rhodes again. I think that\'s right there. The
thing that comes to my mind is I\'m wondering, Bob, would you expand
that to include other foundations? Do you see this as kind of a World
Bank kind of model or is it, pardon the expression, just the 14 million,
or is it some other kind of?

**MR. SLAVIN:** 14.9.

**MR. RHODES:** 14.9 million.

**MR. STONEHILL:** You missed the clearinghouse.

**MR. RHODES:** Are we looking at just that or are we looking at a much
more large, more comprehensive view of school reform, capital
investment?

**MR. SLAVIN:** I think it might be a wonderful thing if let\'s say
there were such a development bank, that then could use this as
foundational capital and might draw in other investors. I think, again,
one of the wonderful things that New American Schools has demonstrated
is that big corporations were willing to give them lots of money,
because they had confidence that they would then distribute it in a
rational way. They never would\'ve given that money directly to
developers, because they don\'t know that business well enough. They
can\'t decide between one and the other. But they can have confidence
that there\'s an agency that can make those decisions and to be
accountable for those decisions. So, something like that I think could
very well draw other capital, and I think that would be a reasonable
thing to expect them to do.

**MR. BARNES:** Everett Barnes from RMC. This was one of the comments
that I was going to make. I think this is a great idea. I think that if
you only talk about the 14 million or whatever the number is, you\'ve
missed the point that Kent was talking about about sustainability.
They\'re just like every other federally funded program, except it\'s a
bigger scale and when the federal dollars disappear, you will disappear.
So, the idea, if you\'re going to look for an intermediate agency whose
primary purpose is to raise the venture capital, then you\'re not 100
percent dependent on the federal funds to support you. The question
Carol raised is are there any of you around that thought you were
intermediate agencies, I\'d raise my hand, because it\'s a big concept
right now. So, why not give it some currency? I think for me, putting
the dollar piece aside for a minute and looking at the technical
assistance piece, there are a variety of potential roles. I mean RMC,
this is not a publicity thing. RMC has done a lot of technical
assistance in a lot of areas and we\'ve done a lot of evaluation in a
lot of areas. To me the tension would be, if you have models who are not
as highly organized and prepared to scale up, for example, as Success
For All is, and you get an intermediate agency like RMC in there, where
do we stop being the promoter of the model and being the promoter of
good comprehensive school reform? There gets to be a lot of ethical
trappings that we get caught in. We\'re out talking with schools and
districts about powerful research based interventions, and yet we\'ve
got an interest in a model. How are we going to modify, protect our
behaviors, so that we\'re not entrepreneurial in the whole venture?
There are a lot of issues for me like that, when I start thinking about
the intermediate agencies and the variety of roles that they can play.

**MR. KIRKPATRICK:** Jerry Kirkpatrick from Northwest Labs, so you know
where I\'m coming from. The question that in fact brings me here is, is
our lab or a lab a logical agency to fill this kind of a role? In order
to answer that for us and I think also in general for this question of
do organizations exist and so forth, can\'t be answered until you get
further down the line about what is the purpose of this. Because on the
one hand, I hear very strongly developers believe this money is for
them, and to state one option, whatever organization this is, it\'s just
a way to do it, as an option to the federal government providing direct
grants and so forth. The other end of the continuum might be the
perspective that there are schools out there that want to adopt and
States that have roles and what is it that prevents that from happening
fully or effectively. Is that because the school has to go 5,000 miles
to a place to get a trainer for a model and so forth, which might or
might not have anything to do with a developer getting direct money. I
don\'t have answers either, but I think that it\'s critical for you and
OERI to make some decisions, so that this is clear, whether it\'s one
thing, another or a combination or several different kinds. When you do
come out with the RFP, and I have a hunch no matter what your answer is,
there will be agencies out there that logically can serve that role. But
there are probably not agencies out there, us or anybody else, that can
serve all the different ones that you might come up with.

**MR. ANDERSON:** I\'m John Anderson with New American Schools. The
magnitude of the money is something that I think is worth considering.
Just as an example, we spent 120 million dollars in private funds on
finding and developing and investing in eight models. So, next time it
can be done for a lot less than that, I\'m sure, but the point is,
you\'ve got 15 million dollars, 14.9 million and the question is, I
think the question is, how do you demonstrate effectiveness with such a
small amount of money that can then lead to continuation or expansion? I
would just second Bob\'s point. There is no institution that exists,
other than the work we started to do around investing in teams based on,
on designs based on sound business plans and practices, and expecting
that that money be used effectively and then in many cases repaid even,
like a bank. In the federal government, there are a lot of examples of
how you use public/private partnerships to demonstrate effective, more
effective use. I think of small business loans, for example, or maybe
even mortgages or maybe student loans, where you use an intermediary, a
practiced private sector implementor. My son just got a small business
loan, worked with his bank, got the loan and the Small Business
Administration backs that loan. I mean there are a lot of examples about
how this works today. So, I would just suggest to demonstrate fast
results and hopefully attract additional money for expansion in the
future, that you consider that kind of approach with a public/private
partnership and that you invest it in, along the lines that Bob was
talking about, so that, or that that organization invest it that way, so
that you show some, demonstrate some success with a relatively small
amount of money.

**MR. HERSHMAN:** Rich Hershman with National Education Knowledge
Industry Association. First of all, our membership consists of labs,
centers, including the Hopkins Center, comprehensive centers. We have
some of those intermediary units, as described in the partnership
language. One issue that hasn\'t really been raised on this, there seems
to be a complete focus on externally based model designs. Congress has
made it clear that schools have the right to create or adapt model
designs for their use and we shouldn\'t forget about that, that schools
have the right, under this demonstration program, to create their own
designs. I know the quality issues are important, but that\'s a
practical consideration and it\'s why the legislation language is, in
many ways, kind of vague. So, I just wanted to make that point, that
schools could be developing their own internal designs or school
districts.

**MR. STONEHILL:** Would they then be considered as developers under the
terms of this and could approach this development bank in the way that a
design team might?

**MR. HERSHMAN:** Well, the way it is now under the Title I funds, they
could, and under the 25 million under FIE. I mean the department
guidance is, suggests states have the right to give preferential
treatment to existing designs, but there\'s nothing in, and that\'s
drawn a lot of criticism from Congress. But it\'s an issue and I know
that there\'s organizations that aren\'t here today, but for people who
represent locals, it\'s a major concern.

**MS. CHELEMER:** This is Carol CHELEMER. It\'s clearly a concern under
the State program for comprehensive school reform. I think Bob\'s
question was, can we conceive of a local district or school that may or
may not get funding under comprehensive school reform, developing a
model and becoming then one of the developers that might come to the
intermediary organization then, to get technical assistance to allow it
to scale itself up, to enhance its capacity to spread its model. I think
that was the question that was on the table and I\'m not sure we\'ve had
a full discussion of what\'s a model and what isn\'t, other than Bea\'s
point, that we have numbers of models that are probably in all different
stages when it comes to their ability to scale up and also the comment
that was voiced about do we need to look at models and whether they\'ve
demonstrated their effectiveness and is that what we need to be the most
interested in. So, additional comments\...

**MR. MCPARTLAND:** Let me see if I can address this rate thing with,
just stating again what I think is on everybody\'s mind. But what we
that have a fairly new comprehensive high school reform model are faced
with is there\'s a long process of Porter-Obey applications. So, how
many letters of intent do you write, not knowing who\'s going to win?
So, you have the staff and you know how many you can roughly really
handle honestly and make a really quality implementation, with people at
the various highest rates that\'ll work with you. We\'re about 10 right
now. We figure we could maybe do 20 more, double next year. But to even
think in those terms, you\'re going to have to be training the capacity,
this human capacity, so that model is really going to be this terrific
reform that it can be. I think that\'s what this is all about, is this
quandary that at various stages and kinds of numbers, that design teams
have is how can you, how do you make that decision, when people are
saying they understand the model, you checked them out, we have a whole
application form and they\'ve got to qualify and we\'ve got to qualify
and all the folderol. But in the end, you have to decide, can you, you
know, we\'re going to be judged, whether this whole comprehensive thing
is working well or not and should be. Can you respond, and you can\'t
unless you have a certain level of staff for kind of the next level you
go to. For that reason, I don\'t see why you need an intermediate agency
either. I think some review panel and traditional agency review process,
for those that are simply trying to, I mean it\'s capital in a different
sense, but simply in the early stage, and they just need a few more
people to respond to the really promising sites that are out there. So,
I\'m just trying to reinforce that. I\'m a little confused about, when
you\'re not really giving money away to create a new business, but
you\'re just trying to in the early stages of whatever your current
funding is. I think that\'s what this is about is a cart before the
horse thing and the cart is, what capacity do you have to really have a
great implementation? You can\'t have that until you know the business
is there. Oh, business is bad, so this whole thing plays itself out.
Right now we\'re finding about a third of those that, a few states that
are through it, that applied are winning. Mostly elementary schools. But
at any rate, I just want to state that\'s what I think it\'s about and I
don\'t really see the need for some enormous apparatus to look at
business plans and so on right now, it\'s whether you have a model that
works, what\'s the kind of market demand for it, and how can you help
that design team respond to that in a way that\'s honest and has some
integrity to it.

**MS. CHELEMER:** Can I ask a question? We\'ll table it, if it\'s not
appropriate at this point. But I think I\'m following up on your point.
For those of you who do have models, as far as the advanced planning you
are capable of doing, to say in the next year I can actually provide
service to x number of places, is that part of the thinking that goes
on? You can tell I\'m not a business person.

**SPEAKER:** You have to face it every day, when you are an organization
that does design planning and providing services and doing evaluation
and doing technical assistance for the groups you get. That is an issue
that is there, when you get up and when you go to bed. What\'s the next
stage, how do you scale up, what do you need to do and\...

**MR. MCPARTLAND:** An extra thing is the people that are talking to
you, you don\'t know whether they\'re going to have the money or not.
So, you have to calculate the probability that these commitments are
going to be called on.

**MS. CHELEMER:** Let\'s hear names before you speak.

**MR. BARNES:** Everett Barnes from RMC. To me there are at least two
issues here, that we\'re talking about. One is we\'ve got 88,000
schools, I guess the rough number is around the country. So, scaling
upwards 10 to 20, our children can line up and take our chairs after
we\'re done. The other issue is it isn\'t just 10 to 20 of which models.
Are all of these models interchangeable and appropriate for a large
number of these schools. The two prong piece in this is, the models are
good. They\'ve structured, they\'ve organized the research and they\'re
presenting it. Today\'s silver bullet though is going to be tomorrow\'s
lead bullet, unless research has now, we\'ve sort of learned everything
we need to know. There is no more research and so we\'re just scaling,
scaling. So, to me the challenge, as a technical assistance provider, is
how do I support states and districts and schools with models, at the
same time that I\'m supporting states, districts and schools in
understanding the research that\'s in those models, so that they can
scale up. It isn\'t buying the package and then moving the package from
place to place. It\'s in some instances buying the package,
understanding what\'s in the package and applying it in a systematic way
in your districts.

**MS. BERFIELD:** Amy Berfield, Galef Institute. One thing as you said,
it seems, what I\'m hearing is the beginning of a kind of list of
criteria. You know, you can look at it in terms of how you would pick
what designs are worthy of getting the bank loan or scaling up in any
way. Looking at the demand, looking at their research base, looking at
their business plan and some sense of their capacity. I just want to say
something about what you were just saying about capacity, and that is,
until CSRDP we had a fairly extensive process for partnership building
in the schools and we took into account that if we had one school in a
district, their effort was more likely to be squashed over time than
supported over time. If we had a group of schools in the district, it
was more likely to be supported over time. If we had more conversations
with the superintendent in that district, it was more likely to be
supported over time and if we even had a relationship with the State
Superintendent, Board, et cetera. So, that\'s our work. CSRD has
actually hampered our work, in that we\'ve got these time lines to work
under, that don\'t coincide with that thoughtful extensive process. So,
we have been scurrying around, trying to do what we can, trying to
encourage the schools, where we already work, but we\'re getting, we
have work in six different states. We already have applications in with
four schools in 14 additional states. So, we\'re, even though we\'re
maybe in a different development place than you are, it\'s still also
the same question about we need the people and we need to train them,
and not just the people that can do the models in schools with teachers,
but people who can talk to principals, administrators, state
departments, boards and parents. So, for us again, it comes back to we
have a sense of what we need. We\'d like to have the support to do it.
It would be great if there was a bank and we had to kind of prove
ourselves to someone and they would be a sounding board for us, in
making sure our plan was up to snuff. We\'d certainly want that bank to
be fair, equitable, have no previous bias towards any design and look at
standards and criteria.

**MS. CHELEMER:** I\'m going to call on Frank.

**MR. SOBOL:** Frank Sobol, ED. A different kind of question on the
entity. Given that most of the likely, most of the known entities that
are around the table now have interests in models. What do you recommend
for dealing with the potential for conflict of interest in how monies
are handled?

**MR. FLEISCHMAN:** Steve Fleischman from the AFT. I just want to ask
kind of a, I think a related question for the one Frank asked, which I
think is a good one, which is, or maybe it\'s just a consideration, is
that this entity has to, the relationship between whatever this entity
is that is supporting the scale up of effective models has to be one
that is supportive only up to a point. The models can\'t capture this
entity, so that the entity in a sense just becomes, develops kind of a
patron client relationship, where some investments that don\'t prove
themselves continue to receive support, because there\'s some kind of
costing problem. So, it really does have to get pretty close to a bank,
in that a bank sometimes takes its losses, cuts off that investment, so
that speaking of this entity is not the same as speaking about the
models which it supports. They have to have very different identities,
so that you can have, hopefully mostly success, but you have to be
prepared to say, to write off some bad investments as well, and not to
have it captured, not to continue too long with things that aren\'t
working out. I think that\'s partly another version of a potential
conflict of interest.

**MS. MARIA FERGUSON:** Just a quick question. Why wouldn\'t the entity
be OERI? I guess it goes back to the question a lot of people have been
asking about when you bring a middle person into an intermediary, in
some ways it makes a more complex situation even more complex, whereas
couldn\'t OERI just do that?

**MR. STONEHILL:** Well, I\'m glad you raised that issue. I was thinking
similarly of framing the question, given that everyone seems to agree
that what we\'re talking about is the provision of capital to
developers. Then the question is, what is the best possible mechanic for
doing that and of course OERI is used to giving money out. John\'s
examples of student loans and the use of trusted private partners is a
good one, but we\'re only talking about 14 million dollars. That\'s not
that hard to manage carefully. So, help us in our minds, and for the
public record, develop, you know, a set of reasons or rationales or
statements that would suggest in fact why the use of intermediary
organizations would lend value to this and would optimize this process,
because that\'s what we need to, I think, articulate clearly, then, in a
statement of work.

**SPEAKER:** Well, Carol is the boss here, but\...

**SPEAKER:** It seems to me that the conversation earlier about
leveraging other sources of funds is one that should be brought into
this conversation, because while OERI is used to running grants
programs, and I myself asked the question about why you need an
intermediary, so I\'m trying to figure this out back and forth, there is
the issue of is a government agency the best leverager of that kind of
funding, and it sounds like lots of funding, where the 15 million should
be a small proportion ultimately of the amount of funding that would be
necessary to really do\... to really do what is envisioned, I think in
the larger scale, would require multiple multiples of the 15 million, I
think.

**MR. ANDERSON:** I\'m John Anderson. Just to build on what was just
said, there\'s growing dissatisfaction, disillusionment in foundation,
private foundations and corporate contributors around the lasting effect
of their grants.

**MR. RHODES:** Of their what?

**MR. ANDERSON:** Of the lasting impact of their grants, and they\'re
searching for new ways to build in self sustaining or continuing impact.
One of the interests is in the idea of social capital and social
ventures, program related investment type ventures. There is wide
discussion about matching funds with private sector and public sector
around creating a larger pool that could have sustaining impact. The
idea that Bob presented of a bank is one of those that\'s receiving wide
discussion. I think if you were to propose matching funds from the
private sector around a venture like has been discussed here, you
wouldn\'t find it very receptive.

**MR. STONEHILL:** So bringing to the table of matching funds would be
something that we would consider in our procurements?

**MR. ANDERSON:** Well, you could very well. You could very well do that
or you could set up an intermediate unit to be a bank, that was vested
with your 15 million dollars to be matched by private sector 15 million.
So, you create a fund of 30 million dollars that\'s spend-able, and I
think you can do that in short order.

**MS. STRINGFIELD:** Kathleen Stringfield. What I hear here developing
are two different directions. One of the issues that has been brought up
is, is this fund available to help get CSRD programs into schools this
fall. If that is the purpose, then the 14 to 15 million dollars,
whatever amount it ends up being, needs to go to the programs tomorrow,
without an intermediary, because they need the programs to fund
printing, they need the programs to fund trainers, they need the
programs to hire accountants to keep track of the bills and to call the
schools daily to collect them, so they get the bills paid sooner than a
year or two down the road. If this is meant to be a longer term and seed
money for a sustainable effort, the point of an intermediary that I
garnered from this would be to go back to what Tom said earlier, which
is, it would be lovely to have OERI hand out the funds and that\'s a one
time thing and it will help those programs that are ready to use that
capital move forward and sustain them. The others that aren\'t quite
ready for it, it may or may not do so much good. But as, no offense
whatsoever to OERI, but as Carol asked a little bit earlier, are you
trying to figure out how many schools you\'re going to deal with next
fall? Well, we\'ve been trying to figure out how many schools we\'re
going to deal with next fall since last fall, among other minor details.
That is where I see the idea of a development bank, with possibly the
matching funds and with the tough minded business point of view to come
in and say, your business plan doesn\'t work here, these are the reasons
why, these are people who can work with you to get it up to snuff. This
is what you do with that. So, they\'re, I really do sense there\'s two
very, you\'re going to have to make a choice between a short term
immediate impact investment in the developers or a longer term seed
money development program.

**MS. CHELEMER:** Better recognize my boss.

**MR. HAMMOND:** I\'m Pierce Hammond, OERI. I\'ve got a question that
was raised a little while ago, that didn\'t get a response about the
idea of what are models. It\'s occurred to me for some time that
probably it\'s a minority of superintendents who would say no to the
question, do you have reform going on in your district. I will take as
an example, Philadelphia. David Hornbeck is quite articulate about what
he calls Children Achieving. He\'s got a bunch of criteria. He might
even argue that it\'s a model. He\'s got evidence in fact that Children
Achieving has had an impact on test scores. Now not everybody is David
Hornbeck, has his tenure, and has something that would be a model like
that, but that\'s not usually what we\'re talking about. Yet, it looks
like a duck and it quacks like a duck, is it a duck? What\'s your
thinking about where to draw that particular line?

**MS. CHELEMER:** Call on George, who knows about Philadelphia and might
want to comment.

**MR. RICHMOND:** I do want to comment. In the discussion of the model
of philanthropy, I thought we might put in another criteria, which would
be a maturing rate, where you start with maybe small enterprises and
they start with a large amount of government funds and some foundation
funds. Then you go to the next level and you have some public-private.
Then you graduate, and you would expect to graduate into the private for
profit type of market. And if you need to have an intermediary
organization to make those contacts, that would be very helpful. But you
also acquire a model where you move from a non-profit to a for profit
and then you let the economy take, the enterprise is sound and has built
itself a market, move into the private sector. That way you achieve your
perpetuation of a goal.

**MR. SLAVIN:** I want to address two issues, the one that Frank brought
up about the conflict of interest and the one that you brought up about
the local developers. Actually the local developers question is really
easy. The day David Hornbeck wants to take Children Achieving on the
road, he\'s a model. But if he doesn\'t want to take it on the road,
he\'s got 100 schools. It\'s irrelevant. It\'s irrelevant to this
discussion, which is about scale up of effective models. Now scaling up
internally to Philadelphia, he has to find his own funds or perhaps he
would qualify for CSRD funds in school or schools in his district would
qualify, but there is, I think that there is a legitimate federal
interest in scaling up effective models beyond the place where they were
born. A district is a perfectly legitimate developer. The majority of
national diffusion network projects were developed by individual
districts, that\'s fine. But to say that just, the purpose of this is to
help you scale up within your own district, I think is very much against
my understanding of what the purpose of this discussion is about and of
this funding and would greatly complicate, enormously complicate the
process of trying to hand out the money, when, by all of a sudden making
15,000 districts eligible for it at the same time, who have no intention
of moving beyond their own district. The second is this issue of
conflict of interest. I think it\'s very problematic and is going to
take careful thought, but I think it\'s not unsolvable, whichever way
you go. I think you have to clearly have, if there is to be an
intermediary agency, you would have to have very clear standards about
the criteria that it would use for funding and have an independent board
that would be reviewing its activities, to review specifically and
particularly for issues of conflict of interest. They would have to be,
you know, very, very, they have to be able to justify their decisions,
not with somebody sitting over their shoulder every minute. But
certainly be able to justify major decisions independently of whatever
connections they may have had to models in the past or what have you. I
think there are many examples of this. But I would also want to support
what Kathleen was saying and really again, I\'m not sure who ultimately
makes this decision, but as of Monday I think I was pretty much in favor
of the notion of a bank like intermediary organization. Seeing this plan
and Frank\'s e-mail made me really nervous about it. You know, are we
about to create a large, self serving, self perpetuating agency that
wants to give everybody advice, because that keeps it employed rather
than actually providing services to the design teams. On the train on
the way down here, I was an advocate for direct funding of design teams,
rather than going through any other agency. So, I think Kathleen poses
the issue very well, which is, how fast can this go? If we\'re going
through the whole process to identify an intermediary agency and then it
may go through a process of deciding what designs to fund, it may be a
lot fewer designs to fund, by the time they finish this process, because
we\'re all experiencing the strains of growth that can, in a business
sense be fatal. People are, the business consultants we have talked
about say that the dangerous period is not when demand is low, it\'s
when demand is high. You get yourself into situations in which you\'re
under capitalized to do rapid growth and you can completely die or
damage the quality of your model or any number of terrible things. So, I
just wanted to communicate a sense of urgency to this and perhaps at
least the hope that if there is an intermediary agency, that it gets set
up incredibly quickly and operated very quickly or perhaps if there\'s
some mix of direct funding to existing designs that are you need it
right this week, as well as thinking about a longer term strategy. I
didn\'t introduce myself. I\'m Bob Slavin again.

**MS. CHELEMER:** If you change your mind, you could change your
identity.

**MR. KIRKPATRICK:** Jerry Kirkpatrick. Bob Stonehill, could you clarify
your most recent statement here? What I thought I heard you say was the
department has made the decision that the purpose of this procurement is
to see that 99 percent of the money go to developers and we\'re just
talking about the best mechanism for doing that?

**MR. STONEHILL:** I didn\'t say that. I believe\...

**MR. KIRKPATRICK:** Sorry.

**MR. STONEHILL:** I don\'t remember using those proportions\...

**MR. KIRKPATRICK:** You didn\'t.

**MR. STONEHILL:** But that\'s basically correct. I mean the purpose of
this procurement is to expand the capacity of developers.

**MR. KIRKPATRICK:** By getting the money directly to them?

**MR. STONEHILL:** Or not directly to them, or getting it to an
intermediary who provides an array of services to them, including the
provision of capitalization. The question is, what is the most optimum
way to go about this. This is of course why we\'re having this
discussion. We could clearly, you know, agree maybe with Kathleen, well,
if we had quick contracts or grants program, we could get the money out
in a couple of months. At least some set of developers in the short term
are off and running. Or we could invest in an intermediary organization,
that would, if it took longer, have other powers that OERI might not
have, including some of the things that John suggested. The power of
leveraging, the power of multiplying the investment pool, and I hope to
maybe get this list a little longer, before we finish today.

**MS. HAWSER:** Billie Hawser, Appalachian Educational Lab. I want to go
back to an earlier comment that was made. One developer has suggested
that there\'s an issue around meeting the needs of rural schools or
districts. Would any other developers like to address that? Are all the
developers finding that an issue?

**MS. MARIA FERGUSON:** I\'ll speak for New American Schools. New
American Schools is participating in the CETLs project on rural schools
and has been trying to get feedback, in terms of our design teams and
how they can meet the needs of rural schools. It\'s the most
challenging, there\'s no doubt. I think all of our design teams are
committed to doing that, as best they can. Amy, I think you were talking
before about how much more effective, in terms of implementation the
prospect of it is to serve a cluster of schools as opposed to just one.
That\'s exactly the process, the problem that comes into play with rural
schools, is that usually they are in isolation and they\'re not able to
cluster. So, our designs are committed to it, but they are hampered and
they\'re hampered by money and the ability to bring someone in, to
provide that on site assistance to one isolated locale is extremely
prohibitive cost wise for them. If they can do it in any kind of
creative way, get more schools, a cluster of rural schools, that makes
it a little bit easier. But it\'s a great challenge, they all want to do
it, much like you were saying. Some have access to technology, connect
as a technology based design and are more willing to do that, but a lot
don\'t want to compromise the on site face to face assistance that they
feel is so important to the fidelity of the design. Bob can certainly
speak to that more. So, it is a vexing problem for us. But again, I hate
to bring it back to this, but it comes back to capacity and money and
ability to have flexibility to serve those schools.

**MR. SLAVIN:** I think the answer to the rural problem is the answer to
the larger problem we\'re talking about here. That the designs that
build national capacity can serve rural schools. I mean our particular
design, we have schools in Shishmaref, Alaska, out on the Bering
Straits. We have schools in God forsaken places on a ranch, that are,
because we can do that, because we can regionalize. Now five years ago
we had trouble serving Los Angeles, because we were small. But the more
you are able to build capacity, the more you\'re able to regionalize,
the more you\'re able to serve rural schools. I think that there needs
to be, you know, specific investment as part of CSRD for those schools,
to attract, to make it, to be able to compensate the developers for
additional costs of serving very, very isolated places. With that being
said, I think that there\'s nothing in the law right now that forbids
that and I think that\'s roughly what\'s happening. But the bigger
question about, you know, how do you not waste all your capacity in
Shishmaref is you have to be able to enhance the capacity of the designs
to serve people everywhere and then they\'ll be able to serve
Shishmaref.

**MR. RHODES:** Doug Rhodes. I\'ll speak on behalf of Southern Regional
Educational Board\'s High Schools At Work program. Indeed that is very
much the issue, as they and we look at it, very much like the rural
electric program. You really do start on a base of populations where you
can serve in groups, so that you have that ability to tailor some of
your models to the small schools, in the hollers and everywhere else,
where there is a very particular kind of sensitivity and cultural
approach that you need to exert. It isn\'t just one model fits all, no
matter about the size and have the luxury of doing that. You need to
have that critical mass and confidence within your main basic program,
to be able to make it available to others. Your Appalachian Program is
an example.

**MS. MARIA FERGUSON:** Or additional funding from an outside source,
which is the case with some of our teams. We have a number of schools in
very rural areas in Mississippi. They\'re there because they have
additional funding from the Hardy Foundation. They wouldn\'t be there
otherwise.

**MR. STONEHILL:** Bob Stonehill. If most of the Obey-Porter money is
committed though in the first two years of the program, how does that
speak to this issue that it\'s going to take time before we could really
work with rural sites. Is the whole demonstration program going to use
up its resources before we\'re capable of serving rural communities,
because that might not be so good for us.

**MR. BARNES:** Excuse me. Everett Barnes. Is CSRD the only source of
funding for these schools that are interested in this type of
innovation? I think the answer is no. Your models are not operating
exclusively on CSRD funds.

**MS. MARIA FERGUSON:** A lot of people don\'t know how to use those
federal funds in ways that they can pay for these models. It\'s amazing,
and we deal with this all of the time. The notion of how do we allocate
federal funds and how do you use federal funds to support comprehensive
models outside of CSRD is really lacking out there, especially in rural
schools.

**MR. BARNES:** Instead of responding to Bob Stonehill\'s comment. I
feel like a flat rock skipping across the pond here, but I want to offer
this practitioner\'s point of view, because we\'ve been out in this part
of the country into the centers working with states, districts, schools
on comprehensive reform and the models. I want to go to Pierce\'s piece
about the quote, so called homegrown variety, because there is a lot of
talk in the field about, among many districts and schools, that they are
integrating what the research says is good practice in schools. They\'re
trying to do that. They want to get to the table in this and they feel
frustrated. Granted the law says you can do external or you can do
homegrown. But it also says you have to meet the criteria, the nine
components, which by the way most high quality local homegrown models
can do, without a lot of difficulty. You have to meet the four
evaluation criteria. They can do that on three of them. They can\'t do
it on the fourth, which is the replication piece. By the way, even if
they were allowed to be homegrown models, I can\'t tell you a
superintendent or a building administrator that I know, that would say,
pack up my middle school staff and send them off to Oklahoma, you know,
to spread the word. I can tell you that there are superintendents, like
Bob Pathong (phonetic) back in Philadelphia that would say, I have
something powerful that we\'ve put together that reflects our
philosophy, our vision, mission, and I want to move it into the hundred
schools in my district. The philosophical question is, do we, if that
worked, are we on the right track in turning over our large urban school
systems to models they\'re saying are effective or are we saying to
them, no, there\'s a smarter person outside there, who\'s going to come
in and tell you what to do. I think that\'s the greatest disservice we
can do to this whole reform movement, is to suggest even subtly that
these districts and buildings are not capable of coming up with their
own answers. Philadelphia is investing in both. They feel there really
isn\'t a lot of good high school models out there that have any content
to them, other than slogans and principles and the rest, so on record
we\'ve got four model high schools in Philadelphia. I think there are
some others around here. So, let the battle begin and let\'s see which
pays off. I would encourage the local homegrown as well. I think
there\'s a lot of experimenting going on.

**MR. SLAVIN:** Remember that\'s an eight billion dollar program that
supports homegrown\...

**MR. BARNES:** I would not argue with the point. I mean the point
you\'ve made all along is that even through programs like the National
Diffusion Network, that supposedly has effective practices, these things
have operated like satellites spinning around the core entity of public
education. If funding disappears, they go.

**MS. CHELEMER:** Carol CHELEMER. I can tell we\'re warming up now,
because we\'re starting to get rowdy. So, let\'s remember one at a time
and give your name.

**MR. FLEISCHMAN:** Steve Fleischman, AFT. I just, I want to
reemphasize. 145 million dollars the, CSRD is a relatively small program
compared to all of the other kinds of local homegrown approaches that
are being used. Some of them successfully, many of them not
successfully. So, the idea that this is, let\'s add this 145 million
dollars, with all the other money that\'s being spent, essentially
undertaking a particular approach, I think is to lose the opportunity to
look at the potential that these programs offer.

**MS. BERFIELD:** Amy Berfield, Galef Institute. One thing that strikes
me when you said would any principal really want to pick up the middle
school and take it to Ohio. An interesting thing is, from what I know
about the designers, in effect we are doing that. I mean, when we say
building capacity, sure the capacity of the Galef Institute is
important, but we\'re much more concerned about the capacity of the
schools and the districts we work with. That\'s the capacity we\'re
building. When we find teacher leaders who are fabulous, guess what we
do? We see if they want to get out of the classroom, maybe 10 or 15 days
a year, and go on the road and learn from, if they\'re in Los Angeles,
they\'re learning from a Seattle school by facilitating different ways
of knowing and bringing back neat things that they\'re doing in Seattle,
that they didn\'t know about in Los Angeles. I know Success for All
tends to hire excellent principals, to show that they understand the
model. I think we all probably in some way look to the field for our
experts and leaders. So, to me that\'s what\'s thrilling about being
able to build capacity, is because the people inside the field are
getting these experiences and getting to go to different places and
learn and bring that back to their own.

**MS. STONEHILL:** One of the other things that we do\...Harriet
Stonehill\...not only do we take teachers as trainers and so on and move
them from place to place, but we then let them build the capacity by
leaving a site person there to provide the technical assistance, who\'s
in the school system and is available to them in person, plus the web
site and all the other technologies. But you\'re absolutely right, that
kind of growth structure, not only for the organization but for
individuals that are involved in the receivership of our programs, is a
very important segment and does give you a long term effect, because
there are people in place in a local, that can continue it and that we
keep training.

**MS. CHELEMER:** This is Carol CHELEMER. Before I recognize Rex, Bob
Slavin made a point about once, you can serve rural schools, once you
kind of nationalize your effort and regionalize it. I think Everett made
mention of the fact that we have many TA providers that exist,
regionally, within states, intermediate agencies, and so before I cede
the floor to Rex, who represents a regional laboratory, I\'m wondering,
I\'d also like some models to weigh in on these existing networks and
the degree to which they\'re being tapped to help with the scale up
effort.

**MR. HAGANS:** I think I\'ll just hold any comment until you get an
answer to that question.

**MS. CHELEMER:** Okay. Anybody want to comment on that?

**MS. BERFIELD:** We haven\'t yet investigated that. I know there are
other models who have and they have experiences to share. But certainly
what\'s appealing to us is the idea that we would have choice over who
we partner with, who becomes our quote, intermediary unit. Just as
schools, we understand the value and the ownership they get when they
get to choose us. God forbid all the designs get forced on one
intermediary that they don\'t want to work with. With that aside, the
issue about\...I just completely lost my train of thought. Rex, where
was I? Oh, partnerships. That we would look to places like the lab.
We\'ve been in conversation with Rex, with folks at the West Ed Lab,
anyone frankly who\'s willing to listen to what we have, what our
challenges are who thinks they can help us. We\'re not against
partnering. We\'d even like to partner with other designers. We\'d like
that collaboration to increase. In my vision of a perfect world, in the
year 2010, we\'ve got what I would call cross-trainers, people who sit
in regional places across the country, who understand outlets, they
understand different ways of knowing, they understand Success For All.
Maybe they\'re not all in the same body, but they work as a team and
they work with schools. I think we need to do what we can to head
towards that kind of reality.

**MR. SLAVIN:** In terms of the use of other agencies, remember that
there\'s four million dollars in CSRD now for the labs, and I think
they\'ve done a very good job of providing information, of brokering, on
making, of spreading awareness, of providing national tasks for
summarizing information and making it, making web sites that people can
get a hold of to get information. I think that that\'s a very
appropriate role that the labs have taken on and, and you know, I don\'t
know whether four million is the magic number to do it, but it seems
that they\'re doing a good job with it. In terms of having labs or CCs,
other technical assistance agencies, actually become trainers of the
model, we\'ve had nothing but failure with that concept. We tried it
early on and it\'s been uniformly disastrous. So, I think, you can ask
me about why that is, but I think the key thing, the models need to
maintain the integrity of the model. They need to maintain the quality
of the model. They need to be held responsible for the quality of the
model. The national program is always going to be held responsible. You
can\'t delegate that responsibility. But what you can do and should do
is take advantage of all those structures that are out there in the
State departments, as well as in the labs, as well as in the CCs, as
well as in other service providers to help school districts think
through what are our needs, what are our strengths, what are our
weaknesses, where do we need to go, how might these various models serve
our purposes, or should we design one ourselves, or should we call in a
local university. You know, there are lots of ways to solve problems,
they just need people who are aware of the full range of solutions that
might be out there.

**MS. CHELEMER:** Would you like the floor now, Rex?

**MR. HAGANS:** Yeah. I would, I think that this is a good discussion
and I guess I would just say from my point of view, I kind of share
Amy\'s long term goal, but I think it does come back to some very hard
decisions that have been discussed here before, and I want to come back
to Kathleen\'s and Bob\'s point about the immediate situation, whether
or not we for example could be a trainer in a given model, it\'s
probably as dependent on the human resource question as it is on
anything else. Come back to your question about an intermediary, it
seems to me that, maybe not now but very soon, you\'ve got to think
through this question of criteria for who\'s going to get help. I do
hear my colleague\'s question to Bob Stonehill. I hear a strong move to
say the basic reason for this, using this money, is to build capacity,
and I would say you ought to think about, that one of the advantages of
an intermediary organization might be to move that decision process away
from the government. Having had the pleasure of being the first in the
catalog, I think that I would probably have more to say about the
problems with that, than anybody would want to hear. But I do think if
you\'re going to try to get money out in a way that builds capacity and
that makes the kind of decisions that have been suggested here, maybe
some to fund to build models that have promise versus short term to
build models that have demand backed up from hell to breakfast. You\'re
going to have to set up a mechanism quickly that can do that and it will
be one that is going to have to be defensible in terms of the decisions
made. The only way to do that is really get very specific with the
criteria and my advice, which is what it\'s costing you, is to get that
separate from the government.

**MR. MCPARTLAND:** Jim McPartland. We\'ve had good success with the
Philadelphia Education Fund as an intermediary agency that had great
local knowledge, wonderful advice, and so on. But in the end, we did the
selection of the people on their staff who were going to be the
instructional facilitators. Basically we hired the best of the local
teachers, that took this kind of time off and so on. That agency helped
to facilitate it, to make it go. But again, I think that the models have
to have that control, because they\'re going to have the responsibility
of the folks that are on the site doing the work. But others can help
you find them and can help you do the local contacts and so on. But I
think ultimately the designer has to, they have to work for you
directly, in terms of running the stuff and doing the job.

**MR. FLEISCHMAN:** Steve Fleischman of AFT. I just want to second a
couple of the things that Rex said about the necessity of establishing
some kind of independence for this provider, whatever it\'s going to
provide. It goes back to a struggle that we had, and I know that a lot
of others had put out information about what are the good models that
are available out there, because our membership, a million members want
to know. A lot of other professional organizations said the same thing.
In the end, all other kind of guidance that was put out by independent
or government organizations about what were good models and what were
not. So, we had to spend our own money to develop, and you\'ve probably
seen this, educators got school-wide reform. We created a consortium to
do that and then went out and hired somebody to maintain independence.
The reason that we think that this guide is going to be defensible is
because it was set up with good criteria and then it was done by a third
party. The level of, I think that becomes very powerful and becomes very
useful and we have less of a stake in it and the end users, which are
the folks that have to make the selections, have a lot better
information. So, we can take our shots, because we can say, this is, you
may not agree, but we think these are fair criteria, that we had an
outside group do this work for us. So, the level of independence and
good criteria that are necessary and really important.

**MS. CHELEMER:** I\'m wondering if\... this is Carol CHELEMER, if we
can\...I\'m going to figure out how to fix the thermostat in here in a
moment. Can we put back on the table Kathleen\'s comment about long term
and short term, an intense opening comment that whatever OERI decides to
do, we want to do something that has real value and that\'s practical,
can we put on the table again now? Should we be examining a short term
strategy or a long term strategy? We have 14.9 million dollars, we
don\'t have that much to invest in this enterprise. Rex\...

**MR. HAGANS:** Well, just very quickly, it seems to me that if you use
Kent\'s criteria of fitting reality, at least that\'s what I think he
said, that you\'re almost going to have to try to at least articulate
both short and long term strategies. I don\'t know if you can, you\'ve
got enough money to carry out a short and long term strategy, but if you
don\'t articulate both I think you\'re going to inevitably be, I don\'t
want to say crucified, it\'s not quite Easter yet, but criticized.

**MS. BIRMAN:** Can I just ask a question of clarification? Is this a
one time funding or is it sort of an, is it considered maybe the first
year of some kind of ongoing?

**MS. CHELEMER:** This is Carol CHELEMER. Showed up in the \'99
appropriations. I didn\'t read any language, which correct me, I didn\'t
see any language that implied there would be additional funding related
to this effort.

**MR. STONEHILL:** Why not?

**MS. CHELEMER:** Why not?

**MR. HERSHMAN:** Well, it\'s my understanding the administration has
requested 10 million dollars under FIE for the year 2000 for general
activities. But yeah, it\'s really contingent on the whims of Congress.
It\'s funded under the Fund for Improvement of Education, which is
mainly a discretionary set of programs. It was funding in the final
Appropriations Bill, didn\'t appear in the original House or Senate
bills. Along those lines, come back to Bob Slavin\'s comment. I think
this money does have to go out very quickly, and I think there\'s, I
mean at the core of the language, the appropriations language, is just a
desire of Congress to see that more rural schools are served. Getting
this money out quickly, if it means getting it right to the model
developers, I mean, the core kind of criteria that some in Congress are
going to look at it next year this time in the spring of appropriations
season, is, what\'s the number of schools in rural areas that are being
served now versus a year ago. Has that number increased, where are they
located? It\'s almost as basic as that, from talking to people on the
Hill.

**MR. BARNES:** Everett Barnes from RMC. I think the short term/long
term question is interesting. You\'re not, I don\'t think, interested in
pouring the money out in the short term, to respond to a crisis. If the
crisis is, I don\'t have enough capital to hire lots of trainers to go
out and expand the models, even if you had the money, the number of
things that were said around the table, you may not be able to find the
appropriate personnel to train and to put out. To me the purpose of the
short term planning would be to sustain the long term plan. What do I
have to do in my short term plan to build where I want to be? Not what
do I have to do to get this particular crisis off my back. If it\'s OERI
or some other intermediate agency who\'s going to take 14 or 15 million
dollars and dispense it, I agree with what other people have said here.
I think you need some very clear and strong criteria for doing that. I
think it\'s like an investment portfolio. I would not take all of the
money and put it in blue chip, because the return is going to be small,
and over time some of those industries, like U.S. Steel that were blue
chip are no longer blue chip. So, it\'s a balance between a kind of blue
chip investment and some sort of speculation.

**MR. HAGANS:** Hopefully not too many Amazon.com.

**MR. BARNES:** Hardly. But I think you have to have that kind of
balance, and that\'s the challenge in developing the criteria. It would
be easy to develop criteria that would fit just your blue chip.

**MR. FLEISCHMAN:** Steve Fleischman. I just want to put forth the
notion that if at all possible a lot of the investment would be just
that, investment. You\'re taking a long term look at it, because if not,
what we\'re essentially doing is we\'re talking about subsidy. If
you\'re talking about short term money, what you\'re essentially getting
is a 145 million dollar program and turning it into a 160 million dollar
program, just channeling the money in two directions. Give some of the
money to developers directly, give some of the money to the states, the
districts, the schools, who are going to purchase the services and what
you\'re doing is just creating a slightly different program. As opposed
to taking some of that money, and some of it, and you may want to take
some of that money to cover some kinds of very justifiable short term
expenditures that will make the program continue to work. But you
largely want to take this money, so that it can produce whatever
downstream additional benefits you\'re going to get out of it. You\'re
not going to get out of it by turning 145 into 160 million dollars.

**MR. MCPARTLAND:** Jim McPartland. Argument for the short term is, this
is not going to the schools directly, this is going to the capacity
developers to respond to the schools. So, that a developer might be able
to do a third more schools with good conscience. This is the problem of
a phasing in of the Porter-Obey awards and the capacity that now exists
in the different design teams. If this, if you didn\'t have a short term
investment in the developers, you would get more, a greater variety of
the developers being able to respond to the interest that\'s out there
in more states. Just because they\'d know, they\'d have some confidence
in their facilitating capabilities to do it. There would be a short term
payoff that would be different than just putting the money into the
Porter-Obey pile.

**MR. FLEISCHMAN:** Can I just respond to that? I agree with what the
intent is of what you\'re trying to do, but essentially every provider
is doing fee for service, which means that that could be and maybe ought
to be built into the fee that\'s charged to the end user for those
things that you are trying to develop.

**MR. MCPARTLAND:** I understand.

**MR. FLEISCHMAN:** Otherwise it really does become a subsidy where some
other developers could be offering that service and you\'re saying I
can\'t figure out how to do it within my cost structure that I\'m
offering to this customer. I mean if you want to look at it in market
terms, and then you\'re getting an advantage for being inefficient.

**MR. MCPARTLAND:** Well, I agree. I think that some are doing
development fees, they call it development fees, and that\'s this kind
of risk capital they\'re building into, those that are already on their
docket. I\'m just saying, let the agency make a judgment. Are the market
requirements out there being turned down by a set of developers that are
more than one, that this money could help do. I\'m saying yes.

**MS. CHELEMER:** Let\'s hear from a number of other models that are
here. Bob, you start.

**MR. STONEHILL:** The issue is not whether, if your economic model
doesn\'t work and you\'re losing money in every school, then you\'re an
idiot, and that\'s another story. But the question is a question of
timing, that you provide the services first and you get paid much, much
later. In essence I think that the government has a legitimate interest
in enabling us to take some risks. I mean, just as a very practical
matter right now, California is going to make its Obey-Porter Awards on
the last second of the last day that it is possible to do so, and I\'m
sure there will be more than California. Now put yourself in my
position. Do you hire a bunch of trainers and do a bunch of printing on
the possibility that California schools might want our model? No, you
don\'t, and you create a situation in which they come on and then you
say sorry, we\'re tapped out, we didn\'t have enough capital, we didn\'t
have enough staff, we didn\'t have materials to serve you, it\'s too
late. Now I think the government has a really strong interest in that
not occurring and in this unique year, it may be worthwhile to try to
move some of that investment forward, so that we can take some risks
like that and be able to fund, just simple survival level
capitalization, to be able to serve the late Obey- Porter states, of
which there will be very large numbers.

**MS. CHELEMER:** Carol CHELEMER. Is there anyone from the program
office who\'d like to give us a sense, or someone else well informed of
the timing of, again we shouldn\'t limit this to just the schools
getting the Obey-Porter money, but for this purpose let\'s do it. In
fact when these schools are going to receive money, how do you see this
happening?

**SPEAKER:** In terms of how it affects developers?

**MS. CHELEMER:** No, in terms of Bob Slavin\'s comment that maybe the
government ought to take the risk to make sure that models are ready to
respond. So, I want to get a sense of timing, again this short term
versus long term and I wonder if anyone will\...

**MR. SOBOL:** They\'ll all have school awards by September.

**MS. CHELEMER:** This\...

**MR. SOBOL:** This September. As Bob says, it is quite possible in
California, that the California schools will receive their notice on
August 15, but the bulk of anywhere up to 1800 new awards, probably will
be by early summer. We only have\...

**MR. SLAVIN:** Summer is death, you understand that.

**MR. SOBOL:** I know\...I know. I have a file cabinet of e-mail on your
schedule.

**MS. CHELEMER:** One at a time, please.

**MS. MARIA FERGUSON:** I think, like Kent said at the beginning of this
meeting, there\'s no black and white here. From a business perspective,
which is how New American Schools tends to approach this, the long term
investment ideas that you both spoke about are absolutely true and we
manage a portfolio of eight design teams. That\'s exactly how we look at
our work. But yet the legislation has caused such unusual problems for
the design teams, that that kind of very rational approach to business,
it may not quite fit the bill here, because Obey-Porter has just created
this demand that did not exist before, which has created a somewhat
unnatural situation for the design teams, much of what Bob was talking
about, that may require the federal government to jump in here in a
place where a normal business approach may not, I guess what I\'m saying
is, it may not be one way or the other. You may have to think of a blend
of this to make it work.

**MS. CHELEMER:** Continuing with some more models then. George\...

**MR. RICHMOND:** I just want to say, we have talked with 60 schools,
now maybe we\'re up to 80 candidates, and we project a capacity of about
35. When we hit that 35 we\'re going to go back to the others and there
will maybe be 20 and we\'ll say we\'re sorry, we don\'t have the
capacity to do this even though we\'ve gone through the whole process
with them, and there are already 80 ready to do it. We just don\'t know
what\'s going to happen, it\'s going to be first come, first serve on
it.

**MS. BERFIELD:** I just wanted to also agree with what Maria was saying
about the kind of extraordinary position that designers find themselves
because of CSRDP and to go back to Kent\'s, one of Kent\'s opening
remarks that he wanted to set up people for success and there have been
some times in the last few months where we feel as if we were set up for
failure, and that it was some design by some Congressional demons who
really want to see Title I fail and they\'re going to use us as a
scapegoat, because it actually feels as if the world is crushing down
and that there\'s no one out there really looking after you, as one
scenario. I want to say also that my sense is that I like the way you
phrase the short term / long term, but I would make an argument that the
short term strategy in this scenario may be a long term investment,
because it\'s a short term strategy that will give us, when we talk
about personnel, we\'re talking about people who will be in the schools
for three years, who will build the capacity of schools all over the
country to do great work. So, if they\'re not able to do that, that
means that the whole CSRD effort was kind of for naught and if that\'s
for naught, then the whole Title I possibility of looking at funds
differently would be. So, I love the long term investment strategy, just
get more money from Congress and do it with another bunch of money.

**MR. BARNES:** Everett Barnes. Two things. One is the famous Tom Fagan
quote, which I\'ve said over and over again, because I love what he
said. He said this, and it resonated with the states\' issues, federal
money is not going to reform American public education. It represents
four percent. So, if you\'re waiting for the cash pile coming down the
pike, that\'s four percent of all the funds available for public
schools, it isn\'t going to grow substantially. There isn\'t any clean
answer to this long term/short term thing, but from again a
practitioner\'s point of view of doing TA, we know that a number of the
models exist on site visits, prior to the school preparing its
application for CSRD. We have seen, because we are providing some
technical assistance and we\'re also involved in the review process in
some places. Model developers who write the same letter, this is a
wonderful proposal, we\'re behind it 100 percent, hope you get funded
and we\'ll be there tomorrow if you do. That suggests, that doesn\'t
suggest a good business strategy to me. That suggests a strategy where
you\'ve got a net out and you\'re trying to scoop in whoever happens to
be funded. The question is, do you have a powerful enough model that
when you go to a school, even before you know it\'s going to get CSRD
funding, that you can convince that school to engage with you, whether
they get the funding or not. CSRD money isn\'t the total underwriting of
the school reform effort, at least that\'s what the legislation says.
So, part of your plan in capacity building is to say I\'ve been there,
I\'ve seen that school, they\'re committed, they\'re going to do this,
yes, they\'re calling for CSRD funds, if it doesn\'t come through, I
still know they\'re going to do it and those are the schools I want to
invest in.

**MS. BERFIELD:** Right, and then it takes money to put that money
there. I mean, that\'s the point. You\'re exactly right, that\'s the
point.

**MR. HAGANS:** Probably, this has probably been thought and rejected by
every single person in this room, but it seems to me that one of the
real dilemmas we have in this short term capacity, which the developers
are articulating quite well, and I really agree with this, we are going
to have a logjam of need for people to be able to deliver services. What
isn\'t quite as clear is which models deliver and service to whom? What
bothers me a little bit about the idea of investing in up front
development, is the fact that you have to, somebody\'s going to have to
choose among the models around this table in another five or six or 15,
as to who\'s going to be eligible to get money to make that investment.
What thought have you given to turning the money around and putting it
back out to the consumers at some point, and letting them, when they
make these agreements then say okay, there\'s money available either
through states, I don\'t know if I\'d put it through locals, to say
there\'s a demand for this model in our state, but there\'s not, the
developer doesn\'t have the capacity. Then the money goes to the
developer. Has anybody thought about that one? Bob is looking horrified
over here.

**MS. CHELEMER:** This is Carol CHELEMER. I think that is every quarter,
and that is a 145 million dollar program.

**MR. HAGANS:** Let me just say, it isn\'t quite, because the dilemma,
the short term dilemma really is what capacity is needed by which
developers and somebody has to decide. I say again, if you\'re going to
do it from an investment through the developer, somebody has to decide
who gets the money.

**MR. STONEHILL:** This is Bob Stonehill. I thought that was a good
intro to what actually I\'ve been thinking over for a while now. I\'m
ready to expand, I think, the grounds that everyone seems to agree on.
We not only agree that an investment capital pool administered in some
reasonable manner be established, but that clear, well articulated
criteria for decision making about who gets those resources,
representing probably an array of people at different levels, but maybe
not. Maybe this is really to meet just short term demonstrated demand
this year. Either way the question now is, what criteria would OERI or
if there was an intermediate organization faced with the same set of
decision choices, what criteria are they likely to use. So, help us out
here. You know, what criteria, other than one that has been put on the
table, which is demonstrated need, might be a criteria.

**MS. MARIA FERGUSON:** New American Schools is developing standards for
our design teams that cover a range of different areas in terms of
business operations, the quality of implementation. They have their own
limitation benchmarks, but we have standards that we\'ve been in the
process of defining. It\'s not an easy thing to do when you have eight
unique design teams, but we felt that there is that need.

**MR. STONEHILL:** So, it\'s a general criterion around the business
savvy and demonstrated capacity of that organization.

**MS. MARIA FERGUSON:** The big focus is quality and it\'s all the areas
that go into defining quality, in terms of service, in terms of
operations, and that comes down to how they manage themselves from a
business perspective, what kind of service they provide to schools, how
they engage with districts, since they\'re an essential part of this to
any number of areas. I\'m sure we could talk about it in greater length.
But if that is something that we had to do, in order to maintain that
kind of relationship with eight teams.

**MR. STONEHILL:** So, when you are actually an offerer in such a
competition, you have criteria that you\'ve conjured up that would work.

**MR. SOBOL:** Somebody said that\... this is Frank. Somebody earlier on
said that one of the initial criteria has got to be effectiveness, that
we don\'t want to be investing. Is that just a flake?

**MR. HAGANS:** I was going to say, I think you\'ve got a real tension
here quite frankly, between whatever you call the criteria of
effectiveness and potential tension between that and demand. I heard Amy
talk about demand. I think we\'re all in favor of effectiveness, but
there are different views, quite frankly, even yet of what effectiveness
is. My question, which caused me to make the idiotic earlier remark is,
how, what will be the way in which anybody who makes this decision deals
with demand as a criteria. So, I think demand has got to be on the
table, as a criteria, short term particularly.

**MR. SLAVIN:** I think I said it before, but let me try it again. The
bottom line is going to be over the long run, the largest potential
impact on the achievement of the largest possible number of children.
That subsumes a lot of things. It means that, it obviously means that
there\'s got to be demonstration of effectiveness, and I don\'t think
it\'s that hard to determine effectiveness. If you don\'t like the
standards that the NEA/AFT did, then you can take the ones that Joe
Conaty did, that were part of the lead up to the CSRD itself. Then the
question is the number of schools that are likely, particularly
additional schools that are likely to be able to be served because of
this funding, how much could you increase capacity to serve a larger
number of children. Perhaps specifically, in rural areas, but I\'m sure
that would have to be addressed for the intention of the legislation.
I\'m not sure that that, you could then put a number of bullets under
those things, but I think everything is going to ultimately result in
that as a criterion, which I think is a reasonable one.

**MR. MCPARTLAND:** In this new volume, there\'s also the support, the
level of support provided by the developers. Is there really an evidence
that the technical assistance is of high quality and depth. So, that
might be another criterion. You\'re trying to replicate something
that\'s shown, has the capacity to do this to some degree.

**MS. MARIA FERGUSON:** Quality of materials\...

**MS. CHELEMER:** Pierce\...

**MR. HAMMOND:** I have a question I want to raise, because I\'m
reflecting on what Bob said. My concern, Bob, for what you just said
about, increasing capacity and who has the potential for it, is it\'s
the rich get richer. I wonder if there isn\'t a compelling interest in
maintaining variety as well.

**MR. SLAVIN:** I think that\'s important also. I mean I think that
there has to be a larger body of things from which people can choose and
then it\'s legitimate to invest in smaller projects, particularly ones
that fill in in areas where there\'s very little that, where more is
necessary. So, I\'d add that certainly. But I think in a way, in the
long term the diversity also contributes to the largest number of
possible children, too.

**MR. BARNES:** Everett Barnes. It\'s an interesting piece, because if
your objective is to get to as many students as possible, and the given
is the models are all effective, then the driver is the cost. So, if
I\'ve got an effective model that costs \$100,000 to implement and I\'ve
got another effective model that costs \$250,000\...

**MR. SLAVIN:** Excuse me\...but that is ridiculous. That is absolutely
ridiculous.

**MS. CHELEMER:** Wait a minute. Everett, do you want to finish your
point or would you like MR. SLAVIN\...

**MR. BARNES:** I\'d like to finish my ridiculous statement. What I
thought I heard and probably heard incorrectly, was that your objective
was to get, provide services to as many students as possible. Without
debating the issue of whether a model is or is not effective, assuming
that any of the models that are going to receive funding are effective,
am I not looking for models that are the most cost effective for
reaching those large numbers?

**MS. MARIA FERGUSON:** Cost is a factor, but it\'s not the primary
factor.

**MR. BARNES:** I\'m not saying it\'s the primary. I\'m saying, you\'re
talking about criteria.

**MS. CHELEMER:** Now, would you like to expand on your point?

**MR. STONEHILL:** I mean, I think demonstrated demand is a far better
criterion than theoretical cost, because people obviously, I mean, you
can assume that school people are not foolish and that they\'re making
choices that include cost as well as effectiveness, as well as appeal
and a number of other factors. To say that cost is preeminent among
those\...

**MR. BARNES:** I\'m not saying it\'s preeminent. I\'m saying it\'s a
factor that comes in here. I wouldn\'t call your response ridiculous,
but I would call it a little naive in that demand is driven by
marketing.

**MR. STONEHILL:** So he says he\'s taken care of that.

**MR. BARNES:** I know he\'s taking care of it. Anyway\...

**MS. CHELEMER:** John\...

**MR. ANDERSON:** I\'m John Anderson. Standards of quality or industry
standards, if you will, need to emerge from all of this. It was
mentioned earlier that we have a draft in process, involving a large
number of developers and others around refining those. But there are
some very specific things that you look for in a quality provider,
regardless of size, regardless of cost. One of those is, you look, first
you look at the materials that they use to engage schools, very
practical, how do you engage a school, what is the material you use to
work with that school. The second thing is, you go see some schools,
where they are, and you observe that work there. The third thing you
look for is some evidence of effectiveness. I say evidence as opposed to
a narrow definition of research. Then the second major category I think
you look for is how is the organization management run? Does it have a
business plan, is it a plan that will ensure or that can lead them to
becoming self sustaining, if they\'re not already? In both of those
areas you look for, and this is the idea of the technical assistance. I
don\'t think you ought to prescribe it. But as you look at a design then
you, what are the gaps in both of those that technical assistance could
help them close so that they could be a national player. That\'s been
elaborated in at least one draft that you\'re welcome to see and I\'d
love your comments on, because they\'re not a finished product. But in
terms of the definition of quality, it kind of involves those areas.

**MS. STONEHILL:** Harriet Stonehill from MegaSkills. One of the things
that we find, and we\'re in 48 states across the county, is an element
of flexibility of the model meeting the cultural needs, and that\'s very
important. Because the way they receive information and the way they can
develop it. So, you need to have it culturally sensitive. One of the
things we do, we train administrators and community leaders to deliver
parenting workshops. We have now found, and it meets Title I\'s needs,
that we can train parents to peer train on the workshops. So, the model
is still the same model, the training is a little different on the
language that we use, and we have trained Hispanic parents to deliver
parenting workshops, because they can do it in the mornings when the
parents are available. So, this whole element as a criteria of success
is also meeting the individual state needs, the community needs, the
population needs and all those kinds of elements, so that you have the
perpetuity of the program going on and meeting your community needs, as
you develop it. Five years ago we did not need to do this, but now
because of substitute teacher prices, because of time, because of
teaching to the tests right now, we\'re saying, we can have other people
deliver this program that will be as effective, and the parents can come
when the teachers, the administrators cannot do that. So, it\'s always
that what can we mold and whether it\'s translations in Haitian or
whatever we need to provide. So, that\'s an element we must keep in mind
when we look at a program, will it meet the demographics and the
realities and the money part of it.

**MR. FLEISCHMAN:** Steve Fleischman. I want to go back to this evidence
of effectiveness. You\'re going to be giving folks one of these models
of a program, and the purpose of the whole program really is to raise
student achievement, then I think that has to be the paramount concern.
Can the model that\'s asking for whatever support it\'s asking for,
demonstrate either that it can deliver or more than likely would deliver
the goods, and the goods are increase in achievement. Everything else is
secondary to that. Whether there\'s a lot of demand for it or not is
secondary. Because we know that the market mechanism right now has so
far been imperfect in selecting the models that are being funded under
this program. Maybe somebody disagrees with me, but that\'s how in
reading through what\'s happening on the ground, we interpret this. What
we want is school and student to get the best possible program and we
don\'t want some funding mechanism to fund programs that are less than
the best possible programs out there. So, what fullness of the circle in
your book passes the test, is it the full circles, the half circles, the
quarter circles. Is that debate closed as far as new evidence? I don\'t
think that debate\'s closed. I think that the important thing is for
whoever makes that decision or whoever makes, the group that makes that
decision take all of the real world considerations into effect, take all
of the best evidence into effect and make some hard decisions, but
decisions based on that demonstrated quality of effectiveness or
potential. You can divide this out. In this, what we did is imperfect,
admittedly, but we tried to push a little bit further and essentially
came up with three categories. Those that showed they had the goods,
those that showed that they might have the goods, and those that showed
that for a period of time so far they haven\'t demonstrated they have
the goods. Those are the three kind of categories that those 24 programs
essentially broke down into. They\'re not the only programs either. I
mean this study was based on the fact that we had a limited amount of
resources. Ideally there\'d be a lot of other programs that would have
the opportunity to reach that kind of analysis, but whichever body it is
that\'s going to take an additional amount of money and give it to
programs, so that they can continue to exist, ought to be considering
whether those programs are likely to achieve what they\'re supposed to
achieve. That\'s the paramount question.

**MS. CHELEMER:** I hate to throw this on the table, too, but since
we\'re talking about criteria for selecting the developers that might
receive assistance directly or through an intermediary, what about the
nature of the program? Are we interested in supporting only programs
that are really dealing with the whole school, changing the whole
school? Are we also possibly interested in supporting programs that are
dealing with a specific area of the curriculum? How broad is the field
that we ought to be looking at here?

**MS. MARIA FERGUSON:** Wouldn\'t it be the Obey-Porter criteria?
Wouldn\'t it be the same as the field that you\'ve judged for
Obey-Porter? I mean, would it be any different in terms of that? I mean,
Obey-Porter\'s kind of confusing, you know, because it challenges the
way people define comprehensive school design. It funds a lot of
programs. Some people would consider it comprehensive, and that\'s up to
the states\' interpretation of it. But would it be different somehow
from those criteria as defined? Wouldn\'t it be for the intermediary to
make that judgment, based on that criteria?

**MR. SLAVIN:** I think, and just to show that I\'m not always self
serving, I think that in the next round of CSRD or whatever that the
child of CSRD or whatever might be, that it would be important to open
up and to allow programs that are not comprehensive programs. I see no
particular reason why Reading Recovery couldn\'t be funded or something
else with demonstrated evidence of effectiveness that does not deal with
the entire school, should not be eligible for funding under this kind of
arrangement. If not CSRD, I mean the C in CSRD is comprehensive, that\'s
what we have before us. But I would hope that there would be
opportunities to develop individual math programs or individual science
programs or what have you and to have those be disseminated particularly
in high poverty schools. That being said however, CSRD is the train
that\'s in the station right now. I think that this Act is intended to
do something that really CSRD should have done from the beginning, which
is to build capacity among the developers of programs that are eligible
for funding under CSRD. I think in the short term at least, it would be
foolish to spread that out when the problem to be solved is a problem, a
good problem created by CSRD, around the issue of comprehensive design.

**MS. CHELEMER:** Rich, did you\...

**MR. HERSHMAN:** Well, I was just going to say one criteria that would
be a little more specific to the issue of the money at hand would be the
requirements of using technology or distance learning approaches to
these rural schools, just the whole focus of criteria on rural schools.
That seems to be a real concern Congress has to date of where the model
designs have pulled out and they\'ve really recognized the problem\'s an
issue of capacity.

**MR. HAGANS:** I think you have to keep coming back to what Bob talked
about, CSRD is the train that\'s in the station or backed up somewhere,
some place, or on the move. I think you need to first remember, though,
that this question of whether comprehensive means model or program has
been defined by the policy. It means program not model. So therefore, at
some level, a number of different models are certainly potentially
eligible. But I think the more\...I don\'t want to beat it to death, but
I think as you deal with this, you have to keep this, and I do think
effectiveness is an issue, I think will be very poorly served if we come
to a situation where what I would call the high demand models, if many
districts, first of all, if almost no rural districts are served, we
have a problem. Secondly, if we have many, many, many, many, many, many
districts that cannot get service from the models they have selected, we
will have another problem. Bob\'s right, California is like a huge big
shadow on the horizon out there in that sense. So, somehow in dealing
with the short term, we\'ve got to figure out a way to provide something
that will assure some capacity to reach the rural schools and something
that will meet what I call the demand and let the demand be a big factor
in determining which models get the short term help or get the most
short term help. I don\'t want to decide that, by the way, but I think
that reality is right there, folks. If lots of folks say under CSRD,
well, we had this great plan, but we can\'t get any help or look around,
when the smoke clears about next September and none of the rural schools
have been able to get the help they want, in spite of the fact we have
to serve, that kind of runs counter to the most kids in a way. So, I
think you need to really\...somehow you have to deal with the short term
question, and I would urge you to look at demand in some fashion, as a
major criteria, not ignoring what Steve has to say. Certainly there may
be demand for models that different people would question, but I think
it\'s got to be a factor.

**MR. MCPARTLAND:** Jim McPartland. I strongly agree that effectiveness
as measured by student achievement is the bottom line. But I would like
to see the effectiveness also expand. That that still be given priority,
particularly for older students. The drop out rate in urban schools, you
lose two thirds of those kids. In 9th grade there will be a 1,000 kids,
in 12th grade, there will be 200. Attendance is 50 and 60 percent, those
are kids that come now and then. The climate is often unsafe, the morale
is horrible. Because the schools are out of control. So, if you do
something about those, you\'re going to increase kids, and maybe the
test scores will go down, because you\'ve got more 11th graders than
before. So, I\'m absolutely, test scores, we have to have the diversity
of kids all reaching high academic standards, no question about it. But
there\'s other harbingers that you\'re on your way and you ought to get
a little half a bubble for that now and then.

**MS. CHELEMER:** I can see there\'s a new currency in the land.

**MR. RICHMOND:** You may want to include in your criteria weighting
some points for evaluation, rural, demand, and reading achievement. If
in the business part of the proposal that your developer submits there
are portions of that to be funded, these portions, it would be in the
interest of this legislation to do that. And it would also be helpful to
the developer, because I don\'t need to have all the funding, every part
of my strategic plan, but if I had two parts, I would really be enthused
on doing, and/or change one maybe from schools in other areas to rural
areas, et cetera.

**SPEAKER:** I just want to put a question on the table. Most of this
discussion has talked about things as though they are going to be
national models and we\'re going to serve across the country. Certainly
in my experience there\'s quite a lot of models that don\'t want to be
national, that don\'t want to serve thousands of schools, that want to
serve a region or a state or sometimes even a metropolitan area. I guess
a question that I would ask you to think about is whether some special
provisions or some specific provisions should be put into this to see
that there is sort of a geographic coverage taking into account the fact
that some models don\'t really want to be national.

**MR. BARNES:** This is a conversation that\'s gone on in New York a
couple of times, I have to blame New York for it, so I won\'t get
chastised. One of the things they were talking about is that they\'re
looking now at models that are purporting to address, for example, math
or reading performance. One of the questions is, to what degree does the
model address the state standards? The response generally from the
practitioner is, oh, it addresses the state standards because the model
says it\'s reading and the standards are reading standards or language
arts standards. Yet there are state consultants now looking at the
models and saying, if you were to use this, even put it in place with
100 percent integrity or validity, your students would not meet the
standards that the State of New York has set in language arts. So, one
of the pieces I think that you need to consider in the criteria is the
degree to which, and I don\'t know how you do it, because the standards
vary across the states, but it\'s a major issue. The other one that New
York has raised is the timeliness of the research. They\'re seeing
models that are providing evidence of effectiveness, but doing it based
on research that is sometimes 15 or 20 years old. Maybe there\'s nothing
wrong with that, but there should be some kind of a litmus test about
whether the models are reflecting some of the current findings, I would
think.

**MR. STONEHILL:** Many of the regional laboratories proposing work
under the four million dollars you talked about earlier, want to look a
little bit at state standards and how models address those issues in
different states that have emerging standards or that have standards
that are being rolled out more stringently now.

**MS. CHELEMER:** Carol CHELEMER. The hour is drawing to a close. But I
think there\'s some individuals in the room who really haven\'t had a
chance to participate, and I wonder if we could just, the rest of us
could just sit back. If there\'s someone who hasn\'t put something on
the record and would like to at this point, I would invite your comment.
Okay, you had your chance. I\'d like to thank the rest of you for being
quiet for those 10 seconds. Now, is there anyone else who has a comment
to make?

**MR. STONEHILL:** You want to wrap up, last thoughts around these seven
criteria?

**MR. HAGANS:** Rex Hagans. Thank you for bringing us together.

**MS. CHELEMER:** Thank you all for coming, and I\'ll turn it over to
Helen.

**MS. CHANG:** Let me also thank you from the procurement side. I\'m
sure from the technical side this has been most helpful. I\'ve been
involved in some discussions and we\'ve been struggling and you guys
have brought some wonderful things and thoughts and ideas to the table
and we really appreciate it. I would encourage you, my phone number is
.202-708-9740, to look at the contract site on the web and the web page,
to see what we have coming. Read our forecast, look at the Commerce
Business Daily and anything that we do in the way of procurement will be
there and don\'t hesitate to call me either, if you\'d like to talk.

**MR. SOBOL:** When will the transcript of this be available?

**MS. CHELEMER:** I believe in about a week.

**MS. CHANG:** Week, 10 days.

**MR. SOBOL:** When will a decision be made as to whether the next draft
goes on the web site or if it goes on?

**MS. CHANG:** I can\'t answer that at the moment, Frank. I don\'t know.

**MR. SOBOL:** My question was, it seemed the way that was phrased that
the decision as to whether it would go on the web site had not yet been
made.

**MS. CHANG:** Well, always a question of a draft going on the web site
is our timing, and timing for releasing of RFPs. We\'re just at the very
beginning basic steps in this, and it\'s very, very hard to tell,
procurement-wise, at the moment, with where we are or where we\'re
going.

**MR. SLAVIN:** But you\'re aware that time is of the essence?

**MS. CHANG:** Absolutely.

**MS. CHELEMER:** Thank you very much. Thank you for coming.

(WHEREUPON, the Public Meeting was concluded at 4:00 p.m.)

**CAPTION**\
The Public Meeting in the matter, on the date, and at the time and place
set out on the title page hereof. It was requested that the Meeting be
taken by the reporter and that same be reduced to typewritten form.