Silence your cell phones and ask no flash photography be taken during the presentation in addition there are books available for purchase and signing right over there after the event an we have a large number of events u coming up this fall including the alice waters. Our book is extex of our mission to promote cultural, political, historical awareness in diverse communities. We hope you use and maintain book space as one in which local communities comes together to learn about the great artistic cultural and political dwo. Of or time. For this in mind were so excited to have you here with us tonight and honored to welcome to the head please join me in welcoming them. Thank you. [applause] all right john mauro. Everything about you [inaudible conversations] okay so reporter and have opinions in education, two pea body awards and education okay blah, blah, blah prize winning reporter producer, documentary, oh, oh okay now were talking okay. Taught in in the public high school. Taught at historically black college. Taught in a schedule prison. Okay so they put your bioin the wrong order should have put the important thing up front. From yeah amazing, and one that person that does not just throw around compliment nobody reports on the treasures and the traumas of Public Education better than john mauro he quite simply is leading educational journalist in america. Please welcome our author of this evening john mauro. [applause] thank you all for being here. I love the opportunity to talk about education, im a reporter of former teacher but also kind of a i love to kig down into the details when i look around is see a whole bunch of fellow walks so thank you very much. This book addicted to reform work for the news hour and pr for 41 years and if you have opinions you were certainly not allowed to express them on public radio or public television. And as i got to the end of my reporting, i realize i had spent hundreds of hours with thousands of marvelous people an best people in the world are in education frankly. Many of them just working so hard had to change things but things really didnt seem to be changing and i started wondering about it, and i started blogging which forces you to sort of think things through, and i realized you know what seems to me to be correct is that we have been reforming put quotes around reform at least since 1983 when a nation at risk came out warning us that our institutions were drowning in a rising tide of mediocrity, i thought well whats going on here . And what i recognize what i think is true are what i say in the book certainly is that these reforms have attack symptoms. Theyve attacked the problem but not the problem itself. And what i thought about it, and i thought well maybe we have, in fact, become addicted its a real high to attack what seems like something we can fix this and you fix it and you feel good and you move on. But, in fact, you havent really changed things, i mean, i can give you one quick example from the last eight years or so was aron duncan fort to raise the Graduation Rate it was about 70 today it is about 83 . It was successful reform. No, if you look at what happened they basically four things happened when we attacked low Graduation Rates. One wonderful thing. A lot of caring adults came and started working with kids. Heres the kid who was close to may fail, lets help. And teachers and parents and adults came in and worked and kid graduated thats good. But other things that happened is a lot of kids were put in Credit Recovery. Credit recovery means you go into a room sit in front of a computer for about a week, and you get a semesters worth of credits. In some School Systems virtually every senior had had Credit Recovery to enable him or her to graduate. Its basically a scam. What had else happened . Some schools and this was not new but been going on for quite a while some schools go likely or not to graduate and they say you know i think you do better with a g. E. D. , and you dont have to drop out why dont you go over there and get a ged and they would show you the doors but make sure you sign up but you would no longer be a student at that school so the Graduation Rate qowld go up. But that wouldnt help molly didnt get and other thing happened adults cheated. They change grades and go while kids were filling out exams are you sure you want to be you dont want to think whether you can have a party they, theres more. Many some cases they actually lowered graduation standards. And in the few cases they established two diplomas and what low and behold Graduation Rate went up so thats the kind of superficial reform in who loses when you do this . Winners, obviously, the people can say hey, look at this reform, success. But theyre, obviously, losers they are the kids who get phony diplomas. Losers also, i think, are Overall Society because after a while you realize that this didnt work. And you begin to chip away at the faith and Public Education, and we have to have faith in Public Education. So that i, i thought okay lets if were addicted then we need a 12step program and what i would like to do just quickly share a little bit about the steps and we can talk and q and a. But so part of our confusion is that we have never wrestled and been talking about this today is the purpose of Public Education. Whats the purpose . If you dont know what success is, you really cant measure success. But we havent had that argument but i would put forth to you that the purpose of school is to help grow adults so lets just unpack those three words. You say help. That means it is a team sport. A parent, the teachers, the community. Everybody has a stake in that. The second word, grow. Now that says it is a process. Theres no snapshot you cant give a test to josh see how he did on the test say okay thats it. Hes finished youre making a movie. Its not a film. And the final word, adult is thing we have to discuss. Where do we want our kids to be able to do when they become adults . You want them to be really good at filling in bubbles . Taking standardized tests . You know, aristotle said we are what we repeatedly do it is not an act but a habit. So thats true in school we are what we repeatedly do if youre repeatedly taking test prep, and in sol schools kids spend a month or maybe six weeks doing test prep before the test comes, that is not preparation for a healthy adult life so help grow adults. So the first chapter in any work about addiction is to own o the problem. You have to yes yes, im john. And im addicted. And it isnt modeled on, i mean, i absolutely mean no disrespect to aa model i think works. But it is not modeled on that throughout there are 12 steps. You have to own the problem. You have to look at what this process of addiction of a temporary high although we saw that problem realizing you have it going back to attacking another superficial problem putting teaching machines in the classroom happened years ago that was going to solve the problem. Weve done, weve done so many of those things. You also have to look at the cost of this Reform Movement because its a billion dollar industry and education is a second largest part of our gdp and all of lot of money beaux to superficial reforms. Now thats the financial cost there is also a real personal cost to reform if i could i would like to just read are a little bit, one of a couple of paragraphs. Im a big fan of reading. I firmly believe that first graders can learn to read. They want to read. They understand its the currency like kids want to learn to quack so they can get somewhere. They want to learn to read so understand environment around them. So my argument in this book is that because we become adigitted to the profit of largely superficial School Reform, weve lost sight of our childrens best interests and our nations future. Caught up many in the minutia and the political squirmish we have lost our ways whats the noncash price of School Reform ive seen it up close. Take ps1 in the south bronx o low income part of new york city serves 700 students prek through fifth grade most of them qualify for free or reduced price lunch. Nationally, only 33 of fourth graders read at grade level but at ps1 just 18 of the 4th graders were reading at grade level. Now one of the teachers spends a lot of time working with the kids. And she has to spengsd her time teaching them how to take reading tests instead of having them read. A veteran shes begun to think she may have made a mistake devoting her life to teaching, quote, the system takes fun out of reading i want them to read for enjoyment but grab that book because it is fun i tell them. Reading you travel or your meet new friends and do new things but it is very difficult they take the joy out, and its hard to infuse is back. Now because were addicted to reform those fourth grade test scores will be used by politicians, policymakers, of course, realtors and use test scores to market homes. Real estate agencies, it is determined that will determine whether she and her colleagues are doing a good job of teaching. So the real victims of School Reform and insistence of high test scores are kids many of whom become convinced theyre not worth much even though and a this is the hard part, harsh part even though they were reading reading with compression in first grade. Cant pass a fourth grade test and i used to do this often. I would go into the classroom and ask the first grade teacher if i can take over the class. And teachers are terrific they would say sure. So i would ask the kids to close their eyes. And it is television, first graders are are great now it if i ask you to close your eyes youll do this. If you ask a fourth grader to close their eyes you go, Terrific Television and then i would write a sentence on the board, the green pancake went swimming many the lake and at a fish. And then i would say open your eyes. And they would look at the sentence, now, if they comprehended it, they would snicker. Because it is a stupid nonsense sentence. But of course theyre looking at this old guy with white hair so theyre not quite sure they can laugh. So but you can see they want to laugh. Because they understand it. Theyre reading it. So i would say what do you think of that sentence . Well not sure to Say Something critical to this old guy so is there anything wrong with that sentence in every hand goes up. Pancake arent green they dont have a mouth and fish theyre taking it apart and i saw it time and again and yes by the time they got to fourth grade, they couldnt pass the reading test because were so focused on the test scores on this reform that question take the joy so the victims i argue in the book are young people and eventually of course teachers who get Public Schools so then i started with this step because it is a very positive book. That the first thing you have to do is you have to ask the right question about a child and its the question you ask as a parent. But schools have to ask the question as well. Right now schools look at a kid and look at lilly say how smart is lilly and theyll give her a test and look at josh how mart is josh and give him a test and then theyll sort. But then that we have to get rid of that. We have to to look at lilly and say how is she smart how is he intelligent and then build on that. Now thats not original with me but montessori but we can do it we have the technology that allow us to build that kind and to capitalize on kids interest so thats the first real are positive step. How smart is marty, no how is marty smart . So you have to ask the right question. You have to connect. You have to connect with kids. You have to care about and teachers do care so they have to be girch the time to care really have to understand that kids are not test scores. And oftentimes reduced to a test score and usually the low income often minority kids who are much more likely to be seen as a test score. Another step start early. You know we lag behind lmg parking lot entire industrialized world in terms of providing preschool Early Education opportunities for kids. 94 of french threeyearolds are in public preschool. Now, my own view is it should be free, and it should be cant be a program for poor kids. You create a program for poor kids you often end up with a poor program but the interstate highway system which was constructed so that josh and his lexus and me and my truck it will be fine to them and you know vw it is fine for her as well. So it has got to be quality that youre willing to sending our own children and grandchildren to. Another step, we have to expect more. When we expect very, very little from our kids frank we drove them. They are products of the school. Im arguing many this book that you have to really change the model. The model now is the teacher is the worker. Turning out kids, the kids are the product. I think thats absolutely wrong. The kids are the workers. The product is knowledge. Teachers become management did you know you were management . But so that the work has to be genuine and work has to be real and i have a lot of examples of different kinds of work that kids can do where they are creating mog. And theyre all arranged us and just one quick example i looked out the window of our apartment in new york, one day and i noticed it was a trash can on each corner. Well i was filming up in south bronx got out of the subway walking to the school it was one trash can, four corners one trash can. But you know maybe these arent trash cans but cleanliness opportunities. So if you call them cleanliness opportunities then you say to your 7th graders lets go map the neighborhood. Lets go to your neighborhood with smart phone with a couple of your friends and take pictures of the corner and you do it and you do it and other teachers and schools and start mapping the urban area and where are the more cleanliness opportunities . On park avenue to new york city man there are in south bronx and so why. Those kids to become masters creating knowledge. Theyre going to know more about that then what do you do with that . Youre sharing data with other o schools and Technology Allows that. You start writing letters. You have to learn to write numbers and embrace things maybe you get on skype with experts and people in other o city. I mean, the possibilities are really endless with you with the technology another one of the steps but you have to expect more with students and workers knowledge is a product. I say i have three steps with things first is to embrace technology and this is really critical. Many adults even adults of education will say oh, the kids are Digital Natives im just a tourist. They know everything. Well that may be true. They may be Digital Natives. But this is a critical point they are not digital citizens and it is the job of adults to develop this citizenship to the habits of good citizenship in children you cant just throw your hands and say theyre digital native this technology is so powerful that your old thing about do the devil work no it is idle thumbs today doing the devils work. And so if kids are not using their technology to create knowledge, they will be harassing other kids and theres sad stories in here that you heard anyway. About kids who have been harassed by other kids sometime ises by parents too. But to the point of suicide. So schools have to embrace technology. But they have to embrace it from the ground up and wise superintendent or principal say heres a great package this will be common core friendly here whether jargon is but you piked out when technology is available and early adapters are, adopters are and sisters that are savvy and bring them in and say try these things, because if they dont want it, nobody is going to want it. But you have to it is as they say the goal should be to use this technology to create knowledge. So that work the kids do has to be meaningful work i have a whole bunch of examples because folks frankly this is important. The second embrace is outsiders. Educators live in this bubble. Theyre bombarded by critics but they forget that 7 5 of households do not have school age ad children and some communities 80 . And those are the people who vote. Theyre older theyre much more like and you say you need them on your side. Well, i argue in this book that you have to embrace them and you have to raise them enthusiastically and that doesnt mean inviting them for show and tell and again using the technology and having the kids do projects, i mean, take a team of 7th graders and a go over to josh who has a deli and interview him. How long have you been in the businessesome . Is it satisfying have you always been, and you know, film some stuff . And create a little video about josh. Put it up on the web. Well, everybody who comes into the deli josh says hey did you see the c did you know they did stuff like that in schoolsome arent you wish yowxd be a kid again, i mean, i have a bunch of examples of my third in the neighborhood and only criteria is people you interview cannot have kids in school. And you ask them to recite a poem and so so this is real work. I mean, you cant accept mediocrity you print it out. Have it and use your smarts phone put it on a tripod and television is just radio with pictures. And then you have the readings so to be or not to be that is the question but it is mobile in the minds eye to suffer the flee and so you go through the entire one, and maybe you have them read eight lines you use two lines, perhaps. And then you have marty read and then you add it together and maybe if youre really cool youll get some select who sneakses in there as well. So that it becomes so all of those people theyre going to and by the way, youre developing a real skill because lets say josh doesnt do a very good job. You a 37th gradesser have to say to this grownup, yeah, that was reading. Why dont we do it again . Four times and you cant let him get mad. It is a real are skill as the and this is kind of people who have no not in the business you know this this is kind of people you hire , and because youre making television, you cant accept a wobbly camera or bad sound. It has to be framed properly. And so what youre doing is youre bringing in the outsiders. Youre showing them whats going on in school. And then in the following embrace for teachers and i think i say how are you sproazed to embrace teachers respectfully, you embrace technology carefully, embrace outsiders enthusiastically and embrace teachers respectfully. I would remind you everybody talks about the one perce