New exhibition space, there was a deliberate decision by the curators not to do that again. And what we wanted was that the flag becomes a metaphor for the country. Its tattered, its torn, but it still survives, and the message is really the survival of both the country and the flag, and were not trying to make it look pretty, were trying to make it look like it endured its history, and it still can celebrate its history. This year marks the 200th anniversary of the British Naval bombardment of fort mchenry during the war of 1812. Learn more about the flag fran be sis scott key wrote about while we tour the smithsonians starspangled banner exhibit tonight at 6 and 10 p. M. Eastern, part of American History the this weekend on cspan3. Part of what makes this a special place as we seek to bring the outside and into the inside out and it is in that spirit i would like to introduce my friend who has come in this evening to read from and talk about his new book. Sam is and always has been a good guy who in at least one case helps me get a troop to life much in the same way that he brings truth to light in his writing on education. He helps me find a way to tell my story to the history teacher and helped me set the record straight. You probably dont remember. But mr. Olson handed back an exam and on the exam there was a short answer question where we had to explain exactly how the bombing worked on the fire attacks. And the thing is i dont remember a lot about that class. But i remember this. Sam was in it and we sat next to each other in the second row in front of the green chalkboard and i knew that i nailed a question about the dress in bombing. And so i got m my paper back frm mr. Olson and was marked wrong. You all know how it looks when the teacher just is through an exam and is incorrect maybe with a oneword comment. But i had it right and they showed it to sam and he said that it was right and that i should tell mr. Olson and so i did and it was hard and i remember my voice was shaking because he was a nice guy but i was essentially telling him that he had gotten something wrong, but i did it and it helped me because telling my stories started a conversation that revealed my understanding and in an even deeper way than i had written on the test and that is what learning can be like sometimes, complicated, clouded by this perception or maybe he was just really tired of grading papers and decided to blast right through i that with connection and conversation, clarity can be reached in his work is all about publishing those important facet of the educational experience in america. Since the work on schools and education to greatest strength is helping folks to see where theres something wrong with the power to make it right. Hes also particularly excellent at heralding what is already right in american schools. More than anything else he believes in the power of schools to shape the lives of the teachers and students, the parents that interested their kids to them and he believes in the power of schools to help shape our very democracy itself and in his new book he beautifully tells the story of two schools in washington, d. C. Where he lives and he raises important questions about the power and peril of School Choice. Our school is an important work for those of us that care about students because he writes about the inside of the schools in ways that reveal a sensual truths about teaching, learning and choice. What our schools show our passion and precision is that education is about real people leading real lives and real places. If school doesnt engage them it doesnt work no matter what the policymakers may say. Thats what this book is about and why its important for anyone who generally cares about schools, communities and their children. In sams own words his project in this book is compelling. I had within our school because i believed before we could answer these questions we must put a human face on the modern landscape of teaching and learning. We must experience modern american schooling is todays teachers, students and families do and we must pay close attention to the notions of community cant democracy and choice. Nothing could get closer to the market seems to be willfully missing in many conversations about schools have a thesis and the experiences of the teachers and students who spend their days in the classrooms and the hallways. Sams book helps him in his present study across the schools and he is of course here to read. So without further ado please welcome to the podium my friend, classmate and colleague. [applause] hello everybody. Thats definitely the first time ive been introduced by a former high school classmate. So not surprisingly, i think it is safe to say that its the nicest and most interesting introduction that i have ever had. Thank you so much for setting the stage and to all of you for coming. You know i went to high school here in the class of 88. Im not from here. I grew up in new hampshire, so it isnt fully coming home but it is a home to me so it is especially exciting as the book goes and im visiting different parts of the country to be in the room where i can be introduced by a former classmate where a former student of mine from brooklyn is now here teaching in chicago where theres friends and family and folks on the front line doing work where there are young people in the room and folks are still in school and starting to think about the work they will be giving in their own lives. So thanks to everybody for coming. Our school is a story about a year in the life of two schools and in an a man of the people we lives intersect. But because those schools happen to be a Charter School opening its doors for the first time in a Neighborhood Schools that first opened its doors in 1924 in the Nations Capital its about a lot more than that. In fact most of the issues that touches on our the most pressing issues of the day both nationally and with the local context in places like dc and chicago and lots of other places so its also about School Choice and School Reform and testing and teacher evaluation and or changing notions of community. So needless to say it is especially a lot to try to talk about in one hour but we are going to try sushi is what im thinking. What i want to do is share three short readings from the book as a way to give you a feel for the story and maybe provide some specific context to these other issues and give you a little bit of a sense of what i think about those things and then let your questions determine how we spend the rest of the time together. So the first thing i should say is a little bit of context about dc. I wrote this book to try to have an appeal to folks all over the country because this issue this is like the brave new world of modern american School Reform in just about every major American City bears some level of experimentation with this idea. So i first started thinking about writing this book three years ago when not coincidentally my wife and i were our oldest son was just near school age so most kids in dc start at three and most of our friends were at a similar point and one of the things i noticed is lots of these really smart, motivated parents had absolutely no idea how to choose a school for their kids. And i thought thats interesting and thats kind of a major problem if what youre trying to unleash is a more educated consumer patrolling the marketplace and ultimately making a decision thats in the best interest of their kid into based on the decision that they are making is there for driving decisions. If people dont even understand why they are choosing to schooll and what they should be looking for car than the house of cards comes tumbling down. But what i also realized is that so, dc its really kind of the tip of the sphere in this National Movement towards School Choice. Theres actually only two cities in the country that have more kids enrolled in Charter Schools and the new orleans and detroit so i think you can understand why that might be happening. So, in dc, 44 of the kids are enrolled in Charter Schools, but what i realized is even in traditional Neighborhood Schools only 25 of the kids that are enrolled at hand their Neighborhood School. So what was happening in dc at the time i set out to write this book and what is continuing to happen today is a great intercity migration of all of these families, kind of ignorantly coming up with a great anxiety and hope in the search of a community for themselves and for their families and for their kids. And i thought this is something we really need to understand more. So the First Reading i want to do is pick from the first chapter this is Teacher Appreciation week. I want to do short descriptions of two of the educators that i write about. So i said its a story about two schools and its about even more so it is a story about the teachers and principals and a lesser extent some parents on the outside trying to search and without giving it any more context i want to introduce you to two of the people i follow over the course of the year and see what you think about it so the first is one of the teachers at the Neighborhood School. And the title of the first chapter is the first day and you can imagine what happens in the first chapter. When the alarm clock went off the morning of the first day, 6 50 a. M. As always and always the annoying beeping sound because nothing else would rouse her from her deep sleep rebecca hopped out into the 17 minute routine that she had honed over her previous two years of being a teacher. Bathroom, teeth, face, makeup, seven minutes. Then six minutes to get dressed and four minutes to find her keys, grab her lunch and head out the door to the park or as it has become locally as a site for demonstrations in the 1960s, malcolm x. Park. Four years earlier rebecca was a senior student at brown and michelle was the freshman chancellor of the Public Schools. When liebowitz saw the tiein cover holding the grilled, singing to clean house, she decided the Nations Capital is where she would start her care career. They believed they had a chance to show the rest of the country with was possible when an urban School System decided to judge the teachers by their merits to set High Expectations for everyone to up the classrooms and to help the kids that had been most poorly served in the past by refusing to keep doing things the way theyve been done before. She got placed in an Elementary School in mt. Pleasant named after the founder of the u. S. Naval academy george bancroft. It was a bumpy beginning. Six weeks into the first year she was switched from first to third grade to replace a teacher that had a nervous breakdown in front of the children. Since then she had two stable years to hone her craft and she felt like she was starting to border and prays that she often received yet as she turned onto the sidewalk that stretched in front of the doors of the only place that she had ever worked, she felt increasingly certain that this year would be her last. She entered the gymnasium to search for the teacher Rebecca Schmidt and together they were known as the two rebecca is and they would soon escort up the stairs past the main office and the colorful mural depicting the arrival in the new world to room 121. Children as young as three and 11 stood or sat in the clubs across the gym floor waiting to be escorted to their homeroom. Payments received information forms while interpreters moved back and forth between the groups to make sure each family understood what was required. Near the gym door ms. Liebowitz approached the boy. How are you doing she said putting an arm around his shoulder. Did you have a great summer . He remained silent with his head down. Each Still Holding with one hand to the leg of her father and each performing her own distinct right. And this is the principle of the Charter School. In an apartment she moved into after the separation that was a long time coming, she closed the bathroom door and quietly got herself ready so her son could grab a few more minutes of sleep. She looked across the street at the buildings at the walter reed medical hospital, selected the outfit for her first day as a principal and thought back to the apartment in Corpus Christi that she lived in as a child, the one on sixth street with the roaches and the gunfire. That is where the wanting had begun. It started the first time she visited a friends house on ocean drive. Why dont we have that, she remembered thinking. How can i get that. Her dad so the change in the following weeks and saw the building anger and resentment. Theres a difference betweenthen being schooled and being smart, he said. Education is a bridge or a border. Choose. As a child, she often fished with her father. The data there that would tell her. Wait it out. Wait until its time to. Learn to distinguish between the tide and the fish pulling on the bluer. She tried to pull back within a force. I cant do this. Dont ever say that. The rod gets lower and lower interest over got behind her and added his hands to the pole and a screened reel it in the child as strained as far as she could until the stingray and urged. The father grabbed it before it could strike and pinned it on the floor of the tipping craft and he reached in for a pair of pliers and a load of his daughter to pull the hook out. In seconds it was out of the boat and struggling back down into the gulf waters and they laid their exhausted and breathing hard. She felt like crying and laughing then and now. He was always getting her into situations like that for situations that were bigger than she could handle. And then pushing her through them. Thats what kept him alive as she rustled her son from colorful 4yearold dreams. He was making sure that i had some of that in me. So it wouldnt surprise me if some of you are like that. It may be immediately selfevident, but part of what became clear to me over the course of the time that i spent in the schools when i knew i wanted to write a book but i wasnt sure what form it would take is that first of all, people are interested in other people. They are not interested in programs. And so a book that explains the specifics of the readers and writers workshops can be found somewhere else in the bookshelf even though thats something that this talks about. But also what became clear to me watching the culture of the schools unfold and this is something the educators in the room now and folks that are not in education but have had experience working in successful organizations is that always the main currency that defines a successful culture whether its via mobile metrics for the company is language and relationships. And always the most effective schools and environments are the places where people know one another dont know what the tendencies are like in the classroom. Its to understand the relationship that she had with her father and what he taught her about life that directly impacts the kind of principle that she is. I think the reason i bring this up and then we will go into reading number two is because kind of k12 School Reform its so contentious in the twodimensional it is the landscape of the righteous and the damned, and to be clear there are some lowlevel and folks out there, and there are some people who are doing thorough a quirk that is unrecognized. But for the rest of us, it is more complicated than determining for example that because rebecca moved to washington, d. C. Because she admired michele reads that we should either love or hate her based on that fact alone because she left her long career to become the inaugural principle of the Charter School we should either celebrate her as a reforming hero or come them her as a part of the effort to privatize Public Education. Its more complicated than that and part of my larger group for this project is that in almost every city including but not limited to this one we need to begin having a different and more poignant conversation about the ways in which scratch race began to unleash very unresolved issues around race and class and place and democracy and of the ways in which School Reform if it works is supposed to unleash better approaches to teaching and learning. The first conversation that we have to have is what is it that our schools should be more effective at doing tax and in what ways might we be able to release the cycle that creates a rising tide lifts all. And from my perspective that is not a conversation that we are yet having sufficiently broadly enough to really impact of the work that we desperately need to do on behalf of kids and our community. Number two speaks to the things happening in dc. Youll get a preview what is coming into this knowing this is a title chapter building a house. How are we giving everybody . Are we doing good . This is the very beginning of this chapter. When she was still a girl growing up on a farm her family owned since 1725 she fantasized about becoming an outdoors ecologist. Most of her youth was spent outside in the woods with the cows are visiting the tenant families that live elsewhere on the farms growing acreage. So when she imagined herself working in a large office with a dark wood and desk for 8yearod rome he added an extra twist. A secret trap door behind the desk through which she and the children would be scape to a beautiful woodland environment free from adult supervision. That is what would heal them, she decided to the parents would never even need to know. Years later they fashioned an adult life that honored the spirit of her childhood fantasy. As a College Student she designed her own nature. She callemajor. She called its Socio Cultural development and education. By the way those of you in high school it is possible to sign your own major and a study the ways different children and different cultures could expect different experiences in school. And as a pro