Washington dc. This is just over 90 minutes. Thanks for joining us on this sunny august afternoon. I hope everyone had a great view of the eclipse yesterday. Maybe you werent where i was where a big fat cloud came over right at that moment. Pretty cool, hearing all the media act like we were going to go blind if we looked at the sky. I am amber northern, senior vp of research, pleased to have our Live Audience today and cspan covering our event today. I will be welcoming the panel in a minute, i want to thank our partners at the American Federation for china who are with us today. And i am not on twitter, probably the last person you not on twitter, i dont miss being on twitter, you can join the conversation by using the hashtag engaging choices, for those who like to engage in conversation on twitter please do. We would like to hear what you would like to say and when we get to q and at the end we will look and see if we have questions coming in. We are here to talk about School Choice at the High School Level. I am going to keep this overview brief. Mike told me to and he is not here today. I will keep a brief and i sat in panels like this and the moderator is the least interesting person on the panel but our point here today is there is a growing sense the comprehensive typical American High School is not serving well all kids. It is a hard job to fill. And comprehensive high schools have been around, most to have attended them, we also know there have been many studies of private and Charter School studies that have come recently that showed promising results, if students attending Charter High Schools in particular were more likely to graduate from high school, Persistent College and in their mid20s a pretty cool study, unique study by credo. Significantly post higher levels of annual growth compared to traditional schools. They do this work where they translate to the number of days of learning but those gains equated to 40 days of additional learning which is a pretty big gain, particularly good results for black, hispanic and low income students. I wont spend a ton of time in the research. The point is studies around vouchers posted good results for High School Graduation rates. The research is not all good news but the point is there is enough good news about i schools of choice that we should want more of them. The growing movement around multiple pathways to career and what do those things look like. Before turning to the panel one more plug, because part of this event is initiated by a study in june, a National Survey of High School Student engagement. We surveyed 2000 High School Students in traditional schools, Public Schools, what engages you, what gets you interested, what motivates you to learn . In a nutshell they said Different Things, reported different ways they are engaged, and one group was the subject lovers, and most engaged by learning challenging things. And those are the kids have social aspect of school, they want to do more, teacher responders of another one, those are the kids who connected with their teacher, and another adult in my school, i need to know they are invested in me academically and personally and that helps me get engaged with the material. Please read the report, other groups of students are engaged differently. One of the things i took away from the report, students arent ridges. We had this report years ago by the new teacher project, the widget effect and the headline was teachers arent widgets, they are not all the same in terms of their quality so here we say students arent widgets either. They are engaged differently, motivated to learn. Engagement and choice go hand in hand, we have multiple types of choices for kids, different schools, and different choices doesnt have to be schools. One of the things we talk about with our panel, what is it that prevents more high School Choice schools from opening, what obstacles do we need to think about, opening more of them and helping them succeed. We have a great panel, what is cool about this panel is a mix of practical experience, working with kids, researching these types of schools and so on. He will find them speaking from a variety of viewpoints, the president of opportunity america, i am not doing this in order. The president of great Educational Opportunities foundation at the Brookings Institution and zach verdon, of Hope Christian school in wisconsin. I will let them introduce themselves, they do a better job when they are doing that. I will have them explain briefly their background on the topic today. And ask them to share a personal anecdote that speaks to choice that i school level. I like to tell people whats going on, what the agenda is like so we cannot be informed. With back, and i am going to start with john. Give us your anecdote and all of that good stuff. I am a fellow at the Brookings Institution. Thank you to all of you for coming and joining a very interesting topic. I have a lot of impractical experience. Most of my work looks at what i would call the demand side of issues. If you take a School Choice reform has been a type of market reform where there is a supply side and demandside peers supplyside question about what it is yet taught me that often comes with this. The demand side is the of what is it the families want. I should say i should come up with the question of high school a little bit nervous about how that works and a part of that reason is my dissertation work. And its my dissertation research. As part of that dissertation, i was running experiments here in washington d. C. And also in milwaukee. It was a very simple at your event. The idea was we would randomly assign a booklet that has information, so it has this or does colorful clip with what types of programs, how they score on test and other information about schools. They have the school grading, and a big eyepopping reading with a fivestar school or a green star school and so we set up the experiment with a Treatment Group to get these booklet in the control group we thought we would go and see if giving people this kind of extra information with the signal quality would get them to choose any differently and maybe you flagged as being particularly good. So we ran the experiment, data came back in and for families moving from Elementary School to middleschool, the results were exactly what we would have gas. They were higher performing, better schools. Families moving from middleschool to high school, it is not even that it didnt have an effect. Posted is actually chose lower performing materials, which is odd. So when you think information interventions are pretty not listen to give a booklet, it is sort of hard to come up with a story for why they didnt prefer that. We dug into the books listed in the book for graduation the spirit that emerge in choosing their own schools. I ran a third experiment. But that some information and i just like to see how getting that information and affect what parents want. They learn so when they expose information, they are more confident in sort of a series of what seemed to me like happy outcomes. When you show the same information from kids, we didnt see any of the positive effects and a hint that kids were lower. Consistent with what we saw. I would be interested in knowledge you have theories about that. One possibility is we are talking about 13yearold and 13yearolds are project decisionmakers and they are in stressful and we are asking them to do that. There is a risk i think it would have to be thoughtful about that. When we are handing over authority to kids and families for School Choice reform, we empower them. We are empowering them to put pressure is and theyll think a lot about what types of pressures we are getting and in that particular case, and about what we can do to help. Yeah, great. I am president of a nonprofit here in d. C. Called opportunity america. We work on a variety of issues called workforce education and career and Technical Education, our big focus. I recently started to look a little bit or quite a lot of career and Technical EducationCharter Schools. That is sort of uninteresting overlap to imagine a ven diagram with schools that is a hot new trend. Kids learning Technical Skills along with their Academic Skills and getting some workspace learning along with it. A lot of advantages, its not the old broken ad. It is to raise the Technical Skills with the Academic Skills and showing a lot of benefit in nonCharter Schools. The way you engage kids that arent that interested in learning, theres a development to them in a project they can do. It gets them excited about learning. Also way to make curriculum. One kid said i wasnt interested in math until i started doing welding. I go back and get interested in geometry. They also look at the rewards of succeeding at something, kids who have never succeeded that much might be good at coding or welding or whatever. The exciting new trend that has been slow to catch on in the Charter School and for understandable reasons, the Charter Movement has been focused on getting kids to college and graduating from college. They were serving kids who hadnt come from families who maybe havent had a chance to go to college and they have been kind of skeptical and that smells like feel that. Thats our population come you know, thats the populations were tracked in the past. It has been slow to come to the revolution going on for about five or 10 years and the rest of k12. Right in the last few years, a number of charter educators started to discover even the best Charter School on the block, it is a challenge to get kids from low income and not academically engage kids in college and beyond, even if we do a super well, we are not succeeding everyone. Which should try that cte thing. We are starting to see the middle ven diagram get populated and its very exciting. I think it is kind of two revolutions coming together and when it works, it is even more than the sum of the parts. The Charter Movement is just taking off and we are working with them. We cte schools what Charter Schools brain that most schools cant do, and they have the flexibility you talked about, and where they can innovate on curriculum, march the technical curriculum and math curriculum than a District School can do. They can work with employers who need to work with to get kids out of the workplace and learn what skills. They can hire teachers out of industry sometimes more easily. They can break at the school day so you go for school before school year and then you have a week off we get an internship. Theres a lot of promise, so im going to tell a story about a kid. Of course it is high schools, right . Cte starts in middleschool, but generally is high school. They have to have a Charter High School to do this. One of the first kids i met that taught me the promise of cte in a few years ago he was actually on the gulf coast and i was visiting a cte school that had a robust Welding Program. This is a kid who came from a high school were literally that not only had gangs, but a prostitution ring. You can imagine what kind of high school that was. He had discovered hed been a marginal hanging on statement, hanging on by a fingernail. He didnt even know what welding was if someone came and said we had a Welding Program. He had to google it and figure out what it was. For the time i met him, he was coming out of the Welding Program and he was one of the best welders in the group and incredibly proud of it. He found something he was good at that the teacher was interested in. It was unbelievable transformation. Of course i got excited and then i discovered i needed geometry. Its a very exciting story. About a year later they are sort of tears of welding, common guard welders commendably folders. He was making his way from construction project to construction project in the Gulf Coast Oil industry and on his way to making a six figure income that year. He had made it to college, but sometimes they do get on an economic have to go to college. Who knows where the schedule and that. Can we combine that magic, witches and for every kid. Some go straight to harvard. Can we combine that magic with the flexibility of charters. A few more quick images before my time as that. It is all spaces and you have kids and they have the flexibility to make them spaces and have the adaptable. The curriculum is entirely focused on aerospace. The aerospace is the focus, so not only are you doing your math or aerospace interscience or aerospace, but you are reading the Wright Brothers biography in english class and learning how to do your history through aerospace. The calendar sixers had been the school where you do six weeks of school and a week off for internship a work in hospitals or Software Companies are nonprofit work, you name it. So to me, charters are really exciting possibility. We are talking about expanding high School Choice. This is one of the only places you can go, but one of the very exciting places we will see a lot more in years to head. Excited to be here talking about it. Hello, everyone. And the executive director for Hope Christian schools, network a school serving nearly 3000 students across southeastern wisconsin in milwaukee. We have started school already, so we are busy and running at full steam. They are particularly important to me and i really appreciate in afc taking on this incredibly important topic. They get so incredibly titled to parents and students just a little bit about me, before becoming executive director, Hope Christian schools, and in the taught high school in the milwaukee, philadelphia, camden, new jersey and houston, texas. Really passionate about the high School Topics and the High School Space. At Hope Christian high school to talk about their mission. It is how important it was for students to be able to develop and get ready and outstanding character before their communities. Some parents or Community Members would ask colleges are everybody and absolutely agree. Cool thing about milwaukee is theres lots of options and parents and so we dont need to be a comprehensive onesizefitsall type High School Like so many big large high schools are. We can be a niche high school. We can Say Something specifically are going to offer to the parents who want that for their kids can have that for their kid. That is incredibly personal to me as a parent, i mean frankly, you dont make too many larger decisions for your children that how you will educate them. If you want a certain type of high school and setting for your students going to provide more choices for parents and families that want Something Like that. On a personal level, we have a couple of toys. Theyve got a little sister named katie. But henry is developmentally delayed and shy and introverted. So why worry desperately about the typos education you can have and how it can be treated by his peers. High school is a little bit scary. We worry about him getting bullied and left behind a little bit. Henrys little brother, tommy is tracking ahead right now socially, emotionally and intellectually. And worry about him going to a comprehensive high school. For us, finding the right balance in having the right opportunity and fit for our kids is incredibly important. We have the option, weve been blessed in my family to be able to find and balance what we think is good for our kids and we are able to do that. So many families across our country dont have the opportunity and blessing like my wife and i do to be able to sit and find the right educational option we want for a child k12. This topic of high School Choice is incredibly personal for not just me, but a lot of the parents here in the room and across the country that are watching and listening. Thanks for having me. My name is kevin teasley, founder and president of gdl education, greater Educational Opportunity in minneapolis. I came out of the School Choice words, talking to their college here, a long time ago from brookings politics markets in american schools. I think the country is on fire when it started talking about choice. Within the word choice, its a definition. There is private school vouchers. They are within Public School within the cross district. If the School Choice battles back in the 90s, in california actually, trying to educate folks on what choice meant and help them decide what choice is best for them, charter, voucher, et cetera. In 1998, and i started to prom