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philanthropy summit. i like it. we've had a lot of summits and conferences, this is a good one. tell us more. >> i think it captures the spirit the summit will have, too. philanthropy is in a different place right now. it's no more about write be checks and walks away. william dreyfuss, who is giving his art collection to the harlem zone, he's not just writing a check. he's giving away something he deeply loves. it's going to a cause, which most of us knows is one of the great education groups. >> who is going to be involved? >> you have some of the best brains, multi-generational
our country and the community decide these are the most important economic assets in their neighborhood and state. we're not there. we're on cruise control. we assume the top 20% of the kids will make the economy go and everybody else gets a ride. those days are gone. >> we've seen it in harlem, other parts of the country succeeding. how do we get the bottom 20% into the game. we have to compete globally. we can't do it if we -- >> we take the best of what we learned over the last ten years, no child left behind gave visibility and accountability to the system. it wasn't pretty when we got visibility because you had almost half of the kids really not performing very well at all. now, we have learned from charter school movements and magnet schools, a whole range of things out there. >> what's the big ideas we have learned, for instance in harlem, what have we learned? >> you learn to provide
they're from a poor neighborhood in detroit or harlem, that's just a cop-out for the education establishment. >> didn't you also find, and don't you find, governor, in the state of michigan, inschool districts like this, within detroit or within harlem, the schools we have been up to, the best teachers, the best teachers want to teach in the most challenging situations? >> they do. governor, i'm sure you will agree. it's an entire culture. what's working in new york city, you have a culture that starts with michael bloomberg who says, there's just no substitution for victory. that filters down to public charter schools and filtering to public schools. you need leadership. >> top to bottom? >> you need leadership in politics and classroom. >> that's right. when you do this right and have an evaluation system that evaluates not just the teacher but the principal and the superintendent and everybody has
into that. my mother was a teacher. the thing that bothers me about that whole tenor, the conversation governing, you just got to it. detroit. pupil performance. you grade the teacher and pupil performance. when you look at school systems like detroit and other large cities, you have an enormous population of very poor kids sometimes without a family, never mind a single parent family, the school is often the safest place they'll ever be, the only place they'll get a meal during the course of the day. how do you bridge that grap in ter -- that gap in terms of grading the teacher? >> you don't put 100%. it's on progress, not just what is the performance of this school vis-a-vis a rich district, how are you moving the kids? if you look at what's happening in the harlem zone, as long as you have an entire system focused on getting this child to
year. up until we went to harlem, i keep talking about zucker, he pushed us and made us go to harlem, i believed the lie. i believed the lie that the education establishment had been pushing off on americans for a very long time that some of these poor teachers couldn't turn students around in very difficult areas, whether talking about harlem or inner city detroit. what we saw up there is, it bears repeating, kids coming into some of these schools in fifth grade, with first grade proficiency in math, science, reading, graduating three years later from this middle school in eighth grade, the entire class being 100% proficient in science, math, english. outscoring kids from the richest whitest suburbs in scarsdale, new york. so this lie, and it is a lie, that some kids are never going to be able to succeed because