DR. FORGIONE: Good afternoon. I thought I was the canoli after lunch here but I guess I am going to be the case study that is going to be provoking you all and if you want to write your trip off just give me free consulting and it will be pro bono hopefully, but we are going to talk about the Austin blueprint to lead No Child Left Behind because I wanted to position ourselves to get all that federal money, and it is about chronically under performing schools. How do you bring them to a standard of performance which will serve their children well? My world is messy. My world is uncontrollable. I operate in practice and I do try to do good but how do you do good and do it well when you are running a complex urban district? But today I do appreciate your opportunity to think even if it is reflectively in the past about how multiple social science models in research could really help us better understand what we are doing and how to do it better as you will see in the next round.

Who are we? You have got to know who we are. We are a large complex urban school district with a rich diversity in our clientele. We are one of the few urban districts in America where the middle class finds the public schools the school of choice and they are in the public schools, if you can keep then in these hard times of accountability.

In the winter of 2002 after several months of examining national models that might help us with this issue of chronically under performing I had a community that basically threw a hand grenade at me and said, "You have got to handle this," but they wanted me to go to one of the private for-profit vendors. So, I used that as an opportunity to have a public month-long conversation on TV. Everything I do is on TV. I run two TV stations. You know, we have got to communicate, and therefore these for profits had a chance and at the end of that public review on February 26, the board said, "You are the man. We don't want to give away this problem. We want you to solve this problem. We believe you have the capacity to do that," and that is when I had to develop a plan to address chronically under performing schools. Remember we end school on May 31. You have got to have everything done because the school year starts in August, and so basically the board directing me to do that was a challenge.

I started off with the four lowest performing elementaries, and the board would have let me do six elementaries but I felt I needed to add two middle schools. America has got to start to change secondaries. Elementary are very amenable to change, but large secondaries especially two large middle schools and you can see these are schools of color, schools of poverty, schools that have had consistently bad ratings. So, what we did basically is more — you know, I had to be face valid. Face validity was my standard. Would my community see enough in the designs that they felt I am a reformer, that I was doing some of the things that looked good? So, between February and the end of April we had to come up with a design and we had these 10 components. The first component obviously is we swear allegiance to standards. I am a standards-based guy. I believe standards are what you should be shooting for and within the accountability framework.

We had to take time. Time is the enemy of the good and how do you structure time into more reading, writing, grammar and math every day?

Then we had to go to a proven curriculum. This was very tricky. You see these are brown schools. I am brown all over in Austin. We are going to look like America is going to look like in 40 years, Texas in 20, but open court didn't have a Spanish version. So, I grabbed the open court proven curriculum but they didn't have a Spanish version. So, automatically I am in trouble within weeks of starting because I don't have a consistent curriculum because I have got English language learners, not just English learning, and this gets really difficult because I need to have immediate bilingual. I believe in bilingual ed. I believe in cognitive development of the child in his native language and you bring him to high level rigorous academic Spanish. Then you go to academic English. That is our belief, and George Bush believes in that, and his kids graduated from my public high school in 1999, but you know that takes more resources and it is hard.

The next three I wiped out every teacher and I had to put 205 teachers back in my district someplace because in public ed you have got a contract forever unless you document it, but at least in these schools we put teachers with 2 years of experience and every teacher was certified when we opened the school on August 15.

We, also, decided that we needed 10 days of staff development to build a team. Some of this I got from Kip. Some of it I got from Slavin. Other pieces we picked up from Edison. You know there are good pieces out there. The question is where is the research to say that all of this together matters, you know, but again it is a lot of face validity.

We, also, decided the key to me was finding a master principal who would lead the six schools and then I had to go to Starbucks and convince six people to risk their careers to go with me and half of them turned me down, turned the superintendent down at Starbucks, and I was offering a bonus because no one wants to do the hard work. It is risky but once you have got a community this was terrific having leadership both a master principal and an experienced principal.

Then we get the use of data, you know the whole issue of technology, partnerships and the last one was a Kip trick. You know we have a compact. The principals all sign the compact. They sign up for 3 years. Every teacher said they would stay 3 years. Do you know why that was important? These are the schools that lose half of their teachers every year. So, psychologically it is not legal; it is moral. If you can get them to believe they have to stay 3 years that is half the battle.

So, we put this together and had to run it. The question is how did we do? Well, the state tricked us. They put a new harder test in place, but in 2003 to 2004 we are a continuous model of progress. There is evidence that we are making a difference. The question is, is it enough? Could you have done better? How do you know you have maximized? That is a judgment I can't answer, but I am pleased that those data were up and then we did meet AYP. So, we met the federal standard as we moved forward.

So, if you had to say what are the two major lessons you have learned to me and this is all based on conversations, informal interviews, the power of having our principals not working in isolation but the four elementary working with that master principal to me was a powerful effect.

Now, can I show you what the evidence was, how much more did we gain, how much less? I can't answer that but we have created nested learning communities and I think as Dick Murnane mentioned this morning that is a piece of it.

The next part of it, to me what was equally important was putting systems in place. Poor performing schools don't have systems, and I just signed up for 4 more years in a weak moment. I have been 6 years in Austin and my wife and I are going to stay a decade because you have got to be there a decade to put systems in place that are not personality driven but can continue because of the good practice and the ownership.

What are those structures? Curriculum alignment, focused instruction. Go on the web site and you will see a scope and sequence. You know, in the first 9 weeks what do you do? I don't tell you what day to do it, but by 9 weeks you are going to uncover that curriculum because you have got to move on to the next because you are going to take a high-stakes test at the end of the 27th week and you had better make those first three terms worthwhile. Obviously targeted training and then you get into the next part of it, frequent assessments, using data and again I often say when I went to Austin it was e pluribus; there was no unum. Austin if you know it is a great community but man everyone is a peacock on a prairie doing their own thing. Standards were foreign and just evil. You have got to have some unum. You have got to have some agreed upon processes that you bench mark yourself against and obviously they are non-negotiable. They had to be for the first time non-negotiable and I am superintendent and I can do very little because you have got to get agreement and that is a wonderful part of Austin because it has the community but boy you would like some days just to make decisions and be held accountable, but yet the bottom line of this is at the end of this, now, 3 years and the 3 years are up this May, I have got to sign them up again. There is no clear sense of what one thing or multiple things work. What do I keep? What went well? I didn't have the time and energy and that is why today I am pleased to have these two really bright people who can help me look at that issue and give us guidance but I did try to lay out what I thought were some questions that you might want to reflect upon to let rubber hit the road.

How can we best use research to find out what was most effective in improving even if it is a rear view mirror view of it? How do we understand what worked and why? Are those hypotheses that I articulated in the 10 components, are they provable based on data? Do we really know some of them work and should be moved out to my 74 elementaries or to my 17 middles from the two middles?

How do we compare the results because right above the blueprint I have got 20 more schools that could easily be in the blueprint you know and they are working hard. Do I know some things work there and how do I compare that, the focus schools, you know the whole conversation we had with Jere Confrey on the fidelity of implementation. I mean people did open court but I can't pay you. We threw the third grade out because the reading level was not difficult enough to pass the state test. It was okay at the earlier years. We had to go back to the former curriculum and so we are doing all this training and it is kind of like building a good minestrone you know, you put a little bit in and if it tastes good at the end you feel good.

The final one is how do you tie data to these contextuals and know what really made a difference? Obviously within our budget limitations could we replicate it? Where would I replicate it? I think Dick Murnane did a good one. I think I am into model 2 now, taking some of this and saying, "We are going to go with it." I have got 29 trip wires in Texas. You trip one of those wires and you are unacceptable. You could be up on 28 and so I have got to make sure when you are near that trip wire I get you over it. So, that is where you have got to focus to make sure you don't let the schools down even though it is about all kids obviously.

So, finally I say that I am very pleased to have this opportunity to get an independent, well-planned research agenda I think for the next generation and I am open to redesign. Don't take any of this as a given. So, what advice would you offer my board and me as we go forward?

Thank you.

(Applause.)