2014 U.S. Conference of Mayors Annual Meeting Dallas, Texas Educational Excellence Task Force Meeting Minutes

Transcription

1 2014 U.S. Conference of Mayors Annual Meeting Dallas, Texas Educational Excellence Task Force Meeting Minutes Chair: Denver Mayor Michael B. Hancock Date: Friday, June 20, 2014 Time: 10:30-11:45 AM [Welcome & Re-Cap by Chair Mayor Michael B. Hancock] I want to quickly provide context about the agenda and the focus of our work as a task force, especially for any new mayors in the room. (Slide 4) There are 4 pillars of our agenda, all focused on eliminating the achievement or opportunity gap from cradle to career. 1. Increase access to early childhood education. 2. Increase the number of high performing seats: This simply means increase the number of schools that are helping our kids achieve at expected levels, including helping those who are behind catch up and keep up. 3. Keep kids on track to graduate. 4. Finally, we must do a better job of increasing access to postsecondary pathways and ensure our students finish. Fact-Sheets about each of these priorities, as well as additional resources for the task force are available online at There you can also find minutes and presentations from our January 2014 meeting, where we discussed these in detail. Since we last met as a Task Force in January, we wrapped up the Mayors for Educational Excellence Tour. (Slide 5) This involved Mayor Kevin Johnson, Mayor Angel Taveras, and former Mayor Julian Castro. Each mayor hosted an education-focused tour of their city. It provided a great opportunity to learn about the best policies, practices, and programs each city was using to eliminate the achievement gap. The reason I bring this up, is that I want to encourage this type of collaboration among all of the mayors in this room. The tour gave us an opportunity to understand what is happening at the ground-level in other cities. It was great to learn first-hand about the challenges and success of a variety of education policies, practices, and programs. My hope is that the online-playbook will serve a similar purpose, in easily connecting mayors, so that we can share our most successful education initiatives with each other. This is a great time for Mayors to take action and make a difference in the community, but it requires learning what options are out there to increase the educational opportunity for our cities kids. Now, I m going to turn it over to our host Mayor Rawlings, and the Honorable Margaret Spellings. (Slide 6) In his short time in office, Mayor Rawlings has taken a hands-on approach to improving education. He has put Dallas in the spotlight nationally and internationally by taking a leading role with the U.S. Conference of Mayors. 1

2 Margaret Spellings is the president of the George W. Bush Presidential Center. She oversees all aspects of the Bush Center activities. Previously Spellings was a president and CEO of Margaret Spellings and Company, a Washington D.C. consulting firm that provided strategic guidance to philanthropic and private sector organizations. She also served as senior advisor the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and was president of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce Foundation. Spellings is also the longest serving staff member to President George W. Bush. She served as U.S. Secretary of Education from 2005 to [National Municipal Report Card Presentation by Mayor Mike Rawlings, the Honorable Margaret Spellings, and Holly Kuzmich of the George W. Bush Presidential Center] Mayor Michael Rawlings of Dallas, Texas We, as mayors, don t have an accurate scorecard to match up one against another. This Report Card will help us to look at important metrics and make decisions on how other cities are successful and what they are doing. We don t have clear best practices to scale. Yet, we have to be able to scale something across the board to be successful. The Bush Institute had just opened so I went to Secretary Spellings, who is raising the money for the scorecard through the Institute. I hope to bring more information back to the leadership committee in the Fall. The Honorable Margaret Spellings & Holly Kuzmich Why Create an Education Report Card For Cities? (Slide 8) We need to bring greater urgency around these key issues. We want to see better results for students and that s why we re doing this and that s why we re around this table. This report card provides a way to better help mayors use their voice. This report card allows you to drive achievement. We aim to develop a template that can be populated with valid comparable data that can be used across state lines to drive student achievement. Potential Data Points for Report Card: This will include comparable data. Data points include information about the city s demographics, their reading and math achievement, and college and career readiness. (Slide 9) We started with a list of 21 districts that participated in the nation s report card trial assessment. (Slide 10) Sample Dallas Report Card (slide 11-13). We compared Dallas to Texas and to the U.S. With this data we can also easily compare different cities. We could also add multiple school districts in the same city together and combine them to present a report card that way. Data for Dallas, Denver, and Sacramento (slide 14 & 17): Here we can easily compare 3 cities in terms of their total schools, students, demographics, average per pupil expenditure, average teacher salary, college and career readiness, and more. Nation s Report Card 2013 Reading Results for 4 TH Grade (slide 15). This is an example of how we can compare many cities in terms of their levels of reading proficiency and math proficiency (slide 16). 2

3 Other Indicators That Could Be Considered for Inclusion: (Slide 18) Such indicators include the environment for school choice, early childhood education, school district productivity, advanced placement course taking, school culture and safety, and local initiatives. You would be able to see how a district does with low-income students, and compare this with other districts. Global Report Card: We can also take district data and compare performance to a set of 25 developed countries all across the world and see how they perform in comparison. You can pull this from every district across the country. Some charter schools are located in the district, but their data is not included in the district summaries. Yet, charter schools in a municipality will be included the report card. If they are not in the municipality, they will not be in the report card Next Steps: (slide 19) Finalize list of metrics and indicators for report card Create a customized template Preview the final product with the U.S. Conference of Mayors Finalize timeline for release Comments from mayors Out-of-school programs should also be measured because of their great impact. We should be careful that we are not comparing ourselves to mediocrity. College and career readiness is where we are the weakest. None of data points presented are actual measures for this. It is not well predicted by ACT and SAT scores. I worry that when we gather basic background information that we re now framing an angry debate around issues that mayors have little influence over. We re setting ourselves up for wrong debate in our communities. The more we can link education to workforce readiness the better off we will be. Need to close skills gap not either or this is really where the rubber meets the road. There needs to be separation between inner city schools to see what the issues are: social, educational, etc. [On-line Playbook Presentation by Mayor Michael Hancock] In January, the task force agreed that developing an Online Playbook for Education Mayors, would be a great strategy. This playbook would serve as a resource for mayors to learn about the best education initiatives that are eliminating the achievement gap in cities across the nation. The goal is that more mayors can have the tools and resources to replicate such initiatives in their own city. (Slide 20) I d like to thank the following Mayors and their dedicated staff for taking the time to work with my own staff in developing the application and vetting criteria for the playbook. We would not have been able to complete this without your guidance and feedback. (Slide 21) Mayor Carolyn Goodman Las Vegas, NV, Task Force Vice Chair 3

4 Mayor Alvin Brown Jacksonville, FL Mayor Christopher Cabaldon West Sacramento, CA Mayor Greg Fischer Louisville, KY Mayor Sly James Kansas City, MO Mayor Marilyn Strickland Tacoma, WA Mayor Marty Walsh Boston, MA The playbook application, which will be released and available on August 1 st, was designed to line up to the 4 pillars of the task force agenda. (Slide 22) It consists of short answer questions, asking about the purpose, outcomes, and mayor s role within an education initiative. It is by no means an extensive application, but definitely provides a solid opportunity for city staff and their mayors to share their great education initiatives with others, whether it is a policy, practice, or program. My staff, in collaboration with the staff of our mayoral co-chairs, developed the vetting criteria. This criteria will help us display the most successful initiatives, with a strong purpose and clear outcomes. While the timeline is not yet completely finalized, and we are still working out some of the details of this process, I want to share with you a general time frame for its completion. Our goal is to ultimately release the initial version of the playbook at the January 2015 U.S.C.M Conference. We will open the application process to any mayor who is a member of the U.S. Conference of Mayors on August 5th. (Slide 23) Cities will have from August 5th until October 3rd to submit their applications. This is an opportunity to really showcase your best education initiatives. Feel free to submit more than one. Our small team of mayoral education advisors will vet the applications, and provide their recommendations to the cochairs of this project. (Slide 24) On the website, our Issues and Solutions page provides resources that go into the 4 pillars in more detail, explaining why they are important. You will be able to create an account and submit an application using the Submit Your Program tab. By January, there will be a password-protected page for mayors to interact - with regards to the education initiatives they are developing and/or using in their own cities. Comments from Mayors Gratitude and appreciation to Mayor Hancock for developing playbook. Data is important to demonstrate the challenges in city schools, but it s equally important to have best practices for these challenges. Will the playbook be available on a mobile phone or as an app? It will most likely be available as a mobile site, we are in the very early stages of seeing if it could be an app. The importance of a strong vetting process to make sure we re actually getting and displaying best practices. 4

5 Mayor Hancock Now I d like to introduce you to Jim Shelton, Deputy Secretary of the U.S. Department of Education. Deputy Secretary Shelton previously served as head of the Office of Innovation and Improvement at the Department of Education. He was a program director for education at the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. Finally, he has a wealth of experience launching, acquiring, and operating educationrelated businesses. (Slide 25) [My Brother s Keep Initiative Presentation by Deputy Secretary Jim Shelton] When you look at data in any of these districts you see that boys of color are performing the lowest Dropout rates, incarceration rates, etc are all higher with them. The question becomes: What do you do about it? Brookings Institute has displayed that there are six specific innovation points: Healthy start and ready for school Early literacy Graduating high school ready for college Post-secondary education/training Getting a good job Avoiding criminal and violent crimes, and getting second chance Target: Boys, and young men of color 0-25 Goal: strengthen cradle to career pathways and break the school to prison pipeline 1. Access to high quality ECE 2. Reduce drop-outs/disconnected youth 3. Mentoring- more caring adults into their lives Ninety-five percent of low-income kids in need of glasses will never even get an eye exam before kindergarten. Now there is almost no low hanging fruit in this work. Yet, if there is any- that s it. It s vital that kids have healthy start and are ready for school. A lot of things embedded in the report are common sense. For example, chronic absenteeism and expulsion are the driving reasons behind low performance. A Universal design of learning means that you design something that makes it better for everyone. When your least performing kids are doing better, all your kids are doing better. Importance of summer jobs- all of this is about jobs- incentives for maintaining learning. Comments/Discussion from mayors Is there a way that Deputy Secretary Shelton could speak directly with people in my own city? The short answer is yes. When trying to lead in a city of multiple contradictory opinions, it s important that mayors first identify the key leaders, and then meet with them and see what they can do to improve city problems. [Adjourn] 5