National data show that African American grades on average are four years behind their white peers. All of the numbers, no matter how you look at it, are shocking in their dimensions. A lot of reformers in education have had a lot of good ideas. Many, of course, care deeply about their work and the children they serve, yet we are not making the progress that we need to as a nation. The achievement gap separating African American and Latino students from whites and Asians has barely narrowed. In my view, that gap is the shame of this great nation. As New York City schools chancellor, I've been working hard to narrow the gap to afford educational opportunity to all students, working closely with the Deputy Mayor Dennis Walcott, who's here, and Mayor Michael Bloomberg. We've made progress. But as chancellor of the biggest school district in the United States, I know we're not going to be able to fully tackle these problems if we don't work together as a nation, don't prioritize education for our highest-need students, and if we don't have the national leadership that this will require. We need to be clear about this. To me, this is not just an issue of school reform. It's a civil rights issue - indeed, the civil rights issue of our time. As W.E.B. DuBois said, education is the most important of all civil rights. And what might be even scarier than that achievement gap that I'm talking about is that our national leaders are not talking about it, let alone taking the bold steps that will be necessary to fix what's so obviously broken. That's why we're here today announcing the Education Equality Project. We're group of people and we're others - we're just starting - from different parts of the country, and we spend our days working on different things. Reverend Sharpton and I are the co-chairs of the group. Somebody else dubbed us "the odd couple," Al... [laughter] ...but I like to view it differently. I like to view it as the end of Casablanca - I think this is the beginning of a beautiful friendship. [Laughter.] But we're joining with school superintendents, a mayor, a former governor, who's here with us, educators, reformers, civil rights leaders, and my friend James Mtume, a talk show host, who's also one of the great musicians of our time. Believe me, this is just the start. We're gonna grow in numbers in the coming weeks and months ahead, and we're gonna press our agenda forward. You'll hear from some of us this morning, and you'll be hearing from more of us in the coming weeks and months. We're planning conferences at both the Republican and Democratic national conventions. We plan to seek to get others, including Senators Obama and McCain, to be talking about education and to be addressing these serious issues. And we don't intend to give up until our leaders take the actions necessary to fix this national shame and also to meet this national obligation. Let me quickly outline what we stand for before I introduce my co-chair and the members of the Educational Equality Project. We believe that America has to take on six key challenges. First, everything needs to be built on a system of rigorous accountability for everyone in the school system - at the school level, teachers, principals, central office administrators like myself, and so on. Indeed, that core principal - that it must begin from accountability - was the key to Al Shanker's speech in 1994 at the Pew Forum. And he talked specifically not just about accountability, but about accountability for student learning and the outcomes and the decisions. Second, we need to ensure that there's an effective teacher in every classroom and an effective principal in every school. You know, every report that comes out - most recently the one that came out with a bipartisan report from the NCLB, the Aspen Commission - concludes the following: one of the fundamental principals of No Child Left Behind, supported by [inaudible] research, is the idea that teacher quality is the single most important school factor in student success. The single most important factor. And yet research also shows that teacher quality is unevenly distributed in schools and that students with the greatest needs tend to have access to the least qualified and least effective teachers. The most important factor, but those who need it most get the least effective and the least qualified. We need to look at how we compensate teachers. We need to look at our tenure system. We need to look at [inaudible] tenure decision making. We need to professionalize the teaching cadre. We need to support our teachers, but we also need to be bold enough to make sure that those who are not right for our classrooms are not teaching our students. Overall, we need to commit ourselves to make sure that every decision about the people we employ, the money we spend, the resources that we deploy, have a single-minded focus: what will best serve our students, regardless of how it affects other interests. We need to call on parents and students - for them to demand more from their schools, but also to demand more from themselves. And in that regard, we need to empower parents by giving them a meaningful voice in where their children are educated. And we need to make sure that public charter schools are a viable option throughout this nation. Competition will help us in public education. And finally, but perhaps most importantly, we need to challenge the conventional wisdom that's left us locked in a system that's not working for many of our kids, and also those entrenched interests that are protecting concerns that don't protect what's the best interest of our children. This means challenging politicians, public officials, educators, and anybody or anything else who stands in the way of the necessary change that [inaudible] is long overdue. We will take on laws, contracts, and other barriers to successfully educating our children. Now I'd like to introduce the man who's my partner in this work, the Reverend Al Sharpton. As some say, we don't agree on everything, but working together in this, if you ask me, this is what's important. I was honored and excited when Al came to me and said, let's work together on this important issue. I think with this [inaudible] we have the potential to make a real difference in this country. And I know one thing for sure: America's kids are lucky to have a civil rights champion like Al Sharpton on their side. Reverend?

Al Sharpton: Thank you, Chancellor Klein. As he stated, in 1954, with the Brown vs. the Board of Education decision by the Supreme Court, it really was a jumping - or jump-off start of the civil rights movement. What began as a pursuit to give equal opportunity to a quality education for all Americans somehow has been lost in the last decade of the 20th century and in the first decade of the 21st century. James Mtume, who you introduced, a Grammy Award-winning musician, challenged me on why are we in the civil rights community being so silent when according to data, only 48% of young black men are graduating high school. I was in Detroit last week. In Detroit, only 34% are graduating. Yes, we're in an age when we are trying to move beyond race, but achievement in education is not beyond race. And those of us that discuss race on a daily basis have had laryngitis while our children are drowning in the waters of indifference and in old coalitions that no longer work and no longer care. So I have decided to stand with Mr. Klein and others that are willing to bring change to the situation of those that need change the most. And that are young people, particularly young people who are locked in a achievement corridor that does not have an entry point for them. Why? Because everyone is important but the student. There are those that protect the principals; there are those that protect the teachers; there are those that protect the administrators. But who is standing up for the children? The parents don't come to PTA meetings. And the results are that over half of young black men are not graduating school--many of them fast-tracked to jail and their lives destroyed. And we don't have the time, because we have our alliances and our old core missions, to speak on their behalf. This group is being formed to give voice to that; to say to those that are bringing about this era of change, whomever that might be, in the White House or in our houses, that we must make a priority this devastating problem, of lack of equal achievement accessibility for young students around this country. If you were born in Mississippi pre-1954, you knew what the landscape looked like. Unfortunately though, if you were born in Detroit in 2008, the landscape is not much different. Who's at fault? All of us are. Who's going to solve it? All of us must. So, he says we're the 'odd couple,' and I thought that after doing a commercial with Pat Robertson, that is the oddest I would do. But I think that we are not the 'odd couple,' we're the 'necessary couple' that have brought on others to say that we've got to bring up what others don't bring up. Ultimately, that's what Civil Rights leadership is about. And let us be clear; education and equal access to achievement is the Civil Rights issue of the 2001st century. It is the most compelling problem that we brought out of the last century, and we can't bring those that didn't deal with it as the ones that will solve it. There must be a new alignment, there must be a new alliance, so we can bring a new day to young students in this country.

JK: Now I'll introduce another member of this project, Michelle Rhee. She's the chancellor of the public school system in DC. A year ago you were appointed chancellor, and in a year she has made remarkable progress. She was also a classroom teacher. Will she prove--contrary to what many people believe--that great teaching can change the lives of all children? Michelle Rhee.

Michelle Rhee: Good morning. So I look at this from a perspective that is very much on the ground, every day, in classrooms. We are a district of about 50,000 children here in Washington DC. We have 144 schools, and if you look at the academic achievement levels in this city, they can be described as nothing but absolutely dismal. We have a situation where if you look at our NAEP scores compared to other urban districts we are dead last. We are the only school district in the entire country that is on high-risk status with the US Department of Education. We have an achievement gap in this system of about 70 percentage points, in some subject areas at the secondary grade level, between wealthy white students and poor black students in this city. And only about 9% of the ninth graders who start school with us graduate college within five years. Nine percent. So if you look at any of those academic outcome measures you know that we are a district that is in dire, dire need. About a year ago--exactly, in fact, a year ago tomorrow--the mayor appointed me as the chancellor of schools under the new mayoral control structure. And after the first week or so, after people sort of got over the fact--they were sort of wondering 'what on god's green earth is Adrian Fenty thinking, hiring a 37 year old Korean girl from Toledo Ohio who's never run a school district before; and why does he think that she is the person to come in and affect this change?"--I sort of went off on a tour across this city, talking to people, everybody that I possibly could. And what was very apparent in those first few weeks was that people were excited; they wanted to see the change. They said we are on-board; we are supportive of you; we will do anything that you need us to do. And when you think about it, when you talk about ensuring that every single student gets an excellent education, when you talk about closing the achievement gap, those are things that nobody wants to argue with, or can argue with. Everyone wants those things. And that sort of stood in place for a few months, until the change actually started coming about. And this what I think is the most important thing to take out of this: we don't get from where we are now to where we need to be without significant change occurring, and with that change comes a significant amount of opposition. You cannot see transformational, revolutionary things happen in a district without a lot of people pushing back, because the bottom line is that you are going to question every single thing that happens, every person's job, what they are doing day to day. And so within the course of this year, in this city, we have approved legislation--the city council approved legislation--to make all central office employees [unintelligible] employees, so we can hold people accountable for ensuring that they are producing results for kids. We closed 23 schools, which is 15% of our overall schools. We restructured another 27 schools. We outsourced certain key functions of the district. We made decisions that we knew very clearly were going to help move us in the right direction, but as soon as we started making those decisions, a lot of the people who initially said 'yes, we want this change to happen,' said 'wait a second, this is too much change, too quickly, not the right process.' And what I have to say is that when you look at where our children are now and the fact that we are doing a disservice to them every single day, I do not think that this kind of change can happen fast enough. And, in fact, when we were in our city council hearing talking about why we needed to move to this [unintelligible] legislation, people were sort of saying 'this is unfair; it's inhumane; we cannot move to this kind of [unintelligible] system.' And so it struck me during this entire time that very few people were talking about children or schools or student achievement in the whole equation--they were talking about adults and sort of job security and job protection and due process. And I thought to myself, you know what, there is no due process for children. When you are a child in this city who does not get the education they deserve in any given year, you don't have an appeals board that you can go to. You don't have due process. You can't say, 'you know what, I didn't get what I deserved this year, therefore, please refund my parents taxpayer dollars.' And so basically what we have is we've created a system where year in and year out we have failing schools, and no one suffers the ramifications of those failures except for the children. Adults get to keep their jobs and keep their contracts and sort of maintain the status quo. And it's about time that we changed that dynamic, and shook the way that we operate in this city and across the nation. We cannot wait any longer. The bottom line, as Chancellor Klein said, is that public education is supposed to be the great equalizer in our country. It is supposed to be the thing that ensures that it does not matter whether you are black or white, rich or poor. We have public schools so that every child can have an equal shot in life. If you work hard and do the right thing, you can live the American Dream. That is not a reality in our nation's capital today. The reality in Washington DC today is that if you live in Georgetown, versus if you live in Anacostia, you get two wildly different educational experiences. That is the biggest social injustice imaginable. That means that we are still, in this day and age, allowing the color of a child's skin and the district that they live in to dictate their educational attainment levels and therefore their life chances and their life outcomes. And so we have made the commitment here in Washington, D.C.--and I think that this group is making the commitment nationally--that we are going to change the culture of public education. We are going to finally put aside the rights and privileges and priorities of adults and make sure that, finally, every singe decision within public education is made within the best interests of the children. Thank you.

JK: Thank you, Michelle, and thank you for your passion for our children and the work you do every day. I want to introduce another superintendent--or CEO I guess they call him. He's a good friend of mine; he was my deputy in New York; he's now the CEO of the Baltimore school district. His story--as someone who came here in his teens from Cuba and went on to Columbia College and Harvard Law School, but decided to get a real job running the school system--his story is a story of what education can do to transform lives. Doctor Andres Alonso.

** Andrés Alonso**: Well Michelle, after listening to you, I only want to say 'ditto.' We're having parallel first years. I was named on June 13th, and welcomed to a district that had made progress over the decade, but where less than fifty percent of the students graduate. As a matter of fact, last week after an Ed Week article naming the graduation rate for the top 50 school districts--I think we were 48th or 49th at 41.5%--somebody wrote in a blog the headline: 'Thank God for Detroit.' And it struck me as ironic, as in, it's not a competition. And it's not a competition because no child is disposable. Children come as is, and no child is disposable. Leaving aside the question though, of those... who don't graduate, there's also the question of those that do graduate and what happens to them. In Baltimore City, with a graduation rate below 50%, roughly 44% of the students who do graduate go on to enroll in 2- and 4-year colleges. Of those who do enroll - and start doing the math in your head - only 14% emerge with a degree after five years. Do the math, less than 50 times 44 times 14, and the return on investment is in the low single digits. We cannot talk about the American dream or about equity or equality in this society, or about meritocracy in this society, and have those numbers. It is not sustainable if we want to be a society where every single child, every single student has the same chance as other children. Bringing it back to the level of the child, I will tell you that after a wildly successful educational career, at some point I found myself working in one of the most problematic schools and school districts in the United States in the 1980s. I became a teacher of emotionally disturbed adolescents in a center school in 1987 in Newark, New Jersey. And what struck me right away, is what had been easy for me was incredibly difficult for these students and their families. There were walls all around us and we kept hitting the walls. And, there is the American Dream, and then there is the reality of how we engineer failure in our schools and inner cities. And this work has to be about reengineering our schools so that every single child truly has a chance to shine as every single child should. It's not a competition. It's been set up right now as a race where some succeed and some fail, and the children who fail are predictable by the color of their skin, the income of their parents, or the language they speak. So I'm very proud to be part of this initiative and we're going to induce changes in the structure of American education.

JK: Thank you, Andrés. Our final speaker is known to all of you, and it's really a privilege to be able to introduce him. It's Governor Roy Romer. When you think about a man's life, Roy was Governor of the great state of Colorado, went on to be Chair of the Democratic National Party. He was at a point where any rational person would have gone on to retirement, read a lot of books, and enjoyed his life, but what did he do - took on one of the toughest challenges in this country, he became a superintendent of the Los Angeles school district. He still kept reading those books, whenever I visited he always had one for me to read, but for six years, Roy Romer put his shoulder against the wheel for kids in the city that were really getting the short end of the educational stick. And after all that, when he asked me what he should do next, and I said you should do what I said last time, retire, relax, and enjoy your life, but he took on Education in '08, EDIN08, which is an effort, a national effort, to focus this nation on the educational challenges we face - challenges that go beyond, quite frankly, the issues we're discussing here today. I'm thrilled that he is going to be a partner in this Educational Equality Project - Roy Romer.

Roy Romer: Thank you very much Joel. I really want to thank Al Sharpton, and Joel Klein, and all the rest for initiating this movement. It is basically a civil rights issue, it's an issue of individual opportunity, family opportunity throughout the country, but I want to connect it to this morning's headlines and to the Presidential campaign that we're in. All of us in this room get up in the morning, and we're identified with issues either of national security, the economy, healthcare, global warming - every one of those issues will fail in this country unless we do a better job with education. And that's the point of this press conference. There are leaders in America, running for President, running for Governor, running for local office, who simply need to bring this issue up front and discuss it. We have an opportunity now to make a decision about where this nation is going and what commitment we all are making to get it there, and education, frankly, is the key to it. Just a couple of facts - in the last thirty years we have slipped from being number one in the world to number 25 in math, number 21 in science. Our economic advantage is being lost, and let me tell you for those of you in this nation who are listening to this or read about it, it's not just an issue of a special group concerned with civil rights, it is an issue of everybody's livelihood. If you are a senior and you're worried about how this nation is going to have an economic base to support your retirement, we have to improve the education in this nation. If you are a citizen that's worried about where your child is going to be employed, you have to worry about how we're going to raise the skill levels of America. If you're a person who has a subprime mortgage and are worried about getting more income for your family, you know the skills and knowledge are the key to income in a family and a nation. This is an issue we must focus. We are in a national crisis and having a national education system that has simply failed to deliver what this nation deserves and each family deserves. So I just want to close by pointing out the detail of this message. This message here is we need to address it, but quite specifically in improving the quality of teaching, improving the relationships we have by contract and by statute, about how we attract people to this profession, how we assign them to work, compensate them and weed out those that don't belong in there. We in particular need to focus upon allocating resources based on a demonstrated criteria that success is occurring and we need to tie that to all decisions we make. This is a right movement, it is the right time, it is the right kind of leadership, and the final thing we need to do is to bring this to the attention of both presidential candidates and everybody in this national campaign, if you really care about America, if you care about these issues, you've got to put education right on the front burner. We can do better, and we must do better. Thank you.

JK: Thank you, Roy. I'm glad you didn't take my advice. Let me just introduce the other members of the project who are here with us today. Starting on my right, your left, Joe Williams, Democrats for Educational Reform, formerly a reporter who covered education in Milwaukee and New York. Kevin Chavous, who was on the City Council and has been an educational activist - City Council here in D.C. - all his adult life. Thank you for joining us. James Mtume, who I introduced before and am happy to introduce a second time to you. If you don't listen, listen to KISS radio, Open Line. It's really a remarkable show. And Amy Wilkins, who, along with Kati Haycock and the Ed Trust are doing some of the most important work on educational quality in the United States. Let me also thank on my staff Chris Cerf and Brian Ellner, who have really worked hard to put this together, along with Charlie King of the Reverend's staff and their extraordinary work in bringing this. I'd be happy to take any questions you have.

Q: [Paraphrase: Why hasn't education gotten better?]

JK: Do you want to take the first question?

AS: Well, let me say this - and I'd be interested in the Governor - I can say, from - since you referred to running for office - is that too many times those that are seeking office are playing to the special interest groups that vote. And the children don't vote. And we - they've not been made a special interest. And we intend to do that with this campaign. We keep going to the old ways that don't work to protect the political careers of some and the contracts of others at the expense of the children. And the results are the data that we have. And someone has to have the political and the social courage - and I hope this group helps to begin that nationally - to say, wait a minute, the children are suffering. And everyone is protected in this setup but the education of these young people. And that is a huge civil rights issue.

RR: I will [inaudible] this very carefully. 420 questions on debates before one was about education, and then that question was, 'Who's your favorite teacher?' Okay? We have a blockage, and we gotta get over it. To examine it deeply, it's because for 200 years we have distributed education responsibility to 15,000 districts. We now live in a world in which every other great nation has a much more coherent policy on what the standards ought to be and how we get the job done. We need a president that can help break through - together with a whole lot of other officials - so that this becomes a national issue. Succinctly, presidential candidates do not want to go to Iowa and tell them how to run their schools. That'd be rejected. We need to change that to where 50 governors and many local officials decide locally to benchmark their standards to the world... then the federal government can come to that local community and say let me help you get the tools to get done what you've already decided to do. One final thing that is all we have to mention here is parents. We can't just have parents left as advisors. We have got to ask two things of them. Much more involvement in schools but secondly more responsibility as parents to make these youngsters care for and succeed in education.

Q: ... Any recommendations, any specific ideas or policies ...?

JK: Yeah, we are. We are going to come out with recommendations, we are going to be filing position papers, we're going to be on radio, we're going to be on television talking about these issues. We're going out there, the Reverend and I are doing something of a tour together. And the issues we'll be talking about are the issues that have been talked about here today. Designing a system that really puts the interest of children first, make sure that there are real options for people, that you don't curtail irrationally things like charter schools, that decisions about tenure are made to reflect a sensible system, that how we allocate and how teachers get assigned to schools. Those are all our issues that we will be addressing and addressing in the coming months.

Q: Just yesterday there was a group ... Schools can't do this alone, that there needs to be a structure of other social supports, health care, and ... is that .. part of your campaign? Or do you agree with that statement as well?

JK: Well, I think the Reverend said it best. This is not...We all are in this and we've all got to work on this. Families have got to work on it, other supports are important. But what our principal focus will be is on the schools. And one thing I will say to you is we don't yet know what schools can achieve because we haven't gotten serious about it. What we do know and what that report pointed out, there are some schools in America today that are getting entirely different outcomes. Some teachers like Michelle Rhee or Andres Alonso are getting entirely different outcomes with the very same kids that people tell me you can't educate to a different level. And so if that can happen for some, the question we all must ask is why isn't it happening for all? If we know it can happen for some, and that report pointed it out, why isn't it happening for all? I've got a school in Brooklyn, it's called Excellence Academy, Excellence Academy is an all boys, over 90% African American, the rest Latino, boys, that school last year in proficiency was 100% proficient in math and 92 % proficient in English, that school doesn't have any selective criteria for admission, it admits by lottery. That school and many others like it show that if we get serious about this, we will see the noise change in this country. That doesn't mean that issues of health and issues of family support and all the other issues are not important. But what our focus will be is on changing the educational system.

Q: Can you offer one concrete, specific thing you'd like to see the presidential candidates say or do about education?

JK: Well, first thing I'd like them to say, is to have the kind of discussion we're having here today. If you don't acknowledge what's going on... Second thing I'd like them to say is outline a program that ensures not just that we'll have graduates, but that our graduates will be college-ready and ready for the twenty-first century. High standards. I'd like to see them articulate a program that ensures just what I quoted from that recent NCLB report, which is also part of Lou Gerson's work in the Teaching Commission, that ensures through incentives and other programs that we make sure we get high quality teachers in all of our schools and not just in some of our schools. And the issue of educational inequity and the quality of teachers is a critical issue. There are lots of ways to go about that, we've been doing some of that in NYC. We've put in place a pay for performance system, we have a program called the lead teacher, but we need to do a lot, lot more. Every system that I know is short math and science teachers. When you're short math and science teachers, you're short math and science teachers in your high-needs communities. We need to make sure through economic incentives and other structures that our high-needs communities, that our kids who need education so much get good quality teaching. Without a good math teacher, a kid doesn't succeed in math.

Q: ... What's your strategy going forward? ...

JK: Well, it's the beginning of a discussion. There are things in No Child Left Behind that we need to build on. I think they can have a much more robust, much more sophisticated accountability system. In New York City, we have our own accountability system. Every school gets a letter grade A to F. We compare similar schools to each other. I think that would be a core principle. I think we need to move accountability throughout the system, not just at the level of school, each individual teacher, the school district itself, all of us. And I think that ought to be built in. And I think federal funds ought to be tied effectively to accountability measures. I think the federal government ought to support the kind of differentials and other incentives that will be necessary in order to make sure that we get an equitable distribution of high-quality teachers. I think they ought to invest heavily in math and science, where there's - if you look at Governor Romer's from the recent [inaudible] analysis, 25th and 21 for U.S. And there'll be a lot of other things, and there are people who have their own ideas. But what brings us together is a shared sense that the discussion by and large on education reform has a feeling of the same old same old getting sadly the same old same old results for our kids. We need a new dialogue, once that's much more serious and much more purposeful. What the Reverend just said is what I see as the key to this. In America, in politics, people with voice, people with power are heard. What our job is to be the voice of the voiceless in this discussion.

Q: What changes would you like to see in No Child Left Behind right now?

MR: So again, this is going to be more a granular level. I think that there are several things that we need to do. One, I think we need to move the debate from highly qualified teachers to highly effective teachers. I think that the research shows that there are not a lot of input characteristics that are tied to student achievement levels and therefore to base the qualifications of people on that doesn't make a whole lot of sense when you could instead look at whether or not people are producing significant academic gains for students, and then deem them qualified or not based on that. So I'd like to move to highly effective. I think that there are some things in terms of looking at the success of ELL and special education students that have to be changed. For example, I think that, you know, how we determine the success of a special education student should be dictated by their IEP first and foremost. But I also want to say that I think that - and I say this as a Democrat - that there are a lot of folks in the Democratic Party who sort of say, well, NCLB is an awful law. We need to completely below it up and start over again. And I would say as a Democrat and as somebody who is leading an urban school district that we really do need to have - we need to continue No Child Left Behind. We do need to tweak it to make sure that it is improved. But the rhetoric around the fact that we're testing kids too much and there's too much accountability, and that sort of thing, to me does not hold water. Because for too many years when we were not holding people accountable and we weren't looking at student achievement by subgroup, etc., we saw what the results of that system were. So we now need to move to make sure that we are looking very hard at student achievement levels, and as Chancellor Klein said, that we have an accountability system where people are held to what the results are all up and down the system.

Q: ... ELL ...?

JK: This is a global economy, and we have to do both things that you just said. That is, we - certainly a city like mine, a city like Baltimore, a city like - we have lots of people who come there and don't speak English. We've gotta do a much better job of teaching them English and teaching them English quickly. And that's another thing we need to measure in terms of our success. At the same time, we need to instruct children in other languages so that they can be prepared for the global economy, and that's, again, part of our challenge, similar to the challenges we have in the so-called STEM areas - science, technology, engineering, and math.