Fix Our Schools: How to Turn Around Public Schools
VELSHI: We're going to continue our coverage of the situation in Silver Spring, Maryland. This is just outside of Washington, D.C. These pictures brought to us by a helicopter courtesy of our affiliate there, WJLA. That is the Discovery Building, 1 Discovery Place on Wayne in Silver Spring, Maryland. There is a gunman in that building. The building and the campus, if you will, has been evacuated. We don't know who's left in there. We know there's a gunman. Police say they've got a visual on this gunman who has apparently got a hostage with him. They don't know if there's more people involved, but he apparently has a hostage with him. Let me tell you -- what they know. They reported there was a suspicious device on this man. Well it turns out that he's got a revolver, they seem to be able to see a revolver and they seem to be able to see tanks on his back. I don't even know what that means, but that's what we're hearing, that there's these suspicious devices or the suspicious device are tanks on his back. So they've called in explosive experts to try and get a closer look. Police say they do know where he is. They see him, they've got a visual on him. He does appear to have a hostage and he has tanks on his back as well as a gun. SWAT teams are on the scene. We'll continue to cover this for closely for you and bring you updates immediately as they develop. That is the situation at Discovery Place -- 1 Discovery Center in Silver Spring, Maryland. "Fix Our Schools," words that you are going to hear a lot of on CNN this week. We have sent reporting teams across the country to document the education crisis in America. Most importantly, we're going to shine a light on success stories that can empower us to offer our children more than they're getting right now. Now imagine a school achieving the following -- 90 percent of its teachers and other staff say that they are satisfied; 100 percent, that's the number of eighth graders who have been accepted to further their education at preparatory high schools; thousands, the numbers of high-school scholarships the students have earned. The school is not fiction, it actually exists. There are two of them actually, both of them are charter schools in Brooklyn founded by Morty Ballen. He -- listen to this, though, Morty says give him a public school and he can get the same results. Morty Ballen is the CEO and founder of Explore Schools. He joins me now. Morty, welcome.</s>MORTY BALLEN, CEO & FOUNDER, EXPLORE CHARTER SCHOOL: Thank you.</s>VELSHI: We think about charter schools as small samples that grow a grade at a time and turn things over over time and run, some arguments go, more efficiently than regular public schools. You think you can do what you're doing here in a public school, how?</s>BALLEN: So that's right and that's exactly why we're doing what we're doing what we're doing, because we're not getting to enough kids fast enough. What we learned at Explore Charter School is in one year, we had double-digit gains with our students, and that's because the grown-ups changed their minds. The grown-ups did different things --</s>VELSHI: The grown-ups being the teachers? The administrators?</s>BALLEN: The teachers, the administrators, the entire staff worked together as a team to change how we were using time, the change the material we were using with our kids and to change how we were selecting and retaining staff. The kids change when the grown-ups change and we think we can apply those lessons to any public school.</s>VELSHI: OK, so in science, you would use a control group. Did anything else change? Are the facilities substantially improved? Is the class size substantially smaller?</s>BALLEN: No, it was the adults who said, this is not good enough and our kids were almost waiting for the kids to change their minds.</s>VELSHI: This is red meat, though, to some people. I mean there are some people who think all we do is bash on public schoolteachers. Is that the implication that your teachers can do better than public school teachers do?</s>BALLEN: I think any teacher in the right environment and help with the right expectations and working toward the same mission can achieve to the goals we set for our kids. I think too often what we do in our country is blame the kids or the families if they're not achieving, when really it's the adults in the school building who can be asking themselves --</s>VELSHI: What part of a kids' success is actually about the kids or the families? There has got to be something.</s>BALLEN: Again, you're talking to a guy who believes strongly that schools have a profound impact on a kid's life. We are with kids nine hours a day, outside the institution of family, I know of no other institution that can have that profound impact. If we're spending our time correctly, doing the right things, working with kids over years, we'll achieve those goals.</s>VELSHI: Let's get down to brass tacks then. What are the things that the adults in the school environment -- the teachers, the staff -- decided to do differently that have resulted in better results for the kids in the school?</s>BALLEN: So one, dig into data. Individual by individual student, look at the interim test results every eight weeks. What does each kid need in order to achieve the standards? And then we had freedom, as a charter school, with resource allocation. Change how teachers are using their time, change the number of kids who --</s>VELSHI: Let me stop you there. You said as a charter school, we had freedom. Which means, could a public school under the system, without being a charter school, do what you did? Or, does something have to change?</s>BALLEN: We need the same freedoms. We need freedoms around human capital and we need the freedoms around resource allocation. And --</s>VELSHI: OK, so this isn't just a bunch of teachers and administrators in public schools not doing it, it's that there's a system that prevents them from achieving what you want to --</s>BALLEN: I think there are two parts. One is you need the freedoms, which is the DNA and the structure. And two, you need the specific levers that you're going to change, and we've learned about both of those at Explorer. So what we have right now, Ali, is we actually have a charter from the state of New York, we have a principal hired, we are awaiting for the school to turnaround. We have -- we wrote a charter to say, give us a school that's failing, give us all of those students, we don't want to grow one grade at a time.</s>VELSHI: And what grades would you take?</s>BALLEN: Our goal is K through 5. Our goal is to work with --</s>VELSHI: So that could be a few hundred students?</s>BALLEN: It could be a few hundred students. And that's why --</s>VELSHI: So you're telling me that if the state of New York gives you a school, K to 5, with a few hundred students that are underperforming, you can turn it around?</s>BALLEN: Absolutely. The kids are waiting for us. Those families are waiting for us.</s>VELSHI: So the idea here is that, can this be -- this can be replicated, in your mind, at any level throughout --</s>BALLEN: So part of -- that's a great question, and part of what we're doing is charter schools serve 3.5 percent of our country's population. It takes too long each year to grow. We need a more systemic solution to our country's educational crisis, turnaround gets to more kids faster.</s>VELSHI: Thank you for bringing us this information, we appreciate it. Morty Ballen is the CEO and founder of Explore Schools, joining us today. For more information about Morty and his Explore Schools program, go to my Web site, CNN.com/Ali.