So welcome everyone thank you for coming out tonight to hear our visitor Dr. Fred Brill of Lafayette speak on his district's recent experience of modifying its approach to gate education and if you can shuffle toward the middle so that latecomers might be able to find a seat then I think that will be great. My name is Karen Hamilton I'm a Deputy State Public Defender and I have had children enrolled in Davis schools continuously over the last 15 years. I have two kids who went through the Spanish Immersion Program and are now in college and also I have a daughter enrolled in the fifth grade gate classroom at Willett Elementary. This event has been planned by numerous individual Davis residents who are parents of students presently and previously enrolled in Davis schools. These include Jill VanZenten, Kathy Sachs, Jan Marie Garcia, Laura Anderson, Lauren Palmer and Maureen Libet. As a group we cover the full spectrum. We have children who have been a gate identified some some of whom have been placed in self-contained gate classes. We also have children who have reframed from being tested for the gate program and children who have been enrolled in the regular classrooms. In hosting this event none of us are acting in affiliation with any school, the district or any district officers or staff. We all care about the district and the success and well-being of all of its children and I'm sure that that is true for everyone in this room. We heard about developments in the Lafayette district and we're delighted to learn that Dr. Brill was willing to come and share that story. I see that several of our district leaders have joined us tonight including President Sue Lovenberg of the School Board, Vice President Sheila Allen and other district staff and administrators and we thank them all for attending. We have heard from other individuals and community leaders who wanted to be here tonight but couldn't be here and so we're having to talk film for future reference. Thanks very much to Davis Media Access for doing that. Also thanks very much to Harper Junior High School Principal Zena Ingalls for her part in making it possible for this event to be held on her campus. On your seat you should find two index cards. One is for you to jot down a question you may have for Dr. Brill. Please pass the cards with your question down to the aisles where Kathy and Jill will be collecting them throughout the program. To save time we will organize the questions and direct as many as possible to Dr. Brill during a Q&A session following his presentation. We have promised him that he won't have to go home too late as he does have to drive back to the Bay Area and get ready to go to work in the morning. The other card that you find is for you to put down any comments about this event or suggestions that you would like to see addressed going forward and to provide your contact information if you would like to be included in the continuing conversation over the next few months. At this point we haven't made any plans to form a book or discussion group but we might consider that if there is a lot of interest. We would like to invite other speakers to Davis so that we can continue to learn about alternative approaches to GATE. If you have ideas of or leads to possible future speakers please note those down on your card along with your contact information. When you leave please drop the second card in the bag which you'll find by the door here. I'm very pleased to introduce Dr. Fred Brill Superintendent of the Lafayette School District and an instructor in UC Berkeley's Principal Leadership Institute. After receiving a BA in education from the University of Michigan Dr. Brill earned a master's degree in secondary education from San Francisco State University and a doctorate in education in policy organization measurement and evaluation from UC Berkeley. Dr. Brill has served as a middle school principal a high school and continuation high school English teacher and a special education teacher at the elementary school level. He also served as the area superintendent of the middle school network in the Oakland Unified School District before returning to the Lafayette district in his present role in 2008. The Lafayette district recently has transformed its GATE program from one like ours in Davis with 20 to 30 percent of students enrolled in self-contained classes to one where less than 4 percent of GATE identified students choose self-contained classes. And the vast majority stay in their neighborhood or home schools where they are served by teachers who are well trained in differentiated instruction and who receive steady support to teach under that approach. Please join me in welcoming Dr. Brill to Davis. Thank you. So I met Jan Murray Garcia a few weeks back maybe a couple months back and she asked if it'd be okay if I came out to have coffee with a few parents. This is not what I was expecting. It is really good to be here and I feel honored to be around a group of clearly very passionate parents and educators. And I appreciate the introduction that we are all here for our kids. And I want to say I feel blessed to be associated with the field of education. I think it is the highest honor because of the profound responsibility for we that we have for serving all of our kids. Neither one of my parents nor my grandparents went to college. And they made a lot of sacrifices. So my brother my sister and I could go to college. And I continue to see education as the great equalizer in our society something that provides all of our kids with opportunities. And I take that responsibility very very seriously. Jan why don't we do a little click here. So you've covered some of the different roles that I've had and I do want to also share with you. I have four children. I am in a blended family. Our kids have gone to the Albany schools and the Berkeley schools. Two of the children were gate identified. Two were not. All four of them are currently in college. And for that I am thankful. It feels good to be an empty nester. On a very separate note I had to tell my son when he came back after graduating actually for Davis he's now in grad school that was that there was only room in a home for one alpha male and it was not him. So where do I want to go here. My wife is also an educator and she is another gift that came to me through education. She was part of a PQR process program quality review coming to an elementary school. And the other principal in the district set me up with her. She's now a principal in the West Contra Costa Unified School District. She works in Richmond in the Iron Triangle. That's very different from Lafayette which is a very affluent population that's primarily white and Asian. And you can imagine what our dinner time conversations are like. I will also say that I throughout my career have had a very strong passion for alternative education. I taught emotionally disturbed kids. That was my first teaching position. I taught at a continuation high school. When I was in Oakland I started a community day school for kids. And I continue to see gaps in all systems about how we're serving kids. What I also want to say by way of disclaimer is I'm not an expert on gate by any means. I'm an educator I've been in the field since 1985. But I don't think there's necessarily one way to provide program for kids. All communities are different. But I will say something and you'll see this as a recurring theme. Our decisions and our actions are a reflection of our values. And I want to make sure that we come back to that as we talk about how we're serving kids. So the first part of this presentation and why don't we flip here. The first part of this presentation is going to be a zillion quotes. And I'll do the first couple and then I'm going to ask a couple of people to help me read them so you don't get sick of my voice. We're not going to stop and talk about them. But what I wanted to do was provide some historical context about how we have done schooling in America over the past 250 years. So the first let me throw some stuff here. I thought my computer was going to be by my side so bear with me here. OK. So the first quote here that I wanted to read which is up on the screen for folks in the back. Purpose is more nearly defined by the aggregate of action taken than by any formulation and words. I think it was Mahatma Gandhi who said your actions speak so loudly I cannot hear your words. And it's a nice quote to keep about going to the next slide. There's an educational researcher named LaBerry and I really like his framing in terms of the multiple purposes of education. His argument is because we have conflicting goals that we are somewhat schizophrenic in what we deliver and the kinds of results we get. He identifies three different purposes of education. One is democratic equality for citizens. Everyone needs to be educated so that they can participate fully in a democratic society. It's for the public good. The second model that he suggests is one for what he calls social efficiency. It's for workers. And this is something that he believes that we have done in the past. So we track kids. There will be those that do academic or white collar jobs and those will be there'll be others who will do blue collar jobs or trade type jobs and schools can play a role in providing different pathways for career and the workplace. Finally education is seen by some for social mobility purposes. And this is a focus on the individual. And education under this model is seen as providing private benefit. I read one study that for every year of college a kid goes to beyond high school their salary will increase by about seven thousand dollars on average. Doesn't mean that all kids who go to college will make up more money. But that's just one statistic. There is economic value with education and we all know that. OK. This will be the last quote I read for a while and then I think it's going to be Mike and who else are going to be my quote readers. Mike and Laura great. So I want to read this one. So back in 1781 Thomas Jefferson when he was talking about schooling wrote trial is to be made at the grammar schools and the best genius of the whole selected and continued six years and the residue dismissed the best geniuses will be raked from the rubbish annually and be instructed one half are to be discontinued frightening. That's my only commentary. So why don't we here go to Mike. Why don't you read this next one. This is just so you don't get sick of me. Education going Education beyond all other devices of human origin is the great equalizer of the conditions of men the balance wheel of social machinery. Purpose of schooling was to create a unique American culture and character that could be used to mold a large number of recent immigrants into our country. This would include instructing the young in the blessings of democracy and become full participant in it. Laura take us to Harvard. Every subject which is taught should be taught in the same way and to the same extent to every pupil so long as he pursues it no matter what the probable destination of the people may be. OK. Let's jump up to 19 18. Principles of secondary education. Different curricula for different students tracking is reinforced to prevent students from dropping out academic track commercial industrial and mechanical track. So you see we're swinging back again. So bulls and gintas to people who are educational researchers. They talk about social reproduction that that's what schools do. Laura school socialized students to meet the demands they will be expected to assume within the existing class structure. Social relationships and interactions are structured to fragment students into stratified groups where different capabilities attitudes and behaviors are rewarded through the illusion of a meritocratic educational system. She has a bias clearly. So I'm not going to read this next one sit tight Mike because I'll probably call you in here. So well maybe I will. Early test pioneer Lewis Turnin. Every step in this is from 1916. And this is when we first started sorting kids through the use of different types of assessments. Every step in the child's progress should be taken into account of his vocational possibilities. Preliminary investigations indicate that an IQ below 70 rarely permits anything below unskilled labor. 70 to 80 is preeminently that of semi skilled later labor 80 to 90 that of skilled or ordinary clerical labor 100 to 110 or 15 that of semi professional. Those above will be permitted into the professions of the larger fields of business. This information will be of great value in planning the education of a particular child and also planning the differentiated curriculum recommended. So students had their place laid out right from the beginning. That that was one of the purposes in designing some of these assessments. Genie Oaks explains that when psychometricians design these types of standardized assessments that they'll come up with a bunch of questions and then they will typically throw out 60 percent of the items if too many kids are getting them right because it's not providing the sorting mechanism that the assessments are designed to do. Mike can you read this next one please. More from Genie Oaks 1985. Tracking seems to be or seems to retard the academic progress of many students those in average and low groups. Tracking seems to foster low self-esteem among these same students and promote school misbehavior and dropping out. Tracking also seems to lower the aspirations of students who are not in the top groups. Tracking separates students along socioeconomic lines separating rich from poor whites from non whites. OK. Next one. Laura please. Arne Duncan. In America education remains the great equalizer. In liberal democracies the hope springs eternal that expanding educational opportunity will increase social mobility and reduce social inequality. OK. Let's go to Carol Dweck here. Mike would you read this one please. Students who view their intelligence as an unchangeable internal characteristic tend to shy away from academic challenges whereas students who believe that their intelligence can be increased through effort and persistence seek them out. OK. Raise your hand if you're familiar with Carol Dweck's research. So we got a few folks here. Let me share with you one of her seminal studies which has been replicated among different age groups genders racial groups different backgrounds and the results have been consistently the same. I think it's fascinating. What she basically did was she provided provided an assessment that was very easy and she broke two groups and on one half she told the group she'd have them take a series of questions and they got them all right and she'd say you are brilliant you are so smart. The second group they also did equally well and she told that group you did great. You must have worked incredibly hard and then she'd say you want to do some more and both groups would say of course and the tests of course got progressively harder. So now they were missing a couple that she'd say you did so fantastic. Do you want to keep going. Yes. How about you. Do you want to keep going. Oh of course we do. Now they brought the kids to a certain level where they were struggling. They were getting most of the questions wrong. What happened. The group that was told and encouraged in this very brief limited period of time that they were smart and brilliant and highly capable said I'm done. I don't want to go anymore. The group that was told you've been working so hard you want to try some more. They said yes. They said I want to keep going. I didn't read about this study till I was in grad school. I missed the boat as a parent and an educator. What we have focused on and I believe and this is this is a strong statement I want to make when we focus on intelligence and consider to be something that is fixed. We are short changing our children and there's profound evidence in the field that we I mean we know that S.A.T. scores even IQ tests with proper coaching and preparation we can move those numbers. So one of the things and I guess I'll go through this a little more. Let's switch the next slide here. So just to give you the hard data 66 percent of the pupils who were praised for being smart and selected the easy test said they didn't want as they didn't want to take the chance of losing their intelligence label but 90 percent of the group who were praised for their effort selected the harder test as they wanted to maintain their hardworking images. The group praised for intelligence. This is unbelievable to me demonstrated a 20 percent decrease in in performance in comparison with the first test though was no more complex. The effort praised group increase their score by 30 percent. Failure had actually spurred them on. This is if there's one message I want you all to take home to your kids and your students that's one of the things that we should be focusing on things get hard. We're going to face challenges as students as workers as friends as partners as parents and we got to work through it and we'll talk about grittiness in a little bit. Okay. So Daniel Goldman 1995 emotional intelligence raise your hand if you've read the book or heard about him. Mike can you read that one. Much evidence testifies that people who are emotionally adept who know the and manage their own feelings well who read and deal with other people's feelings are at an advantage in any domain in life whether romance and intimate relationships or picking up the unspoken rules that govern success in organizational politics. People well developed with well developed emotional skills are more likely to be content and effective in their lives mastering habits of mine that foster their own productivity. Okay. So he goes on to say when I calculated the ratio of technical skills IQ and emotional intelligence as ingredients of excellent performance emotional intelligence proved to be twice as important as others for jobs at all levels. The most common reason that folks get fired is not ability to do the job. It's not intelligence. What is it the ability to hang to get along with others all different kinds. And this is something that we as educators have a responsibility to emphasize character education is incredibly important. Price of privilege Madeline Levine Laura raising children has come to look more and more like a business endeavor and less and less like an endeavor of the heart parents focus more on achievement that their relationship with them to mistake. Thank you. The relationship with their child the misguided pressure and expectations from educators and parents has resulted in an increase in the incidence of depression substance abuse anxiety and unhappiness and in happiness is increasing at a staggering rate 20 percent of early teen girls are depressed. OK. And this is incredibly pronounced in communities like ours in communities like Lafayette our kids are under enormous pressure. And you know when I grew up in Chicago as a kid school was something you did but it was not your life getting into college was so much easier. I talked to a lot of kids who once a ring card say the pressure is off. I worked so hard to get in. But at what cost. How many of our kids are twitching their way through high school completely sleep deprived over program because of the pressures. And that's something that we have to pay very careful attention to. We want. I'm an educator. I love academics and intellectual growth and development. But if we do that to the expense of other portions of our personality other intelligences are emotional IQ. We're short changing our kids. We're robbing them. They need the downtime they need the social interactions. They need those skills and tools to be called out and cultivated. We've been working in our district with Dr. Ken Ginsberg he's a pediatrician who does a lot of work on resilience. Whose turn is it here. I think it's you Mike. We're almost done here doing great seem to forget that there are different kinds of thinkers and learners. Some of us learn best visually others through listening and still others by tackling a problem with our children with learning differences are not broken. They are different if parents and teachers find appropriate interventions while reveling in and supporting their children's strengths. They will be just fine.  Okay this is powerful. So this pediatrician came onto this whole notion. He has a movement called challenge success. And he's worked a lot in affluent areas like ours. And basically really deeply concerned with the type of pathology sicknesses depression anxiety that a lot of the kids he was seeing in his practice. And it prompted him to look at what we as schools and as parents are doing to our kids where you have to be this person who plays on the soccer team and you're on the swim team and you're getting all A's. And he's basically arguing that we're killing our kids and we're emphasizing the wrong things. And that's not what makes healthy productive adults. So we've had him both work with our teachers and our parents as well as our kids. He's a great great speaker. Angela Duckworth any of you read that great New York Times article. Oh it was I don't know maybe six months or a year ago on grittiness. And Angela Duckworth is a person who was an inspiration to some of the KIPP schools and I'll talk about them in a second. But essentially what she argues is that people who accomplish great things combine a passion with unwavering dedication there's that effort thing to achieve their mission whatever their ops the obstacles and however long it might take. She called this quality grit. And there's a bunch of schools springing up a lot of the charter schools that use a whole rubric based on grittiness. How do we foster that. That when you get stuck when you struggle you have to work through that. And one of the ways in which we're changing that in our classrooms in Lafayette is rather than our teachers simply calling on the kid in the front row who always has their hand open. They'll work with the kids. First of all they give way more opportunities for 100 percent of the kids to participate either through whiteboards. Show me the problem that you've done. Johnny explain your thinking Johnny gets it wrong rather than saying oh no Johnny can someone tell them how the right way to do it is. The teachers will hang with Johnny for extended periods of time. The first time I started watching this I was writhing in the back of the classroom saying this feels kind of cruel to me. This feels very uncomfortable. What the teachers are doing is creating a space where it's OK to fail as long as we're working through it and figuring out how to think through make public our thinking and figuring out how to get it right. Tell me a little bit more about your thinking. I don't know. Well if you did know what might you say. Powerful question. What are some of the things you're sure that you don't know about. I've seen kids applaud others when Johnny who's been struggling for five ten minutes gets the answer. The other huge change that I'm seeing especially in the math classes is this is not the algorithm that you need to do 30 times at home. We're working so much more on you know conceptual understanding and problem solving. What does that look like. Here's a complex problem. It's a word problem. Your job is to come up with five different ways to solve this problem. Not the way. Five different ways. Afterwards the kids show on their fingers what they got. Let's see the different ways. What we're building here is a number since the kids don't get from doing the repetition one way. And we'll be talking about the common core in just a little bit. So I want to talk about a couple of different schools that have been identified in the literature. When I was in Oakland I oversaw school a KIPP school. Raising it if you know about knowledge is power program schools. They're really really cool.  But I'll try and restrain myself. KIPP schools tend to work. They tend to be charter schools and they tend to work in high areas of poverty primarily with African American Latino kids and a lot of English language learners. There you know how all of our schools we all have great mission statements and vision statements and 21st century skills and all to theirs is really simple. Work hard be nice. That's it. Work hard be nice.  There are signs all over the school. There are no shortcuts. No excuses. Teachers have very high expectations for all the kids. Where this was really really now I will also say one of the things that they provide that we don't provide is their school goes from 8 in the morning till 5 5 30 at night. Saturday schools teachers are required to be available to kids from 5 30 till 9 o'clock at night every night five days a week. It's part of their contract. They get results. They give the time that some kids need all kids need to be able to make meaning and learn the standards. They don't move on. They'll give the extra time for the kids. It was the highest performing middle school in Oakland when I was there. What ended up happening was the teacher union said that they felt like the working conditions for the teachers were inhumane. They felt like it wasn't OK. 100 percent of the teachers had signed on to be in that school. The KIPP school said we don't want to have teachers who don't believe in our mission and don't want to be here. They can work here. This is a choice. Admittedly they turned over a lot of teachers. They got a lot of young teachers for America folks. Right. But they got results. So the school the district we asked for for a side letter to be able to continue this school. And it was very very sad for me because I felt like I was going to be at a table where historic things were happening where we were supporting an education that did not allow for schools that that did not did I'm sorry that did not allow for failure that did not support kids that said we will do whatever it takes to make sure all of our children are successful. And we know it's hard but we're not going to send our kids out and we're not going to send them to the reading that we're going to own our children all of them and be responsible for their success. And again I remember they're saying well we're not sure the general membership is going to go for this and I remember my what I considered to be my best line was Darwin is shrieking at you saying adapt or die. You are going to lose all these teachers from your union membership if you don't allow them to continue that which they want to do. They chose not to do that. Kip school continues in West Oakland providing great service for kids. They're a charter school now. That's fine. What's important for me is that kids are being effectively served. I love the model that teachers show display the commitment to make that that difference. And and I want to say I know the teachers in Davis are rock stars. I know they give life life's blood. I know that people do not enter this profession for the stock options or anything else. But I believe that our schools are not structured so that all children can be successful. We know that now talk about that in a moment. So this next slide is is interesting and I do want to read something to you if I may. So when I was in grad school I started getting very very interested in educational leadership and what is the role of a principal or an instructional leader in moving instruction. And my first work at Berkeley was part of the tier two credentialing program and I would meet with new leaders new assistant principals and principals once a month. And they would come in after a full day's work. I almost swore but I was very good looking terrible. They they would be rumpled. Brows were furled. They were just exhausted. And one of the first activities I'd have them do is I started giving them prompts and I started wanting to hear their stories and really the stories from these new leaders just poured out of these folks. They were trying to make meaning of this very complex work. And that ended up being the basis of both my dissertation and a book I wrote called leading and learning. And it's it's an aggregate of 246 stories that new leaders tell and they typically came in somewhat idealistic and looking for ways to change some systems. And and you know I identify in this book the different roles they play how they make decisions how they navigate intense emotion and ultimately how they inhabit this funky role of a school leader. So I want to read one story from one of the leaders that that resonated and I think it's related to our topic today. And then I will share some of the stories of what we have done in Lafayette. So so Mark is a person. And it's a little bit long so hang with me here. And this was a great way to do a dissertation because I'm a former English teacher. I love writing and it's like oh you could use stories as a means of promoting professional growth and development. And it is one of the ways in which we make meaning of new situations. So Mark writes so who gets into these honors sections is what I started to look at. In the science and math class it's sequential and foreign language is to it's pretty much how you take them the sequence. There's not a lot of discussion there. If you're in fourth year Spanish it's automatically AP class you're in. If you've gotten into pre-calculus well you show up at AP calculus. However the issue in English in our English curriculum we have this honors freshman year honors class sophomore year but junior and senior years you get the extra grade point average to be in these classes and what I found out is they have a quota system. The quota system was pretty much based on the number of sections that this department wanted to offer. So it didn't have anything to do with the student's ability. And I uncovered this kind accidentally because all of a sudden I heard there was going to be a list that was going to be posted and only the kids on the list were going to be allowed in. In fact the data clerk was telling me that every year she gets a list and then pulls out all kinds of honor pulls all the kids out of honors class if they're not on this magic list and it was disjointed it wasn't alphabetized and they had these scores that were supposedly based on some sort of assessments a writing test they had done a reading test they had taken teacher recommendation I don't know they had some formula which I have to admit was not too impressive but I didn't even bother to fully analyze it because I just didn't believe in it at all. And then I looked at how many students had signed up over 130 students had signed up they wanted in. So we're talking about bumping out close to 40 kids from this honors class and I said wow that's a big discrepancy here 130 kids have signed up how are we going to kick these kids out and then I started going wait a minute I can run a report that chose grade distribution by course so I can see how many A's and B's are in different classes and imagine this in an honors section alone there were 107 students who got an A or B so if you just use common sense none of these formulas and assessments and tests were meaningful if a student got an A or B in the freshman honors class why shouldn't they be allowed to continue especially if they wanted to where did this random number of 90 come from so this is a person who tried to take this on and of course got the sloppy out of him because what he found was that not only the teachers but the parents who were in those exclusive classes didn't want them watered down they did not want other kids to have watered down they didn't want other kids and this type of thing comes up again and again and I will say in the program that I teach in Berkeley's principal leadership institute it is geared towards urban education and to closing the achievement gap that is what folks are trying to do so it's not surprising that they look for areas where they see inequities where they might make a difference so this isn't just a random story I need to give that full of facts about gate and schooling that I want to throw on the table here maybe there's some of my beliefs woven in so I believe there we go there are some students whose needs cannot be met in a heterogeneous classroom I believe that my experience in working with emotionally disturbed children informed this when I worked at Seneca center I was physically restraining children every single day that was part of my job while many of those parents parents of those children who had these special needs wanted their children in a heterogeneous classroom the disruption would have been too profound it wouldn't have been right likewise we have an aim class in our school a gate class that's a self-contained class in fourth and fifth grade and I do see I have observed that some of those kids would not function effectively in a heterogeneous classroom I've observed that so I'm leaving that one as a belief statement but I'll follow it up by saying the vast and profound majority of children benefit with quality instruction in a heterogeneous classroom a couple other statements in making decisions there are often trade-offs one of the things that I've learned is over access is limited those who don't make the cut will become angry and frustrated where's our middle school principal here there you are how about when kids don't make a particular team or don't get the lead role in the drama program do you ever hear from parents in this community in my community I heard from parents I had parents come to me and say clearly the criteria you are using for protecting kids for the eighth grade boys basketball team is off I know how my son plays that's not uncommon likewise when access is increased you also get a different group of folks who are often angry and frustrated what are you doing watering it down you're lowering the level you're lowering the quality next fact I want to point out the determination of access in schooling is fluid I won't say it's arbitrary but we educators have discretion like the story that I read about mark and the honors courses we have choice about how we sort children our decisions and our actions express our values so let's talk about the Lafayette school district and where we were where we've come where we're going I want to start by saying I love my district I think our teachers are extraordinary our principals our instructional leaders they're doing incredible work we do not have all the answers what I like to say is sometimes it feels like we're stumbling in the right direction and sometimes that's okay in education we're always looking for a silver bullet there ain't one there is no silver bullet to ensure that all children are successful requires incredible perseverance greediness collaboration and what I would argue is data based inquiry so when I first arrived as an assistant principal in principal I have no idea when that was a long time ago we had about 30% of our students that were gate identified and by the time many of those children came to middle school what we definitely noticed was that many of the non gate identified children were out performing the gate identified children but were denied access to the gate classes that was a problem even children who were struggling mightily behaviorally and academically who were gate identified parents were clinging to the opportunity to remain in the gate self contained classes and we began a lot of discussions and self analysis I want you to know this is easier for me to be in this group because you're not my parents I'm a little nervous about that video camera in there the hardest one of the hardest meetings that I was ever at was my first meeting as a principal where I sat before these gate parents who said you don't know what it is to be a gate you know child I said you're right I was not gate I don't know that and for two and a half hours I was peppered with questions about the profound needs of this 30% of the community I don't want my child isn't that a great line I don't want my child to be around people with lesser skills and abilities that will drag my child down and there were a lot of things that were said that were really uncomfortable and at that point we really didn't look at changing how we place and serve children in the district but one of the things we also started focusing on at that time which was around 1996 or so was character education more recently we've adopted a program called character counts but we invented our own we focused on respect and responsibility and integrity we did full days of respect with our students with outside facilitators cross grade level to get kids to engage in a more caring accepting nurturing way middle school can be brutal for a lot of kids it's when their bodies are changing so much and every kid feels different so how are we creating great learning environments that feel safe so all kids can learn and we did see with the focus on character education continued declines in kids being sent out of class classroom disruption less problems out on the school yard and when you looked at our healthy kids survey more kids saying that they felt connected to the school like they felt that there was an adult that they can talk to they cared about them these are big data points to pay attention to what I will also acknowledge is that our suspension rate which was relatively not low we had about 50 suspensions a year in a middle school of 1300 kids didn't budge so the significant behaviors remained the same but most of the children who were in there were benefitting and we sought data to support that interesting data point so it was at that point that we started saying we need to have all teachers focusing on differentiation of the curriculum of the instruction of the type of assessments we provide what I want to tell you now I'll go back to my experience as a high school English teacher I was in Albany high school where I had kids coming to me at a fourth grade reading level and some kids who were in the same class reading at a college level and we would read Romeo and Juliet and I remember stopping after every single line what does this mean how do we make meaning there were other times where kids had to be assigned specific books according to their reading level but I could teach a very heterogeneous class math I understood that there or believed to be significant developmental differences in kids abstract thinking that might prevent some kids from being successful in algebra that was my belief we'll talk about that in a second so we did a lot of training we did a lot of coaching and we persisted with this and we're going on about 15 years of doing thinking strategy differentiation work the research on professional development for teachers is really clear when you do the one stop shop and you're done oh that was inspiring that was great and you don't pick it up nothing happens it's when you maintain a focus of effort over time and you engage teachers deeply in the work and provide opportunities for up period not evaluations observations and administrative support and coaching so folks know this is not going away this is what we do this is how we do it is when you get the traction so in 2001 after lots and lots of community engagement meetings and lots of training with teachers we made the decision to use the all set I'm not a psychologist I'm a mathematician as a screening tool for gate identification and we made the decision that we would serve only the profoundly gifted I don't know if our district made that name up but that's what we had that was part of the nomenclature at the time now guess what folks who were in that 2% were really really happy and folks who weren't said the kid was just near the cutoff I want to retake can't we use you didn't measure this level of effectiveness one thing we do know in gate is that we're not we don't have clear guidelines of how we measure giftedness and talent is that a word we're not good at that and from district to district the tools and measures that we use and how we choose to serve kids who are gifted and talented there's a wide variation of that and what I can tell you right now is right now we offer this assessment we have the self-contained class and approximately it changes from year to year 28% of the children and parents who are assessed and qualify for what we call our AIM class refuse the service they say I just want to have my child served in their neighborhood school it's not enough about the quality of education that that's where we want our children in fact ironically today I was at the CSBA conference and our enrollment our class sizes are really high and we had some new kids move in and we had a parent say I want my kid out of the self-contained class it's not serving my kid that doesn't happen very often but I want to say it's no longer got the un-ring aura that it once had and I attribute that to the work of our teachers the profound dedication our continual investment even though these last five years financially have been miserable we've continued to invest more than a quarter million dollars a year in professional development and coaching some of the coaching that we provide is real time we'd have a coach standing next to a teacher pay attention to the kid in the back row have you asked him this question try this I was in a classroom just last week before Thanksgiving with 16 other adults 16 teachers and principals from the district you would think come on you can't possibly do that without interrupting the kids were focused we were there to learn the person who was doing this model lesson who would do some instruction and then say now teachers here's what I just did the beauty is when you see on your next walkthrough teachers trying it on doesn't always work teaching is really really hard but they're going for it they're committed and we have continued to have a profound focus on what I call database inquiry let me talk about that right now what is database inquiry so if you read the work of Rick Dufour Eker Hargreaves there's a whole bunch of folks who talk about professional learning communities raise your hand if you know about professional learning communities PLC is really a pretty simple concept the experts in this business teachers everyone else in the business from custodian to counselor to secretary to principals to superintendents we have one role to support teachers there is no position that's more important that's where the action is so the notion of PLCs is when you get smart teachers together and you give them data to look at multiple data points to figure out which kids and Dufour and Eker identify three or four guiding questions what is it kids should know what are you able to do that's your standards they're going to be changing to the common core number two how do you know if they know it that means you got to assess the kids number three this is the deceptively simple question that's impossible what do you do if they don't know it haven't learned it or already know it that's where the differentiation piece comes in that means you need to have layers of supports and interventions and opportunities for all kids but when you get teachers together looking at student data we use something that we call an assessment wall so every single teacher in the third grade in a school will get together and they'll put all every single kid's name is on a bulletin board with a little felt and they have little notes attached to how they did on the sort and five or six different assessments and the kids who are falling behind they end up getting moved into different categories different bands so they get different levels of intervention the kids who are accelerating we make sure that they're getting served with some different types of texts and opportunities in the classroom the coolest part about these meetings which happen at least four times a year is kids move they're not stuck in a crack based on a test that they had at one particular point they move over time that's beautiful that shows growth when one of the kids remains in a band the teachers put their heads together and say what are we going to do here this isn't working essentially what we've done is we've stolen from special education we're creating an IEP for every child in the school that's where the action is I don't want to see a stinking spreadsheet with numbers I want to know about individual children how is each children growing and thriving or not and what are we going to do about it hordes of time loading data into data director assessments and tons of standards and pressure from parents but we know our kids and we know what's working and what's not working when I was an English teacher we didn't have a common curriculum we taught before standards and benchmarks it was like what novels do you want to teach what essays do you want to teach what I found at that time where kids were really really good at writing journal entries and poems but couldn't write an expository essay standards and benchmarks are a good thing so what we know is since 2003 after we became a more heterogeneous school our district api has risen from 3934 we had growth every single year except for one so let me tell you one more big story so math and I shared with you my Piagetian belief that kids develop developmentally and that you can't really rush that you guys remember I took psychology when I was in college I can't remember the age of the kid maybe three years old and they have two different vessels a long and thin one and a short and stop one they have the exact same volume and you show a kid at a certain developmental age and you pour it back and forth and you say which one has more volume and they say the taller one and you're like no no look look at the volume and you pour it back and forth and you say which one has more of on and they say the taller one well that was my argument when I was a principal at the middle school we were serving about 40% 45% of the kids in algebra in the 8th grade some kids are just not developmentally ready there's one of them I took algebra in the 8th grade and then I had to retake it again when I was in high school I didn't get it and I also didn't work very hard so 90 90 90 schools what are they they are schools that we have identified across the country that have 90% kids of color 90% free and reduced lunch and 90% proficient and advanced we know it can be done some of them are those kids schools I was referring to all kids can learn if given high expectations and the necessary supports so some things that I learned it came to my attention from actually the high school principal that some of our kids in our lower track were really in bad shape and were not likely to get out of the lower track when they got to high school and it was really putting them in jeopardy in a lot of different ways and so we looked at the longitudinal data of kids in the lower track what's the idea of a lower track to accelerate kids to bring them up to speed what we found was that the longer a child was in the lower track no surprise do you want to hear the crude way that it was said in my district a more politically correct way of saying that is the longer our kids were in the lower track of math the further behind they got so the very programs that were designed to catch kids up were failing our children why pretty simple to me and now can we turn those cameras off for a second I had a teacher who said oh you know those kids I had a teacher who was loving the children to death and not necessarily and there's been a lot of studies that show if you take two classes of equal performance and you tell one teacher oh these are rockstar brilliant kids and oh this is a slow group of kids guess what the end of the year that's what kind of results you're going to get and that's what results we were getting in our district so I did a lot of work with the teachers and a lot of work with parents probably not enough work with parents had the conversations and by the way we have three six nine ten eleven twelve we had 14 tracks in the middle school 14 tracks and the middle school teachers were very very clear that they needed to have those tracks because kids were operating at very different levels so Rick Dufour this great professional learning community guru has a great article it's called in praise of top down leadership and what he says in this article is after you've provided the scaffolding and the research and the evidence and folks don't want to move at the end of the day you have to make a hard decision and that's what I did I said we're getting rid of this lower track and in the meantime we had professional development going on for our teachers our teachers did not want to do this they did not believe in it and the parents went ballistic you're gonna dumb down my track how dare you put those kids who can't perform around with my kids board meetings parents lined up not quite this big a crowd but they were vocal and they were angry and and I was nervous you know I know I had done the research I know I was making the decision for the right reason I know my governing board was on board with this very controversial decision but I was nervous at the end of the year we saw an increase in performance this is the lowest bullet here of proficiency and advanced rates of 12% in one year we jumped from a 77% proficiency rate to 99% in one year clap please it's a big deal now that does not mean our work is over that does not mean we may not backslide what it does mean is when kids have access to the standards and teachers are committed to serving those kids that we can get more kids there if you look at the top of them we'll talk about algebra so I'm hammering on the principal of the middle school saying I want more kids in algebra because we had a 95% proficiency rate in algebra so my belief was that's bad data I did not like that data why? because you're being too restrictive let more kids in there's a lot of pressure math teachers aren't sure some of the parents don't think we can do it so we moved 55 more kids about 12% more kids into algebra last year proficiency rate no change no change we provided more children access to a rigorous you know the old dolceani algebra probably that you're familiar with with profound commitment to teaching thinking strategies metacognitive practices multiple pathways for solving problems conceptual understanding and we're maintaining the high level so I'm upset I want more kids in there I want to see the proficiency rates drop sounds counterintuitive right? I want to see the proficiency rates drop because that means we're pushing more kids up I'm still not ready to say every single child to be there some schools have done that I'm not there yet but I'm moving in that direction okay let's talk about the common core for a quick second and then we'll open this up to questions common core is great I had one parent say hello this is terrible we're giving up our local control as though we had local control with california standards versus federal standards but what I believe is when you look at data a single data point on its own means nothing to you if you said kids scored a 77 on a test that means nothing what you have to know is how did other kids do how did the child do on a similar assessment last year what are kids in neighboring school districts and across the state or across the country doing I like the fact that we are going to know how our children are doing compared to every kid in the nation except you heard Texas opted out and some other did you hear this this is a true story Texas opted out because they did not believe they were teaching critical thinking to children true story I'm not making that up yes it certainly does ok so according to Lucy our whole district is reading a book called pathways to the common core highly recommended very dense text but if you want to understand what's coming down the pike it's a great book she talks about the common core is creating systems of continuous improvement there's teaching toward clearer and higher expectations and doing this work in more transparent collegial and accountable ways those are powerful words every single one of them so it's building on the PLC model but the California standards I read one study out of Colorado that basically said if you were to cover the current California standards you would need effectively and thoroughly you would need 100 additional instructional days per year so what has been said is that the standards currently are a mile wide and an inch deep the common core is not about that it's about doing deep and rigorous understanding using complex text when I was an English teacher I taught novels poetry short stories in the common core and you walk into all of our classrooms at the elementary level they have their little libraries tons of fiction this much nonfiction that's going to have to change and it's all about rigor and use of complex text critical thinking use of evidence and speaking and writing to inform to make an argument student engagement depth versus breath focus on academic vocabulary are these smarter balanced assessments coming out using writing where kids pull direct evidence from the text to measure comprehension and understanding so this is exciting work and it's going to be hard too so considerations so getting back to those great do four questions as an educator we continue to need to ask ourselves what should our kids know and be able to do and I suggest that it's not limited to just academics it's so much more than that number two how do we know if they know it or are doing it we have to have continual assessments not just one stinking assessment at the end of the year that you get in the summer that I like into an autopsy because the kids already gone the teacher can't do anything about that child that doesn't help us that doesn't help us we need ongoing regular assessments formative assessments so that we can make adjustments and then the big question what do we do if they can't or already can how are we teachers educators responding to that so three questions hard questions can schools change their role in reproducing the inequities in the larger society fact we're doing that right now we need to own it that's what our values are saying are okay with us how can we provide greater opportunities for more students all of our students and how do we ensure that all of our children are appropriately challenged hard ongoing work so thank you thank you so much Dr. Brill now is our time for questions and we've collected some so we're going to start if you have any questions you can send them to the end of the aisle and someone will pick them up but we're going to start this is the first one it's actually two together that's cheating one at a time please how does your district compare to Davis joint unified the for example the number of elementary students junior high high school and how many children are in each class in the Lafayette school district so we have about 3400 kids in our district we have four elementary schools ranging from 450 to 800 is our largest and we have one middle school of 1250 kids our class sizes are up to 24 grades K3 grades 45 I understand and on the middle school there about 30 I would say in both academic and electives and how would how does one teacher differentiate for 34 children so let me say it again it is brutally hard and we have no choice one of the teachers I remember during the budget cuts where we class sizes were going up we still have some instruction laid they were going down the types of children in the classes are much more discrepant we have more English language learners more kids with special needs more kids in poverty even in Lafayette more kids who are medically fragile kids who have diabetes and EpiPens and asthma and the teachers responsible for all of this and they said let me get this straight you're taking you're making the class sizes go up you have a more diverse group you're cutting my pay and you want better results yes is the answer so one of the things that I like that our teachers are doing at the elementary grades for example they're doing something called just right reading groups so based on the assessments cluster kids across the grade and go ahead and teach kids for a particular unit a particular book or set of strategies that they've identified as being a gap so there's way more collaboration and sharing of children but at the end of the day it does come down to maximizing the type of parent support you a lot of times see parents in the classroom working with clusters of kids that requires a whole level of work and enormous planning which our teachers are doing more collaboratively now but I want to be clear everyone hears me it's brutally hard and there is no other choice how do twice exceptional gate identified and learning disabled children do in your district no place for them with homogeneous gate classes are their needs met in heterogeneous classrooms with differentiation and couldn't one attribute wait could you read this one couldn't one attribute less interest in being in a self-contained 2% class to the children in that class having serious issues and especially poor social skill so that's a really very very powerful question so again I shared with you one of my biases I have a strong belief and interest in alternative education and serving kids who have the greatest challenges so I'm being up front with you that's a bias of mine there was a very very important I believe it's a federal case about integration of kids with special needs and we're allowed to use four different criteria for determining the appropriateness of placement one of them is is a child getting educational Rachel Holland is the name of the case the Rachel Holland case see 50 years old and I can still draw those out sometimes so in the Rachel Holland case is a child receiving educational benefit number two is the child receiving social and emotional benefit number three is it cost prohibitive guess what number three is fake you can never use finances as a means for denying access so scratch that one number four does having the child there create don't quote me on the exact language a persistent disruption what's a persistent disruption some might say if the child has an outburst once a year that's too much some might say five times a day is too many what I can say is our district is very intensive about integrating children with pretty significant needs and does that sometimes become a disruption for other kids yes it does do we continue to monitor and make sure that we're doing whatever we can to make sure that all kids are learning yes I'm going to share just one other thing connected to this and this is another growing evolving perception of mine about segregating kids out when I looked at the children in Oakland who had multiply significant needs multiple suspensions, expulsions chronic truancy failing four or more classes I think when I was there identified more than four or five hundred kids in the district it's a big district I don't know if there were 36,000 kids in the whole district but I was outraged these were kids who were in general ed schools and that's what prompted me to start this community day school what ended up happening and I you know got you for community day schools you get double the ADA funding so we could keep class sizes below 15 there's tons of money that can come in from the county or there used to be early prevention screening treatment and diagnosis so we had $800,000 in mental health supports and we were going to do an outdoor ed thing and I was all excited but guess what happens when you cluster kids with significant emotional and social difficulties they look around and the norm is to swear and to fight and to go off and not do your work that's a change for me I think and this comes back to the character education and the Dr. Ken Ginsberg work that we were doing that there's profound and tremendous value in having heterogeneous groupings and learning how to hang with all different kinds of folks and supporting each other that's what I have to do in the workplace and all of you have to do but there are extreme cases if you remember my facts which I sort of hedged my bets and called them beliefs I don't believe that all children can be served in a heterogeneous classroom and I believe that most kids with proper support and intervention and that might mean a one-on-one aid three inches from a child ready to remove the child if he becomes disruptive might be a way to help integrate but that might not be enough so that's one of my evolutions I won't say all but most what effect if any has the new policy had on closing the achievement gap between your district's highest and lowest learners we're making significant progress one of the other huge changes that we had this year with our kids with special needs was we saw about a 15% increase in proficiency rates with our special ed identified children and part of that is just more targeting more intervention shadow classes and paying attention saying we need to do something here does it the data that I just gave you includes 100% of our special education children as a teacher I feel quite comfortable teaching in a diverse classroom I'm wondering what support and training specific to teaching gate students did your staff feel the time spent was worthwhile and I just want to add these was it difficult to get the teachers to buy in to differentiated learning we have some who would do it and some who do not how do you get get it to be district wide and wait stop there because that's a million dollar question so I want to say something about this you know schools have been described as being egg cartons where teachers go into their little separate unit and don't really pay attention in many traditional schools of what's happening and oftentimes there isn't accountability for what happens once they get their kids in their classroom number one I want to say we have a assistant superintendent of curriculum and instruction that's terrific she just loves the work and works with teachers and is relentless in her pursuit of change and excellence in all teachers what I want to tell you is we have teachers who do not buy in I promise you that but they are getting fewer and fewer pressure on them not from administrators but from their colleagues to get on board to get with the program is huge so we also have both external coaches and internal teacher coaches who have credibility with teachers who will work one on one they'll co-plan, they'll watch the lesson so I believe one of the things that I talk about with my principals is I call it the pressure support continuum so if you are just all about being a cheerleader yay everything's great come on everything's not great and we don't grow that way likewise if we hang out on the other end of the continuum where it's all pressure do it faster, higher, now people shut down no one wants to operate under the conditions where you feel like you're under a microscope and everything you do is not good enough it's not right so you gotta hit that sweet spot but the word that does come to mind is relentlessness and overtime is another one and the word accountability comes up as well it's the right thing people want to fight about do we have a moral, ethical obligation to effectively serve all kids the low end kids the kids in the middle, the high end kids oh yeah, we have to do that we have no choice and when there's evidence that we're not doing that we need to adjust how was your district able to convince parents that this model was a viable method of providing for the needs of gate students especially after having self-contained programs so what I can tell you is and I'll refer back to that do for article and praise of top down leadership I am not purporting or suggesting that you just go in and do something you have to engage and educate and listen and like I'm saying I'm not saying we have all the answers I want to say that again and I'm also not saying that what we did in our district will work in your district but I do think it's important and one of our processes was to look at the longitudinal data and find out which kids we were serving well, which we weren't and what decisions we needed to make there's another word I want to be very transparent and use you have to talk about tradeoffs when there are limited resources and sometimes even if there are limited resources when you make a decision you're expressing your values and as a community you all have to decide are you happy with the way you're organizing yourselves and the other part of that question is are we looking at our own interest or that of the common good I want to share a phenomenal data point you're going to love this so in Oakland Oakland has the Hill Schools which are very rich and primarily white and Asian and then you have the Flatland Schools which are primarily African American and Latino the Hill Schools tend to be very high performing 90 plus percent are going on to college the Flatland kids they for some of the African American males they had about a 50% drop out rate from high school and definitely I don't remember the exact rates but we used to do this and I think they still do it what we call the use your voice survey and we asked our parents is your school your teacher effectively preparing your child for college the Hill School 30 40% of the parents said you're doing a good job now 95% of the kids are going to a four year college Flatland school 80 plus percent saying you're doing a good job preparing our children for college that's sobering data and it tells us a couple of things this is my interpretation number one there's obviously an inverse relationship between parents satisfaction and student performance so even though you can all be a pain a lot of times keep doing it your advocacy makes us better don't back off be demanding all of you especially if your children are not being served the other takeaway for me is that parents don't always know what quality instruction or education looks like not all parents do and we have a responsibility to talk about what that looks like for all children isn't that an interesting data point have you considered using Carol Dweck's computer based course for 4 through 8th graders that has been shown to improve academic performance disparities by teaching the growth mindset I'm not all that familiar with it and I will also tell you this so our teachers are great they're doing great work the biggest complaint I get is please do not put one more thing on our plates New York writing project this powerful math instruction thinking strategies educators are great loading more stuff on we are horrible at taking things on a plate no I'd get killed what grade level specifically did you push ahead the kids into algebra so primarily in 8th grade although we have in our district about 30 kids who are 7th graders who take algebra and therefore we have you know it ranges from 20 to 30 each year who take geometry in the 8th grade and we also have really angry parents when their kids don't qualify our criteria must be off can parents be given or are they given homework to help their kids solidify what they learn what's parents role to support their teachers where do the coaches come from so we do a lot of parent education on our parents to know how they can help their kids and how we're doing writing differently and reading differently and the types of higher order questions they can ask we don't want our kids when you're wrestling with difficult tasks who was the main character what did he do what was the setting that's all surface level stuff we want kids engaging with the tasks and old psych majors mazos hierarchy no it's blooms taxonomy blooms so we want them comparing contrasting analyzing making connections to their personal life to other texts that they've read why asking the question why would he do that making predictions and those are the strategies that we teach our children and we also teach our parents those our parents have loved going to these parent education we've had great turnouts for them I want to say this and again I'm going to give props to our assistant superintendent she screens these coaches intensively and we all know that the way in which content is delivered will have a profound impact on how it's received so you can have two teachers side by side teaching the same stuff and one's great and one's bad you have or less good you have a profound responsibility to make sure that the folks are resonating with teachers and what I've really learned from watching this is our work is really grassroots the teachers see and recognize the value this is not you will and that's a huge difference okay this is a little tricky I'm going to read three different people's questions do you want to have Mike and Laura do it no I just want you to be able to synthesize it for me higher order thinking skills so the first one can you address how gate students did with differentiation you show how the lower and middle improve but nothing about how gate kids do are they increasing in their performance Davis has many programs struggling students but few for the gifted that's a great are you going to stop me oh do I have to synthesize all three oh you're killing me here our district has gone from having one school with self-contained gate historically a lower SES site to putting gate at four wealthier schools gate enrollment has ballooned parents values appear to be my child comes first overvaluing the entire school community any thoughts on how we change those values one more and can you address how gate students tell me why I should sacrifice my child's elementary or junior high while teachers experiment with differentiation do I need to hide behind the podium here so so let me acknowledge a couple things when I hear those three overlapping statements I hear a lot of passion and a lot of advocacy and a lot of concern for how a parent's child assuming it was one parent or multiple parents are going to be served and those questions while they can be uncomfortable are good questions to be asking I want to honor them and I want to say that clearly there's profound emphasis across the United States to close the achievement gap what does that mean you focus on typically the lower performing kids and you try and move them up makes sense what we also know is you know when I work directly with teachers and I say who are your focal kids I always ask that question who are your focal kids because if they say I'm serving all of them I want to know who you're targeting and why you're targeting and what you're doing differently to serve those children and I want to acknowledge that not only can the gate kids the higher performing kids get lost why kids in the middle I don't I even heard one question about the kids in the middle not one and again what I would suggest is that number one it's really hard and I want to again continue to emphasize the advocacy but I also want to talk about one of the cool new assessments that our teachers are doing and this shows me how kids can go deep over time so one of the things that they've done is they've given a short non-fiction passage to kids and they haven't write an analysis of that they give some question in the beginning of the year, middle of the year and the end of the year and it's a beautiful assessment because you can see the kids change over time they're writing but more importantly they're thinking they're understanding and what that tells me as we enter into this world of the common core that I believe some of the big beneficiaries are going to be our gate kids that the expectation is to go deeper and explain more nuanced sophisticated thinking will all kids be able to do that? No but that is going to be what the expectation and the push is I want to acknowledge that when you put your eye on one thing it's easy to take your eye off something else and that's where the parent advocacy comes in okay I'm going to put these two questions together and they go along double questions these are our last questions they go along with what you just said and they won't take very long are the assessments goals for students teacher driven or district standard driven and how are you really measuring how former gate students are improving and being challenged so ask it one more time because that was a complex question okay so it's about assessments are the assessments and goals for students teacher driven or district standard driven and how are you measuring how former gate students are improving or being challenged so the first thing is it's a combination of teacher driven and district driven there are some assessments that we say you will do but the teachers have had a big hand in rewriting the formative assessments to really capture the kids thinking in both math and writing and we use more hand programs for our reading one of the other tools that we use is we do a yearly survey and one of the things that we're continuing to check with all of our parents is one of the things is are we effectively challenging your child and we do disaggregate that data according to self reporting data and our parents for the most part have been very very satisfied with our program even and I will say this those folks that had concerns when we took away some of the lower levels and the upper levels became believers over time when they saw and observed and talked to their children so will I tell you that a hundred percent of our parents are satisfied no way are there still some people who wish we would do things differently yes and that's the nature of working with large groups you make decisions some support it and some will fight you every step of the way but you have to do what you think is best for the whole well I said that was the last question do you have time for three more three more what process did your district go through in deciding to make changes in this direction so I was not the superintendent when we did the 30 percent to 2 percent for the gate program that was led by a prior superintendent as I said a lot of input from teachers and a lot of community engagement but at the end of the day it was an administrative decision as it has to be if you take a vote you're going to get a split vote every time and we pretty much can figure out where folks are going to vote depending on where they are right now so the second part of that question was that was the one question what process did your district go through and for this most recent one with the math levels that was Fred driven with the support of my principal assistant superintendent again engaging wider circles math teachers parents and so forth okay this will be our last question and then depending on how you feel maybe people could ask you how does how does what's being taught with high expectations reconcile with a child's developmental readiness I don't see any problem reconciling that even a child with low developmental readiness and I want you to know there's new research even questioning that right now about that whole that whole notion that we still provide the tools the scaffolding the support to make sure kids at all levels are successful I really genuinely believe that and I have deep and profound concerns when I hear teachers say that they don't share those beliefs and I'll share something with you where I got in trouble I misspoke because I can get a little passionate sometimes and when you know a teacher was saying well I don't believe all these kids can learn and these are the same ones that showed the jump of 12 percent proficiency rate and I said what we are doing to children is criminal now in some respects when you are robbing children of future opportunity there may be truth in that but how that was heard by the teacher was I was calling her a criminal which was not the case and it shows how profound the emotional heart work this is not just head work it's not just hand work it's heart work too and we need to be mindful of that throughout the process but at the end of the day I'm here for kids I'm here for all kids and if folks are going to stand in the way of our effectively serving gay kids or middle of the road kids or struggling kids we are going to fight we are going to have to change practice there is no other way thank you so much Dr. Brill for your time and all your effort you have given us so much to think about and we really appreciate everything and I don't want you to forget if you have interest in more information being involved with other things or would like to give us comments or suggestions the bag is right here by the door