acknowledging that I'm in an article very recently for the nation, criticizing the notion of the common core as a game changer. And in fact, I criticize the notion that anything is a game changer. I'm tired of policymakers claiming that the next new thing they come up with will be the game changer because they tend to often forget so many of the details that go into any new policy initiative like how it's going to be implemented and what needs to happen differently. So we hope to dig into some of those issues with you this afternoon. We also hope to address some of the challenges that you've already faced before the new standards, namely how to educate disadvantaged children, how to educate children who are not English speakers as their first language, recent immigrants, children who are the products of globalization, who in many cases have transnational families and are living the results of families it caught in the midst of our inability to pass comprehensive immigration reform, the undocumented children out there. And so as we think about these 21st century learning standards and what it means to educate children for a world that's changing so quickly, very important to make sure we think about all the children and what it means to educate them to prepare them for that world, not just our most affluent. Now we were reminded yet again today, if you saw the New York Times where the discussion of the most recent TIM study, that's the study that is done annually on math and science achievement, that the United States is not looking so bad, we're above average. But again, anyone who knows this work by now knows that when you disaggregate our data, poverty and inequality continue to be our major challenges in this country. We don't do so bad at educating affluent kids, whether they live in Maine or Arizona. It's poor kids that we have trouble educating in most places. And so we want to probe those issues, even as we also think in a more holistic manner about what it really means to educate children for the 21st century. Where does language, competence fit into that and not just the English language, since increasingly our children will be expected and those who have the ability to speak more than one language will have a huge advantage over other children. And where do the kinds of skills that enable a person to adapt to changing circumstances in the world, to think critically about the world, to understand the world in its complexity. Where does that fit into our curriculum and how do we manage to do all that and prepare our kids for the new state assessments which will eventually be rolled out? So we want to take on some big issues. As you've heard already, we have two very significant players and intellectuals who've been working on this issue and who've been thinking about this for some time. So we're going to hear from each of them, from Tony and from Fernando, who are going to take a few minutes to first of all lay out some of their thoughts about global education and then we'll engage in a discussion here and then we're going to invite you. However, if during our conversation, something comes up that you say, look, I got to get some clarification here or I need to react, raise your hand and we can, this room, despite the size, we can entertain some interaction and I think that will make it a more valuable experience for all of us. So why don't we start with Tony and then we'll move to Fernando and then we'll open up the dialogue. Great, thanks a lot. I really appreciate the opportunity to be here. Harriet, thank you for the invitation. It's always a great pleasure to be among folks from E.A., some of my favorite folks. In my remarks this morning, I just really want to see if I can do two things. I want to first describe to you what we at Asia Society have, how we would define global competence and why it's so important for young people to develop what we call global competence. And the second is to really give you at least one example of how to teach for global competence, how, as Pedro said, we go from theory to actually thinking about the implementation of this kind of work in schools. In our view at Asia Society, they're really kind of two interrelated and intertwined challenges facing American public education. The first is exactly what Pedro was saying. The first is overcoming the chronic inability of our school system to educate all students to high levels, especially students from low income and minority backgrounds. And I think some of the evidence that we see coming from some of the tests that are beginning to test kind of the common core skills are going to suggest to us that it's going to probably look worse before it gets better. But the other imperative is what, if that's the achievement gap is one part of the equation, then the other imperative is the opportunity gap. The need to prepare students for jobs and for citizenship in a globalized environment where it successfully requires the complex thinking skills and communication skills and collaboration with people particularly from other backgrounds and really a fundamental understanding of today's world and how it works. Now I know everybody here understands that we live today in a world of flattened economies where the nature of work itself has changed and really requires a new way of preparing students for employment. It's a common refrain now that students need 21st century skills to be able to be successful in today's job market. But I would argue though that these skills must not be thought of as a kind of generic set of off the shelf skills that can be developed in a vacuum. Rather, what students need are competencies learned and applied within a global context. Students need opportunities to pursue really engaging questions like are social networking technologies developing in the same ways in countries like United States or China? Or what are the economic and social and environmental consequences of outsourcing to India and Mexico? Or what tools do governments have to promote economic development and eradicate extreme poverty? Those are kinds of meaty issues that we think kids need to get into and through those learn those 21st century skills. But the need for global competence is not just about jobs within an interconnected world economies. It's about relationships and about civic engagement in a vastly more diverse world that's been made so because of unprecedented levels of global migration and immigration. According to the United Nations data, the total number of migrants in the world is about 235, 240 million folks. And 50 million are estimated to be living in the United States. And if all the migrants in the world were considered one country, it would be the fourth largest country in the world behind China, India, and the United States. And so as a result, the world over ethnic and religious and racial diversity is the new normal. And so how young people make sense of this will depend on the degree to which they have been prepared to live in diverse societies. So students who have learned intercultural skills, who understand multiple contexts and traditions, and have had multiple opportunities to reflect on their own worldviews in light of others, these are folks who are going to be less likely to experience difference as a threat. They're going to be more likely to experience difference as an opportunity for collaboration. And to put it bluntly, globally competent youth are more likely to become the kind of adults that do not view diversity as a threat and do not feel the need to resort to violence within neighborhoods or between nations. So global competence developed in kind of a K through 12 education, not again, just as Pedro said, not just among elites, but among the broad kind of body politic of folks in the United States or any country, it provides a pathway towards equitable civic engagement as well as a sustainable piece, we think. So our work is sort of based on this philosophy at Asia Society, and so it's really about equity and excellence, but defined within a global context. So in this work, we define global competence as the capacity and the disposition to understand and act on matters of global significance. And what is critical to realize from the very beginning is that content knowledge and the understanding it brings matter. Students develop global competence, not as an extracurricular activity, but rather within the study of the core curriculum. Students need to think like historians or scientists or artists, and they need to think within these disciplines from a global perspective. I mean, if you think about it, American history students obviously need to know about the US Civil Rights Movement in the 1950s and 1960s, but they need to understand that even more deeply by looking, comparing it to the truth and reconciliation movements in Chile or South Africa or the struggle for nationhood in India. They need to do chemistry experiments to determine the caloric value of foods, kind of basic science, but then they need to be able to apply that to learn what it means and how it applies to understanding world hunger. So I think you get the idea that knowledge and understanding of the world developed through disciplinary and interdisciplinary study, that's the foundation of our definition of global competence. What also matters, development of a range of capacities that we've grouped in kind of four main areas, the first of which we call investigating the world. Global competence starts with paying attention to what's going on in the world and then identifying important issues worth examining closely. So globally competent students can frame essential questions, and these are ones that don't necessarily have one right answer, in fact they most likely won't, but ones that are engaging intellectually and emotionally. And globally competent students can then kind of explain and identify and collect and weigh the credibility of information that they're getting not just from US sources but from around the world through digital technologies, and then to analyze that information and come back and put together a compelling evidence-based argument that looks at the issues from multiple perspectives. So that's investigating the world. A second group of capacities that we think is important, we put under the title of recognizing perspectives. And a big part of recognizing perspectives for young people is to in fact realize that they have a perspective and that the world isn't the way that they see it all the time. Others have different perspectives and to be able to understand a little bit about why people see things differently. And what's really critical, globally competent students are able to enter into a kind of authentic negotiation between perspectives. It's what we mean, or maybe what we should mean by critical thinking, not just the ability to critique a set of ideas, but rather to kind of weigh those ideas in relation to your own and then come to a deeper understanding through that kind of back and forth between perspectives. That's what recognizing perspectives is really about. There's a third group of capacities we think is critical and we kind of put those under the rubric of communicating and collaborating around ideas. Globally competent students can understand that audiences differ on the basis of geography and faith and audiology and wealth and a whole lot of other factors and that they may perceive different meanings from the very same information. They can, so globally competent students can effectively communicate verbally and non-verbally and that includes being able to communicate with diverse audiences in more than one language. We think that's absolutely critical. And these kids are also very media savvy as well. They know how to use and communicate with digital technologies. And finally, we think that to be globally competent also means having the disposition to take action. And this is perhaps one way that we differ or sort of add on to what I think maybe the Common Core would have us concerned about. Here we're talking about not only learning about the world but making a difference in the world. Taking action to make a difference first requires that students see themselves as capable of making a difference. So globally competent students are, think of themselves as actors and not bystanders. This is important for all students but it's especially important for immigrant or ethnic minority students and students from poor families who may not travel beyond their neighborhoods much less around the world. Yet to know that they have the power to change the world and starting in their own neighborhoods is absolutely essential. A big part, we think of leveling the playing field is opening up the horizons of possibility for all students and inculcating them within them a belief that even though you may be poor and even though your community may lack resources, you have the right and the responsibility to try to compete and collaborate on a global stage. So that's how we define what it means to be globally competent. Disciplinary and interdisciplinary knowledge, learn and apply through a global lens, coupled with the capacity to investigate the world, recognize and negotiate perspectives, communicate and collaborate around ideas and then to take action to improve conditions. So briefly then, how do you teach for global competence? Well fortunately in as many ways as great teachers imaginations will take them. And I just wanna just kinda talk about one way in which we've worked on this issue from at Asia Society, particularly as it relates to the Common Core. In 2004, Asia Society created the International Studies Schools Network, which is a national network of small urban secondary schools that prepare high need students for college and for success in a global era. The 35 of these schools, 82% of the students are of color, 67% are from low income backgrounds and 14% are from our English language learners. And the average graduation rate in these schools is about 90% and on various state tests, our kids tend to perform better on about two thirds of the time. So within this network, we've developed something called the graduation performance system, which is a technology driven approach to performance based assessment. And it's a system really that kind of makes good on what has been said by President Obama and Arne Duncan that bubble tests don't cut it anymore and we need a better and more authentic way of assessing student knowledge. So what we know about the Common Core standards and the new assessments is that they will create really a seismic shift for teachers and they are themselves gonna be called upon to design learning tasks and formative assessments of student learning that really measure and also deepen students' learning going forward. So the GPS is a performance assessment system in which teachers develop and engage students in project based learning and standards based evaluation of their work by embedded performance assessment tasks. And the key to all of this are the performance outcomes that kind of anchor the whole system, which are a set of very high expectations about student work that we've outlined in six different core subject areas that are completely aligned with the Common Core. And so what teachers do basically, what we help teachers do is to sort of reframe course material that they would traditionally teach in this more project based approach with this accent on developing performance based assessment as a key part of it. And so for example, a task in mathematics designed to enable students to achieve proficiency in the Common Core standards in algebra might organize learning through exploration of questions like what measurable variables relate to food scarcity and how can mathematical models be used to analyze relationships between variables? And students would then use regression models and correlation of a wide variety of international data and then the culmination of that unit might be to choose a country and analyze and represent that country's food scarcity issues at a Model U.N. Poverty or Economic Summit. So the point I'm just trying to get to here really is that this and other ways, there are ways to do this, we can do this. The idea of being able to use performance based assessment and sort of project based learning and so forth, it's a method that we can use and use it in such a way that the Common Core is sort of a launching pad potentially for developing global competence and by the same token, developing global competence can be the way in which we actually enable kids to get to the Common Core. So the point really is this is a doable proposition and it isn't something that we can't do and we have to figure out the methods to do it but there are ways in fact that Common Core can be kind of aligned and hand in glove with the development of global competence. So I'll leave it at that. Thank you.  That almost sounds like the silver bullet but I'll ask you about that later. It's a big deal. It's a big deal, okay. Fernando. Thank you Pedro. Let me first say that it's a privilege to be in this panel with two colleagues whose work I admire and who have a tremendous commitment with working with the profession to improve schools for all children and it's an honor to be with all of you here today. I wanna thank Harriet and salute her efforts of demonstrating that anything worth doing, any difficult challenge worth tackling can only be tackled by teams and I think that this idea of bringing teams together to work on issues that are complicated. How do we address the challenges of our most needed schools? Is I believe exactly the right way to go and I've learned a tremendous amount just this morning in being part of the conversations. I wanna make two very simple points and then I wanna share some information with you. First one is, I wanna talk about the reasons to do global and the second one is I'm gonna talk about the opportunities in doing global. So the reasons are two. One is cosmopolitan, one is more parochial. Cosmopolitan, we have a number of challenges that we've become increasingly aware of whether it is sustainability of this planet, whether it is making sure we have peace, whether it is making sure we can reduce the worst forms of poverty and exclusion that no nation will be able to solve alone. Friend of mine told me that he had asked a junior colleague recently, what do you think the last 50 years of this century will be like? And the response was, well, I think they'd be great if we can get through the first 50 years. And whether we can get through the first 50 years, I think to increasingly will depend on how cosmopolitan, the entire population of different nations can be. I think it's no accident that the secretary general of the UN recently announced that the three big priorities for education for the entire UN system includes as one of them developing global citizenship. Now the whole UN is trying to figure out what does that mean and how do we do it? So that's the cosmopolitan reason to do it. The more parochial reason, the more selfish reason is that over the next decade or two, about 50% of the jobs in this country will disappear. They will disappear because machines will do them, machines that can learn. And we're gonna have to figure out two things. A, how do we create new jobs and new industries? And B, how are we gonna share the potential losses in our standard of living that would come from that? And how are we all going to participate in a democracy in generating the solutions to that? I think that the possibility of some real social turmoil is not out of the question. Particularly the trends in inequality that we have seen in the last three decades continue for much longer. And so the point that Denis van der Riekel made this morning of the importance of developing civic capacity, the capacity for engagement in democratic citizenship. So we get to the point where one person gets to be one vote again, couldn't be more important at this time. Now, what does global have to do with it? I think global presents for many kids for a growing percentage of our students, those who themselves or whose parents come from other places. An opportunity to change the conversation about cultural difference. From a conversation that has been largely about fixing kids who have some problem because they speak a language other than English at home or because they or their parents came from a different country to getting to see that as an asset. If we begin to talk about global, all of a sudden schools need to be cemeteries for cultural difference and for foreign languages. They can be a place where we actually build and capitalize on that. So that's one reason. The other one is that global, in many ways, as we develop the kinds of 21st century skills that Pedro and Antonio have been talking about, there are many things that we need. I don't think there is a single path that all kids should follow. We need sports, we need arts, we need engineering education, we need robotics, we need new ways to do English and math.  English and math, for example, those domains have owners in the departments. And so good luck. It's a job that needs to be done to begin a conversation in the departments about how do we rethink how we teach mathematics or physics or chemistry. But I suspect it's gonna be a little bit more challenging than doing it around global education because frankly, until now, nobody cares very much about global. So this is virgin territory. We can all be in it together. No one has to give up any preconceived ideas about the great things we've been doing in the past because we haven't really been doing enough. And so that's a pragmatic reason to do global. Let me share with you some information just as a reminder of how important this is. I won't have time to go through all of my slides but I will leave them behind and I hope that Harriet and her colleagues can distribute those with you. But I just wanna highlight a couple of them. So these are data from an exercise conducted every five to seven years in about 80 countries around the world called the World Value Survey. Where representative samples of the population in all these nations, the US included, are asked about 500 questions. This is one of them. What are important qualities in kids? And in your book, the very last document in the book is a short article where I use some of this data. So I expand on some of the ideas I'm only going to introduce in the remaining 10 minutes. And so what we see here is that in the US, most parents, the one quality that most value in children is the ability to get along with people who are different which in some ways should not be a surprise because this country, this little democratic experiment in self-rule was built as a result of a very powerful philosophical movement of the 17th and 18th century that basically proposed, you know what? We should give up on the aspiration of salvation and enduring misery in this world so that we're rewarded in the next. And instead, we should replace that aspiration with the aspiration of reducing human suffering. And the way we're gonna reduce human suffering is we're not going to ask either kings or religious authorities to do it for us. Ordinary people can do that very well themselves. Thank you very much. And so that's why we have public schools. Public schools were invented so that ordinary people could rule themselves. And of course, a precondition for that to work is that we can trust one another across all kinds of difference. It is very difficult for any experiment in self-rule to function if we cannot work across lines of difference. So it's good to know that our parents are with us when we're trying to teach kids to be accepting and embracing of diversity. It's quite another thing to see how we're doing. And in terms of the rest of the world, there are other countries that value tolerance a little bit more than we do, but we don't do too bad. About 80% of our parents value that. So we've got some work to do with a fifth of the population. When we ask people in the same survey, how do you feel about having a neighbor of a different race? The US, compared to other countries, does great. Now, there is a certain social desirability in answering that question, but it's reassuring to know that only about 4% of Americans admit that they would rather not have a neighbor of a different race. Compare that with the French who reappeared to be real bigots here in this slide. And I'm glad I don't live in France, I guess. Same is true for religion. We do very well. But when we ask a different question, which is how much would you trust someone of a different race or religion? We don't do so well. Certainly we don't do so well with gays. When we ask people, how would you feel about having a gay person next to you where eight times more intolerant than we are for religion and race? So we have a lot of work to do on this particular issue. But we certainly have a lot of work to do on trust. And so, for example, when we ask how much would you trust someone of a different religion, about a third of the US population really wouldn't trust at all or very much someone of a different religion. And very few people would trust someone of a different religion completely. Now, that's a little complicated for a country that has the religious diversity to the point that Tony was making, as the US has, because how do we get the politics to function? And maybe if we look down the street at Congress, we know exactly what the answer is to that question. It's even worse for nationality. So as someone who's an immigrant to this country, I look at this figure and I worry how many of you are having second thoughts as to whether you can trust me or not, because I speak with this very thick accent. Right, so when you ask people to what extent do you consider yourself a global citizen, a world citizen, only one in five Americans really sees themselves as a global citizen. And that gives me pause because, you know, the idea of developing cosmopolitanism is at least 100 years old in this country. One of the very first persons on record to argue in front of an audience of secondary school principals, 1928, a professor at Teachers College named Isaac Kandel, that the high school curriculum should really prepare our students to understand interdependence of our nation and other nations, in a one hour speech, he devoted 20 minutes to making the case, the kinds of things that Tony has said, and then he devoted 40 minutes to explain that he was not a communist and he was not an anti-American. And so to think that 100 years later, we still think that somehow embracing the idea of cosmopolitanism negates patriotism is a sign of how much work we still need to do to prepare our population. And the consequences of these are dire. I serve, for example, on the US Commission for UNESCO. You may or may not know that the US has not been meeting its financial obligations to UNESCO. UNESCO will soon vote on a new secretary general. We will not be able to vote. And one of the things, we had a bit of a crisis this summer with the Secretary of State and the Ambassador in UNESCO in saying, how are you gonna fix that? How do we get Congress to do something about that? And we said, well, the first issue is how many Americans know what UNESCO is, much less care about that. And so how do we get the Congress to get us to behave as a civilized partner in the bodies that were created after World War II precisely so that we could have peace in the world? That's just one example. It could give you other examples. When we ask people, have you heard, let me ask you a question. Could you raise your hand if you have heard of the Millennium Development Goals? The Millennium Development Goals, you know where they are? Right, so it's like the population. The MDGs are a very important global compact, crafted about a decade ago to eliminate the most object forms of poverty from the face of the earth. And only 5% of the Americans have heard of them, a much lower percentage than the percentage of people in Ethiopia, in Brazil, in Mexico who have heard about the MDGs. So these are just some signs, I could keep showing you data, that suggest that our students receive an incomplete education at best in a world that is as interdependent as you have suggested, even on the facts. Not talking about affection, caring about the facts, or having the competency to do anything about the facts. And so this was Mr. Kandel already told you about you. For a long time, we've been trying to do things to develop global competency. I just wanna be clear in terms, when people talk about global competency, some people think about getting more people to go to college and we certainly need to have more Americans transition from high school to college and finish college. A lot of people think about making sure that what we teach in the core subjects is aligned with what other nations around the world teach and so the article in the Washington Post this morning referring to teams reflects that. This is the third conception is the one I'm talking about, is the one that Tony has spoken from. And basically, we also need to teach people to understand the world in which they live and we need to develop the capacity to think comparatively, for example, about how different societies think about equality and how different societies organize themselves to take about the people who don't have very much in life, you know that in Finland for example, whenever a kid is born, a family receives a little box that can serve double up as a crib, but that has some basic clothing and some formula for the kid and so on. I think symbolically about what it says to the society that you're born in life and that the rest of the society is giving you this gift, is welcoming you. If you are too poor in Finland to afford a newspaper subscription, you get one subsidized by the government because there are some Chinese that you really can't participate in a democracy if you don't follow the news. Now I think it would be helpful to our high school students at a time of very resilient inequality in this country and at a time when our society is increasingly divided between people who live in echo chambers in bubbles to know that there is more than one way to organize yourself as a society. I was recently in Finland visiting some schools with a number of superintendents and poll toner I saw you here and some of the colleagues in the state and I was struck by a number of things. I was unimpressed by their pedagogy. Let me just get that on the table. I didn't think it was particularly innovative but I was really very impressed in talking to high school students. Remember this Paul? That this society functions on trust and these kids learn to be trusted from a very early age and to have a lot of autonomy in that society. I think it would be helpful for us as educators to see how other countries get organized. I think it'd be helpful for our kids to know their history, to know that we haven't always run our schools the way we do today and to know that other countries don't organize our schools the way we do today or their societies more generally. That's one of the kinds of things the exercise in comparative analysis is one that would serve everybody very well even to engage as responsible citizens in their own society. So for example, I asked one of those high school kids in Finland, I said I noticed that there is a lot less civic engagement in your schools than we have in America. A lot less service learning and so on. And one of them had been an exchange student in Detroit. He said, yeah, that struck me too when I went to your country that I saw how many clubs you had to engage kids in NGOs and so on. I said, but you know, I then realized that all the things that civil society and the private sector does in America, we expect that the government will do them for us. And so of course that was, that caused me to reflect about the extent to which we really have privatized government and have reduced government to its lowest possible minimal expression. And I think it would be helpful for all of us to remind ourselves that there is more than one way to think about these things and our citizens. So I think that's part of what global education can do. This is an example, it's a wonderful little girl to me exemplifies what global competency means. Here's a girl in a very isolated part of the world who thought she needed to have the right to be educated. Some people didn't think she had the right and she began to blog in a blog of the BBC. And as you know, she was shot. I've been working with her and her foundation and her family for some time. We had her at Harvard recently, gave an award. Two things blew my mind about this 16 year old, one to an audience of 800 people. Everybody stood up in applause for 10 minutes. She said, I don't want you to think I've done anything extraordinary. It's just that in the face of grave injustice, when no one does anything, the voice of a single person can make a big difference. So a piece of the mind of this girl reminds me of Dr. Martin Luther King or Gandhi. But she's a 16 year old, you know, she said over dinner to a group of people. She said, I don't want you to think I'm exceptional. You know, someone recently gave me an iPod and one of my brothers said, Malala, you already have an iPod, why don't you give it to me? And I had misplaced my iPod, so I began to give him all kinds of excuses about how mean he had been to me. And he said, Malala, Malala, you were in the UN saying that you've forgiven the Taliban and you can't forgive your brother. But to me, this is what an empowered, global citizen looks like, right? It's someone who understands how to operate at the different levels. It's someone who embodies this spirit of enlightenment, who embodies this notion that we can take care of reducing human suffering in our immediate communities, right? And in the world, anyway. I'm gonna skip that. Some of these ideas are old. If you walk into one of the halls in the UN, they have all these gifts that different nations have presented to them. And this is a mosaic that reproduces this painting from Norman Rockwell, which I hope you recognize. It's the Golden Rule, right? Do unto others. And to me, it's a powerful reminder of what some of the goals are of global education, right? Equip people to really have the skills, to own the skills, to see your common humanity across all lines of difference and to have the capacity to join others in this shared enterprise of reducing human suffering. I have this painting on my living room and my older son, who's a bit of a devil, one day says, Dad, did you notice the date when this was painted? I said, no, it was April 1st of 1961. This is April Fool's Day. And I said, well, I hope there is no symbolism in that at all. This is, of course, another reason to do global education. I've talked about it. I think you can get the rest of the slides. I'd rather stop here. In the slides, you will see, every year, I organize a think tank where I bring together a group of educators like this one who are interested in this practice to learn from one another and will spend three days together. And I always ask them, what are the biggest challenges to doing this work where you are? And so I won't have time to go over them, but you will be receiving their responses. In fact, I've talked to Harriet. I hope we can ask you to the extent that doing something of this sort, developing the global competency of your students in your districts is a priority.  So you probably will be receiving a survey at some point if Harriet and I can get our act together and do that, and it would be very interesting in your responses. But let me just stop here and have more time for dialogue. Thank you. So thank you both, Tony and Fernando, for that very interesting set of presentations. I'm sure the audience priors lots of questions, but I'll start us out. Many of the districts that are here are struggling with teaching to the old standards. And they're worried about the Common Core, and now you're saying they gotta go global with the standards. So I'm wondering how do we reconcile this demand or this need, and I think you both made the case the need is there, to do more with the reality that we're not doing very well at what we've been asked to already. How do we close that gap? Yeah, please. Yeah, in the earlier conversation I had with the group of Springfield was really enlightening to me to hear that group. Because it seems to me, you know, to reflect back on Finland, the one thing that did impress me other than the way they organized their society and care for everybody, the one thing that impressed me was the consistency and the coherency with which every group we talked to, whether they were people in the Ministry of Education, whether they were people in the schools of education, had teachers and teachers, the coherence with which they spoke about their purposes for education, why this work was important, and they spoke about a vision for society and how that translated into their specific work. And I imagine that in order to get to that coherence, they've had the opportunity to have a lot of conversations within the building and outside. And in our earlier group, I think it was the superintendent of Springfield who said, well, obviously our conversation has to go outside the building because one of the things we need to do to support our most marginalized kids is to make sure that there is a coherence of support in very different aspects of life that right now do not exist for them. So you were talking about Boston Connect and these experiments. And to get to that point, I guess the starting point is to have a conversation, like the conversations we're having here. And I'd like to suggest that we should also extend those conversations inside the buildings and the districts to make sure that for each child, we really can do the personalization that Secretary Rayleigh was talking about this morning, that it is possible for each kid to connect deeply with one set of interests. And it doesn't have to be the same thing. I'm not proposing that every kid needs to take an AP course on global education. I think some kids should have that opportunity. I think that what all kids get should give them some cosmopolitanism. But I suppose that some kids have two sons, one of them is absolutely about basketball, the other one is absolutely about computers. And it doesn't really matter what I do, they're gonna be different. And I think our schools should do that. So to your question of how do we address the challenges really of the 19th century, that we haven't addressed for some kids, while also addressing the challenges of the 21st century, I think the starting point is convening a conversation in districts and in buildings about what is the end goal? What are we trying to achieve? What are these competencies that we want for our graduates? And I think the Common Core gives us a wonderful starting point. I embrace it, I salute it. I don't think it's a magic bullet, but I think it's a great step forward. I don't think it should be the only thing that we think about when we imagine what those, that profile of a graduate should be in terms of the things people should know, the things they should care about, and the things they should have a skill to make a difference about. And once we're clear about that, you can then go back and audit the existing curriculum and ask, okay, where in our curriculum are there opportunities to develop those skills? And when we do find things that are wonderful and aligned with that, we should celebrate that. We should celebrate those successes, unlike other people know about it. And where there are gaps, we should feel them. And I think that exercise is not a parallel exercise for the Common Core and Global. It's the same exercise. So that's my answer to it. We need to organize the conversation so that we're really all working in concert as teams, so that what we do in the first grade, the teacher in the first grade is absolutely in sync with what the person in high school is doing in sports. I'll use this one. I'll just make one comment if this is still working. If not, maybe I'll use this one. I think one of the things we actually also need to realize is that the issue isn't necessarily that we've now discovered a whole new set of skills that need to be taught, because in fact, there's a whole dialogue that says that 21st century skills is a misnomer, that the skills we're talking about essentially are fourth century skills, that Dewey and others long time ago and before that, and just sort of the basic fundamental notions of what education should be about said that what it's really all about is helping people learn to be thinking productive, innovative citizens, and that's as old as it gets. The issue really is that for many years now in this country, that kind of education has been reserved for one group of folks. And the question now is how do you create the means by which that kind of education is available to all students? And so I think some of us who are in this room actually have recently returned from Singapore where Asian Society has an initiative called the Global Cities Education Network, of which NEA is one of the funders, thank you. And we basically are trying to have a dialogue between Asian and US districts on kind of best practice and innovation and so forth. And it was clear there that in Singapore, for example, they are very much thinking about 21st century skills. But what is clear in their thinking about this is it's all about implementation. It's all about engaging teachers thoughtfully and on a prolonged and deep basis in the kind of learning of the kind of stuff that I was talking about, project-based learning and ways of really engaging students deeply, developing that capacity in every teacher in every classroom. And so they do have a set of standards for 21st century skills. It's sort of comparable to our common core. But what they really place their emphasis on is how do we make sure that every one of our teachers is able to teach towards this kind of approach in every one of our classrooms? And it isn't the case that every kid in Singapore is well to do. I mean they have their pockets of poverty and so forth. So that to me is the issue is how do we essentially create a means by which this form of education which has been reserved for a few becomes now the norm for everyone. And that's the big question to me. How about you go ahead and then I'll back. Called Rethinking Globalization and also Rethinking Columbus. And I wanna just point out that what is discussed in terms of global education oftentimes focuses on high school. And I really think it's important for us to realize that what happens in the earliest grades is super important because the first time that kids in our schools sort of see a intercontinental collide or meeting is with a Columbus as discoverer myth. And the Columbus myth really teaches kids ultimately whose voice is to listen to and whose voice is not to listen to. And if you pick up a biography of Columbus you'll see what I mean by that. And it also teaches ultimately that heavily armed white folks going to another country is legitimate if there's gonna civilize the other country. You think I might be exaggerating but that is really the subtext of that myth. So in my classroom in fifth grade we put Columbus on trial for genocide. And we have Columbus and his lawyers. We have the king and queen and their lawyers crew and their lawyers and the Tainos. And they debate, they debate from different perspectives the multiple perspectives that you're talking about and they, I have to put my best students as Columbus's lawyers by the way because he has a lot to defend. But my point is that the dispositions and perspectives that we and Colgate at the earliest grades have a huge impact on how kids look at global issues nationally, internationally. And we shouldn't downplay that. I also have to say that when we talk about multiple perspectives I think it's really important for us to push kids to figure out in whose interest is this perspective? It's not just a matter of knowing that there's different perspectives. In whose interest was it that Columbus was guaranteed 10% of all gold coming back from the new world? And in that way we can examine the critical issues like you mentioned for instance the Reconciliation Commissions in Chile and South Africa. I think that's great to tie that in. But I think we as Americans have a moral responsibility to also look at what our role was on September 11th, 1973 when Allende was overthrown by the CIA. And for us to look and help our kids examine our role in Vietnam. And what responsibility do we still have for the three million Vietnamese who were killed in that war? And these are very uncomfortable things and I know somebody in 1928 would be called a certain name for saying these things and somebody in 2013 might be called something for saying these things. But we as a nation I believe and we as teachers have to have the moral courage to help teach our kids to look at these issues critically from the very earliest ages. Thank you. Thanks Bob. Let me respond to Bob before I, because I said I could also talk up here. I didn't get to ask questions so I gotta join in. So what I appreciate as speaking as a teacher too, that is that you're raising, because one of the things I think we have standards and curriculum and then we have assessment looming over schools and teachers. As a threat and a weapon, right? But then what we often miss is the teaching, right? And how to do teaching that's engaging that will get kids to think deeply, right? And so one of the questions that raises in addition to all the ethical issues that you brought to us is depth versus breath, right? Because as I listen to the conversation of all the things we want our kids to get, I can just see we're just adding more and more to the curriculum and where's the depth of knowledge? Where's the depth of skills? Where does mastery fit into this equation? Because we have lots of kids, lots of evidence right now of kids getting good scores on test, not prepared for college, taking remedial courses in college because they still can't write, they don't reason very deeply. And so I wanted to temper our enthusiasm for the Common Core with the reality of teaching, right? Which I think Bob has brought to this conversation pretty well. It's a very important issue you raised. And I think it exemplifies well the power of having conversations inside the school and in the district that begin with a clear sense of what are the outcomes that you want. What I would hope for your kids and for my kids is that you're helping them develop the capacity to engage in the public sphere. The concept of the public sphere is fundamental to a democracy. It's a concept that says we do not know all the answers to the challenges that we're gonna face together as a democracy. But we will figure them out by talking them out as equals depending on evidence, on science-based evidence to inform our thinking. And so that means that exercising in the practice of deliberation is fundamental to have those competencies. I agree that teaching history doesn't have to be world history. Even history can be a powerful way to do that. I do think that there is a distinction obviously. I have on some of the issues you've talked about or on whether Finland is doing the right thing or the wrong thing in organizing the welfare system that they have, I have a point of view. What I hope I do as a teacher is not to indoctrinate my students in my point of view is to give them the opportunity to engage with different points of view, including those that disagree with mine. So they really have the skills to engage in the public sphere, so thank you. Well, I'm actually more interested in having this colleague join in here, but I guess I'll just say one thing that, I mean, I think the Common Core could be a bad thing if it was meant to be that it's just a new, very broad set of standards that need to be learned from A to Z. I think if it is instead taken as a platform for the kind of more in-depth kind of conversation you were just talking about, I mean, that's where I think there's an opportunity and that's what we've been trying to think about is how do you actually use this as a means to go much, much deeper and much deeper in the development of thinking skills and so forth. The one thing actually I just was also really sort of came to mind when you were talking is how interesting that class must be as a student. And I think that's one of the things also that this sort of emphasis on global brings to the table, which is it makes school much more interesting and it gets kids engaged in the issues that they see around them in their neighborhoods or in the world and they feel as though they have some way of connecting to those very fundamental issues rather than have school be this esoteric exercise of stuff that you'll need this when you become an adult, which never worked for anybody, frankly. So anyway, I'll just leave it at that, but we had a, I don't know if you wanted to join in. I'll get this here and then we'll get some others. Okay. No. Yes. Yes. Well, I almost hate to say, but I'm very proud to be from Columbus, Ohio. Coming after you, it's like, do I stand up and say Columbus? Well, but very proud, very proud. One of the best city in the world at this point. So I had a question about a few things that you said, Mr. Jackson, first of all, just the whole global competency conversation was just speaking to me. So I really appreciate your comments. I had a question about how is, and I'm not an educator. So that's probably my disclaimer, but how do you have leaders, the teachers in the classroom lead a discussion about the necessity of global competency in some cases where there's low exposure to the need or necessity of being globally competent because we all bring to the classroom as we all bring to our work our own life experiences. And so if I have not been exposed to other cultures or the necessity of living in that world, how do I not only embrace it, but embrace it enough to teach it? That's my first question. And I'll sit down, ask my second question and then I'll sit down. And my other question is you talked about educating low income children. I see the necessity and how do you communicate the necessity and what is that differently? You know, there's terms that describe teaching in urban environments and things like that and the assumption of urban being low income and trying to make sure that that discussion doesn't say that there's something different about teaching that child without saying that they deserve the same equitable education at the same time. To the second question, I would be struck dead if I ever thought that I was saying that there was any difference in the quality of education that needs to be from one community to the other. I was just saying that the schools that we actually have been working in are in low income and minority communities primarily. In fact, in Columbus is one of the sites of one of our schools. To the issue though that you were raising first around essentially if there hasn't been a broad global exposure, how do you teach that to kids? I think the point really is along the lines of what Fernando was saying is that you have cultural difference nowadays in virtually every community within every community and so to be global is to be understanding and able to relate to people who are different, who are different than you are, who have different cultural backgrounds in your very own neighborhoods. So I mean, a very good first exposure to global competence that I've seen in one of our schools in LA is there are African American kids and Latino kids learning Korean with Korean kids in the same classroom. This is in like first grade and it's the basis upon which their whole worldview of what languages people speak, what languages are available to learn, who is competent and who's not, starts at the very early age of their exposure of kids in their neighborhood or from the close by in their neighborhood who they might not regard or think about their cultural heritage otherwise. So I think there's ways to get at global that don't require thinking or being involved in sort of great world issues. It's really looking in your own neighborhood. I mean, one of the things we do in our schools is we do an asset mapping of the neighborhood. What are the global resources that are in shops or in organizations? How do you find the global in very kind of situations where you might overlook it otherwise? So I don't think it's a matter really of waiting until people have the opportunity for exposure or exchange around the world. It's using the international or global resources that are really inherent within societies where diversity is the new normal. So that was kind of the way I would think about it. Fernando, you probably have some thoughts on this as well. I don't want to say something, I'm not gonna embarrass you here, but Tony and his colleagues at the Asia Society did something about a decade ago that I think any district in America and any state could follow. They basically identified good practices in global education at the elementary, high school, college level, and district level. And then they brought together, it was a competition model, those that were considered truly great, they brought them together, I forget, New York or Washington someplace, every year for about 10 years you did that. And I thought, what a smart thing. In education sometimes we have a certain fascination with pathology and we're great talking at length about what doesn't work. And sometimes we have a little bit of a hard time flicking the switch and saying, well, how are we gonna improve on that? So this model was all about that, was about let's recognize and spotlight things that are working well and let's create a mechanism to make them visible and help others learn. I bet you that in every school district in America there are some practices at some level that we could learn from. And if we could create as part of these conversations of teams in the district that are thinking about 21st century skills and the common core and how do we develop a shared and coherent vision, part of what these teams could do is let's identify areas of strength and let's communicate them to others in the district and to others outside. And maybe the community that you have already built here over three years is uniquely positioned to do that. And if I think, to me, that is the single most important intervention in this country that really move the global education forward. And it's really too bad you discontinued that. And right, but I think we could all learn from that. That's the only comment I wanted to make. But I would just add, I think that's a very important point. And I think it's a particular role that the NEA should play, right? That is that the conversation about teaching and what is good teaching needs to be taken up by the union, right? That is that because we've been focused on, I would say too much on assessment. And now we're on standards, but who's talking about what good teaching is and how to make it available to a broad range of children and do work that truly engages and results in not just a cosmopolitan orientation, but all the higher order thinking that we would hope would have. So I think that's a particularly good role for the NEA to play. So I saw a hand way back there. Yes. Yes, thank you. As you were discussing the global competencies and in particular the response of Americans with regard to trust of neighbors from a different culture and so forth, it struck me that I think it is unfortunate and counterproductive that all too often when we are talking about the common core and when we're talking about topics like STEM and so forth, it's always framed in sort of a fear-based framing that we have to get better at this or else we're not going to succeed in this competitive global economy, whereas probably the greater reality would be that we're actually all going to be cooperating in an increasingly global economy in which you may have team-sourced or group-sourced activities where some of your team may be global or you may be interfacing with other teams in a larger setting or you may be doing some work that is sort of more of a public sector sort of open-source kind of work, which is all cooperative in nature. And I think we contribute to that very fear-based lack of trust when we frame the need for common core in language around if you're going to compete in any global economy and not lose your job to some scary person in another country, you've got to do this, you've got to have STEM, you've got to have common core. I don't think it really is an ideal framing for us and I would just encourage us to think about that. You can make the same case by saying the economy is an increasingly global economy and we have to be able to be successful in that. You can say the same thing without it creating sort of a global bogeyman kind of argument out there, just an observation. I just wanted to make two comments. I agree with you that no one learns very much or is at their most creative when we have fear and that's why I think that these exercise where you come together once a year for a few days and have time to take perspective and I hope some distance and some historical perspective and get to know one another a little bit is probably very valuable in terms of building that trust. But I fear for my kids. I mean, I fear about the reality that automation creates the possibility that half of the jobs will not exist in 15 years so I ask myself what are my kids going to do? And where I have hope is in the democratic process because I think that we should be able if the public sphere works and if everybody has the competencies to engage thoughtfully on these issues I have hope that we can solve that. I don't place my hope in the 1% and I do think that some of our democratic processes have been breaking down for some time. We have a democracy that is not functioning the way it should so that every person can engage with the issues that concern them and has the skills to represent their own interests and the vote to represent their own interests. So that's why I think that making that a purpose of the public school is absolutely urgent. Understanding that we invented these institutions to equip people, to be citizens, to equip ordinary people to take care of their affairs. I don't think we're doing that very well at the moment. So I share your point of view that trust is more important than fear and we should do it and we should do more of it. But I think there are good reasons to fear. To fear about jobs, to fear about the future of our democracy and to fear about our capacity as a species across national divides to really sustain this planet and life on this planet. But, Fernando, what I hear the person saying is that if we think about it only in terms of fear that what we miss out on is the opportunity. I know that the superintendent Fayet is now in India right now, right? That's why he's not at the conference because he's involved with other educational leaders thinking about global education. You just got back from Finland, right? What can we learn from that system? And I think, I don't know how many other districts are doing that kind of work where you're visiting other places because I think part of what America suffered from is a kind of- Myopia. Myopia, right? You describe children learning in Korean and English, right? That is, part of the other side of the fear is to recognize the opportunities that exist for expanding our horizons and looking at what we might learn from other cultures. Yes? Tatiana Joseph from Milwaukee, Wisconsin. And one of the things when we have this discussion about global education that makes me very nervous and you just touched on it a little bit is the language component. We live in a nation that prides itself in being monolingual. We cut bilingual education funding. We strive for English only. So how do we build this global education system when we can't even be on the same page about language issues and allowing opportunities for children? One, to develop two languages, three languages. I mean, we were just hosting a German exchange teacher and he speaks five languages fluently. And he asked me, well, how many languages do children need to be fluent in to go to university? And I said, well, honestly, barely one. So, you know, it's... But how do we even approach this global education when we, you know, as a nation, we're probably divided around issues of bilingual education? I'll just mention that I think that's exactly right. I mean, I think one of the great failings we have in our education system is the lack of emphasis on language learning. And it's a political issue because, I mean, at Asian Society, we are not a lobbying organization. We do educate members of Congress, but we tried very hard to educate Congress around ESEA, reauthorization around the fact that language learning was being sort of bundled up among a lot of other issues in sort of these almost competitive nature that funding would be allocated on. I think that NEA as an institution would be terrifically positioned to take a stance on the fact that there needs to be much greater emphasis on language learning and learning of world languages within our schools and that we are light years behind other countries. There's no other industrialized country that has the lack of language learning policy like we do. And when you do travel in Asia, well, I travel mostly in Asia, it is just commonplace for people to speak two or three languages. And I just came back from Hong Kong and it's required that they come away with English, Mandarin, and Cantonese. And it's the same thing in other places. So, I mean, we're just woefully behind there. And it isn't just the learning of the language that comes from language learning, it's the learning and appreciation of other cultures and the capacity to think from different perspectives. And that wholism that comes from language learning has been shown to have cognitive benefits beyond simply the language capacity. So, I just would make the case that NEA could really be a significant force to speak out on that. I just wanted to add two things. I agree that we're divided on that issue. We're divided on too many issues which would not in itself be a problem if we had the opportunity to then come together and explore where do we have the common ground and really understand the basis of our divisions and so on. But to go back to the language, even with the divisions we have in the country and the lack of sort of singular point of view on what to do that, there's plenty of very good examples in this country at the school district and state level that are global examples that are better than the things I've seen in Finland. Take the state of Utah for example. And so I think that this field is one that would be absolutely ready for the approach that the Asian society didn't invent but demonstrated in recognizing good practice in global. I invite all of you to look at the foreign language policy of the state of Utah. They have the most enlightened policy, 100 schools where they're teaching two way bilingual education in five different languages. Who would have thought? And so the languages are Portuguese, Mandarin, German, Spanish and what's the other one? French I think. And I think we could all learn from that from what that state is. But just like the state of Utah is doing that, there are schools doing very good things today in America. So it seems to me that identifying that kind of evidence, understanding it and sharing it in appropriate venues such as this one would go a long way in helping us move from our divisions which are largely based on preconceptions and ignorance and inform with facts about what we're doing already and help us maybe build a little bit of common ground. Thank you. Is the hand back here? Yes. Hi, good afternoon. My name is Joyce Warner and I'm here from a nonprofit that's located headquartered here in Washington but works all over the world. And one of the folks, and I'm originally have my teaching license from New York but one of the things that we have co-developed with the State Department is a program that's a year long professional development program for teachers in middle and high school and we're talking about elementary to help them be able to introduce more globally oriented teaching into their schools and their communities. And so if during the break anybody's interested in this, please let me know it's fully funded. It's mixed methods learning. It includes workshops in person, it includes online classes, it includes international travel and it includes grant funds afterwards for projects at the school level. So if you're interested in learning more about how you can bring that to your community, we've had, it's only in its third year now, just starting, we've had almost 200 teachers go through it so far. Thank you. Thank you. Did I say, Alan, did you have an hand back? Yep. Yes. My question has to do with how we can move forward in a way that does not just pit the 20th century construct of knowledge and skills. And we often start with that question of what do I want folks to know and be able to do? Is that a mantra? And to offer, I guess, some perspective of how can we not continue that construct which pits them against each other and come up with a new frame that moves us forward and beyond? And I would suggest just to, instead of saying know and be able to do, if we had a more student capacity-centered frame that was about who do we want our children to become which can be know and do much more, might be a way forward with regard to having a way of saying that we're really trying to develop student capacities of all different kinds and our knowledge gets its meaning by how it plays out in the development of those capacities. And so I guess I see the global competency, not just knowledge, and I look at common core versus 21st century skills, and wonder if we can move beyond a polarizing way of trying to just put them both there together and saying if we're all really trying to develop student capacities, can't we find a way forward for all of that as they are means unto developing the human core? Okay, so, and I apologize, I'm gonna be leaving shortly, so that, but these two gentlemen will be more than happy to continue this conversation without me. I wanna say something that is an indirect response to your question. One of the great institutions we have in this country is the National Research Council. It was created by Abraham Lincoln soon after the Civil War. Was created to solve a very simple problem when people began to build ships that were made of metal as opposed to wood and those ships were going in the Mississippi River, the compasses wouldn't work. And so these got to the attention of the president and he asked a few friends who were scientists, how do we get the compasses to work? So I forget what the answer was where they did it, but Lincoln thought it was a great idea to create a little institution where you could bring scientists from time to time to look at the evidence and inform of issues of public importance identifying where the consensus was where we didn't know and where was disagreement. So the National Research Council is based here, continues to work. They have produced recently a consensus report which is the best thing I have read on 21st century skills. It really has clarified my thinking. The authors of that report are Hilton and Pellegrino and the name of the report is something, knowledge and skills for life and citizenship or something like that. But if you Google National Research Council, Hilton and Pellegrino, I encourage you to read that report, encourage all of you in your teams to read it and talk about it. The report basically looks at the basic science. It doesn't say how we teach them, tells us what they are, gives us a very good organizing framework. The language of 21st century, you could call them 4th century BC skills. Basically they say there are three buckets of competencies that really matter to being in charge of your life. Cognitive skills is one bucket, self-knowledge is another bucket and the capacity to work with other people is another bucket. And within each of these buckets, they're very clear in naming the skills and examining the scientific evidence on what we know about the short and long-term effects and the kinds of things that help us do that. It's a lot more useful than a lot of the Mambo Jambo I've read, cognitive, non-cognitive, soft, hard. A lot of that is not clear thinking. This is really clear scientific thinking. And on Lincoln, there's so much we could learn from that man these days. I've watched that movie that Spielberg put together time and again. There is a piece of that movie, which is great on leadership. It's a conversation he has with, forget his name, Stevens, I think it is, in Congress, about how Stevens is gonna behave and he tells him, I lead, you have to try it sometime. And Lincoln steps back and he says, I have, I admire you, I admire your zeal and I have tried to profit from your example. But there is a difference between knowing true North and not getting stuck in a swamp in moving there. And he's saying, the art of moving forward is the art of compromise. Is the art of finding this common ground, which we need a democracy. So anyway, National Research Council was a great institution to do that. These kind of convenings is another great institution to help us move forward. I'll just say a word on that. And then I think I'm gonna, I've been deputized to take over the panel. Yeah, thanks. One of the things that you were, the, because of what you were saying, the idea of sort of not trying to just make it about skills and knowledge is why in our definition of global competence, there is this notion of disposition. And it's really about sort of creating an overall sort of way of being in the world that we're talking about. And it's very interesting. It made me think about the fact that when I was in Singapore and then I think, Fernanda would say the same thing in Finland, it's very interesting how much they will tell you that the purpose of education is to develop a certain set of values within students. They don't start with knowledge and skills. They really are about who they want their kids to be in the world. And that's their orientation from the very beginning. And it does, it's very interesting because I mean, this is the government saying that that's what we want our kids to do. And the fact that it is accepted and people are sort of happy with that idea that the government is helping to develop values is because there is a deep trust of government. Not unchallenged, but I mean, there's a fundamental sense that the government actually is interested in actually every one of their kids doing well and developing those kind of values. And so it's just a phenomenon that I've noticed that there is a huge difference. Well, it's a significant difference between kind of the overall orientation of what education is for that then leads to this whole notion of character development values, disposition as a key part of what they really want their schools to produce. Oh, okay, so other questions or other comments? Yeah, right here. Other thoughts? Over here. Tom, Jonathan Knapp in Seattle. So I'm glad you brought that question up because that sort of raises a whole new series of questions in my mind about sort of how do we build? I mean, it seems like we're deeply divided as a country about that question of values and the role of government in advocating for certain values. And I just wondered if you had some thoughts about how to sort of leverage those conversations in the communities and, you know, I mean, in this room, we can have that conversation. I mean, most of us can agree that that's probably a good conversation to have. You know, I have a lot of sympathy for my brother over in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, where that kind of conversation just doesn't go anywhere. It's not politically possible on some level. I'm not saying it's absolutely impossible, but in the current political reality, it's really, really difficult. How do we engage the other side in the notion that, you know, we need to articulate a common set of values for education and the things that flow from that, how do we, you know, how to get from here to there? I mean, that's a technical problem. The values question is, it seems to me, to be even a thornier question. I have a perspective. You know, one of the things that struck me on this recent trip I took to Finland is I talked to a guy who was the head of the School of Education of the University of Helsinki. I talked to him prior to his trip and I asked him, what's your take on why you do so well as a country? This guy's field is science education, so his response struck me and maybe it'll strike you. He said, I think that there are three reasons. One is that we understand that a country is bound by a set of values. And for example, the value of solidarity, you know, that the value that we would be there for those who are in great need. And because we realize how important this is, it is a function of the public school to engage kids in those deliberations. I said, well, how do you teach those values? He said, well, we teach religion and they teach, the way they go about it would be a non-starter in this country, but here moral deliberation rather than religion. They basically teach from kindergarten to high school. They engage their kids in the deliberation of our ethical dilemmas. I think this is the best thing we ought to get our schools and these days, when I take the boss to my work, I'm doing a little course, which is free. I recommend it by Michael Sandel Justice. It's a fantastic course. It's a course that any of us could engage in. It's engaging you in moral deliberation about what's the right thing to do in the face of difficult dilemmas. And I think that we are currently failing our kids. We do our best work, I think, in kindergarten and elementary school in teaching those things. And after that, we think the kids are set and as we move up, it's all knowledge. It's all cognition and we assume that somebody else is gonna take care of the values. So I'd say we start with the things that we can control, which are the schools. And I think as we do more of that work, and again, I would say the job is not indoctrination. It's not to say, well, this is my perspective. We ought to be more like Finland or more like this or that. It's a, we all recognize that we have a series of very difficult issues that we're facing as a country right now, right? What do we do with people who are out of work? And let's get the facts on who these people are at the moment and let's make sure that everybody understands how many there are and what the circumstances are and combat some of these narratives that the media have created, right? Of the welfare moms that drive Cadillacs and things of that sort, which have been very damaging to our public imagination. And then as we engage in that practice, I think we'll be more skilled in engaging with the other side. Now, my own perspective is what we have to be absolutely committed is to deepening the democratic processes and the functioning of democratic institutions. Now, in my mind, democratic institutions require parties. I can't imagine a democracy without parties. I worry that we may not realize how important parties are to the function of a democracy and that we may have the illusion that these institutions would take care of themselves if we didn't take care of them. I think unions are an important piece of it. From my mind, maybe this is not my role to say this here, I think unions need to connect with political conversations beyond the schools as part of the democratic process. And maybe they do and maybe they could do more of that. But anyway, I think we commit to democracy and to making sure that we engage all of our students in the practice of democracy and we engage ourselves in the practice of democracy. And that means there are some fairly evident things. We need to get school committees that do what they're supposed to and that represent the population. I think it's a shame, for example, that we have so few Latinos which represent 20% of our kids in our public schools in school committees. And we only have about 100 superintendents out of the 4,500 districts in this country who are Latinos. It tells us for one fifth of our population, we're not doing very well in terms of representation. And I think we can fix these things. I don't know if I have much to add on that, except that one of the things that I do think is a way in which students can develop values I think would be helpful to them is to this whole notion of recognizing perspectives. And it's not really just about recognizing, but it's about valuing perspectives. It doesn't mean that you will accept every other perspective as valid. I mean, there's a weighing of them. But just the very notion of taking the stance that other perspectives on things are credible enough to be weighed and thought of and considered and then possibly sort of enter into your own view of things. That's a way of sort of values formation, I think that's important. But it's not sort of a front and center we're gonna teach you certain values. It's rather a discovery process by virtue of not taking your own point of view as the sole one or the starting point necessarily. So I think there's ways to get at that, but it's an important issue that we have to kind of, you know, keep on working at. I saw a hand back in the back, yeah, way back in the back. But what I think is happening, and I would ask you for your comment on this, is that the fear that we would lose our identity by being so cosmopolitan constricts that desire for global competence in schools. And I think it's a very real fear that's a gripping fear that as we get more cosmopolitan, we'll lose who we are. But what I found that my experience is that by immersing in another culture, you start to appreciate your own more. So how can we advance that idea and narrative in schools to promote global competence? I think that if we look at our own history, there's so many cosmopolitan connections we can bridge. When you visit the museum of Dr. Martin Luther King, there's a whole section there that talks about his trip to India as a guest of Nero, where he spent the time with his leadership team learning about nonviolence. And you understand how important that global connection and exchange was to the civil rights movement in this country. When you look at the role that Benjamin Franklin, a great cosmopolitan played when he persuaded the French to bankroll our war of independence, basically. And you realize how he had skills that John Adams, for example, didn't have in being able to communicate with his different culture and so on. I think that in looking at our own history and getting our kids to understand what this country is about, when we look at these experiment which is really informed by this notion, this revolutionary notion that ordinary people can actually govern themselves. This was not an American idea. This was a global idea. It was a cosmopolitan idea. And Ben Franklin and some of the founding fathers were very, very knowledgeable of the philosophers of the Enlightenment. So I think one starting point is to make those connections in our own history in understanding the events that have shaped us as a country and our identity and mapping how they connect to events that are global in nature. But I know what you mean. And I don't have a good answer for how do we solve it in every context. I would just say that one of the things that we try to do is to help teachers think about the kinds of essential questions that can kind of get at that, not so much the fear aspect of it, but to put the American experience in context. So in history, for example, you can ask questions like, how has America's been shaped by international forces over time? Or what does it mean to be an American? And it isn't, I think, by any such imagination, a way or a, I mean, it shouldn't engender fear that we're going to not feel more American by examining that closely and perhaps in comparison or looking to the influences of others. But it's really to get a deeper perspective on Americanism from that global lens. So it's really finding ways within the curriculum, really in the way in which you think about lessons, that you can find ways to hopefully kind of put it in a context that isn't about, you know, losing an American identity, but rather enhancing an understanding of American identity by that comparative analysis. So I think either we're done, we're done. We're done. Thank you.


in biosynthesis flexes so okay so it's a model on cell growth so I'm studying cell growth and for that I'm starting from the central dogma of biology so transcription and translation from DNA to mRNA to protein production yes is it better like this is it better okay okay so yeah so I'm studying the transcription and translation to fluxes to study the production of proteins and so I'm starting from the I want to get those fluxes to understand cell growth so the first thing as I'm not really looking at the enzyme and metabolic pathways so I'm looking at the distribution of the RNA polymerase over the different chains of interest so for now it's a really very simple model I've just got three proteins of three sectors of interest the ribosomes RNA polymerase and all the other proteins so there is four ribosomes and it's for RNA polymerase and O4 orders so from that distribution of RNA polymerase over the genes I can get to my mRNA pool and from that mRNA pool with the ribosomes and the different initiation rates to the mRNAs I can get to my distribution of ribosomes on the mRNAs on the different sectors of mRNAs and that then gives me my prediction of proteins for the end my distribution of the proteome so again very simple sectors so they don't need to be the same sectors but here for simplicity they are so this gives me my repetition of the proteins and this will then determine along with the proteins the number of proteins my fluxes of transcription and translation and so I want to to go from there to cell growth and I want to do it to a mechanistic approach so I'm looking at those fluxes but like with a traffic model so I'm looking at how fast the ribosomes and RNA polymerase go over the DNA and the mRNA and to get to that protein production so I will first talk about the so that transcription and translation model and then see a few applications that we can use with this model so first off the traffic model that we use as the base the totally asymmetric simple excision process so it's a traffic model and which where particles are going over lattice with three important parameters the alpha k and beta respectively the initiation rate the elongation rate and the termination rate and from those three parameters we can get to every property that we're interested on in the in the model so the density of the lattice and the flux that you get for for those for those rates and so so in the simplest case we have this this flux that depends on the density row and you get to a saturation if the density gets too high so just a fair warning before this is and also the older equation you will see for the case where the particle over the lattice is of size one and that is really the case actually that is not the case in the cell as the ribosomes it's more this size so we can still solve analytically all the all the equations but for simplicity I just show the case where the size is equal to one so we've got to the model for we've got the the traffic model and so we want to apply it to translation for example so here translation we just have every lattice every mRNA is a lattice and the ribosomes go over it and the initiation rate depends on the free ribosome pool so it's every active in our ribosomes and the initiation rate then depends on the free ribosome concentration so as the new number of ribosomes increase you have a higher ribosome pool there's a higher initiation rate and that's your amount of ribosomes on the mRNA will increase so if you see can you see well no in the top left you have the how the density will change with the with the amount of ribosomes so if you increase your ribosomes your density increases as long as you're in that in a certain low density phase until until you get to saturation and as you get to saturation you change phase you get to a maximum current phase so the density is optimal for the for the current and no matter how many ribosomes you add in there you will still keep the same density and so the same flux over the mRNAs so we call that either the maximum current or the saturation phase and it is only limited by the inongation rate so we got we get actually a third phase but where the termination rate is limiting but we don't really see that in practice so I don't really show it here so in in practice we have just two phases the low density and the saturation phase one where the initiator and initiation rate is limiting on the inongation rate and so we can the flux will then depend on the amount of ribosomes you have on your mRNAs that's your bound ribosomes and that will depend on the so initiation rate so that's alpha zero times the concentration of ribosomes times the inongation rate and that's for one side so you multiply that by the number of sites you have or columns you have in your in your mRNAs so the average length of the mRNA times the total mRNA and which this number then saturates in the saturation phase at a half of all those sites so we get the the model for the translation process and we do the exact same for the transcription process the lattices are DNA the particles are in a polymerase but nothing changes so we have the wall the wall model and we can just find the fluxes depending on your amount of ribosomes and the parameters of the initiation rate and the inongation rate of DNA and mRNA and so you get a very simple gene expression model where you will be able to see the evolution of mRNA depending on your gene copy number the transcription flux and the degradation and you also see the production of proteins depending on the mRNA and translation translation flux so this is so this is the model and we don't want to see how that relates to the growth and so as you saw there are two phases for each each flex or transcription and translation so if you look at the growth you will have also four phases for each possible phase in which the fluxes are one where the everything is in low density and as either ribosomes or RNA polymerase will be abundant so you will get to a saturation phase for either transcription or translation or for both of them where the growth rate will be maximal as we will see so now we want to see what happens when you look at the growths in efforts really easy but it is you're just looking at the bulk growth so if you look at the mean value of the cell so you can make two hypothesis protein concentration is a constant for given growth rates so in a given condition so p is constant and the gene copy number concentration is constant to not for every growth rate for just for a given growth rate that means your flux of transcription and translation will also be constant over time for that given growth condition and so for each condition we can find a unique value of the RNA polymerase concentration and the ribosome concentration so first we can see a bit more about the transcription flux how that will in relate to how the flux will change for different values of the concentration of the genes and RNA polymerase so you see that it will saturate so this is the flux normalized by the maximum transcription flux so it will saturate for certain value and otherwise be in that low density phase so as long as you are above the black bar you are in low density phase and as soon as you go below it that's the saturation phase and the same for the translation process so also low density saturation and when we apply this to to find the prediction of proteins you get the phase diagram of the growth rates for different values of the RNA polymerase and ribosome concentration and so you either have both of the processes in low density or again ribosome or RNA polymerase to be abundant they will lead to saturation and you have again this part where both ribosome where both transcription and transcription are saturated and that's where we expect our maximum growth rate and indeed if you look at the normalized growth rate so the growth is every growth rate divided by the growth rate you have in the saturation part you see that it's indeed saturated where we expected it to be so in the top right and then it it decreases for the ribosome concentration and RNA-PE concentration when you are in the low density phase so this gives us a value of the growth rate for every possible condition but that's not every possible con not every condition is possible in the cells so we're looking at what we expect to find and as it happens the ribosome density of mRNA is supposed to be constant over the mRNA over the different conditions so those are lines where the density of ribosomes is constant so you'll have a relation between the RNA polymerase and the ribosome for different growth rates for a given density of ribosomes and so we expect our actual values in the cell to be following one of those lines now a slight problem you might have noticed in this diagram is the values of the ribosome concentration and the RNA polymerase concentration which are way too high for biological values so if you look more at what we expect for values to be found so for E. coli in normal growth rates so we'll find something more like this which works between zero and three because it's still you still have a saturated bit saturating part on the top right and values of the density of ribosomes that are closer to what you will expect and what we actually what is actually measured for the density of ribosomes is this line so that's our prediction for the ribosome concentration and RNA polymerase concentration for a given growth rate so we want to check that with data so we use the is the black vision and data from 2022 and you see we see that it's a very good prediction so it's not a fit it's just so starting from the density of ribosomes of RNA what you get for the ribosome concentration RNA P concentration for a given growth rate so for those of you who know the bio question and paper know that the RNA polymerase is actually the available RNA polymerase in the in the paper which is set by enzymes so but as we ignore the metabolic pathway the available RNA polymerase that's just our total RNA polymerase and so it's it is the it is the same but to be certain of that we can also look at the mRNA synthesis flux so the actual effect of the RNA polymerase for the yes so for this prediction you're looking at the low density phase for both transcription and translation here as it happens they're both in low density phase okay it's not it's not necessary I mean it's no no but it happens to be there just that was a question so that's the prediction and so if you look at the mRNA synthesis flux it also if it predicts the data very well so is the prediction based on assuming a constant linear density of ribosomes over M&A yes okay that is the the starting yes otherwise you have way too many possible values of RNA polymerase concentration and ribosome concentration for the same growth rate so of course you could get to this repetition two different ways just fitness evaluation or something like this but here it's just just a question and how far are you from from the saturation phase so here it is actually quite far but we still have traffic so if you it's low density but there's still traffic because you still have interaction because between the ribosomes and RNA polymerase so I mean I don't show it here but it's you all have a difference in the prediction if you remove the traffic from the from the model yes so if you look back if you look at the current density relationship you're not in the linear regime yes so yes you are in so this regime where so in the red the parts over there okay so that's the a bit the the results for this model on the prediction on cell economy and so we wanted to go a bit further see what we can do with this model in different applications so we looked at single cell dynamics and the first thing with single cells is that the gene concentration to be assumption that the gene concentration is constant is no longer true in small times so if you look at so before DNA replication or before division the cell is growing but you don't have more genes so the gene number is constant and why this is a work in progress so be careful about that but we we can make a prediction of what will happen because of not saturation but because of those traffic the impact it will have on the growth so if you look at the so the growth during a gene number of constants so during this space you will have that the ratio between the RNA polymerase and the number of genes will change because the protein number increase but not the gene number so you have more RNA polymerase for the same amount of genes and at some point you will get more traffic until saturation if you get saturation for the RNA polymerase you will then also have a limited amount of memory production and if you have limited amount of RNA production you can also have saturation for the ribosomes and that leads to saturated protein production of proteins so over a long time you will see that the production of proteins will saturate and so you have two two parts in this plot one where the production is still kind of auto catalytic so the you produce more proteins but the effect of having more proteins increases the the production of proteins so it is still a process that is kind of exponential but once it is saturated you so this saturated phase you will expect the production to not never change with the amount of proteins and that will lead to linear growth so that's the protein number over time over long time and when the production of proteins is limited that's you get a linear regime and when you are still the auto catalytic auto catalytic process you will have a pseudo exponential growth pseudo because it's still the transition between exponential growth where gene concentrations constant to that linear growth in effect that means if you look at the growth rate of your protein at a given amount at a given time so just the normalized production of proteins it will decrease slowly over time and once you in linear growth it will just exponentially decrease to zero very long time where you don't have exponential growth anymore the but in effect this time is very long so for a given given growth rate the actual time yourself will be in that phase of constant gene numbers will be relatively short so if we normalize the time by the time it needs to to divide you will see that the amount of of genes of the decrease in growth rates is actually quite small so there's two things we can see here one is first while it is a small decrease the instant growth rate is still decreasing that means you're not exactly in exponential growth rate during the gene constant number part but the actual decrease is really small so less than 6% even for very small growth rates so the actual approximation of that the gene is concentrating this constant is actually seems to be quite reasonable now we want to first use this to then make prediction on how long it takes to to get to the linear phase we already have that but this is still a toy model and then to make experiment to see if we can see that the transition by inhibiting DNA replication but in conclusion it's still we still have a model that can predict the economy in different conditions and while the single cell dynamics for now don't really have an impact on single on normal growth conditions we expect to see more effects on doing different stresses so when we add antibiotics especially with effects on transcription and we hope to see to make experiments with DNA replication so that's thank you for your attention and if you have any questions I will be glad to answer thanks a lot we have time for questions okay since we had already question let's thank the speaker again