Hey everyone, my name is Nameshah. I'm a product manager at Microsoft and I used to be a data scientist and I successfully made the transition to being a product manager. So this is a presentation on my journey of self-assessment which I've also shared with several people and it's really helped them. So hopefully this journey of mine where I spent three to four years being a data scientist across various teams in Microsoft, also spent some time in a Fintech company, American Express and then move into product management has value for you as well. So without quickly, you know, deep diving into my details, which I'll probably share with the product school later on and you can also get access to. Let's go into what the agenda of the talk is, right? So we're gonna spend a minute or two on understanding who this talk is for. So if the stock is not for you, feel free to pass it on to someone for whom it makes sense. Second, we're gonna talk about, you know, what the traits of a product manager are and this is important to know because you will need to understand whether you have these traits. And finally, we go to the self-assessment plan which as I mentioned, I used and a bunch of people have used and it's really brought them a lot of value. So yeah, let's get into it. So yeah, who should be listening to this talk? Essentially there are folks in three buckets, I'd call it, who get value out of this talk. So the first kind is, if you're someone who's pre-interview, you know, you're not in a PM role yet, you are thinking about making the move, you probably get to receive an interview call, you're kind of fidgety. So this talk will give you clarity about whether you like the idea of product management or whether you really want to be a product manager. The second kind of folks, I think, several folks who will gain value out of listening to this are the folks who are interviewing for a product manager role right now because this self-assessment plan will help you improve your skills. And finally, also PMs who are early in their career. So you just landed a new product manager role, you wanna understand what your strengths and weaknesses are and understand what your blind spots are because you don't have as much experience. This talk will really hit the nail on all of these things. So if you're not any one of these people, feel free to stop listening and send it to someone who will get value out of this. So going to the second part of the talk, let's talk about what the traits of a product manager are. Again, product manager and not program because they're quite different as roles. I don't want to spend a lot of time talking about this here but product school actually has a lot of good resources on what the differences are between product, program, project, all the different PM roles that are out there. And it's good to know before you jump into trying to become one. So there are a lot of definitions around what a product manager does. And if you probably see the job descriptions of various roles out in the market, you'll have slightly varying descriptions. But at the end of the day, a product manager is somebody who solves a user problem by any means necessary, within reason, to bring the company closer to achieving its goals while staying true to mission. I know that this is throwing a lot of words. So let's take an example and understand it quickly. So let's say the company we're talking about is Uber and you want to be a product manager here. The goal of the company is, among other things, to make money. And the company's mission is, this is actually taken from their website. So there are company that connects physical and digital worlds to help make movement happen at the top of a button. So if you're a product manager at Uber and your goal is to make money, you will identify user problem, something like, okay, going in cabs with unknown drivers has safety issues, right? You will solve this problem by any means necessary. So let's say, as a product manager, you ideated and envisioned that you would be creating an emergency alerting system on the Uber app, which can be activated with voice. Again, it could be any different solution, but this is just one of the solutions, right? Finally, by implementing this feature, you reach your goal, right? Users trust Uber a lot more now. They're gonna pick you over the competitors. They're gonna spend more money on the app because they're gonna book more rights on the app. So basically, this is the job at the end of the day that a product manager has to do. And this any means necessary bucket is how they do it. So that is what we need to kind of go into. And at this point, if you haven't been clear about, this is what a product manager does, I think you definitely need to rework on what this role means to you, right? So now that we're clear about what a product manager does or at least expected to do, here's the self-assessment plan that you kind of need to think about doing. If you are either think about making the jump, if you are having second thoughts about that, if you are already a PM and you want to become an even better PM, right? So let's go to step one. Most of these assessment plans, which are catered to yourself, start with reflection, right? You need to kind of start with seeing where you are. So do you find yourself exhibiting the traits of a product manager, right? So let's look at what these traits are and we'll see how much you probably are exhibiting these traits and figure out what to do next. So I usually like to explain with examples because it's easy to envision yourself doing this rather than as a theoretical concept. So let's take an example. Let's say you're a software development engineer or a data scientist at DoorDash, right? This was something very similar to what I was doing at Microsoft within the advertising organization. I was a data scientist and I was going through all of these steps. So, okay, so you're working at DoorDash, you're a data scientist or a software engineer and you're thinking about moving to a product manager role, all right? So step one, let's reflect on whether you have user empathy. So if you were an SD at DoorDash, would you think about who the users are, right? You're coding up a particular feature, you're building sound distributed system within the app, whatever it is, right? Are you thinking about who is actually using this app? Are you thinking about the restaurants who are signing up on the app? Are you thinking about the dashers who are picking up the orders? Do you worry that the feature that you're building is actually not going to be used by these people at all? So this is the basic level of being a product manager and whether you have this trait really matters a lot because if you're not able to think about anybody other than your team and what you're building and you're not able to kind of think like the user, you can't be solving user problems. So are you somebody who has this trait which is user empathy? Second thing is, are you someone who wants to know the bigger picture? So you could be working on say, just one button on the app, you could be working on say the order button, right? Are you somebody who thinks outside of this?  What countries is this app famous in? What cities is it doing well in? What restaurants or what cuisines are popular on the app? Why are Indian restaurants not signing up for DoorDash? Stuff like this. So are you kind of thinking big picture because usually product managers design or at least come up with like product roadmaps and stuff. So you can't be thinking about just one small thing. You should be interested in the bigger picture. You need to think at an org level at a company level, at a market level, what are other apps like Uber Eats, for example, doing in the space that you are working in? So are you someone who wants to know the big picture all the time? You always want to zoom out and see what makes sense and where and why. The third thing is, do you usually find yourself playing detective? So as I said, let's say you're working on the order button, for example, and something is off in say, the data that some other team is providing you. You notice that after 9 p.m. in Seattle, the number of orders through the DoorDash app have dropped significantly. Now, this is not something you're working on, but are you inquisitive about these things and do you end up going and talking to this team? Maybe you want to talk to the product managers who handle this data. Are you interested in finding out why this is happening, even though it's not directly impacting your work because this being nosy is something which product managers should really be good at because they need to dig out things that are going wrong and anticipate things so that they can go and fix it before things get really bad. And at the same time, if you have an intuition or a sense that you can make something better, you have to play detective and go dig by yourself because product managers or the folks are deciding what kind of comes next, of course in association with everyone else in the company. So it's really important to play detective. It's really important to just really be on something before you come to a conclusion which leads me to my next very important trait which you should ideally be showcasing. It is trying to get clarity about something even if it's just for yourself. So how in the previous trait I said, you figured out that there was some data where you saw that DoorDash orders were dropping after 9 p.m. in Seattle. Are you trying everything in your faculty to understand why? You're kind of just digging through making charts, talking to everyone who's responsible for that data. Is it being logged correctly? Are the dashers not picking the order up? Stuff like that. You kind of go and figure out, okay, you reach a point where you're able to understand that situation clearly. So let's say you reach a stage where you realize that dashers are actually not signing up after 9 p.m. in downtown Seattle. Like people don't want to do late night deliveries and this is a problem. So you've reached this stage, you've reached this type of clarity in your mind. So at this point, usually someone who would be a good product manager or who wants to do product management would organically want to fix this. They realize that there is huge potential here, that this 10% drop in orders can actually be beneficial to the app and to making money and to having good engagement on the app. So you're somebody who actually puts a team together. You maybe participate in your company's hackathon. Maybe you do a site project, all of that stuff. And let's say you come up with a solution and you even test it out. Let's say you release something like after 9 p.m. in certain cities, for example, in Seattle, every third order made by a dasher has a higher tip. You're incentivizing the dashers to maybe pick up more after 9 p.m., which is a way for them to basically not drop orders. So this is a solution. You don't know if it's gonna work, but you could try and test it out. So you have put together this team. You are enrolling people onto your idea. You have a level of influence over other people because you're able to clearly communicate, things like that. So at the end of the day, if you are exhibiting any of these five trades or all of them or some of them, you're either interested in being a product manager or you know that moving to this role would be good for you because these are your strengths. And this is of course just scratching the surface. And also along with this, you should be interested in talking to people that goes without saying, you should be interested in being very comfortable in an environment where nothing is known to you. You're okay with paving your own path. So if you notice these trades in yourself, in your current role, in any company, I think it's a good thing to think about moving to a p.m. role. And if you're already doing this as a p.m., keep doing more of it because this is what is expected of you, right? So finally, once you reflect, right? And you complete understanding that, okay, this is what is right for me, you can move on to the next step.  I did not know that being a p.m. is actually doing all of this. I just thought it was not coding or it was organizing meetings. These are some of the misconceptions which are there for people. So if that's the case, then yeah, explore other roles which give more meaning to you. So now that you've reflected, the final thing is to actually test the waters. So it's not enough to just have trades, but you also really need to develop skills, right? You need to get all of the p.m. skills in order to be good at your role.   Can you become better at it? Can you become better at enrolling people in routine? All of that. So the best way is to test the waters, right? So basically you need to be a p.m. for a product, okay? So either do a project with your friends, do a hackathon at work, do a side project at work, whatever it is, okay? Solve a user problem. And as always, let's walk through the steps in doing that and then we'll go into how exactly you can assess yourself, right? So I'm not gonna go very deep into doing this. I'm just gonna explain with an example as always. So let's say that you are someone working at Instacart, okay? And you want to test the waters and be a product manager. So step one, identify a few problems that you as a user or people around you as users face, okay? Let's say for example, you realize that if you wanna make complicated recipes on the app, it's really hard to get individual ingredients, okay? Among other problems, of course. Second step, put together a team, okay? Get some people who are working around you, maybe in your company or friends, whoever it is to give their opinions on this, okay? Because they might have other ideas, maybe you're being biased, you need to rule out all of these things. So discuss and pick one problem to solve. In also doing this, you are understanding the market, you're understanding your competition, you're picking the problem which makes more sense for Instacart to solve right now, okay? So let's say you wanna solve that problem of users who come to the app, find it very hard to prepare complicated recipes because it's really hard to enter 25 ingredients from some other website into the app, right? So now ideate on actually solving this problem, okay? Talk to it, talk about it to a bunch of users, figure out what their journey is like when they open the app till they order something or even after that, right? Understand how your competitors work, do all of that research, okay? Actually ideate on this. Finally, let's say you have a working feature, I'm sorry, a working MVP, you're gonna actually go and tell your team, hey, let's go build this. This is how the UX will look, these are the designs, this is what the backend needs to do. So in doing this, you're forcing yourself to create requirements and understand the end to end flow for this feature that you have ideated along with your teammates. And in this process, you're also aligning people, there will be conflict, you will be resolving that, you'll be the glue that holds this team together and ultimately you build a feature, right? So once your feature is built, test it out, show it to a bunch of people outside your company maybe, or if you can't do that, then do a local test within your company, figure out what the reception is, you will get feedback, it'll be good, it'll be bad, incorporate that constructive feedback and iterate on your feature. Do this over and over again, right? So one iteration of this going from identifying your user problem, going all the way to release of that is one product or feature cycle.   So naturally in doing all of this, you have acted as a product manager. You've done a subset of things which a product manager would do in most companies, but you haven't done everything, but that's okay.  But you've done some of the major things that a product manager is expected to do in a company, okay? You have solved a problem which you identified, solution that you and your team came up with. It's a very good experience and it's a very good exercise to do, okay? So now this is the most important part of this talk. It is doing the self-assessment. You know what a PM does, you know what the traits that you need to exhibit are and after testing it out, now you need to know whether these traits can be converted into skills, okay? So let's look at the skills which I think and also a couple of my managers, et cetera, have told me that are very important for being a PM and whether it really makes sense for you to go down this path or not, right? So first one is clear communication. Can you communicate your ideas to somebody, okay? Second is user empathy. We already discussed this. If you don't think like a user and if you don't care about the user, you cannot be solving problems for them, okay? Third thing is you should be comfortable with ambiguity. Think about it. You are solving problems which nobody knows about yet. You are finding solutions for something which nobody has worked on, okay? So you need to be comfortable paving a path for yourself and constantly being in situations where you don't have the answers. Fourth, you should be comfortable playing detective. What does this mean? Good data analysis skills. Good visualization skills and intuition or a sense of where all this information is finally leading you to. If you're not okay with trying to come to a cohesive solution with a large amount of data, it's got to be really hard being a PM. Next point is enrolling people onto an idea. Your entire job is to get a whole bunch of people who are not gonna be working together at all to work on something. They will have different priorities. They will have different things to do. They will not be interested in working on your problem. It's all a day-to-day thing, but you need to get all of these people aligned and working on something.  And finally, driving clarity, right? So once you get all of these people together, there's gonna be noise, there's gonna be chaos. Your project trajectory is gonna go off the charts sometimes you need to always keep drilling down sense into people and keep asking the right questions to get people kind of going on the same, the track that needs to be taken. So if you're not interested in doing that, you shouldn't be thinking about being a product manager. So you not only need to know whether you're rating yourself well out of say five or 10 points on each of this, you also need to know whether you have an interest in doing each of these things. So which is kind of what I have shown. And if you have ratings where you're interested in something but you don't have a good self rating, like you don't have that skill, it means that you have room for improvement. So you don't mind kind of grinding and becoming better at something. But you might also see that you're good at thinking about users, you have good communication, you like driving clarity, but you couldn't be bothered about playing detective or enrolling people into an idea. That's okay. It just means that maybe you really like being, say, a researcher, you're interested in being an engineer, maybe a UX engineer. You could be interested in marketing. A product management may not be for you because being comfortable with ambiguity and all of that, that just is not your cup of tea and that's okay. So there could be different combinations that you are good at, that you're interested in. So the more number of times you do this exercise, the more patterns you see within yourself and you figure out whether this PM role is good for you or whether there are other roles that are good for you. And if you're already a product manager, doing this is of course, you're already doing this as part of your job, you're just probably not rating yourself or understanding whether you're interested in something. So the more you reflect, the more you assess yourself, you get a better idea about what you need to improve upon. And if you're someone who's interviewing, you probably know if you're doing well in certain parts of the interview, you know why. Maybe because you're not interested in thinking about certain kinds of questions, maybe you're not interested in doing analysis type questions or estimation questions. And if that's a deal breaker, maybe you should rethink or if you're interested, but if you're not doing well, maybe you can drill down and get better at just such kind of questions in the future. So there's a lot of value, I think, if you already exhibit these traits naturally because then you don't have to really force yourself to work on it. And I think some of those traits are user empathy, being comfortable and calm in ambiguous situations and being open to enrolling people and bringing people together. So these are things which are hard to learn. They are traits which eventually get developed into skills. Imagine trying to force yourself to think about a user. If you don't like the idea of it, it's very difficult to do that. So the job, the product manager job is complicated. As I said, all of these things are not things that you learn in school. For example, no one says, hey, this is the track that you need to take. Of course, there are a lot of different sources out there and product school has a really good set of courses to understand your blind spots and actually take courses for each of these skills and develop them, which is a great idea to do. But if you don't have that opportunity, then the self-assessment would be really, really helpful.  And I'm gonna link this self-assessment plan in the description for this talk and also in this presentation. So feel free to download it, feel free to rate yourself, see how the trends are looking for the next three, four months, see whether you are improving in certain areas, whether you're just not able to like certain things. And at the end of those three, four months, you will understand how to get better and whether this path really makes sense for you. And this is exactly what I did for the last year of being an ML engineer or data scientist at Microsoft. I rated myself constantly after taking on a lot of side projects at work. And yeah, I'm doing, I think, a good job right now and I really like being a product manager. So if you are having double, you know, second thoughts on this whole process, feel free to reach out to me. Yeah, all the very best, you got this. And thank you so much to Product School for giving me this time. And yeah, thanks everyone for listening to this talk.


The Neistrom-based spectral clustering, NSC, algorithm was proposed to decrease computational burden in individual tree segmentation using point cloud data, resulting in good performance for 32 plots in China and Europe with an overall matching rate of 69% and extraction rate of 103%. The method also showed improvement of 7% for the average matching rate in a benchmark dataset. This article was authored by Yong Pang, Wei Wei Wang, Liming Du, and others.


Legends like Bobo coming in here giving you that them stores like he been having them stores He could have gave them stories up. That's right. Yeah, we on boss talk one-on-one Yeah, we gonna show them the history even having even having Legends like Bobo coming in here giving you that them stores like he been having them stores He could have gave them stories up. That's right. Like that's why it's like I think it had to be a comfortable spot He done watched it. He had to The first place he came in that interview That's love like cuz he got he got all the stores. Yeah, yeah, and he love Bob We talked daily. We talked today for a while We go we chopped it up because I'm a beyond I told y'all Pmc fanatic So with that they could call I'm like whatever going on stop this nigga got my ear Really we be talking like that. So but at the end of the day He just a dope guy man that I think he's gonna go far. He's gonna start his podcast I'm pretty soon and I just know he could go in he got a lot of stuff in the pipes and Developing and that's a lot of stuff that we're doing, you know We really staging the fact that he about to come on the scene and it about to be a whole whole another outlet Yeah, I think Dallas is one of the most creative media Basis that that people have and we don't realize that sometimes you can't see the picture from being in the picture Exactly, there's a lot of people here dope people here when you look at the Dallas global when you look at real-life Street star when you look at What tune is it he moved to Houston? But when you look at Big D the mogul like all of the state cheese TV All that stuff out of here, man And you don't really see that kind of stuff going on in other cities that deep and embedded Atlanta Somewhat like getting like it too though So you just got to look and see what's going on But I think Dallas has one of the most demanding and promoting Like bloggers and and cuz I mentioned all the black got trill talk no pill talk You got a lot of people man that's doing this And they all got different fan bases that exactly you can if you can tap in with each one of them You can cover so much ground With them folks everybody gonna see you they gonna see you man and that's the no part man So I know you have been on it when you on breakfast brothers the TV Yeah, I went on there when you went on that TV show, you know, we followed it up. We've been on there So, you know, we're right behind you. Yeah It's a dope experience though shot to Rick man Rick dope man Rick put it together man So so I mean I love the energy in there, too I actually took the set and interviewed him down there. Oh, yeah It was live to the correct I want to get this whole scene. I said, alright, let me do you down here. Why cuz he been on the show Okay, but let me get out here with the camera. Let me get on with this back drop Let me let me get you on film while when our show come out I can go and put yours out with ours. You know what I mean? Yeah, so that'd be dope But just thinking outside of box, bro That's it, you know, most people can't just pick up like that But I got a dope wife that she got my back and we can put the camera together anywhere. Oh Yeah, you're hustling like I told y'all see y'all moving groove and y'all going across the map man Y'all going across, you know how the movies be having to months. I just with the car Show the United States and it showed the lines with the car Y'all going going to the money we was in New Orleans a few weeks well month ago months ago And we was with a Mac Mac just got out from no limit. I did him and then I did a Project Barbie Paco I did a KLC, but the most dopest one I did was your running She's the one that started like Birdman. She took she took BG's record and sent it to Universal And baby that's and she's a store the record store in New Orleans where because back then Nobody wanted to deal with around me because I thought it was too dangerous. It was too ghetto It was too you see what I mean. So she was like, no, what are you talking about? So everybody had to go through her store Yeah, man, and she's had four stores. So she'd been around for a very long time. Oh, yeah. Yes. Yeah, she a staple And that's that's that was what we did our interviews that too It's just dope to when you when they embrace you in the city like that But it's dope when you got when you when you go to get the information and you approach it knowing like the history like Like which I'll even giving me that like she got these stores I'm gonna go do it at these stores what you tell me you think I'll do in the shot. Yeah, it's like Where where you gonna be at? It's just build net that I don't know It's a it's a suspense thing there as well because it's like this is where I don't know I just I don't know I'm really into like what you have to be you have to be older or a certain And really know what it carries because this younger generation with all these young kids coming up rapping doing music They don't care about history. They don't care about a lot of watching if you embrace it the way that it needed to be embraced It's like mixing a gumbo up if you put it together, right? Yeah, they'll look at it and I always say you can't get everybody No, I'm saying some some some of these youngsters. They they don't want to it's cool. That's ain't that ain't y'all talking. Oh, yeah You don't say y'all talking audience It's a bunch of people that maybe haven't seen it Like you said them folks that when it's when they see it served up and package a certain way you can get them That's right. Like How you just want it being good people you want to touch the math you want to touch everybody because Even although it might not be your forte for you to know where you come from know your history because as long as you black You need to know this stuff no facts You understand what I mean, but some people don't care But you need to know your history a lot of people just living to die because they're not teaching in schools No, for sure. I'm not teaching in school You need to figure out how to learn it Yeah, but I can tell you right now like I said with people like Bobo Steve B. Low are different people that been in Dallas They're really love Dallas this nigga live and breathe Dallas. I was rocking in Houston with Bobby Neal But nigga, I'm a Dallas nigga from heart snake and all these other man This nigga is the one like he's gonna be that one that can also Feel these gaps where these youngsters can look back at the history and then know how to push forward a little better You know what I mean? So you we just need to go to work. That's what I look at Yeah, if we go to work, we can let and show it out how it is and next thing You know people can look at it and kind of build from it. You know, I feel like they get all information from the stories That's what the beauty of that's what it is It's on platform because people can come through her tell a story that nobody heard before From somebody that's right there right there that that's telling you the angle that they was that and then y'all might get Come through here that was there too and they give you they angle of any and now motherfuckers putting the whole story together. You know, I'm saying


I usually play on the computer and a lot on the iPad. A computer and iPad. And I put touch and iPod. And I put the shuffle. Um, mouse. But the grenade from the board. We usually just do games. Sometimes do some movies. We have this thing called compass learning where you have to put in answers. It's fun because it's not just like a written down test. It has pictures to it and sound. I like more games that are fast. Like Temple Run. Tell it back and forth to get coins. Then you have to swipe it back and forth to turn it. Just slide it. That needs to jump. I like that you can buy stuff on it. And you can keep upgrading stuff so they get even powerful. We get to go to the Mac lab and play on the computer and do work. We get to play on iPods for about like an hour. We have to do like learning stuff and then the other half we're allowed to do whatever's on there. It's kind of boring and the alien get to do like kind of one thing. Well I don't like them because they're just too babyish. Like ABCs, I already know that. Reading books is better because sometimes it's more fun than using technology.


Good afternoon, welcome, and thanks for coming. You know, one of the great joys of this institution we inhabit is that we do all have the chance, on a fairly frequent basis, to hear from some of the most enlightening and significant figures across the spectrum of academic and journalistic, scientific, and public life. And it's especially, I think, exciting when leaders of our national government share time with us. Just in the last several months, we've had Secretary of the Navy Mabus was here, Secretary of Agriculture Bill Sack was here, but I've not been any more excited than I am today to introduce the Secretary of U.S. Secretary of Education, genuinely one of the great public servants of our day. Please join me in welcoming Secretary Arne Duncan. So by your leave, the Secretary and I will do a little duet for a short while, but you might be composing those of you who are interested in questions, and in 20 minutes or so, we have microphones on either side, and as you summon the nerve, we'll invite you to step up to them, we'll let you drive the discussion. Mr. Secretary, I think the first question, in some ways the central question, I know for you and in your assignment is, how are the nation's children doing? First of all, I'm thrilled to be here. That's my first time coming to Purdue, and I'm a huge fan of your president. He and I, the lot will work together as governor, so it's good to finally make it here. The short answer is very mixed, and I get to visit schools all over the nation, been to all 50 states on a bus tour now, going through seven states in five days, and I see things that are both unbelievably inspiring and make me very hopeful. I also visit places that frankly break your heart, and so for me, the challenge is always, how do we get better faster? How do we help the kids in communities that often have been educationally underserved for decades, have a chance in life? I think we all know that the stakes have gotten so much higher that I'm not that that old, but when I was growing up in the South Side of Chicago, it wasn't fantastic, but if some of my friends dropped out of high school, that wasn't the end of the world. They could go work in the stockyards and steal mills there and get a pretty good job and own a home and support a family. Today, if you job out of high school, you're basically condemned to poverty and social failure. There are no good jobs out there in the legal economy. So we have high school graduation rates to all-time highs, which is fantastic, about 81%, but I think a lot about that, 19, 20%.  So we're making progress, but it's never fast enough for me. I think we all feel a real sense of urgency because our kids have one chance to get a good education. You'll be remembered, you're already known by anyone paying attention for your courage, the forcefulness with which you have called the nation to account for its educational shortcomings and proposed constructive measures that might improve this situation. When you look back now over close to seven years, ten year, which of your initiatives and policies do you think have worked the best? And then, which are you most disappointed or frustrated about in terms of slower progress? Well, I give all these things, I give us an incomplete grade because none of these are where we need to be. So I think the most important investment we can make as a nation is in high quality early childhood education. There's nothing more important than getting our babies off to a good start in life. So I'll give you both sides. I'm very proud that we've invested more than a billion dollars in states that want to increase access to high quality learning opportunities. I'm thrilled that this has become a truly bipartisan issue in the real world. We have Democratic and Republican governors investing, which historically didn't happen to increase access. But there's still extraordinary unmet need. Tens of thousands of kids in many states that I visit don't have access. And the fact that we allow so many of our babies to start kindergarten a year to a year and a half behind is just crazy to me. And other countries don't do this. Other countries that's sort of universal access. And the fact that we don't value those early childhood years enough is heartbreaking. So we've struggled to get more of our friends in Congress to help make this a national issue, so that's in that one. On the K to 12 side, lots of really hard work going on. Many states struggling to raise standards, which is the right thing, to assess those standards in different ways. Find better ways to support and evaluate teachers and principles. But it's a choppy, difficult time. It's a time of transition. The past year or two have been hard. The next year or two are going to be hard. It was a nation I think we're going to move to a much better place. Again, love that graduation rates are record highs, but still our dropout rate is unacceptably high. And then finally, our goal is to lead the world in college graduation rates. And it's interesting, one generation ago we did. Today we're about 12th. That's not something I think we should be proud of. And it's not that we've dropped, we've flatlined, and about 11 other countries have passed us by. So all of these things are building blocks. I think our collective goal should be to have the best educated population, best educated workforce in the world. And we are not near where we need to be. Let me ask you about a couple of specifics with which you've been associated. There are many, but just to pick out too. You've been very forceful in calling for the closure of schools that are failing year after year after year. Are we getting anywhere? It's always hard to do. And to be clear, it's not even looking for closure necessarily. We are looking for change, for transformation. And I'll just give you one anecdote, well, it's a couple things. The fact that graduation rates are up, the fact that dropout rates are down, that's an indication things are going the right way. Race to the top has gotten most of the press and attention. We can talk about that. We've invested $4 billion there. What folks may not know is we've invested $5 billion, a billion more in our school turnaround efforts to take those chronically low performing schools. And to be clear, we're talking about the bottom 5% of schools in states and districts. So not the 19 out of 20, but that bottom one out of 20, where it simply hasn't worked. Just one quick anecdote of why this is so important to me is when I was leading the Chicago public schools, we were each year turning around, transforming, occasionally closing. But we'd always reopened something else. Schools, and there's one high school, Englewood High School in the heart of an African-American community in the Southside that we were turning around. And a guy came to me, his name is Don Stewart, who went on to go to President Spelman College. He was President of Chicago Community Trust. He was President of College Board. He said, Arnie, you're not going to believe this, but 50 years ago, I was supposed to go to Englewood High School.  And he said, we were taking all kinds of grief in the community and lots of pushback.  And it just stopped me because it made me think, over those 50 years, how many Don Stewart's did we lose? Because at school, at time, had like 6% of kids reading at grade level, and like half the kids were dropping out. And for me, it's not just about trying to help those children and their families, oh, that's a big part of it. These are communities that have been devastated by lack of educational opportunity. If we want to have strong, vibrant communities and stronger families, we have to have great schools. We have to have high expectations. One more quick note, it was in Des Moines, Iowa, on Monday, the start of the bus tour with the president. We're at one of these schools that's being turned around, North High School. And a couple years ago, they had two AP classes. And today, they have 15. I'm a huge fan of advanced placement. Having more high school kids get college credit. And while that progress is fantastic, it's great to go from 2 to 15, where I said to the audience there, the children today at North High School aren't seven times as smart as they were four years ago. They just have seven times the opportunity, different expectations and different culture around success and different beliefs about what poor minority kids can do in terms of take college classes. That's the kind of transformation that we're looking for. One more. And that is charter schools. You've been an advocate, a practitioner in your Chicago days and other places. However many years we are into that movement, a lot of debates still out there. What's your assessment of the contribution they are or are not making? I'm just very, very pragmatic and non-ideological. So I am pro-good charter schools. I am anti-bad charter schools. I am pro-good traditional schools. I am anti-bad traditional schools. And again, let's go back to those basic questions. Are high school graduation rates going up or not? Are more high school graduates truly college career ready? Are dropout rates going down? So there are extraordinary charter schools that, again, in some of these underserved communities for decades, that are seeing 95% graduation rates and 95% of their graduates go on to college. They are literally changing kids' lives. There are other charter schools that are in that bottom 5% around the nation that should be closed and shut down. So it's a mix out there. And again, I think all of us, we can sort of fight the adult battles and we can think about what's good for kids. And I always say a seven-year-old or eight-year-old, they don't know or frankly care if they go to a charter school or a traditional school or this school or that school. Is my teacher teaching me? Am I safe? Am I cared about? Is the principal in my corner? We need a lot more schools like that. So we fund good charters to replicate and we help them grow. And I've also challenged the charter school community. There's nothing sacred about the brand charter and actually bad charters hurt the brand and they should be very proactive in seeing the bad charter schools go away. Well, they are easier to close than traditional other public schools. But that's not the same as saying people finally do pull that trigger. Lift my spirits about something if you would. After all the effort and all the commitment and dollars, we can still read all the time about school districts, usually large urban districts, Baltimore, Philadelphia, Chicago, Boston. Per pupil expenditures, $15, $16, $17,000, $20,000 or more. Pick your metric, eighth grade reading, 2015, 12 in Detroit, 9%. Are we forced to accept that there are some communities where the problems cannot be solved by the best educators and all the best efforts that we try to make? Yeah. So I don't agree with that at all. And for all the very real challenges that you articulate in the many of us see every day, I'm actually wildly optimistic and wildly hopeful. And again, I'm always looking at- Oh, great, that's the answer I was hoping for. Yeah. And again, I have the luxury, I probably visit more schools in more parts of the country than anybody. So I think I have not a perfect but a pretty good perspective of what's going on out there. And I'm always looking at growth and progress and who's improving, not just absolute results. And I look at other urban areas, places like DC that were absolutely dysfunctional and corrupt, places like New Orleans that had massive struggles. And you're seeing very rapid improvement. Now, is this mission accomplished? No, do they have a long way to go? Absolutely. But many of these urban areas are actually improving faster than the states in which they live. And they're dealing with much more difficult social problems. They're dealing with much higher levels of poverty. When I ran the Chicago Public Schools, 85% of my students were minority, 90% lived below the poverty line. And we were trying to get better faster than the rest of the state of Illinois. So we are getting, there are many places that are getting better faster. The question to your point is how do we accelerate the pace of change? And not to, just to take one second on it, there's no simple answer, but where you're seeing this rapid improvement, there are a couple pretty fundamental things that many of them are doing. First, there's a huge focus on early childhood education. I keep coming back to that. We have to stop playing catch up. And they're starting to have their kindergartners enter kindergarten ready to be successful. That's a big deal. There's a huge focus on attracting and retaining great teachers and principals and nothing's more important. We have to be so much more creative about putting incentives in place to have that great talent come to our underserved communities, be that inner city urban or rural or remote on tribal reservations. There's a focus on wraparound services and afterschool programming and helping families and making those schools truly community centers. There's a huge focus on rigor, more AP classes, more advanced placement, more IB, more dual enrollment. And there's a very intentional look at the results each year and a nimbleness and a humility that you have to make constant improvements. But where you see districts that are getting better fast, they're doing some combination of that in really, really thoughtful ways. And again, the progress has been really fun to watch. Switch to higher ed then for a little bit and I'd remind everybody that the mics will be yours here in just a couple or a few minutes. It's a timely trip. You and the department just released a new scorecard plus some liberalization of the financial aid rules that a lot of folks have been calling for for a while. I'd like to say on behalf of at least one school, we think these are really good steps forward. I know they haven't been universally acclaimed yet by the rest of, by everyone in higher ed, but thank you for the initiative on both fronts. Will you want to say a little word or two about those improvements? Obviously we always think about this sort of cradle through college and onto career, so a lot that we're trying to see happen. But on higher ed, we have to continue to make college more affordable. And again, love that what you've done here to keep tuition down and fixed. If you pull the American public, lots of the American public is starting to think that college is for rich folks. It's not for folks like them. That's deeply troubling, deeply disturbing. So how we make college more affordable. So more financial aid, having states reinvest, making the financial aid form simpler. The fact that the FAFSA form, the financial form is so hard and complex is crazy.  We have it down to about 20 minutes. And the families can fill it out. That unlocks the key to $150 billion in grants and loans and stuff we did to use prior income taxes. Hopefully make that the next step easier. We need to keep going there. So we have to focus on access. We have to focus on affordability. And the big thing we're pushing is we have to focus on outcomes. And are we graduating more students? Are we graduating more first-generation college goers and Pell Grant recipients? So we're trying to put out masses of amount of information and transparency to help young people and their families make better choices. I think it's navigating college and grants versus loans and one-year costs versus four-year costs. It's too hard. It's too complex. It's daunting if you have your parents have a college degree. And if you're new to the country or English-language learner, it's almost impossible. So whatever we can do to provide more transparency, more accountability, more information, make forms simpler and help young people figure out the right school for them and for their unique circumstances. Not where I tell them to go or you tell them to go, but the right fit for them. Hopefully we'll see better completion rates and hopefully we'll incentivize the kinds of behavior among other universities, the leadership that you're providing, not just in cost but in competency-based education and other things, I think, is exactly where higher ed needs to go. And the new scorecard will make more visible, more information more visible to more students and families. I just think that's, inarguably, a good idea. And thank you for doing it. It's different than a rating system, which at one point the department looked at, which is a talk about a daunting challenge. I guess you decided at least not for now. Yeah, it's interesting. Just think about should the federal government put its ceiling of approval once a year on ex-set of metrics or is the world changed? And folks can draw their own conclusions and have this change on a daily, if not minute-by-minute basis and sort of open this up to public and sort of crowdsourcing all those ideas. And the more we thought about it, the more we thought it'd be pretty arrogant for us to try and do one thing once a year and be static rather than just get this stuff out and let folks figure it out themselves. And so I think it's a different sort of notion of what government can do with this idea of transparency and openness. I think there's real power there, and frankly a lot more power than us trying to do by ourselves. So I think we've got to, I feel really good about where we got to and we'll keep doing more of this going forward. You just mentioned in passing competency-based education, you also and Ted Mitchell, your terrific undersecretary, have been out promoting and encouraging innovations of various kind that would move us away from the, not just the agricultural calendar, but the modes of instruction that have been more or less unchanged for so very long. We're interested here, but are you seeing a lot of, are you seeing encouraging trends elsewhere? We're seeing movement, not again it's never enough or fast enough so I appreciate the leadership so much. And again, just sort of step back whether it's high red or K to 12, this move from what we're all doing now is just a bad example from seat time to competency. I just think it's the right thing to do. And whether it's advanced physics class here in engineering or whether it's algebra is a ninth grader, eighth grader, seventh grader, if you can demonstrate that you know algebra, why should you sit in that chair for nine months? If you can demonstrate that you know biology or any other subject, why should you be stuck in a chair? And this idea of having folks learn at their own pace and let some folks who can fly, fly and go much faster and folks who need more time, that's okay too, give them the time to do that. What's been fixed in higher red and in high school and middle school is time and seat time. We want that variable to be the one that's actually flexible rather than fixed. And one way of looking at it and thinking about it seems to me is whether we can commit that our educational systems at all levels will be built around the student or around the system itself and the convenience of the people who operate it. I think again historically you taught to a lecture hall of 500 or K to 12, a class of 25 or 30 and you sort of taught to the middle and that had some strengths and I'd say lots of weaknesses. And the question now is how can we all individualize and personalize education? And this idea of a teacher differentiating instruction, the idea of folks learning at their own pace, at their own time for what works for them. People have very different learning styles, very different skills. People have very different life situations and the traditional college student is now the non-traditional college student. So many are working, so many have family, so many have other pressures and challenges and to try and make them conform to a traditional academic or agrarian calendar makes no sense and how we are more flexible, how we help people not just K through 12 or high red but for the rest of our lives all of us have to be lifelong learners. How do we create those opportunities where you and others and other institutions like Purdue can provide leadership on that? That's a really, really big deal. One of the most exciting, gratifying moments that I've experienced here in three years was when we got the word that the department had chosen Purdue for one of your first in the world grants and which goes right to this. That's our assignment under the award is to try to innovate and pedagogy here and we're close to 200 courses now that have been transformed in part or entirely away from the old model and into various forms that incorporate online learning or as they say active learning methods. So we know we'll make some mistakes but we hope we learn enough that you can then share it with everyone else. I'm sure you will make mistakes and we welcome that if this was easy. We wouldn't be finding it but we think all the time about I'm sure you did too as a governor when you were in the White House of what's the appropriate role of federal government for me, what's the appropriate role of the education department? Lots of debate around that. But I think the more we can foster innovation and support creativity and let folks like you get out ahead of the rest of the nation and make some mistakes and learn but help to drive that, I think that's a really appropriate use of our resources and the federal government's role in education. So was in the high red side or K to 12 we're trying to do the same thing and really help folks lead the nation where I think we need to go. We've got one bold soul over here I believe on the right. I'll thank you and your question please. Let's see, is this turned on? Ah, beautiful. Hi, my name's Carrie Sopalo. Oh, could you please? Right, and thank you. I graduated from Purdue in 1999 so yes, that means I'm old. But being totally blind, I received lots of Braille and tactile graphics support as a student here back in the 90s of which I'm forever grateful for.  And that being said, the matter of Braille literacy and fluency in Braille as it pertains to science and math is of deep concern to me. And Mr. Secretary, you may or may not be aware that the Braille Authority of North America recently adopted a new Braille reading system for the blind in the United States called the Unified English Braille System which is great for literary Braille. However, it underserves blind and visually impaired children that wish to pursue math and science as a career. And further, once this adoption by Banna has occurred there has been a decentralization of the Braille math system that's gonna be used from state to state. The system that I utilize is something called the Nemeth Code for Math and Scientific Notation. And that's been around for over a half a century. It was created by Abraham Nemeth who was himself a blind mathematician. And hence he incorporated lots of mathematical theory and equation structure into the code communicating visual information to me as a blind Braille reader. But unfortunately, the new Braille system no longer factors in many of those conventions and in many ways it requires more Braille cells to be used so hence it's more convoluted. And the Braille Authority of North America has recently taken the position that it's not their role to mandate that the states use one math reading system. So therefore I'm deeply concerned because now we're gonna have starting in 2016 when the new system goes into effect blind children studying in Indiana might be using the old Nemeth Code system and blind children in Illinois that are using the new Unified English Braille math system there's no standardization of Braille's code. And when students and families move from state to state they might have to switch code further discouraging their interest in math and science. Thank you, that's it. Let's give the secretary a chance to respond. It's a complicated question and don't have an easy answer something we can continue offline. The question I always think is sort of what's our again what's our role at the federal level here to what can we do? Our ability or even willingness to say you have to have one unified way to do things. That doesn't work well we've figured out. When we do that whether we can provide incentives to you and other scientists to think about better ways to do this and create options for states or for students who you think might be underserved where we can help in the innovation space that's maybe a place that we can play. Michael Uden runs this office for us we'd love to sort of set up a separate conversation to continue it. So thank you for an interesting question. The good news is you've inspired an astonishing number of people to come over. The bad news is if you can't if you all could cannot keep these questions very brief we don't have a prayer of getting through them. So Ted- Short question, I'll try to get a short answer. Show some leadership. Secretary Duncan, Ted Malone, the financial aid office. I just wanted to thank you and echo President Daniels that we believe that the use of the prior prior year in the FAFSA is going to revolutionize our ability to serve students especially low income students. Thank you. Thanks so much and just quickly keep pushing us. This is an important step in the right direction. It doesn't, as you know, entirely solve the challenge of underrepresented kids and communities thinking they can go to college. So other things we should be doing please push us hard. Over here. Hi, good afternoon. My name is Chinmej Obilekar. I'm a PhD student in biological engineering and my question is, what was the day like when you were appointed security of education? So sort of like a personal perspective. What was the day like when you were appointed? And is it like, do you know a priority or like how is the process? Can you give us some perspective? So what was the day like when I was appointed? So when did you first, like when you knew that okay, I'm appointed as a secretary then what was your reaction? Can you share some experience? Sure. No profanity allowed here. No, no, no. I'll try and be brief. To be very clear, my goal and aspiration was not to be secretary of education. I think when I was in primary college I didn't know if the job existed. I loved Chicago. I was leading the Chicago Puget Schools. My goal was to do that for 10 years because there's so much instability in those jobs and it had been seven and a half years. So honestly, I was not jumping at the opportunity. What for me was just so unique is someone who was a close friend and someone who I deeply respected and worked for became president named Barack Obama. It's not too many times in life your friend becomes president. It's sort of crazy. So to be clear, I didn't come for the job, the title, the position. I came because I really, really believed in him and to have a chance to be part of his team was this life-transforming opportunity. So at the end of the day it was a very short conversation with my wife and family. It was just the right thing to do. I feel so lucky to have had the chance and honestly, some days you still pinch yourself. It's a little crazy. My mother ran an inner-city tutoring program in South Side Chicago at 46 in Greenwood to try and take her lessons from working out of a church basement there and what I learned all my life to try and have some impact on the national scale and build upon her life's work. Personally, I can't tell you how meaningful it's been. Thank you. Good afternoon, Mr. Secretary, Mr. President. I'm Lyle Janney. My job here at Purdue is a student portal, my Purdue. In response to President Daniel's question with regard to... Sorry, the learning... Competency. Competency-based learning. Sorry, brain freeze there. Your responses were really mindful to me of the educational system in Finland where it's fully accessible, no standardized testing, tailored for the students, et cetera. And it sounds like we finally learned from other nations in this regard and we're implementing steps to activate some of that. So I want to ask you, what's our roadmap for finally eliminating high-stakes standardized testing? What? I think you've blended two things I might not totally agree with, and I'm trying to unpack it. So to be very clear, if you're moving towards competency-based education, you have to assess whether folks are actually learning something or not. And so I don't know how to assess other than having an assessment. We can debate what that assessment should look like. But I just can't... I love Governor Daniels. I just can't take his word that folks who are taking these classes have the skills they need to be successful in the workplace. So I think, just to go directly to your question, there are some places that are doing too much testing. I've talked about that. The President has talked about that. As we try to fix no child left behind, we'd love to see a cap on testing. We want to remove redundancy and other things. But I think we also have to have an honest assessment of kids' ability, not just in college taking these classes, but in third and fourth and fifth and sixth grade and all the way up. I think there's a common sense middle ground where students know whether they're on track to be successful or not. You can do that without having too much time taking tests or teaching to the test or having duplicate or redundant tests. So to walk away from assessment, that's one end. I'm never going to support that. Folks who have way too much time and energy and attention on a test, I'm not going to support that either. I do think there's a middle ground and we need to get there. But to be clear, I'm not going to support that. Thank you. Thank you, Secretary, for coming here. This is truly an honor to hear you speak. Horizons is the largest trio program in the state of Indiana. There's a handful of us around here. Horizons to me has offered so many opportunities for leadership. I am currently in a class where I mentor a handful of other Horizons students and I was able to take a pretty cost effective study abroad course and would not have been able to go to otherwise. So I just want to thank you for continuing the funding trio and that's all. Thank you. Thanks and they're fantastic programs like trio and Upward Bound that help students be prepared for college and be successful. I think it's really important too that folks understand the trio community and understand that that's critically important. In my mind, funding high quality early childhood education is also critically important and we need to not be pitting all the challenging folks in Congress to see education as an investment and not a blank check. We have to be getting results. We have to hold ourselves accountable but we're very concerned to be clear with the current Congress that many of these education agenda that we're trying to push whether it's more college going, college success, early childhood many of these things are going to be defunded or cut significantly and that's a huge concern to me right now. Dr. Sanders, welcome David. Thank you. First a comment If we all, as I think we virtually all do believe that active learning is an advantageous approach it's going to require more resources and smaller classes and we aren't always heading in that direction so that's just the comment. The question is that for-profit colleges are a carbuncle on the body of higher education and I'll hold myself back. So how are we going to overcome the political opposition to dealing with them with cutting off their access to federal funds to there being the modern corporate welfare queens that are bleeding the higher education budget? So let me take the two. That was the restrained version of the question. So let me just take the resource question broadly and again for me it's not Republican, Democrat liberal conservative and governor and I are different parties and slightly different beliefs on these different things but we need I think more politicians at every level, local, state and federal who see education as an investment not as an expense as the best investment we can make not a blank check we have to have results but that's the conversation we need to have just one quick plug we got a couple dozen folks running for president right now and I wish he was running for president he's not but we should be asking them are they willing to invest in early childhood education or not are they willing to what's their goal for increasing high school graduation rates what's their goal for leading the world in college graduation rates and we let politicians give us sound bites no one runs as the anti-education you know governor or president congressman or mayor they all love to kiss babies but very few walk the walk and I don't blame them I blame us so if we want more resources for schools and for after-school program for early childhood we have to demand that across the political spectrum and we don't we don't vote on these issues and I think our kids and our nation pay a real price for that so I challenge all of us on that on the for-profits to be clear I am not again like I'm not anti for whatever I'm not anti all for-profits there are some for-profits that folks are gaining real skills that lead to higher paying jobs and we hope they serve more students and do well the fact of the matter is we have many far too many bad actor for profits who are taking taxpayer money taking your and my money and leading disadvantaged folks in a worse position than when they started and that is absolutely unethical and moral and we have to challenge that every single day so we've had some major victories lately which you've probably seen we have still far too many bad actors out there and I will say I talked to a reporter earlier today one of our toughest battles was trying to get our gainful employment regulations passed we spent a crazy amount of time on this and can lead the pushback was from Republicans and Democrats who had been bought off with our taxpayer dollars to fight us on this so we've had some huge victories in court recently that opened that door it's one of the toughest fights we've had it's not been that hard but just know we're going to continue to fight it not to eliminate for profits but to eliminate bad actors over here well good afternoon and thank you Mr. Secretary for coming President Daniels Representative Klinker I represent industry here in Lafayette I'm with Cutting Edge Industrial Technologies my name is Paul DeFabio and we just hired three Purdue engineering grads in May so I'm friendly but I have a question and that is last month Lafayette was named the number one one of the number one cities in the country for its size in high-tech manufacturing and with the advent of President Daniels Polytechnic School and somewhere between 600,000 to 2 million to 3 million empty jobs manufacturing jobs what's the road that you see that we should travel here we have an excellent opportunity and I'm just curious you know these are all great questions so I can't tell you how many CEOs and the president has met with that in tough economic times with unemployment being higher than we would like who say we are trying to hire right now and we can't find the employees with the skills we need to hire and that disconnected it drives you crazy so there's no in many in the STEM fields so you have to look at this sort of comprehensively we've put a huge amount of money through the Department of Labor behind community colleges we've built partnerships with industry 2 billion dollars so that real training leads to real jobs that's a piece of it we've put a couple hundred million dollars behind high schools to redesign and to focus more on these areas and again to be very clear this is never STEM or STEAM versus the liberal arts we need more both but we know so many of the high-paying jobs are in these areas I love the fact that the university is going to start to run a school they'll help more students from the minority community be successful I don't know this but I bet the three folks you hired who are graduates were white one was white I'm happy to be wrong that's very encouraging but we need to make sure that again underrepresented communities and families have access to this kind of stuff so how do we build those pipelines the final thing I'll say it goes down to how do we get more STEM teachers in grade who love the STEM fields and comfortable to confident that's when we lose so many kids so no simple answer but we need a better pipeline of teachers when you think differently about how we're teaching in high schools when you continue to fund higher ed and community colleges to build real partnerships and it's both a crazy challenge but also to your point an amazing opportunity if we can keep those good jobs in this country and have more folks have access to them everybody wins here did I do that no they're giving pens out from the Department of Education my team's smarter than I am I didn't know what you're doing I just want to know why Paul only hired three we need you to make more money Paul so you'll hire next year we want five good afternoon Mr. President Mr. Secretary my name is Abigail Johnson I'm a junior in the psychological sciences program and I've always kind of had an odd passion for educational policy both of my parents are educators my father has a background in the Head Start program and then is now actually a business law teacher at a charter school in downtown Gary, Indiana so and to be perfectly frank sir I think I do want your job someday you can have it I'm just giving you one so I was just curious as I'm still in my undergrad and for anybody who might also want to get extremely involved in educational policy in the future what some suggested next steps would be that's a great question I wouldn't call it an odd passion I'd call it a great passion and sometimes I'm the wrong guy to give advice on this because again candidly this was not my life's ambition or career whatever what I wills you were going to start for the Celtics weren't you one good enough I know that you were drafted you had a pro-career outside the country I was lucky amazing chance but just a couple quick things whether it's education or something else for me it's always following your passion and figure out I've loved two things in my life I've loved basketball and I've loved education and I played basketball for four years and for the past 25 I've done education and lots of my friends from high school have been more financially successful than I've been but I wouldn't trade places and I think to have the impact and do something that you would do every single day for no money so find your passion whatever that is and do it secondly it's important particularly on an education side you need policy you need people doing the real work with kids so I've spent a lot of time working hands on with kids I worked for a city public school system I ran a public school system I didn't have experience at the state level so that's the one thing that would have been good for me and now I've had experience at the federal level if you're a policy whiz but don't understand the impact on the classroom you're wasting your own time wasting other folks we need folks who can bridge those two worlds who know what it's like to teach in Gary, Indiana as you do and to think about what policies will help kids and teachers in that environment be successful so follow your passion think about working at different levels policy, practice, local, state, federal and the big thing for me is I've just been so lucky to always work for good people finding people with regards to the job or title or position or salary find really smart people who are going to help you grow that's probably the most important thing you can do thank you if I'm counting correctly we have 14 people in 13 minutes so I'll remind the questioners of the value of brevity please so my question is brief but it's two parts first is that there's a movement to link students' scores to teacher assessment as far as the teacher will be paid based on their teacher's test scores although we keep their jobs based on the teacher's test scores or the student's test scores so my first question is what your thoughts are on that and the second is with that in mind how are you attracting experienced and high quality teachers to lower performing schools especially in the inner city two great questions so I think again we're going to have the facts here that a piece of teacher evaluation we never say the whole thing but it's a piece of teacher evaluation student learning needs to be a part of that and there are different ways to assess student learning we can have a long debate about the different ways to do that but the question is like what are we fighting against and what I'm fighting against is a system that historically across the country for decades teacher evaluation and student learning were divorced from each other in fact when we came to Washington there were a set of states where it was against the law and I think the goal of great teaching is not to teach the goal is to actually have your students learn so let me just start with that secondly I'm always interested as I said earlier not in absolute test scores or anything or absolute graduation rates but in growth and gain how much you're improving and I can tell you from some of my toughest neighborhoods on the southwest side of Chicago where you had amazing teachers seeing remarkable growth of students who weren't born with silver spoon in their mouth and want to elevate and strengthen teacher profession we have to talk about those teachers who are transforming kids lives and be willing to shine a spotlight and no one goes into teaching to make a million dollars teachers are the most altruistic people ever but compensation should be a piece of what we think about and so I think we can debate the best way to do it and it's hard and complex but to say that teacher evaluation should be no part of student learning should be no part of teacher evaluation and to say that a great teacher a hundred and fifty thousand dollars a great principal shouldn't make two hundred and fifty thousand dollars I think we should be paying teachers a heck of a lot more money I think we should be paying them a heck of a lot more to go work in intercity Chicago or in a native American reservation and actually our lack of courage in thinking differently about these things I think does kids a disservice last thing I know I'm telling you quickly a place like DC which has been dysfunctional for years is getting better a fantastic teacher who's twenty nine thirty years old in DC can make a hundred thousand dollars a year now it's pretty interesting and they're not having a problem attracting and retaining good teachers there thank you thank you sir my name is Manas Telyarkin I'm a grad student at Purdue Polytech the United States has world-class colleges and universities and yet our public school system is the way it is how much of it do you think is attributed to how we as a society value professors versus how we value teachers I've never been asked that one before I think I don't know if that's maybe a piece of the challenge I think our maybe when we get that for me we have to just fundamentally elevate the teaching profession itself I look at places like South Korea and Singapore that are kicking our butt educationally part of my language and teachers there are known as nation builders well I think our teachers are nation builders too I think our teachers are doing extraordinary things in under-resourced communities every single day so how we attract, how we retain how we compensate, how we support great great talent to come into education to come into the K-12 system and again keep repeating myself in underserved communities in disadvantaged communities and not just come for a little while but stay I think we have to be much more radical much more creative in how we do that so for me it's not a conflict of teachers versus professors I hate these you'll pit one versus another I don't see that but I do see a huge need to elevate the teaching profession itself and if we do that I think you see student achievement skyrocket Good afternoon my name is Rakaia Perkins Williams I'm a first year doctoral student here at Purdue at Leadership and Policy and my question is the Washington State Supreme Court recently ruled publicly funded charter schools as unconstitutional what are your thoughts about this ruling and what do you think is going to be the impact on charter schools moving forward nationally? Yeah I don't know the details of whether it's unconstitutional or not as I said earlier I think great charter schools are part of the solution bad charter schools are part of the problem and I think in Washington they have not had a lot probably like six or eight charter schools but if those schools are helping kids learn who didn't have the opportunity before if they're creating an option that didn't exist in the neighborhood to deny kids and families that option doesn't quite make sense to me and the one thing about charter schools is we can debate all the pros and cons no one has ever signed to a charter school you never have to go and if they're not doing a good job parents and kids vote with their feet that school no longer exists and again for high performing charter schools you often have waiting lists of hundreds if not thousands so the question is what are we doing to learn the lessons from successful charter schools and taking them to other schools be they traditional or charter thank you Mr. Secretary my name is Sean Karm senior in political science here my question is you spent the beginning part of your talk talking about how you want to increase the number of students graduating high school where I like 80% you're saying but while we're increasing our output of students graduating high school we're not necessarily increasing the quality of graduating so my question is what initiatives right now besides increasing AP and IB classes is the Department of Education pursuing to implement the next year or so it's a great great question and it's really important it's not so much what we're doing but what states are doing so the goal to your point is not just to graduate high school students for me the goal is to graduate them actually college and career ready and for me the simple test there is do they have to take remedial classes in college and in many many states historically the standards have been dummy down to make politicians look good we've been lying to kids and families for a long long time and it's absolutely insidious so this is hard and controversial and push back from the far left and far right for a whole host of regions but the idea of having high standards each state can do their own call them what you want doesn't matter but if the goal is not just graduate students but to have them graduate able to take credit burying college classes for me that should be a do that then those diplomas actually mean something Hi my name is Sophie Longest I'm a freshman here studying English education and something disheartening and fascinating I've learned already in my first few weeks here is that many people don't consider teachers professionals because they don't write their own standards and I guess my question is why aren't teachers involved in writing what they teach in the classroom so as states are working towards moving towards higher standards teachers have been absolutely integral to that process and so I think so much what we have to do is to empower teachers to be creative to have a joy for learning in the classroom and so these aren't again these are false choices and the move towards higher standards has been driven and teacher led and they're extraordinary teachers who are helping to challenge the status quo and do something better and as hard as this is the vast majority of states are going the right direction and we would not be in the classroom today without the hard work and courage and leadership of teachers thank you Mr. President, Mr. Secretary my name is Troy Bell let me start by saying thank you President Daniels for the opportunity that I had to share a flight with you from Atlanta to Indianapolis and in large part because of that flight it was in coach it was in coach it was AirTran actually so but in large part due to the conversations that we had I went on to pursue the opportunity to become a leader in a charter school management network so I lead a network of 22 schools in eight states they are all title one schools and in Gary, Indy as well as in East Chicago we have ranged from 97 to 100% graduation rates as well as college acceptance rates so we're doing some good things but from my experience I'm going to ask you two questions from my experience one of the challenges that we run into is the lack of connectivity between higher ed and K-12 what's going on in higher education and K-12 and I want to applaud you President Daniels for what you're doing to bridge that gap so I'd like for you to talk a little bit about the idea of higher ed becoming more involved with K-12 education through their involvement with charter schools and then the second question a little bit different the reason why our schools are as successful as they are in my opinion is because we're addressing social problems all of our schools have a clinic we have in addition to health care as well as day care so we're showing that the correlation between healthy students and student performance thank you so my question along those lines are what can your agency do to help incentivize more schools to be able to address the social problems that are preventing or limiting student performance so just quickly again having higher education work with K-12 it's just so hugely important and whether it's running your own school whether it's your social work students going in or your dental students going in or your medical students going in or tutoring or mentoring or coaching we have to get out of our ivory towers and whether it's running your own school or University of Chicago where I'm from that has a network of schools many places starting to do this John Hopkins is doing some really interesting stuff in Baltimore there's a growing awareness there's no one well and so applaud the leadership here we need to see that continue to happen not every university is going to run their own school a network, I'd love to see more of that but you have amazing undergrads and grads and faculty who could be doing all kinds of things in the real world and don't forget with all the challenges we talk about, you know, discipline between professors and teachers 99% of our nation's teachers are coming from your institutions and so to somehow just simply doesn't make sense at all you guys create high-rate creates the K-12 infrastructure so we have to be honest about that I call wrap around services it's just so important when we were in Chicago we had a couple dozen schools that had healthcare clinics attached to them the biggest thing I learned in my mother's program growing up if kids were hungry it's hard to concentrate can't see the blackboard it's hard to learn, they're not safe if they're scared it's hard to focus and so all of those things are not extra they're foundational, they're fundamental so we do a lot of funding of after-school programs one of the things that came out of the Affordable Care Act just people didn't know is not us but HHS funded a couple hundred school-based healthcare clinics and we want to continue to do all those things to make sure kids physically, emotionally, socially are safe and cared for so we can start to talk about algebra, trig and biology so you guys are doing things exactly the right way thank you Thanks for the question Troy and for all you're doing Hi, thank you, my name is Sean McCann I'm the director of the Associate Accelerated Degree Program across the river at Ivy Tech Community College we help get first generation and low-income students a degree 60 credit hour degree in 11 months very fast paced, very accelerated at a high success rate programs like the Horizons program the Purdue Promise program TRIO programs in general like you said are not a blank check and we have to have results the first step for these students for these low-income and first generation students getting them aid and access to higher education is the first step the second step is keeping them here and having that opportunity to engage to engage in the principles that incorporated with Student Success how can we as constituents fight to keep programs like Student Success, Purdue Promise, TRIO, Horizons and my program in addition, what is the Department of Education doing to fight for that funding to make sure that that's maintained so first I'm just a big fan of Ivy Tech and we've done a whole lot with them and the creativity and the leadership has been fantastic so I love what you guys are doing I would just say, again I could care less Republican, Democrat and Uplical we need people to vote along educational issues and if you go back to the 2012 debates it was very discouraging to me that education was like not a part of those debates and I haven't seen much across the spectrum this is much interest right now politicians reflect what we want them to reflect and so I don't blame them, I blame us so at every level, state, local now the presidential election coming up are folks willing to support and invest in these things or are they not and if we don't insist upon it as voters we get what we put in so that's on us to do those things so we for the third time I'll remind everybody, quick, quick, quick please so the secretary is down schedule well, hello, my name is Danae Rash, I'm a senior in health and physical education here on campus and my question is actually about the health of our nation in a nation where chronic disease is the number one killer of the United States citizens one in four children are considered obese and overweight, 80% of those will continue to be obese and overweight into adulthood which leads to chronic disease and yet we're cutting health and physical education at elementary levels even at campus levels in case of Purdue where the program has been cut so my question is what are we doing to continue to fund those programs that are so vital to the health of our nation so unfortunately lots of things have been cut that don't make sense so PE gets cut music gets cut arts gets cut social workers get cut counselors get cut and these things aren't for me extra or extra curricula they are part of what keeps students healthy and engaged and in school every single day and it simply goes down to investment just to be clear quickly on the funding K-12 funding from the federal level is usually 8-10% and half is usually sort of state and 40% is local so this is really a local much more local and state issue we can help we do some things but these cuts are made by boards and by superintendents not because they want to but because that's their fiscal or financial reality so unless we are investing and investing wisely in education untenable cuts happen, untenable cuts get made final piece that is just continues to be to me very unfair unfair and un-American is so much of K-12 education is funded on local property tax base so in Chicago I had less than half the money for my students and wealthier suburbs just 5 miles north of us along like Michigan and those kids are already coming with tremendous advantages to school that my kids didn't have so it tells a nation we are willing to take on some of these just huge inequities and resources these aren't getting cut in affluent communities these are getting cut in impoverished communities who need them the most and it's a travesty Hello Secretary Duncan my name is Anand Ballar and I'm a sophomore here I just have a real quick question do you think that you'll ever win MVP of the NBA celebrity all-star game there's still hope there's still hope alright thank you Mr. President, Mr. Secretary my name is Caroline Shanley and I am the Director of Federal Government Relations for Produced Student Government so I was just wondering if you had some ways that our students could voice their concerns or ideas to your department absolutely and I'll give you my card when we're done yes sir, thank you well that worked Hello, I'm Morgan I'm a senior studying English Education here I am observing a school that has been piloting a one-to-one program in a couple of classrooms for several years my question for you is what else can these schools be doing or can your department be doing to help push the one-to-one initiative completely thanks for raising that I should have so for all the lack of investment we talked about in cutting programs and the challenge there each year as a country a thousand school districts spend 8-9 billion dollars a year on textbooks and I would argue those textbooks are basically obsolete the day they show up in their classrooms and so in tough economic times this move from print to digital is a really big deal and you have a relatively small number of school districts moving this direction I was in Williams Field, Illinois which is a town of 650 last night and they stopped buying textbooks a couple years ago and they were like extraordinary things so this is where again we talked earlier we in education aren't great at stopping doing things we're good at doing new things I think we need to stop buying textbooks I think we should put all that money into digital and we need to make sure we're supporting teachers in that transition and supporting students in the transition and again that's hard and it's a tough change but the fact that we're buying books five, six, seven year cycles socialized books that again it doesn't seem to me whatsoever thank you and thanking you for your patience you have the last question Hi Alan Friedman, biological sciences if the for-profit higher education model has been let's say largely a failure there are some other innovations that are going on out there like the Minerva project do you have any idea what kinds of radical experiments you'd like to see tried in higher education that's a great question to provide funding for folks who are doing stuff in this space so I think the competency-based stuff is very important I think the short-term training if you can learn to code in four months and get a job paying $55,000, $60,000 and historically we couldn't do that because of Carnegie News and stuff we should be looking there we're doing some things recently to get Pell grants to folks who are incarcerated and that's pretty controversial but I think it's absolutely the right thing to do if we want to reduce recidivism and have people come out of jail and be productive citizens so I think these are all these are all areas where we're trying to provide seed funding in space and flexibility the big one that where we are still part of the problem is ultimately for me it's all about outcomes and we do $150 billion in grants and loans each year and it's all basically on inputs on access it's important but I don't want just access I want completion, I want graduation rates I want people walking across stages like this and so we need to move some of our funding towards not just inputs but to outcomes and wherever those good outcomes are coming from we should be agnostic, we should be wide open there so thanking the audience for being here and the questioners in particular for a terrific set of topics for the secretary I was saving a question he doesn't like to talk about himself anyway so I'll convert it to a comment in the interest of time if you hadn't reflected on this here we have a person who has not only served in two of the most difficult challenging high pressure occupations one can imagine heading the Chicago school system and then his present job notice that he's stuck with those assignments for an extraordinarily long period of time these are jobs that either chew up and spit out their occupants or in many cases are used as sort of a place where someone goes for a couple years checks a resume box and moves on having made very little imprint I just want to say how much I admire someone who has taken on these jobs and in so doing face some of the most rigid difficult well-funded often selfish special interests we have in our whole society and has stuck with them for seven years in each case it's an extraordinary commitment and for that reason secretary Duncan I consider you one of the finest public servants of our day and produce very very honored you came and spent some time with us today thank you for your time