04/13/04 -- Following are brief reports on some of the major speakers who addressed various sessions at NSBA's 64th Annual Conference in Orlando, Fla., March 27-30.
Melinda Gates
All students should graduate from high school ready for college. This is the ambitious vision Melinda French Gates asked school board members to embrace at the fourth annual Danzberger Memorial Lecture March 29.
"I recognize this is extremely ambitious," but the future of the nation rests on this vision, says Gates, co-founder of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.
Only one-third of today's eighth graders will be ready for college four years from now," Gates says. Every day, 3,000 students drop out, and 1 million will drop out this year.
She says being college-ready is important for the economic strength of the nation.
"Eighty percent of the fastest-growing occupations will require some education after high school," she says, and "by the end of the decade, we will need 12 million skilled employees in the fastest-growing sectors of the job market."
And it's important for students, she says. "A college graduate earns 70 percent more than a high school graduate."
"We don't want a two-tiered system where a small number of well-educated professionals are making decisions for everybody else," Gates says. "We must equip all of our young people to make the right decisions for themselves -- and our country."
To help prepare all students for college, the Gates Foundation "has targeted high schools as the area we feel we can make the biggest impact," she says. "High schools are the most neglected part of America's public school system," she says. "Too many of them are big schools where students are bored and teachers feel disconnected."
But she says there are great high schools in this country, and they have three things in common -- rigor, relationships, and relevance.
The Gates foundation has formed partnerships with school districts to transform large, impersonal high schools into small schools and develop new smaller schools "where students get personal attention and a rigorous curriculum that is relevant to their lives," she says. So far, the foundation has provided support to 1,400 innovative high schools.
Christopher Reeve
To Christopher Reeve, "nothing is impossible." Reeve, an actor best known for his role as "Superman" and subsequently paralyzed in an equestrian accident, told the audience at the opening General Session: "There is no kid who can't somehow be unlocked. Every kid can learn."
Reeve told the audience how his family strongly valued education and instilled in him a love of books. Reeve also touts the importance of arts education, calling it "critical to children's development." Arts education can "help children avoid isolation and provincialism," he says, and expose them to "a diversity of culture."
He cautioned school board members not to blindly meet testing mandates without taking into account individual needs and urged them to engage in constructive dialogue with Washington to ensure opportunities for every child.
He says that his former work as a coach for the Special Olympics taught him that the definition of victory is different for every child. "Some need to win. Some need to complete the race. And some just need to get around the track."
Jim Collins
Management expert Jim Collins told school leaders at a General Session that, "One of the chronic problems with education is the constant search for the new program." He says schools would get better results if they stick with a good program instead of constantly starting over with new approaches.
Collins says school boards need to learn what he calls the "flywheel principle." It is a metaphor for the idea that many small efforts in a consistent direction will produce self-perpetuating and increasing momentum. Constantly starting over with new programs often produces short-term gains that fade, says Collins, author of the bestsellers Built to Last and Good to Great.
Collins praised NSBA's steadfast promotion of the Key Work of Schools as an example of a simpler-is-better philosophy that he calls the "hedgehog" concept. It's the idea that one reliable strategy -- the hedgehog's burrowing -- is superior to that of the more clever fox, which is apt to try a dozen strategies to catch a hedgehog without success.
While optimistic that radical improvement is possible, Collins acknowledges "running a public school district is generally more difficult, perhaps by an order of magnitude, than running a Fortune 500 company."
Betsy Rogers
"They say to teach is to touch a life forever, and we hope to do that as an educator," says National Teacher of the Year Betsy Rogers. "But sometimes the opposite is true, and there's the child that changes our life forever."
Rogers told the audience at a Focus on Education lecture how, when she was recently widowed and going through a difficult time, she was inspired by a small child with significant physical disabilities who challenged a larger competitor in a math game to "bring it on."
Rogers went back to school and earned a master's degree and doctorate. She also became a nationally certified teacher. Today, she coaches teachers at high-poverty schools in Alabama.
In today's world of high-stakes testing and accountability, she warned school board members against eliminating the parts of the curriculum that make learning fun, such as field trips and drama lessons.
"Tests are important," she says. "But it's how we use these tests that are more important. I welcome the accountability. But our curriculum has to be very enriched, especially in areas of high poverty where students don't have a lot of outside experiences."
LouAnne Johnson
Combining elements from her Marine Corps training with plenty of compassion and determination, LouAnne Johnson turned gang members into high achieving learners, some of whom even attended college.
Johnson, who spoke at American School Board Journal's Luncheon for School Leaders March 29, is the author of My Posse Don't Do Homework, which became the basis of the movie, "Dangerous Minds," starring Michelle Pfeiffer.
That book recounts her experiences -- and ultimate success -- teaching students who threatened her and even threw books at her.
She engaged her students by offering them "amnesty from their pasts," Johnson says. "I told them that I was not going to read any of those lists that say whom among them is violent or stupid. I said everybody gets a fresh start. That changed their perception of themselves and they responded."
Her forthcoming book, The Queen of Education: Rules for Making Schools Work, includes the following "edicts":
• No classroom will have more than 20 students.
• Every elected official will teach in a public school classroom for weeks using the materials available and will be paid a teacher's salary.
• Members of Congress will be required to enroll their children in the poorest public school in their community.
Douglas Reeves
Douglas Reeves, chair and founder of the Center for Performance Assessment, told the audience at the School Leaders Breakfast March 27 that most evaluations of superintendents are inadequate.
Too few school administrators are given evaluations that measure what's really important or that provide useful information for improving their performance, he says.
Reeves suggests some areas of leadership that should be added to an administrator's evaluation, including the ability to react constructively to disappointment or failure, to handle dissent from subordinates, and to manage time well.
An administrator's role in student achievement isn't always measured correctly, he says. It is not enough to simply look at test scores.
The evaluation should consider whether the administrator blames the problem on the socioeconomic background of the students or analyzed the data and implemented new programs to boost future scores.
John Walters
Testing students for exposure to drugs is little different than testing students for exposure to tuberculosis -- it is a public health tool that identifies the source of infection before it spreads, says John P. Walters, director of the Office of National Drug Control Policy.
Speaking at a special session at the conference March 29, the nation's drug czar told school board members that testing helps catch students who use drugs before they expose their friends and fellow students to illegal substances.
Drug testing is necessary, Walters argues, because "it gets us to intervention."
The need for intervention is immense, he says. Of the 7 million people across the nation addicted to illegal substances, 23 percent are teenagers.
One challenge for school officials is battling a certain cynicism that drug-prevention efforts don't work -- and that some experimentation is normal for young people, Walters says. But the world is a lot different than it was in the 1970s, when many people thought marijuana was harmless.
The reality is that there are many dangerous drugs out there, he says. Even today's marijuana is much more potent and addictive.