List of Latvian women writers

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>>Male Presenter: Thanks everyone for coming. I'm Brad Greene. I'm an engineering manager here at Google. I wanted to introduce to you David Kirp. David is a Professor at the University of California Berkeley. He's previously been a Dean. He was on Obama's Transition Committee. And he's here to talk to us today about his book, "Kids First." And I'll turn it over to David. >>David Kirp: Thank you for coming. The inspiration for this project was an attempt to think about what you'd want for kids in a society that thought seriously about kids and wasn't thinking pipe-dream expenses, came from out of my time that I spent on the Transition Team. I was with the Education Group. There were seven of us and there were probably 200 groups that came. So, there's the Technology and Education folks, and the Pre-school folks, and the Child Care people, and the Native American Head Start people, and the Compensatory Education Program in the Catholic schools and the--. You get the idea. The Voc-Ed people, all there. And they were all estimable folks. But the difficulty was they were all looking at particular slices of kid's lives. And there was really nobody that was only thinking about, talking about, a kid. So I wondered, putting on my policy wonk cap, what would a policy look like? What would a set, a system of supports for kids from crib to college, or vocational training, look like? And so, I traveled around the country. I had a little bit of money. And I saw some amazing programs in the most unlikely places--the Highlands of New Mexico, and the middle of the barrio in Los Angeles, and Washington Heights up at the tip of Manhattan--a tough neighborhood. And one of my favorite programs is a preschool in a neighborhood in Chicago that was so tough that there was barbed wire around the playground to protect the kids when they were there. And they were all great programs. But the problem is they were programs. They weren't systems. And that, to this audience, probably makes particular sense. If you were lucky enough to be in a certain place at a certain time and be eligible for a certain activity, that was great. But a lot of folks weren't. And a lot of people, from one age group, children got great stuff and then nothing else. So, you might be a poor, single mom with your first child and you sign up for something called the Nurse-Family Partnership. Great, famous program. A trained nurse comes to you once a week. A lot of work on child development. Helps you be a better parent. Second birthday comes, the nurse and the mom and the kid blow out the candles and the nurse is gone. And there you are. There you are, a mom, without any of that support. And then comes your second child. And those of you who've had kids, or can think about siblings, will know that second child, first child often very different. The program says, "Sorry, we only look at first kids." And I think about a friend of mine from Chicago who knew a young state legislator turned Senator named Barack Obama. And he went to visit him in 2005 in his office. And they bonded over the classic middle-class dilemma, "You have kids. Oh, my God. Summer camp is over. School hasn't begun. What are we gonna do with them for that two-week time?" And I thought for a lot of parents, it's not two weeks. It's two years or three years or more. Parents are asking that question and there's no good answer. And the final lynch pin for me with this was an event in New York sponsored by something called the Dream Foundation. The Dream Foundation is scattered across the country. Provides tutoring and mentoring for kids from about 3rd Grade on and then supports last dollar support for college. It's a great program. And this girl, who is an NYU student, said, "I happened to be in Red Hook, 3rd Grade, Mrs. Ruiz' class, and the Dream Foundation folks adopted our class. So, if it weren't for them, I wouldn't be here." And I thought exactly, "But if you showed up the next year in Mrs. Ruiz' class, or you happened to be in Mr. Brown's class down the hall, very different life." Programs, not systems. And as I started looking at what was out there. I thought, "What's the encapsulating concept here? What am I really trying to think about?" And the answer was really simple. This book is about--. You can encapsulate it in one sentence. It's the policy version of the Golden Rule. Every child deserves what you would want for a child that you love. Simple, straightforward, and very useful. So that, for example, there's a lot of attention now being paid to early education. Very important. It's one of my five big ideas, but it's not enough. People start thinking about this as the panacea. You think in Golden Term rules. Could you imagine saying, "Kid. We'll have to ignore you until you're three or four. You're gonna have a great early education and then you go off to the untender mercies of the neighborhood public school." Probably not. So, out of that, I came up with an agenda--a five idea agenda. Why a list? 'Cause Americans love lists, right? This is the David Letterman Show. Rick Perry certainly had his list the other night. [chuckles] We got colleges, US news rankings. And they're rememberable. And they're short. Short lists work. And I was looking for not new ideas, but tried and true efforts that could be expanded and had good basis in evidence and that really were potential game changers in the lives of kids. And the one big idea is if you put them together, you get a synergy that really reinforces the effect of any one of those ideas. So if somebody asks me, "What can we do now?" I've got answers for that. What can we do that's really affordable, really feasible, now? But ideally, the scheme of some scope, when I say what you want for a child you love, I don't mean the Cadillac. I don't mean that you're giving folks an internship at the Google campus in this summer and you're sending them off to Argentina to learn Spanish. It's really the Kia model, not the Cadillac model. But good stuff. Good, serious, engaging stuff. And at the end of this book, I try to think about what "affordable" means. And I do a little bit of budgeting. And the easiest way to understand that budget is if I had--I don't know what the quarterly profits are at Google. That might be a better example here. But if I had a year's worth of Exxon profits, I'd be halfway toward fulfilling this agenda. So, what's on the agenda? Five items. First, strong support for parents. I don't know a parent who says, "I don't need to talk to anybody. I know everything there is to know about parenting." And we know how important parents are in kids' lives. Not just at the beginning, but all the way through their lives. And we actually do know some things now about what you can do to help parents be the best they can be. And my favorite system--on occasion I'm gonna reference particular programs--there are a bunch of good programs, like the Nurse-Family Partnership that I mentioned before. They're small. My favorite system is called Triple P--Positive Parenting Program. It exists actually here in San Francisco, in Mendocino. It's scattered around the country. Its, in policy terms, one of the world's best kept secrets. And it looks like this: First, for 20 years, the developers of this program asked parents, "What do you care about? What are the issues you care about?" "My kid can't sleep. My kid can't eat. My kid cries. My kid won't listen to me, having trouble in school, fighting, etcetera" And then try to develop strategies for addressing those issues. And then tested them. And although the deviser of this program is a psychologist, he was not interested in one-on-one strategies. He wanted to reach parents where they were. And so, he then turns to everybody to whom a parent might go--the minister, the social worker, the principal, the teacher, the pediatrician. He says, "I'll give you training in these programs. It's ten sessions for basic program if you wanna learn about helping a parent cope with a developmentally delayed child." It's another special program. Training is free. And then you go out there in the community. You've got this tool kit. It's a little bit like doctors who go off every year for a week or so of retooling. It's that same kind of effort. Then, they do a lot of social marketing to get parents aware of what's happening. So, the minister says something to them. You go to the principal to talk about your child. The principal says, "By the way, there's this program that's available if you're interested in doing it." And the program is whatever the parents want. It's everything from pick up a pamphlet to participate in a ten-week course to, on some occasions when you have a really difficult problem, it's some one-on-one or small group work. And the data is amazing in terms of what the impact is. In this country, the Center for Disease Control did an evaluation of Triple P and the units of comparison were eleven rural counties in South Carolina that got Triple P, and eleven others that didn't. That's a huge population base. And the CDC was concerned about abuse and neglect. And it was interested in two measures--hospitalization of kids in foster care placements, both indicia of parent's abuse and neglect. Big, big differences between those communities. And they would've been bigger still had Triple P been allowed to use TV ads, which they couldn't because the TV ads would be seen across counties. This is new. And all of anything that I'm saying is quickie rendering of what's in "Kids First," which you're getting at an amazing bargain price. I couldn't get the book at the price that you have if you're sitting right outside. So, that's strong parenting . Item two. Really good early education. I doubt that I have to say a lot to this group about why early education matters, about how important early brain development is to kids. I do wanna say that it's not what goes on in an early education program. A good education program isn't like pouring a pitcher of water into the--the pitcher of knowledge into the empty vessel of a kid's head. A common metaphor. Kids are not empty vessels. They really are explorers. At 45 minutes, they're looking around the room and they're beginning to recognize things. Forty-five minutes after birth. And at three and four years old, those of you who've seen and spent time with those kids, they really are curious about everything. And you give them things that really will both satisfy their curiosity and whet their appetite for more and you've got a teacher who understands how to be helpful and how to stand back and let the kids work. Amazing stuff goes on. But it's not just cognition that's important. It's also all those things that go on in a good preschool classroom--learning to wait your turn, to share, to not scream at somebody or beat up on somebody. "Use your words," as the teachers would say. All this extra emotional stuff. And that matters a lot as well. Not just nice, but it's really, it's important in terms of lifetime outcomes. An economist named James Heckman, Nobel Prize winner from the University of Chicago, had a large sample of kids who were tested at age three, both for cognition and for social/emotional functioning. And then looked at again at age 18. And what the data showed was that the kids who scored really high in cognitive terms did better in school. Not as much better in school as you might imagine, but better. But the kids who were high on the social/emotional scale, less likely to be pregnant, less likely to be in trouble with the police, less likely to be on drugs or drinking or all those other things that matter. So, these so-called "soft" values that pop up along the way here--good parenting-- and what it does for parents listening to children. Good early education. They really have some hard outcomes. OK. Strong parenting support. Really good early education. Then three, connecting accurately rigorous education with all the resources of the community surrounding it. We are currently stuck in a debate that I sometimes describe as Waiting for Superman versus Diane Ravitch. Diane Ravitch wrote a bestseller about how don't blame--. It's not just the schools. It's all the surrounding concerns of the social issues that arise. And there's "Waiting for 'Superman'," which basically says the schools are the enemy. The unions are the arch-devil and charter schools are the answer. And that conversation, is it all about blame the teachers and get better teachers in schools? Look, hold them responsible and they'll produce better reading and math scores. Or, is it in our social conditions that difficulties of life in the inner city--. And the answer, of course, is both, right? I mean, it's this silly kind of conversation. There's nobody out there who doesn't think an academically rigorous education--. Just take that image of Lewis and Clark and carry it on through. Children as problem solvers. All the things that you're asked to do when you're working on the job--the problems you need to solve--just imagine them applying across the curriculum. That's what you want. Nobody would disagree with that. But it's also the case that the model of school that says you show up at 8, you leave at 3, you come 180 days a year, just doesn't work anymore for many, many kids--not just poor kids, but middle-class kids as well. Parents are working. What are you gonna do at 7 o'clock in the morning? So, they're working until 5, 6, 7 o'clock at night. The community school model says, "We're gonna start with that academically rigorous school as the core and we're gonna work around that." So, there are programs that have hot breakfast in the morning. And teachers are there to help kids with their homework. After school, all those things that have been squeezed out of the public schools because of the high stakes testing in literacy and numeracy. All those things you don't get very much of go on after school. So, science and history and social studies and art and music and gym. You know, gym is really interesting. I discovered that the typical school now has a gym class one day a week. Well, we also have an obesity epidemic. Somebody has failed to put those two parts of the puzzle together. But you want all that kind of activity going on after school for kids. You wanna figure out a way of engaging parents. You also wanna bring the health services into the schools. I mean, it's great that all kids are now entitled to health care through the Children's Health Insurance Program. But being entitled and having a doc is something very different. And as some of you who have kids know, if your child needs to go to the doctor, you've gotta take half a day off from work to make the appointment and go to the doctor, etc. So, move the public health programs, move some of the doctors into the schools. Provide that kind of service for the kids and by the way, why not make it open to the families in the community as well? Why not open the school generally to the families in the community of the school? Make it a real community school. So, this also might just sound like nice stuff, but it's not. I mean, it's much more than that. Start with health. About a third of the kids in the typical city come to school with uncorrected vision problems. About a third of the kids come to school with untreated dental problems. And I don't mean they haven't been to have their teeth cleaned in the last six months. These are kids who are in such pain that they lose a million and a half days a school year--are lost to dental pain. And about 30 percent of the kids have untreated asthma. So think about it. If you come to school and you can't read the blackboard and you're in pain, you're having a hard time breathing, being able to pass that high stakes test in 3rd grade where you gotta write three paragraph essays and read a complicated passage and some non-fiction text and some answer some ques-. It's hard to keep your mind on that stuff if you're having a difficult time. After school? Well, what we know is that the number of hours that teenagers spend unsupervised after school is a better predictor of school dropouts than race or social class. So, being connected also, you know, why? Because the kids get much more engaged in school. They connect. And it's not just the skill and drill part of the world. It's the fun part of the world. And summers? Well, it turns out that kids from across the social spectrum make about the same progress academically during the course of the school year. It's in the summers that the differences emerge 'cause middle-class families are scheduling their kids with a fancy dance card. But poor families? I mean, those kids are hanging out on the streets. So, that's strong parenting support, good early education, connect school and community. Four. Get a caring, stable adult. A champion in kid's lives. When I would talk to people who work with kids, I would hear this phrase "caring, stable adult" so much that I thought maybe this was a talking point, right? Somehow like--. But it's not. You think back on your own lives and how you got here. None of you made it on your own. You all had somebody--not just a parent--who was there for you in some way. It was a teacher. It was a coach. It was a minister. It was the neighbor. In the case of the guy who runs a program called Experience Corps, which is one of the really good mentoring programs. It was the barber. Somebody who went out of their way. Somebody who could inspire you, could guide you, could support you. The best of those systems is Big Brothers Big Sisters. Been around for a century. Reaching about a half a million kids. And also, an evidence-based program, when they've studied kids in that program compared to a control group of students, what they found is more engaged, happier, doing better in school. The big effect? Better relations with their own parents. And that surprised me at first. And then I thought, "We're talking about teenagers." Now, for teenagers to have somebody else to connect to, some other adult who can show them alternative possibilities, other ways of being and who doesn't have all that charge of being a parent, well, it takes a lot of pressure off. And it gives this kid someone else to talk to. And that's item four on the list. And number five, finally, is probably the only item that's not gonna be familiar to you. And that's a children's savings account. The program that existed in Britain for about ten years and that's been introduced in Congress for many years--bipartisan support one of the last times it was introduced--its supporters, its co-signers were Charles Schumer, liberal Democrat from New York, and Rick Santorum, then Senator from Pennsylvania--a Conservative guy. The model is this: Every child, every newborn, gets five hundred dollars deposited in an investment account at birth. For poor and near-poor families, the government makes an additional offer. If you, parents, or family, or anyone contribute more money to this account, we'll match it up to five hundred dollars a year. So, why does this matter? Well, the obvious thing is there's gonna be a nest egg. The miracles of compound interest mean that you're gonna get a fair chunk of money if a thousand dollars is going into an investment account. And a lot of kids, poor and working-class kids are very, very good at thinking about short term costs. They look at the sticker price of colleges and say, "I can't go there." And the result of that in really highly technical language is that poor, smart kids have about the same chance of going to college as dumb, rich kids. Money helps equalize that situation. So does savvy, because the other thing that child's savings account does is it changes the dynamic of families. Poor families start getting interested in their kid’s futures because they see them has having futures. And the kids themselves become more money aware. Banks are always--the Federal Reserve is always talking about "what can you do to make kids more money smart?" Well, this program does it. When I've looked at what happens when you give kids a matching kid's savings account, they know a whole lot more because now they've got some money to be smart about. Those statements are coming in every quarter. By the time those kids are seven, eight, nine, ten, they're gonna begin looking at them and seeing what's happening to their money and talking about the dollars they have. When they've done these little studies, kids are told, "We'll match up to whatever amount of money, money that you save." The results are pretty amazing. I always thought about teenagers as little hedonists, but in fact, they turn out to be little Puritans. They save a ton 'cause they do see what down the road looks like. So, what you have is five pillars of support that carry you from the time you're born to helping your parents do the best they can. Really good early education. Helping to develop both your social skills and your academic skills. An academically rigorous school connected to all the resources of the community. A mentor to help guide the way. And then, that pot of gold at the end of the rainbow. That's the hope. That's the ideal. And as I said, I mean, to me, it satisfies for the broad majority of kids my Golden Rule test. It's pretty close to what I would wanna do for my own kid. It's affordable. When I try to work out a budget, I was talking about 60 billion dollars. That sounds like a lot of money--maybe. But again, in comparison to any of the measures that are out there, not such a fortune. If every American drank one fewer Coke a month, we'd have a billion dollars a year to add to the pot. There's nothing partisan about this. Kids aren't Republicans. Kids aren't Democrats. Kids are kids. Parent's concern about kids cuts across lines and so does their willingness to support kids. And yet, we're at a point in which for every dollar that goes to a kid, seven dollars goes to a geezer like me. And the reason for that is pretty clear. Four-letter acronym. First two letters are vowels. Anybody wanna tell me what that four-letter acronym is that explains why seniors do so well? >>MALE #1: AARP >>David Kirp: AARP, right? Seniors, 1960, were the poorest part of the population. Along comes AARP. Mass membership. Forty-five million members. And what they have harped on is three items. Seniors want social security, Medicare, prescription drug benefits. That is it. Kid's advocates? We don't have time to list all the things that kid's advocates want. They're badly organized. They're fractious. Politicians can get away with not paying any attention to them. The old political line is, "Kids don't matter because kids don't vote." And until there is some effort to organize all the folks who are engaged and involved with kids, in an effort that even vaguely approaches the AARP, unless there's some way to push/nudge the political system into rethinking its priorities, investing in the next generation and enabling families to be the good stewards they want, then this becomes nothing more than a nice conversation. And I say that with particular poignancy here because this is a group that is interested in reshaping the universe in various ways and has a set of tools that can be put to use in the interest of kids. And I hope that happens. And we can talk more about what that would mean. But let me stop now and invite comments, questions, thoughts, puzzles that you might have. Yeah. >>MALE #2: So, how is AARP successful? And what won't stop, for example, groups of parents--? Would it require seniors who have a lot of money to create this? And instead invested [inaudible ] money, or--? >>David Kirp: Yeah, it's an--. >>Male Presenter: Can you repeat the question into the mic? >>David Kirp: Yeah. The question is how did the AARP make it? Which is a great question. And the answer is that a group of organizations got together, agreed on a platform, and decided on a model, which was "we're gonna be a mass organization, 15 bucks a years, and you're a member of AARP." You don't have to do anything. So, when this organization starts growing into the millions, when it shows up at the bargaining table, people pay attention. You will notice that despite all the brave talk about cutting entitlement programs, which means cutting Social Security and Medicare, it hasn't happened. And when a Republican Congressman was endorsing serious Medicare cuts and transfers and was kicked out of office in Buffalo this past spring on that issue, people paid attention. So, the agenda is simple. The organizing principle is clear. The institution mushrooms over a period of time. It would take kid's advocates sitting down at a table and being willing to put aside adult egos--really tough to do. My program, my program, my program. And saying, "OK. For this year, this is what we're gonna focus on." And it can be at Washington. It could be in Sacramento. It can be in Mountain View. Wherever. These days, it's probably easier-- even despite the state of economy here-- it's probably easier to look at the local level than to look at what's happening in Washington. But it takes that kind of energy. At the local level, it means you think about the people who are involved in kid's lives, you bring them together, you sit them down, and you keep saying, "For the kids. For the kids. For the kids." And eventually, they get engaged enough to in fact, put aside what it is that their program is about and think about how they can be more powerful by combining with other forces. That's what's required. And it happens in some places. My favorite story comes from Illinois where for the last 30-odd years, the kid's organizations really have come together. And they have been able--. They were one of the first states to get pre-school-- state pre-school--universal state pre-school. Now, they were the first state to make sure that that program included early pre-school. Zero to three as well as three to five. And they have a big child care program. How did they do this? They did this in the way I'm describing. They get together. They fight it out. They come out and say, "This is what we're about doing." Every year, they send about 30, 40 thousand parents. They bus them to Springfield's state capitol for Kid's Day. And one mom from south side of Chicago buttonholes her state Senator and says, "Senator, how can we get more money for early education?" And he said, "I wish I could help you, ma'am, but there's nothing I can do." And she said right back, "OK. How can we elect somebody who can actually do something?" [laughter] That's the attitude that's sorely lacking and that we need to see more of. Yeah. >>MALE #3: So, if I look at the four points, and I like the examples that I got from your description of one, three and five, a pretty good sense of what policies can support those things. >>David Kirp: Mm-hmm. >>MALE #3: Could you elaborate more on policies that could support two and four? >>David Kirp: So, what policies could support early education and mentoring? OK. Start with something that's happening in Washington now. And that is an Early Learning Challenge grant program that the Administration has introduced. A five hundred million dollar program. And that program says to the states, "We want you to build a system of supports from birth to age five." It's very much like what it was that I was working on when I was on the Transition Team. States develop a--. You know where the gaps are. You don't have good child care. You don't have early education. You don't have parenting programs. So, we want high quality, public, private, transparent, parent-engaged programs. And I was not a great fan of Race to the Top because of its incentives. Here, the incentives are all in the right direction. More generally, there's a pretty effective--there was--a pretty effective political push to expand early education at the state level. Even through the 2000s, as money was getting tight, more money was being spent across the states. So now, about eight billion dollars is spent as opposed to about two billion dollars seven or eight years ago. The problem is this, and here's where the political difficulty arises. Politicians are naturally credit claimers. That's not an insult. That's a description. They need to be able to say, "I did this." Right? If they're gonna get elected again, "I did this." And it's a whole lot easier to say, "I added 50 thousand kids to the pre-school rolls," than it is to say, "I demanded better qualified teachers, smaller classes, and evidence-based--." The audience has gone away. So, the task of the folks who are focused on policy of early education is to start with better and then move to bigger. It's a whole lot easier to move from better to bigger, politically, than it is to move from bigger to better. And that really again, means starting at the local level and working out from there. It also means making sure that the horrible fight that goes on between early education folks and child care folks comes to an end. I mean, this is just ludicrous. These guys are always at each other's throats. It's as if education goes on from 8 to 1 and then the kids are left free to do nothing. Their brains just turn off. It doesn't work that way, right? And it's all about education. And it's all about play. But those guys have got to get it together. Mentoring. What's interesting now is as the Baby Boomers turn 60 and older, ten thousand a day, ten thousand people a day, turn 60 years old. They say that they want to be involved in giving back to the community. They're not just wanting to play bridge and golf and what have you. And kids and the church are the highest two items on their list. So, tapping that untapped potential is really a task. Not just for government, but for private organizations, I mentioned before an organization called Experience Corps, which sends seniors into the schools to tutor kids from Kindergarten through 3rd grade. Experience Corps, on whose board I sit. So, they just merged with AARP. It's a great example of what I mean when I talk about taking a program and making it a system. Experience Corps is a lovely little program. Ten thousand volunteers. What, from my view, if you think about the infrastructure that AARP has, we're talking about a hundred thousand in five years and growing. AARP's point of view, they love it because they're now branded as selfless seniors. This is a way of doing well by doing good. Their organization, it's actually spreading its wings. It doesn't have to be government. Although, government can certainly fund, and has funded, mentoring programs for kids, particularly at risk. The children of folks who are in prison. The children of kids who were, in one way or another, in trouble. And the great thing to me about Big Brothers Big Sisters though, is that it's open to everybody. It's like universal pre-school. It's like good parenting programs. Anybody can sign up. It's about "the poor." It's not about "them" needing help. I mean, this is a book. This is a set of ideas that's meant to cut across the spectrum--the income spectrum. I spent a lot of time in my career thinking about poor kids and special needs kids and African American boys and their educational problems. So, I get the importance of particular needs. I was a counsel in a case challenging a policy in Texas in which a child who spoke Spanish on the playground got suspended from school. It's only 40 years ago that this happened. But here, I wanted programs that would reach systems that would reach across the spectrum. For example, in terms of school readiness, we know that poor kids come to school to Kindergarten well behind middle-class kids. What we don't know is that middle-class kids are as far behind wealthy kids when they come to school. And the numbers are bigger. So, here's a program whose general thrust is what I'd call "selective universalism." You focus first on poor families because their needs are gonna be greatest. But you really do think broadly. I think it's politically much more feasible, so that we're talking about us, not them. And I think it's ethically preferable to have a world in which we really are not thinking about just the poor, but we're thinking what it is that society as a whole could benefit from and needs. Yeah. >>MALE #4: I noticed one of the five things that you don't talk about, or one of the things you don't talk about in the five things is the quality of the education itself. Why isn't this topic in the book? >>David Kirp: Well, it's a great question. >>[audience member coughs] >>David Kirp: And why didn't I talk about the quality of education in the book? Because we're stuck in this sterile debate about what quality means. Is it all about accountability and test results and firing teachers and charter schools? Is it about giving teachers lots of support, etc.? There is a ton of stuff out. That's the conversation. And as I say, I posit in this book that rigorous academic programs are essential for kids--all kids. I just--. People pick an argument about that. I don't see that. You can't solve the education problems of this country with charter schools. Not with 60 million kids and 3 million teachers. You're just not gonna be able to do it, whatever you think about charter schools. You've gotta work within public schools. And public schools are the only institution, along with churches and libraries, that are in all communities. They become a base for what you're doing. But I just didn't see any reason to enter that fray. It's a pretty well-worn area. And frankly, I don't think anybody's--. People's minds are made up by now. There's enough stuff out there about get rid of the unions, or the charter schools are really draining resources from our public schools. So, I quite deliberately said, "I wanna look at all the things that aren't just about 8 to 3, literacy and numeracy." That's the world that nobody is talking about these days. >>MALE #5: [ inaudible ] books. Was there--? What was your issue with parents who can't send their kids to charter school who don't feel well, at least I want our kids to get the best education they can, don't feel like they can save the whole world [ inaudible ], but perhaps is there a pitch that you could make that would provide the [ inaudible ] to try to get the best solution for them? >>David Kirp: I think for parents, it's tough. Parents are fundamentally conservative when it comes to their own kids. We have all sorts of great ideas for changing society. For our kids, we see this narrow pyramid of what success looks like and all the failures along the way, or seeming failures along the way. They wanna give kids every advantage. I think if you look inside public schools--and I'm spending a lot of time these days in poor, urban, Latino school district just outside of New York City. The most crowded city in the country. Those schools satisfy my Golden Rule test. And I found brilliant teachers there. So, one of the things I'd say to parents is check your prejudices, walk into the public school, see what's going on. The other thing I would say is your child is gonna be exposed not just in the 8 to 3, 180-day year, but all the time, to ideas. There are books in the house, right? You're having conversations at the dinner table. You listen to middle-class families when they're on Muni in San Francisco talking to their kids. They're always talking to their kids. "What's that out there? What do we call that? Do you like that?" It's always education going on. So, I think people fetishize the elite schools. Certainly when it comes to pre-schools. Not needed to spend 25 thousand dollars a year to get a good pre-school education for your kids. And I think that's the hype, danger hysteria. I think it's hard to ask parents--particularly parents of young children, to get very politically engaged because their lives are consumed with making a living and raising their children. But it's not hard to get grandparents involved because they do have the time and they have the perspective. And I've seen wonderful examples where grandparents get engaged politically, for example, where in a very conservative congressional district--the district that's the home to George Bush's ranch in Texas. The odds on favorite to win congressional elections, somebody who'd been schooled by Karl Rove, who had a ton of money lost because she had bragged that she had saved the state a billion dollars by cutting kids off the state's health rolls. All it took was one TV commercial. A kind of Walker Evans photograph of a mom with her kid--her nine-year old kid--and the mom, who was a widow, was saying, "I love my child, but if she gets sick I don't know what I'm gonna do because now I don't have any health insurance because of what's happened." That's all it took for a bunch of very conservative, particularly women and particularly grandmas, to vote Democrat once in their lives. So again, this is not a partisan pitch. This is not a partisan set of ideas. I think the Republicans would expand their appeal enormously if they realized how broad-based the support is for kid's programs. But for people who are either in their 20s and not yet having families, or people who are in their 50s and 60s and their kids are out the door, there's lots of room for supporting them on this. Also, for all those folks who work in kid-serving organizations--the social workers, the teachers, and the librarians, and the nurses, etc.--they're all involved in kid's lives. And they're doing amazing work, but if could also be thinking in policy terms and politics terms and not just "what I'm doing in the classroom." with a little bit of their lives, they'd make an enormous difference in the conversation. Do I see a hand back there? Yeah. >>MALE #6: So, what can individual people do at the national level to support [inaudible ]? >>David Kirp: I think the most useful thing to do, and I'm thinking aloud on these questions, is to get involved. If there's a political campaign for a national office, particularly Congress, that pits somebody who's got a record of being effectively anti-kid, against the challenger, to be engaged in that campaign is hugely important. The reason for that is pretty simple. Politicians are risk-adverse folks. They see a few politicians go down in defeat on kid's issues, they're gonna change their tune. So, to take the aftermath of my Texas story was the Texas legislature convenes that January and the first thing it does, the first thing it does, is restore those kid's health cuts. They got it. So, that would be idea number one. And I would, when it comes to organizations, there is nothing that really spans this terrain. So, I would say you look for groups that are doing either good substantive work, good research work, or good policy work on behalf of particular groups of kids. I think that beyond the political universe, people's energies are much better focused at the state and local level. Because that, right now, given what's happening--that circus in Washington--things are much more likely to happen in Mountain View than they are in Congress. And I hope that happens. And I hope--it's a good last question--I hope that you all think about ways that you can use the talents that you have and the talents this organization has to work for the interest of kids. These are your--very crassly put--these are your future consumers, future users. It would be nice if they were more able and adept at being able to play both of those roles. They're also your own children and your neighbor's children, so they matter on that basis as well. Thank you. [applause]