Today we recognize people like my parents who surmount their disabilities and achieve success in a world of work. These are people who have worked harder than most. They had to. They are people with determination and courage and i am honored when i am among them. We also honor their employers who know that the most valuable workers is one that is loyal, dependable, and gives an honest dayss work for an honest a. s pay. These people know that hiring people with disabilities is good business. Adversity builds character and people with character are good employees. Thanks for giving me your time and attention. I have enjoyed this panel. I enjoyed being with you last october. I think all of the employers here who open their minds and job sites to workers with disabilities. By helping them you are helping yourselves. Your efforts also unlocked doors formally closed to workers with disabilities. Thank you. [applause] thank you very much for that personal story. I think you can tell by the reaction how much everybody was touched by that. Before we move on as want to ask you one short followup question. Because of your own experience and what you have seen and lived, what is one thing you think a u. S. Governor can do to make employing people with disabilities more possible, more realistic for employers in your state . I think practical steps are offered to talk about the leadership from the top, involve people with disabilities in announcements, identify employmentfirst as a policy or state is going to follow. By employmentfirst we mean that citizens with disabilities first and foremost the best service the government can give is held finding employment. To help parents understand that if they have a child with disability, they can inculcate in that child to the notion that i am expected to work when i become an adult instead of the notion of i am disabled and i cannot work. It is all in ones head. For those with disabilities that want to work we should be racing to find them opportunities to work. It is mutually beneficial. That was some of the discussion from earlier today. Now we are back live at the national gunnars Association Winter meeting in washington d. C. For a discussion about education. Afterwards we will be taking your calls. Ron if i could ask everyone to take their seats we will get started in a moment. This meeting is called to order. It doubled for joining us today. I am the governor of connecticut and chairman of the work force committee. I am honored to be joined by our committees vice chair, gov. Terry branstad of iowa. The proceedings of this meeting are open to the press and all meeting attendees. Please make sure your cell phones are silenced. The briefing books for this meeting were sent to governors in advance and could be found in the blue binder in front of each of you. They include the agenda and background information, update on federal legislation activity under this committees jurisdiction. To my right is the staff director of this committee. If you need any Additional Information or have any questions please see her. Today we will hear from two distinguished panelists. After the formal remarks gunners will engage in a roundtable discussion on state reforms. Before we begin, i would like to take a moment to pause in remembrance of the tragedy that struck Sandy Hook Elementary School in the quiet town of newtown, connecticut. We lost 20 beautiful children and six groot educators who gave their lives in the service of their students. We in connecticut have come together. The town is slowly recovering and the students are back to school where they belong. We will never forget what happened and we must learn from the horrible event how to better protect our children and our citizens from violence. Sadly, connecticut is not alone. Violence of this nature have touched many in our state. Barack, colorado, a college in virginia, a temple in wisconsin, a supermarket in tucson, arizona, a mall in portland, oregon. The list goes on and on. I ask all of you to join me in a moment of silence as we think of the countless lives that have been lost in our schools and around our nation in senseless acts of violence. I would like to invite you to make some comments. On behalf of all of your colleagues i want to begin by expressing my sincere condolences to you and all of the families impacted by the sandy hook tragedy. Our children and grandchildren remain our most precious gifts. My family has been keeping you and all of the people affected by this tragedy in our thoughts and in our prayers. We are all interested in ensuring Safe School Environments for all of our kids. Thank you the better. Whatever our it the as to prevent these unthinkable tragedy is in the future, we fervently share the at least honest commitment to protect and care for the citizens. Especially for our children. Thank you. Turning to our agenda i begin by saying that even in recent years, when state budgets have been stressed by the great recession, gunners have recognized that failure to responsibility and adequately invest in our childrens education would be penny wise and pound foolish. Educating our students and preparing them for the future work force is paramount to building a Healthy Society and a Strong Economy and a nation ready for a competition. In connecticut, education is one of our Top Priorities and we have enacted significant reforms and a significant new investments in both k12 and Higher Education. We have increased our Education Aid to School Districts. States in School Districts need a strong federal partner as well. It has been over a decade since Congress Passed the no child left behind act. Connecticut was fortunate last year to receive a waiver from the u. S. Department of education for flexibility under the no child left behind at. These absolutions should not continue and they do not work for all of our states. It is time for congress to reauthorize the elementary and secondary education act. As gunners we stand ready to assist congress. As dubliners we stand ready to assist congress. As governors we stand ready to assist congress. This allows governors, chief officers, city and county leaders, local Education Board members, and state School Board Members speak with one voice and advocate for this authorization. We will not all agree on budget and priorities. We all do share a common goal of making sure our schools are safe and home to well qualified teachers and administrators, such that our children actually learn and reach their full potential. We are honored to have representatives from the coalition with us this afternoon. David atkins, executive director of the state governments, chris from the Council State governments, from the National Association of counties, from the National League of cities, from the National Association of state boards of education, from the National City management association, and from the National SchoolBoard Association. I want to say to all of you thank you for the leadership and collaboration. Dubliners cannot wait for washington d. C. To make progress on education legislation. In connecticut we certainly cannot wait. Last year i joined with legislators and local partners. We authorized interventions in 30 of our lowest performing School Districts, expand the availability of highquality school models, taken actions to unleash innovation by removing red tape and other barriers to success, and ensuring our schools are home to the very best teachers and principals with their of valuation and support systems. Our reforms and initiatives are particularly focused on the teaching profession as a list as a linchpin of success. Recognizing their state and local leaders across the country are working to gather to support an incentivize innovations to grow School Leaders and teachers. Earlier this month i was proud to announce a historical aberration partnership with our state department of education and our two statewide teacher unions. We will create a competitive grant process to seek out innovation and best practices to attract top teachers and School Leaders, and to retain them. Teachers should be recognized for their hard work and should be supported in their efforts. As a nation we must work to strengthen and evaluate the teaching profession so that we can build upon our success as today and began recruiting the next generation of Great Teachers. The goal of this session is to highlight successful strategies and best practices to help grow, recruit, train, prepare, and support teachers and School Leaders. At this point i would like to turn the floor over to the committees vice chair for his opening remarks. Thank you very much the better my life for your readership gov. Malloy for your leadership. We live in a Global Economy and giving our students the skills to compete in that dynamic economy is vital to our states future success. Last year the Legislature Took a First Step Towards answering our call to provide transportation all education reform by passing legislation, teacher preparation programs that have exit exams and a major new curly child illiteracy and initiative. These actions are a good beginning but not early enough. I laid out three pieces that we can build upon and truly provide students with a worldclass education they focus on having a great teacher in every classroom, a great principle leading every building, and High Economic standards and strong matching a student assessment. The centerpiece of our reform is to update the teaching system by evaluating by elevating the teaching profession and that includes providing new teacher of leadership and compensation structures that provides five career path twice to provide more professional opportunities for teachers. Similarly, principles, like teachers, need collaborative support to grow professionally. That is why we propose an executive coaching system that will help make sure that no prints paul works in isolation no principal works in isolation. Our teach Iowa Initiative will address the problem of getting High Achievers digging into teaching by raising beginning salaries and providing a 20,000 Tuition Reimbursement for High Achievers to go into teaching, especially in key subjects like math and science. The third piece of our plan is a new college or Career Readiness certificate that High School Students could earn in addition to their diploma. We would give students the option of taking College Entrance exams or Work Force Readiness test during their junior year in high school. Let us get on with the discussion on how individual states can develop innovative human strategies to ensure that every child has an effective teacher and that we have great School Leaders in every building. Our panelists will discuss concrete state and federal action steps following their presentation. There should be adequate time for questions and answers. We have a lot to plenty of time for direct input from the governors who are present as well. They are telling us what they are doing in their space. The speakers bios are available in your packet. I am going to give a brief introduction to our speakers to our speakers. He is a codirector of Public Impact in chapel hill, North Carolina for he consults with government agencies, nonprofit organizations and foundations to dramatically improve k12 education. He is a recognized expert on charges schools, school turnaround, education entrepreneurship and teacher and leader policy. His recent work includes co authoring seizing opportunity at the top. He earned his ph. D. In Public Policy at Harvard University where he was a classmate of our other panelist, rick. Rick is an educator, author, and political scientist who studies k12 and Higher Education issues at the American Enterprise institute for policy analysis here in washington d. C. His books include, common sense goal reform and spinning wheels. He also received his ph. D. From Harvard University, worked as a former High School Social studies teacher, thank you both for being here and for your opportunity to participate. I am going to turn the form over the floor over now. Thank you for inviting us. We are very happy to speak to you today. Thank you to my former classmate. We were in our Doctoral Programs at the same time. I am going to talk about teacher policy and then rick is going to talk about leader policy issues. I do not think i need to spend a lot of time talking about how important this is. Teachers are the single most Important School based factor that determines house that determine how well students learn. All of you have been working on this issue and have made great strides. I am not going to review the progress, which is impressive. What i want to talk about is my main point, even if all the policies we have been working on in the past few years were successful your states are still going to fall way short of the goal of having a great teacher for every child. To give every child that kind of access you need another wave of policy change that addresses some of the fundamentals that have not been addressed in this latest wave of policy. That is what i want to talk about today. One of the facts we need to confront is that even though spending on education has risen almost 150 in the last 40 years, a teacher pay on average has gone up about 11 . Teacher work hours have gone up about 11 . Affectively teacher pay has been stagnant. Arguably we have been spending money on useful things but we havent been investing it in things that make the most difference for student learning, attracting and or retaining greek people to the classroom teachers. Attracting and retaining great people to the classrooms. Most importantly, we raised the expectations for teachers. We said we dont want to just stand up and deliver instruction. We want to the stand and deliver results. Not for some students but for all students. Those results get more complicated with the common corps coming on line. Teaching became less attractive as a profession, especially compared to other higher pay opportunity rich professions that compete with teaching. It is less so the go to a profession and other opportunities in the economy. Only 23 of new teachers came from college classes. Only 14 percent came from the top third of their college class. Teaching became one became much less attractive to folks that really need to be teaching our students. I do not mean to beat too gloomy. But the result is on this slide. After all this time, only a fraction have teachers that are getting the results that we need for our students. A lot of class and have good teachers. For students who are behind and who need to close achievement caps, they need to make more than a years worth of progress. Only a fraction of teachers can deliver that under todays teaching force. The good news is we can fix this and governors can play a big role in fixing this. The reason you can is because of the developments that make it possible to get out of the one teacherone classroom trap. The idea of having a great teacher in every single classroom is beyond what we can hope. If we get beyond the model we can get where we need to be. Im talking about new technologies that allow students to spend sometimes learning digitally. Freeing up the time of teachers then to be with more students into deeper work with them. Were talking about new school designs the talk about reorganizing the rolls within the schools so that Great Teachers can take responsibility for all students learning, not just 25 that are in their classroom. Governors can play a role in moving towards these new models, and therefore giving every child access to excellent teachers. At the same time, making teaching a super attractive and rear attractive career. Here are some potential policy ideas that would help advance towards this. The first one is get selective about who can teach in your states classrooms. Said a clear bar and goal for raising the caliber of folks who entered teaching over the next five years in your state. Eliminate policy barriers for excellent teachers reaching more students and leading their peers. Whether that is limits on how much the best teachers can earn propose legislation to get rid of all of those policies. Number three, start counting how many students in your state have excellent teachers in charge of their learning. You are already doing a better job of cutting how many teachers are excellent. Start counting how many students have those excellent teachers. Thatll get schools to think how they can get the most impact from them and how the most students benefit from their learning. Declared new civilrights to excellent teachers. Tell students in your state they have a right to have an excellent teacher every year. Finally. Medical of pushing average teacher pay not just up to 5,000 or 10,000 but up to a sixfigure career on average. Set that