Thank you, Alex.

I am glad to have won the coveted after-lunch spot. I want to thank you for being here, when I know you could be taking a long lunch or walking along the riverfront. Thankfully, I arranged for a thunderstorm to be rolling in at just the right time, in case you needed extra incentive to head back in.

Seriously, thank you for being here. I wanted to take this time to discuss an important issue, something that I feel we, as a Department, need to address.

It is this: over the past few years, but especially in recent months, a new conventional wisdom has developed. History is getting squeezed out of the curriculum, and No Child Left Behind, because of its focus on reading and math, is to blame.

Now that's a serious accusation. Some arguments against NCLB are easily dismissed, such as the claim that it's the cause of the nation's childhood obesity problem. But if NCLB and similar state reforms are, in fact, hurting the cause of history education, it might be a compelling reason to trash the whole thing. After all, many of us who support No Child Left Behind also care deeply about the importance of history education.

What I want to argue today is that it is not inevitable that NCLB and NCLB-style reforms will push history out of the curriculum. In fact, I want to argue that NCLB can help to advance the cause of ensuring that all students have access to a full, well-rounded curriculum. That's what the crafters of NCLB on Capitol Hill and in the Administration wanted—the kind of education that was once reserved for the children of the elite to be made accessible to everyone's children.

But we at the federal level haven't done a good job getting this message out. This fact has been hitting home recently as I read newspaper articles from around the nation, and learn that, supposedly because of NCLB, schools are cutting art, cutting music, cutting physical education, even cutting recess. It really came to a head a few months ago, when I read about a school board that decided to cancel the spelling bee. They felt it was antithetical to the spirit of No Child Left Behind, for, in the end, there was only one winner, and the rest of the participants were "left behind." Thankfully I'm happy to report that we worked with the officials in the state and clarified that there is no "anti-spelling-bee" clause in NCLB, and the spelling bee is back on.

But what's become clear is that when those of us who favor standards-based reform and NCLB do not sketch a vision for what we're trying to achieve, a vision of what the ideal school under NCLB would look like, our opponents do it for us. And it's not an attractive vision. They say that we want schools to be "testing factories." Nothing but three hours of reading in the morning and three hours of math in the afternoon. Maybe a short break for lunch. No art, no music, no history, no civics, no P.E., no joy, no laughter, just drill and kill. "Get 'em in and get 'em out." You know, if that's what NCLB was really all about, I certainly wouldn't be in favor of it.

So one of the things that those of us who support NCLB need to do is to communicate a positive vision for the kinds of schools we hope to create as a result of the law—schools that are holistic and full of joy, and committed to providing a well rounded education. More on that later.

First, I feel that I need to make the case for NCLB itself. Otherwise, it is all too tempting to say, "Well, NCLB is pushing history out of the curriculum, so let's just get rid of the law." Some are making that argument as we speak. I want to demonstrate that NCLB, just like rigorous history education, is essential, and that they can go hand-in-hand. In short, I want to save this marriage between NCLB and history education.

Our Nation's Educational Challenges: Proximate versus Ultimate Causes

I could only use this next line in a room full of history people: I'd like to start by going back 13,000 years. I'm serious. Who among you has read the masterful Jared Diamond book Guns, Germs and Steel? I know I'm a Johnny-Come-Lately to this book, since it was published back in the late 1990s, when it won the Pulitzer Prize. But earlier this year I became enraptured by Diamond's most recent tome, Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail. After finishing it, I decided to go back and read his classic.

Now, this is a very big book, and I'm going to try to summarize it in a minute or two, so please forgive me for any inaccuracies. In the book, Diamond investigates one of the most intriguing questions of human history: Why did the Spanish invade and conquer the Incas instead of the other way around? Put differently, why didn't the Incas, or Aztecs, or other Native American societies get on a boat, sail halfway around the world, and take over the European continent? Why aren't the Spanish today speaking Aztec tongues, and practicing Aztec religions?

Diamond first discusses the proximate, direct causes. And as you can guess from the title of his book, they come down to guns, germs and steel. In effect, the Spanish, and other Europeans, had better technology—certainly guns and steel armor and steel swords, but also horses, boats, compasses, complicated writing systems, and so forth. And they had a wide collection of germs inside of them for which the Native Americans had precious few defenses. As a result of these advantages, the Spanish triumphed when the two civilizations collided.

Then Diamond gets into the really interesting debate. Why did the Spanish and other European societies have such advanced technology? Why did the Spanish have the guns, germs and steel, and not the Incas? What were the ultimate causes of Spain's overwhelming advantage? Here, Diamond takes on one of the most widely held, and blatantly racist, views of the past 500 years: the idea that those European societies were more advanced because the European people were somehow smarter, more evolved.

Diamond shreds this theory to pieces. He looks back 13,000 years, when the entire globe was recovering from the last Ice Age. All human societies around the world looked mainly the same at that point, wandering bands of nomadic hunters and gatherers. But a few thousands years later, major differences emerged among the various continents. In Eurasia, and specifically in the Fertile Crescent, societies had begun to farm. They learned how to domesticate plants and animals. This, of course, set in motion a whole series of events. Because not everyone was needed for hunting and gathering, societies could afford to support chiefs and nobles and bureaucrats. Populations exploded, eventually kings and queens and complicated nation-states arose, on and on until we get to 1500 A.D. with its advanced societies, guns, germs and steel. (The germs, by the way, came about because of these societies' long proximity to farm animals, and the large, dense human populations that agriculture can support, upon which germs thrive.)

In the Americas, Australia, and sub-Saharan Africa, on the other hand, agriculture did not start until much, much later, if at all. Why was this? Diamond's response: luck. It turns out that some plants and animals are much easier to domesticate than others—so much so that very few plants and animals have been domesticated in the last few hundred years, even with advanced technology. And it turns out that the plants and animals that existed in the wild in the Fertile Crescent were easy to domesticate, and therefore were domesticated earlier. Add to this the wide swath of land that is Eurasia, with relatively few barriers to the movement of people, ideas and technology, and you have a compelling case that the ultimate causes of Europe's advanced state are all related to the environment that Europeans were lucky enough to inhabit.

Now, we can debate this theory later. It certainly doesn't explain, for instance, why Spain led the way in exploration, rather than, say, Egypt. And even Diamond will argue that "environmental determinism" is a dangerous theory on many levels. Nonetheless, he provides a clear example of what it means to distinguish between proximate and ultimate causes.

So what does this have to do with education and NCLB? I want to look at the causes of educational failure in America—both its proximate causes, and its ultimate causes.

We've been talking about educational failure in this country for at least two decades. And for good reason. Only a third of our fourth graders can read proficiently. In math and science our twelfth-graders are among the most mediocre in the industrialized world. And we are staring an enormous achievement gap in the eye. The average African-American twelfth grader is reading and doing math on approximately the same level as the average White eighth grader. The numbers are only slightly better for Latinos. It's simply shameful.

Now, I'm not arguing that our education system has necessarily gotten any worse. It probably hasn't. But once upon a time we could afford to let kids drop out of high school, or graduate illiterate, because they could still find good jobs in places like the steel mills of Pittsburgh and enjoy a solidly middle class lifestyle. But the world has changed. Those jobs don't exist anymore; every young person needs to be able to read and do math, at a minimum, to have a shot in our economy and to participate fully in our democracy. Our schools simply haven't kept up with these changes.

For forty years the federal government, states, and local communities have been trying all kinds of reforms to jump-start student achievement. And little has worked. Now, from my point of view, that's because most of those reforms dealt with the proximate causes of educational failure, which are countless, but include: poor teacher preparation, inadequate facilities, shoddy textbooks, union hiring rules, inefficient central offices, large class sizes, rotten professional development, lack of training for principals, too few computers in the classroom, and the list continues.

But I would argue few of these reforms address the ultimate causes of educational failure in this country. And what are these ultimate causes? Why is it that in community after community in this nation—with just a few exceptions—we see disappointing educational results, along with the myriad dysfunctions I just mentioned? What could be the ultimate reasons that school districts across the country are struggling to get the job done? I would posit three possibilities:

1. Lack of resources,
2. The kids themselves, including the culture they live in, and
3. Local education politics with its lack of accountability and incentives

Now this is where the really interesting debates in education reform lie. Which of these three hold the key to understanding our mediocre educational results? Many believe it is primarily a resource issue—we are starving our schools of funds, especially in our urban and rural areas, and if we could only provide an influx of resources the system would have the capacity to get the job done.

Or are the kids, their parents, and the larger culture to blame? Now this argument comes in many shades. One line of thinking, which the President calls "the soft bigotry of low expectations," is that it's unfair to expect poor kids to achieve at high levels. This mentality asks, "How can we expect kids to learn with all the craziness going on at home, in their broken families, and on the streets?" A related argument is that if our society had more supports, better early childhood opportunities and stronger safety net, like the social welfare states of Europe, our schools would yield stronger results. Many educators feel that absent such a safety net, the schools get blamed for all of society's problems.

Or are our problems mostly political, rather than educational? Do we have a broken political system, in which local school boards make decisions based on the interests of adults, rather than the interests of children? Do we have a system in which there are precious few incentives for making tough, unpopular decisions that might yield benefits for kids down the road? Do we have a system in which a tiny minority of citizens in a community can, in effect, hijack school board elections and pursue their own narrow self -interests? Can we solve our educational problems without solving our political problems?

No Child Left Behind takes a firm stand on these competing claims for the ultimate causes of educational failure. It rejects the first argument—that the kids, their families and their culture are to blame. It says "no excuses."

Now, many people who support NCLB might agree that greater social supports would be a good thing—Senator Ted Kennedy, for example. But even they argue that while we are working to build those supports, we can still expect schools to teach all students to high levels.

And others who support NCLB also call for a reawakening in the culture, a stronger focus out of school on achievement and effort. But still, those who support NCLB are comfortable holding schools accountable while this work continues.

As for the second argument, the law acknowledges the importance of adequate resources, and increases the federal contribution to that cause. Federal spending on K-12 education has gone up almost 50 percent under NCLB. Nonetheless, as you know, funding remains an area of great contention.

More than anything, NCLB addresses the third ultimate cause of school failure: the political challenge. It buys into the argument that local education politics are fundamentally broken, and that only through strong, external pressure, with a focus on student achievement, will the local political dynamic change to allow good decisions to be made for the benefit of kids. NCLB, more than anything else, tries to provide political cover to superintendents and school board members to drive their own school reform agendas.

This idea is not well understood.

It became clear when a friend sent me a cartoon that had been circulated by the National School Boards Association. It depicted the "theory of action" for standards-based reform in ten or twelve panes, complete with all sorts of arrows and flow charts. It started with, "States set standards for what all children should know and be able to do." Then, "States test students to assess whether they have met those standards." Then, "Schools are held accountable for the results of those assessments - given rewards for good performance and sanctions for bad." In the next-to-last pane, it said, "And then a miracle happens," and in the last, "student achievement goes up."

And then a miracle happens? Is that how it feels to lots of administrators and school board members? Boy, we at the federal level have not done a good job explaining how this whole thing is supposed to work. Let me try to be explicit. What are some of the specific changes we're hoping districts will make as a result of the pressure placed upon them by NCLB and other accountability systems? What changes can local leaders make as a result of the political cover provided by the federal law?

First, let's talk about holding people accountable. Let me give you an example. I was speaking in a northeastern city a few months ago at an event sponsored by the local school district. I said a few nice things about the district, and went on to explain NCLB to a group of parents and teachers. Afterwards a few teachers approached me, and they were furious. "How dare you say positive things about this school system," they complained. They went on to describe numerous problems over the course of the next hour, but their major complaint boiled down to this: they worked in a high school headed by a principal that everyone knew was awful. He never left his office. He never gave support to his teachers. He didn't even try to get to know his kids. His school's test scores were in the toilet. And yet he had held his position for ten years. Ten years! A succession of superintendents came and went and no one was willing to fire the man. The teachers desperately wanted leadership, a principal who would help their school improve and who would support their efforts to teach.

I mentioned this conversation to my contact in the district headquarters who had invited me to speak. He knew exactly which principal I was talking about. "You know," he said, "if you wanted to grab a beer with someone down at the pub and shoot the bull, he's your guy. But yeah, he's not a very strong principal."

Due to the fact that he was well liked, year after year went by without anyone removing this terribly ineffective principal. So now what happens? NCLB comes along, and puts serious pressure on the school district to raise student achievement and close achievement gaps. The school is placed on the list of schools "in need of improvement." Scary things, like closing the school or replacing the staff, might happen in the near future. Now will the superintendent or school board have the guts to take action and remove this man? Can the external pressure from an accountability system overcome the inertia of bureaucracy and personal relationships? That's the idea. And I can't help but wonder how many communities in America there are where bad principals get to keep their jobs because they are friends with someone on the school board, or the head coach of the football team.

Let me give you another example: reading. We have thirty years of rigorous research about how most little kids learn to read. We know that reading must be taught in an explicit and direct way. We know kids need to be taught phonemic awareness, phonics, fluency, vocabulary, and comprehension. Sure, there's plenty we still don't know, especially how to help older kids who haven't learned to read, but there's a lot we do know. And yet in thousands of communities across this country, school systems continue to resist putting in place scientifically based reading programs.

The reasons usually boil down to two factors: ideology, and resistance from teachers. As for ideology, the idea that children can learn to read "naturally," like they learn to speak, is a deeply ingrained religion for many educators. Yet it is founded in absolutely no science whatsoever—it simply isn't true. As for resistance from teachers, that's tougher. Many of the scientifically based programs are fairly structured, even scripted. Great teachers, drawn to the profession in part because they want to express their creativity in the classroom, resist being turned into "reading robots," and rightfully so. Once teachers give these programs a try, see how well they work, and see their own kids doing great, the resistance melts away. Every teacher wants success for his or her students above all else. But because of initial resistance to these programs, many schools never even reach that point.

So now what happens? NCLB comes along, and puts serious pressure on the school district to raise student achievement and close achievement gaps. A school is deemed to be "in need of improvement." Scary things, like reconstitution, might happen in the near future. Now, will the external pressure from the accountability system overcome the initial resistance to structured reading programs? Will superintendents and school boards now have the wherewithal to put the needs of the kids above the concerns of the adults? That's the idea.

Let me give you a final example: teacher quality. We all know how important teacher quality is—more important than anything else that our schools control. Yet we also know that in community after community in this country, you are much less likely to have a fully qualified, in-field, experienced teacher if you are poor or if you are from a minority group. Even within the same school district, pernicious "teacher quality gaps" exist, whereby the high poverty schools—the Title I schools are much more likely to have the "newbie" teachers, who are right out of ed school, or the teachers on emergency waivers. Why is this? Did school boards pass resolutions saying, "We are going to systematically assign all of our least experienced, least qualified teachers to the students who need great teachers the most?" Of course not—yet they have adopted policies that have had the same result.

Let's look at how this works. First of all, teachers are paid the same whether they work in a tough, high-poverty school or in a cushier affluent school. Next, teachers with seniority are given first dibs on open teaching positions in the district. Finally, school budgets are based on "FTEs" and average teacher salaries, rather than the actual salaries of the teachers at that school. So here's what happens: a brand-new teacher comes in and is sent to a high-poverty Title I school, which desperately needs teachers. She spends five years at the school—the first few going through all the trials and tribulations virtually all new teachers experience, and probably struggles quite a bit. But after a few years she's starting to hit her stride. After five years of tough working conditions and little support, she either leaves the profession like half of her colleagues, or she notices an opening across town at the more affluent school. She gets first dibs on that position and takes it. You can't really blame her, since she's not getting paid any more to stay at the tougher school. Now the high-poverty school has to start all over and get another new teacher to replace her, and the cycle starts all over again. And who has to be the guinea pigs for the new teachers? That's right—the poor kids.

And look at the school budgets. One school, the high-poverty school, has all rookie teachers, and is paying them at the bottom of the pay scale—let's say $30,000. Another school, the affluent school, has all 20-year veterans, and is paying them at the top of the pay scale—let's say $60,000. Each school has the same number of teachers, but you are actually spending twice as much to educate the affluent kids as you are the poor kids. We wonder why there's an achievement gap?

So now what happens? NCLB comes along, and puts serious pressure on the school district to close achievement gaps. They look at the data and realize that the kids who need help the most—poor kids and minority kids—are the ones getting the least qualified teachers, for all the reasons explained above. Now will the superintendent or school board consider ending the seniority hiring policy? Now will they consider "combat pay" for teaching in high-poverty schools? Now will they start to allocate budgets based on real dollars, and real salaries, to equalize resources across the district, including the quality and experience of the teaching staff? Now will they stop using the poor and minority kids as the guinea pigs upon which new teachers practice? To date, all of these changes have been considered politically impossible. But now, under the threat of school reconstitutions and the like, will these issues finally be put on the table? That's the idea.

Supporting History Education in the Age of NCLB

So let me return to the my original argument: NCLB is essential if we want to close the achievement gap and create the kind of nation we all dream about—a nation where every child has an opportunity to fulfill their true potential and contribute to our democracy.

If you take away NCLB, and its accountability, and its incentives, and its political cover for local leaders, you take away the healthy pressure that helps decision makers do what's right for kids, even if it is unpopular with adults.

But if NCLB is essential, is it compatible with history education? How can we minimize the unintended consequences of NCLB, of pushing history and other subjects out of the way, because of NCLB's focus on reading and mathematics? Let me offer a few ideas.

First of all, each of us, in our own communities, must communicate a positive vision of the kind of school we're hoping to create. And it's a school that's full of joy, art, music, activity, and history, where teachers love to be and love the kids, where students are achieving academically but are also thriving physically, socially and emotionally. It's not a rigid, soul-less testing factory, but the kind of wonderful, well-rounded school once reserved only for the children of our society's elite. And yet so many superintendents and school board members seem to think that we in Washington want all schools turned into testing factories. I've never actually seen a "testing factory school" that is successful at raising student achievement. As KIPP says, "There are no shortcuts." We want our schools to be joyful temples of learning—and we need to do a much better job sharing that message. We need leadership, at the local level, standing up for a well-rounded curriculum.

What else can we do? In line with the adage that "what gets tested gets taught," we can push for states to include assessments in history in their accountability systems. Now, some might fairly argue that NCLB should be amended to require this from the federal level. I have to say, though, in the current political environment, "more testing" is going to be a tough sell in Washington. But perhaps history educators can be more successful for pushing for this at the state level.

Finally, I see great opportunity at the local level. Surely schools are under tremendous pressure from NCLB to improve achievement in reading. Yet after the earliest years of elementary education, once students are fluent in decoding, more than anything they need to learn how to comprehend. Don Hirsch and the Core Knowledge Foundation make this argument better than anyone. And learning how to comprehend comes from reading content. Yet, as far as I can tell, much of what students read in the upper elementary and middle school years is a vast wasteland. Why can't they read good history instead? What can we do, as a movement, to embed solid history in the reading curriculum? I think there's a great deal of potential there.

Those are just a few ideas about how to maintain history education in an era of standards and accountability. We need more. I'd like to hear yours. But I hope you will agree that both of these causes—No Child Left Behind and history education—are absolutely essential to the future of our democracy. We need to get this right, and we need your help. Thank you very much.