John Pepper’s Speech "Development and Education of Our Youth" Now Available Online

The following is the keynote address delivered by John Pepper at our 2010 Annual Awards Luncheon. John Pepper is the former Chairman and CEO of the Procter & Gamble Co., and is currently Chairman of the Board of Disney Companies. He has had a lifelong interest in and involvement with education at the local, state and national levels.

OUR FIRST PRIORITY: DEVELOPMENT & EDUCATION OF OUR YOUTH
Lessons Learned and Suggestions for the Future

John E. Pepper – March, 2010

Thank you all for being here today. Our time is limited, so I will move right into my subject – the education and development of our youth – and what we can do to make good on its vital importance.

Twenty-five years ago, I heard a talk which changed my life. I was in Washington, DC. The then Assistant Secretary of Labor, Roger Semerad, spoke about the peril our nation would find itself in if we did not make a dramatic improvement in the education and development of our youth. He talked about the increasing demands of the jobs to be filled and increasing global competition. This shouldn’t have surprised me. If I had read the report, “A Nation at Risk,” published two years earlier, I would have known what he was talking about. That report began by saying, “Our nation is at risk. Our once unchallenged preeminence in commerce, industry, science and technological innovation is being overtaken by competitors throughout the world. If an unfriendly foreign power had attempted to impose on America the mediocre education performance that exists today, we might well have viewed it as an act of war. As it stands, we have allowed this to happen to ourselves….”

It would be hard to imagine a more concise summary of the situation we face today with the greater competitive challenge posed by the emergence of third world countries, with technology requiring higher levels of education, and the social challenges caused by the decline of two-parent families and the persistence of poverty.

About the same time I heard Semerad speak, I read a book that changed my life: Ron Kotulak’s “Inside The Brain.” Here I learned that the importance of the first three years of a child’s life was not just some intuitive belief but a biological fact. Kotulak documented that the development of the brain was hugely influenced by the emotional and early learning experiences surrounding a child. The implication: we should do everything in our power to make those experiences positive ones.

In preparing my remarks today, I have talked to more than thirty leaders in education and childhood development. I want to thank them for sharing their experience and for what they are doing for our children.

These discussions have conveyed the challenges we face, but even more they have shone light on many bright spots that show that we can make progress.

As Ginger Rhodes, Principal of Hughes High School put it: “We don’t know everything about what works. But we know a lot.” The question is whether we have the will and the perseverance to act on what we know to be true.

There are many educational reforms we could discuss: national standards (badly needed), extending the school year; the funding of public education; pay for performance. As important as these issues are, I am not going to discuss them here. Rather, I will focus on three opportunities which I believe are, to a greater degree, within our control in our community today.

But first, permit me to assess the bright spots and the challenges as I see them.

The bright spots:

• The graduation rate from Cincinnati Public high schools has increased dramatically from 52% in 1990 to 82% today.
• We have proof that all kids can learn as we see strong leadership in schools produce amazing results, among even the most underprivileged children.
• We have launched promising programs for early childhood development and impressive organization models to enable our community to better support student success.

As to the challenges:

• Nationally, 30% of young people drop out of high school. That’s 6,000 every day, over one million per year. It’s like the whole city of Cincinnati is gone.
• The price a high school dropout pays is horrible. A shocking 44% are not in the labor force and 15% more are under-employed.

• In CPS, almost half of students in Grades 3-8 test below proficiency levels and we see a double digit point difference between minority and non-minority students.
• We are covering a woeful one third of the population that should be served with our early childhood development programs.
• We are facing a significant and I fear ongoing gap in government revenues vs. our societal needs. We must make bold changes in organization design and better choices on how we spend the money we do have to bridge this gap.

Against this background, I have asked myself what are the key learnings and what actions should we take?

Learning #1
Strong school-based leadership makes all the difference.
It provides living proof all children can learn.

If I were to choose a single intervention to significantly improve the education of our children, it is to have a school building led by an outstanding principal and empowered, committed teachers, dedicated to the proposition that every student not only can learn, but will, learn. Bob Seuss, former Principal of Hughes, puts it simply: “We are always looking for the latest technique. This suggests we don’t know the answer. But we do. We need great Principals and great teachers.”

Several years ago an intern at Procter & Gamble asked me what was the single most important thing I’d learned in my entire business career. My answer was instantaneous: “Personal leadership makes things happen.” Nowhere have I seen that more clearly than in our schools.

Take two high schools right here in Cincinnati: Taft and Withrow University. Through the late 1990s, Taft had dropout rates of 60%. In the last decade, Taft has gone through one of the most remarkable transformations of any school in this country. Almost all of the children still come from disadvantaged backgrounds. But that is not stopping the principal, Anthony Smith, and the teachers and parents and the community from doing what it takes to ensure these students succeed. Their graduation rate today is close to 90% and 99% to 100% of students are scoring proficient in each section of the 11th grade tests. These scores are right up there with Walnut Hills, a school ranked in the top 100 in the nation.

Spend a few minutes with Anthony Smith and you will understand why this is happening. He knows every one of the 500 kids in the building personally. “It is critical to develop relationships,” he says, to convey that “there is no limit to what you can achieve. You can go as far as you want to go.”

Anthony emphasizes student responsibility. Each student has an individualized plan, informed by performance data. Each sees and reviews their transcript at least 12 times before graduation.

He talks to every teacher, every cafeteria worker, every security guard, one on one. “Every one of them has to understand why they are here – to serve young people.” No wonder people want to work at Taft, challenging as it may be.

A similar transformation is happening at Withrow University. When its principal, Sharon Johnson, was asked to rebuild Withrow in 2002, the percentage of students passing the 9th grade proficiency tests ranged from 7% to 30%. Today, over 85% of the students are passing these proficiency tests. 98% are graduating! 75% are going on to college and another 10% into the military.

Sharon describes the root causes of our challenge as: “kids without hope and teachers looking for excuses.” “Our job”, she says, “is to have students light up like a flashlight; help them see the light; that is our job, to inspire them.”

Yzvetta Macon, Principal at South Avondale, previously one of our lowest performing schools, is also riveted on achieving excellence. “Whatever we need to do for children, we will do,” she says.

“The teachers and I are exhausted at the end of every day, but it is the kind of exhaustion that makes you want to come back the next day,” she says.

Her attitude towards her students is uncompromising: “You will master this program. You will be prepared for high school. South Avondale is your pathway to success.”

It’s the same everywhere – high expectations drive progress.

What’s the secret of these schools’ success? You know it. It is what makes for success in any organization – a strong principal leader is empowering strong teacher leaders who have a deep caring interest in children – in their character and their future. They are enlisting parent and community support. They are enlivened by one overarching ethic: every child can and will learn.

My celebration of the great results achieved by the leadership in our best-performing schools raises a simple question: Why can’t we have more great principals and more outstanding teachers?

This brings me to what I have concluded is our single-biggest opportunity for progress -- significantly improving the preparation and continued professional development of principals and teachers.

The development of our principals today, nationally and locally, is woefully inadequate.

It’s not that we aren’t doing anything. We have principal performance standards in Ohio. CPS has its best principals interview aspiring principals. This is good, but we are a long way from having the pipeline development and leadership training that we need for our principals.

Again and again, I have heard that Principals need more training and experience in how to lead an organization: how to establish a shared vision; how to inspire staff and students and the community; how to make critical budget decisions; and use data and deal with tough personnel issues. Put simply, Principals need to learn to be leaders, not only managers.

P&G spends more time on leadership development today than ever. So does every other great company. And so should our school systems.

We have a good model emerging here. The principals of our 16 lowest performing CPS schools are currently receiving leadership training at the University of Virginia using the combined resources of the Darden School of Business and the Currie School of Education. The reports on the value of this are very encouraging. There is learning here. Accessing the resources of our schools of business alongside the Schools of Education can better prepare aspirant Principals for the job ahead. I understand UC’s Larry Johnson is exploring this. I hope he makes it happen. It makes sense. This is an area where business leaders can help.

Formal schooling will only take you so far, though. Strong Principal candidates should spend at least a couple of years as an Assistant Principal working with one of our strongest Principals. Craig Hockenberry, Principal at Oyler School in Price Hill, describes his two-years as Assistant Principal as his most important development experience. “I couldn’t believe the things I saw,” he says. “I had to learn on the job.” We all know it: we learn on the job, working with a great leader.

Yes, we can and must do better in preparing principals as leaders.

Teacher training needs improvement as well. Secretary of Education, Arne Duncan, asserts that “America’s university-based teacher preparation programs need revolutionary, not evolutionary, change.”

The importance of a strong teacher is well-documented, and it is staggering. Research shows not a 10, not 20, but a 50% point difference in proficiency test results between students having a strong teacher vs. a weak teacher for three consecutive years. Great teachers do more than instill students with the knowledge to do well in standard tests. They instill the love of learning and high expectations. I’m sure every one of us can recall teachers who did this for us.

As UC’s new President, Greg Williams, says: “Great teachers provide a sense of hope. They don’t let students put a limit on what they can achieve due to their current circumstances.”

We have some good things going for us in teacher training. The Mayerson Academy is a great resource. We are benefitting from a 4-year $20MM grant from General Electric to improve teachers’ math and science skills.

But we still have big opportunities.

Everyone I’ve talked to has emphasized the need for better teaching of math and reading content.

Most importantly, I believe teacher education should include a full year of in-classroom experience as an intern paired with a great teacher. That is the only way teachers will learn how to engage students where they’re coming from – and if they love teaching them. After graduating, teachers should have extended mentoring by an outstanding and caring teacher, just as most of us who have succeeded in business have.

There’s a final point about leadership I want to highlight: we need greater continuity. Principals and teachers need to be in their positions long enough to make their plans work. Tony Smith told me it took him 3-1/2 years before he knew he had the culture at Taft developing the way he wanted.

The lack of continuity is shocking. Sixteen percent of all the teachers in this country will leave their jobs before the end of this year. Sadly, this lack of continuity is greatest in the schools serving disadvantaged students. In New York City, for example, 44% of teachers are gone by their fourth year, while, in nearby affluent Scarsdale, 82% of its teachers are there after five years.

In Cincinnati, in the last ten years, we have had four superintendents. Not one of them had a tenure of longer than three years. Can you imagine if the heads of our corporations had average tenures of just three years and that this went on and on over the course of a decade? These would not be companies you’d want to invest in. Observing the leadership of Mary Ronan, Superintendent of CPS, I can only express the hope she will be around for a long time.

Finally, we need to celebrate our most outstanding teachers and principals. They are not going to receive six-figure bonuses. But they – the best of them – deserve our unvarnished appreciation and recognition.

Learning #2
Investing more in proven child care and pre-kindergarten educational programs is the best investment we can make. This is the only way we are going to have all children enter kindergarten on an equal playing field.

It is impossible for me to fully appreciate the day-to-day challenges which many children experience. Our community lives in two different worlds. In one, children do not have enough to eat, often encounter domestic violence, have a parent in jail, or working two or three jobs or unemployed. It is hardly surprising that children from the highest economic group start out at about the age of 5 with kindergarten reading readiness scores 60% higher than children from the lowest economic group. We cannot allow this to continue.

I can report to you that, while we still have a long way to go, we are in a better position today to make good on the opportunity and the responsibility to invest in early childhood development. Why? Because we now have programs that work.

Every Child Succeeds is serving 3,000 children in our community from pregnancy to age three. Infant mortality rates have been reduced by two-thirds, over 90% of the children are on track developmentally, and over 70% of mothers have returned to school or are employed.

Success by Six is providing 2,500 children with quality pre-kindergarten education. We have seen a 20% increase in the number of children achieving target reading skills entering kindergarten. And we’ve seen even greater improvement for those children who have been in the program for 2-3 years instead of one.

I have been impressed by the leaders of these early childhood programs. They are focused on continuing improvement in three areas:

• Expanding coverage, recognizing that only about 30% of eligible families are in the Every Child Succeeds program.

• Obtaining better data to allow teachers to improve the development of each child prior to entering kindergarten.

• Recruiting more qualified teachers and addressing their dismally low compensation. Teachers, even with BA degrees, are often starting at $18,000 per year, an income that qualifies for food stamps, just like most of the families they serve. It’s no wonder the turnover rate for day care providers in children’s centers is 40%.

It’s going to take more money to do this, and we’ve made a start. Led by Jim Zimmerman, former CEO of Macy’s and Founding Chair of Success by Six, the “Winning Beginnings” campaign was launched two years ago and has raised about $10 million (for Every Child Succeeds, Success by Six and 4Cs.) I have to tell you the need for private support is greater than ever because the state’s budget challenges have wreaked havoc on early learning programs, reducing spending this year by 15%, eliminating support for about 1,000 children in our community.

We also need to be smarter in how we spend the funds we do have. We are dramatically under-investing in the early years.

Study after study shows that high quality pre-school programs deliver returns of up to $7 per dollar spent. Do you know what the biggest components of those returns are? I’m sure you’d guess one of them: lifetime income. The other largest one you might not guess: lower costs related to criminal activity. Sadly, the reality of that tradeoff is clearer today than ever. This year, in the State of Ohio, we will spend more than $3 billion in the Department of Rehabilitation and Corrections. 40% as much as the State spends on K-12 education.

Learning #3
It takes a community, and by community I mean all of us. Over the course of American history, the school has been asked to take on more and more problems and become the solution to more and more social ills. What’s wrong with that picture? Simply that Superintendents, principals and teachers cannot do it alone. They know it, and we know it.

Kids are in school for less than half their waking hours.

The environment they are in outside of school is vital to how they develop. They need services, like psychiatric, eye, and dental care. They need adult role models and character-building activities. That is why it takes a community -- businesses, churches, social service organizations, all of us working together -- to achieve the shared vision of meeting individual children and family needs.

We are in a better position to make that community support happen today in Cincinnati than ever before. Why? Because we have new organizational programs that are showing great promise.

We have STRIVE: the most well-organized plan I have ever seen to bring together all the support that it takes for the development of children, prenatal through high school. STRIVE is leading the formation of alliances of our mentoring, tutoring, mental health and college access organizations.

We have schools that have become Community Learning Centers, bringing in a wide variety of needed services from organizations – not just during the school day, but after school, on weekends and over the Summer. We have fulltime mental health partners in 42 of our 52 CPS schools.

We have full-time Resource Coordinators leading these Community Learning Centers in 23 of our public schools with funding from the Greater Cincinnati Foundation and United Way.

Earlier this month, I visited the Community Learning Center at Oyler. What a sobering experience! Yet hopeful and inspiring!

I learned first-hand the challenges these students face. I saw what the Principal, Craig Hockenberry, and his staff and the many on-site organizations were accomplishing. I visited an on-site Boys and Girls Club and a center operated by the City’s Health Department providing full health services, including routine check-ups and mental health counseling. The City Recreation Center is on-site, operating after school and evening programs. Students come to the “Kids Café” for free hot meals provided by the Free Store Foodbank.

And did you know that Oyler has the largest mentoring and tutoring program in the nation? It does! Over 350 mentors from 65 different organizations. It also houses a college access center that partners with Jobs for Cincinnati Graduates and CYC. And an early childhood center is being installed to serve infants and toddlers.

Is it working? Yes, yes it is! Since Oyler’s high school program started two years ago, there has not been one single dropout. Contrast that to the terrible situation not long ago when over half of graduating 8th graders failed to pass beyond even the 10th grade.

Ladies and gentlemen, this is a “bright spot” to build on.

CLCs are also bringing our arts and cultural organizations to schools.

And business partnerships are playing an important role. (Cincinnati Bell at Taft, General Electric at Aiken, P&G at Hughes, to name just three of dozens.)

Yes, these are “bright spots.” In STRIVE, in the working together of our mentoring and tutoring and college access organizations, and in the Community Learning Centers.

And, yet, we must do more. For these programs are reaching far less than half of our children and the families who need them. And there is agreement they should focus even more on improving academic results.

Doing this will involve almost every one of us.

In a real sense, this brings us to the gut issue. Will we ACT personally on the conviction that the development and education of the children in our community is our top priority. Not someone else’s priority but – OUR priority. Will we seek out a role we can play knowing that it really will take all of us to deliver on this priority?

Which leads to the question – how can you help?

• You can become a mentor or a tutor. We need thousands more. Thousands! Would you be willing to spend an hour a week to change a youngster’s life forever? That, Ladies and Gentlemen, is the opportunity; that is what’s at stake.

I became a mentor 15 years ago. It has been one of the most rewarding experiences I have ever had as my mentee, Kevin Andrew, and his family became part of our family.

The impact of mentoring and college access programs on student lives is amazing. Ninety-eight percent of participating Seniors graduate; 85% go on to college. There are many programs to choose from.

Here is the opportunity to give a young person, one with probably few, if any, adult role models, that most valuable of gifts: your belief in them, your expectations of what they can achieve and your support to help them realize their dreams.

There has never been a time when strong adult relationships are more vital in youngsters’ lives.

• You can contribute to “Winning Beginnings” to expand coverage of proven early childhood and kindergarten readiness programs.

• As a business, or a health or social support organization, you can partner with a Community Learning Center. In a world of increasing needs and fewer means, we must bring existing resources to children and their families in an integrated individualized way.

• And you can advocate for policies that strengthen the development of outstanding principals and teachers.

Well, there you have it. I hope I have conveyed three truths:

• With great principal and teacher leadership, all kids can learn.
• Supporting children, from birth through pre-kindergarten, is a great investment. We need more of it.
• It will take the community, and by “community,” I mean all of us -- believing and acting on the conviction that the development of the children in our community is our highest priority.

To declare the goal of enabling all of our children to develop and learn as challenging is altogether obvious. To declare that more than anything else, it will determine our community’s future is, quite simply, the truth.

In my lifetime, we’ve never had clearer ideas on what to do to carry out this priority. We need the will and the persistence to do it.

***********

In closing, I would recall these words from the Talmud: “We are not required to complete the work, but neither are we free to desist from it.”

In that spirit, I have placed a form at your table inviting you to indicate your interest in learning more about one of the ways in which you can help. Please think hard about what you can do. Please act on the belief that the education and development of our children is indeed our highest priority. Our community and thousands of young people will benefit mightily from your engagement.

Thank you very much.