merrow08

Monday, February 25, 2008. John Merrow. "Reflections on ADD -- Then and Now."

MR. GALBRAITH: Thank you. You're a very good class for coming to order so well. We have another member of NAPSG who will introduce our next speaker.

MS. LONERGAN: Good morning. I'm Joan Lonergan from Castilleja School in Palo Alto, California. I was so excited last night when, just before the dinner, Bruce asked me to introduce a speaker. I have been a member of this organization for 15 years and I have only done that once before. You know, it's such a great honor to introduce Dr. MAR-roh -- MUR-roh -- mer-ROH -- mur-RAH.

I really was quite interested in the Academy Awards last night, but gave that up because I felt I really needed to do a little research on the Internet and get to know Mr. Merrow -- Dr. Merrow, actually. He is someone that I know we're going to enjoy hearing from.

Let me see, now. He was born in New England. Connecticut, actually. A large family of six. Grew up on a small farm. And then, like his father, went to Taft. He knew the independent school world and stayed in New England for Dartmouth, and then traveled a bit, went to Indiana for graduate work, and eventually ended up at Harvard.

The first time I met him actually was on the alumni council there, and was very impressed. I had no idea what he did. I found out that he had been a teacher in prisons, in high schools, in a black college in the south, had quite a range of experience, and actually then went into National Public Radio and did a lot of programs in the 1970s, which I had not heard.

And then -- let's see. After that, he went to public television, and has been very involved there, and started a company called Learning Matters. And from that little production company in New York City, he produces Front Line and a couple of Front Line shows, and also is on The NewsHour, on the MacNeil/Lehrer Report.

I have heard lots of praise about Mr. -- Dr. Merrow's work there, and he has done quite a bit -- a few series on new teachers, and he has one now on Michelle Rhee, who's the superintendent of schools in Washington, D.C., and another one on Paul Vallas, who's the superintendent of schools in New Orleans, on The NewsHour this year. And he writes op ed pieces for The New York Times and sometimes the USA Today, and other newspapers.

He's really quite active, very engaged in the field, quite passionate. I know that firsthand. I'd like to introduce my husband, John Merrow. Thank you.

DR. MERROW: Classic definition of a tough act to follow. Thank you. Is it LON-der-gan?

When Bruce called me up and asked me to speak to this group, I was really very, very excited about it. I mean, a remarkable group of people whose work I have admired for a long time. And when Joan got home that night, I said, "You'll never believe what happened today. Bruce Galbraith called me up, and has asked me to give a major speech at NAPSG. I mean, did you ever imagine that happening in your wildest dreams?"

And she looked at me and said, "Sweetheart, you aren't in my wildest dreams."

I actually stole that joke from somebody else. I am in her wildest... but I stole it from one of the original crop of presidential candidates, and I'll give extra credit -- you know you're being graded -- if you can identify the presidential candidate (of course, it was not Mrs. Clinton) that I stole that from.

Who? Anybody? Anybody? It's from Mitt Romney. You know, Mitt, we hardly knew you. So that's a joke.

But because I work in what is essentially a dead medium, television, and you guys have clickers, and we don't really know how you're reacting, I really like the idea, the chance to talk to real people. But when I get up to give a speech, I'm always reminded of the first speech I ever gave when I was in graduate student at Harvard. It was 1973, and the PTA in a town to the west, somewhere around Newton, asked me to give a talk and offered me $50. I had two little kids, I was on a scholarship, and so $50 was a lot of money then. So I prepared a slide show. It was something about elementary school -- I think lunchroom and third grade curriculum, something like that -- and it was supposed to start at 7:00, and I got out there about 6:15, because I was pretty excited about it. And I set up the slide projector and made sure everything was working, and waited. 6:30, nobody. 6:45, nobody. 7:00, nobody.

Ten after 7:00, one guy walks in. This is a true story. So it's a little bit of a question. What do you do? You have one person in the audience. Do you say, "The hell with it," or -- well, I figured -- I weighed the moral -- decided in favor of the $50, and it was a little awkward because I had to ask him to operate the slide projector. And he was very gracious and did that.

Now, the summer before, anticipating that I might, in fact, get to make speeches at some point in my life, I took a course at community college about making speeches. And one of the things that stuck with me was: Make eye contact. Well, I did. I mean, I made eye contact with that guy, and as I remember, I kind of rushed through the speech. Then, you know, I thanked him for operating the slide projector at the end, thanked him for paying attention, and as I was packing up, he said, "Hey. Excuse me. Fair is fair. I'm the second speaker."

Bruce and I agreed that even though I went to an independent school and even though I wake up most mornings next to the head of an independent school, I should not attempt to talk to you about your world. I spend most of my time with the public schools. I have done so for the last 30, 40 years. I live in a world that's preoccupied with the federal law No Child Left Behind. I suspect that you give thanks every day that for you, NCLB means Not Contaminated by the Laws of Bush, or whatever, something like that, or Not Co-opted by the Laws of Bush.

But in any case, we agreed that I should talk about trends and patterns in public education, American attitudes toward and treatment of kids. This is the 25th anniversary, in a month or so, of a landmark report called "A Nation at Risk," which warned that our public education system was drowning in a rising tide of mediocrity, a phrase that I'm sure you're all familiar with, and it basically said if a foreign power did to us what we are doing to ourselves, we would consider it an act of war. And the waves of so-called education or education reform have been sweeping over the system ever since. So it's a good time to be raising that question.

Now, let me just say what I'm going to do. I'm going to paint a very bleak picture here, but I'm going to end with three notes of optimism. So what I'm talking about is what I call the new ADD. You know what ADD is: Attention deficit disorder.

Well, 13 years ago, my colleague John Tulenko and I produced a PBS program called "ADD: A Dubious Diagnosis." We followed the money trail. What we discovered was that the company that makes Ritalin -- which is methylphenidate, but that's the commercial version of methylphenidate -- a company named Ciba-Geigy, was secretly buying off a supposedly neutral parents group called CHADD, Children and Adults with Attention Deficit Disorder. They were funneling about a million bucks, without telling anybody, into this group called CHADD. CHADD, in turn, was endorsing Ritalin. It, in fact, had even infiltrated the US Department of Education with its public service announcements, and these leaders of CHADD were posing as ordinary parents talking about how Ritalin had changed their kids' lives. At the same time, CHADD was lobbying Congress, trying to reclassify methylphenidate as a category 1, category 2. They wanted to make it easier to get.

At the time, the United States was using 85 percent of the world's supply of methylphenidate, a great deal of it going to white, teenage, middle-class boys, and yet they were trying to make it even easier. At that time, several million kids were being medicated. Not many girls. Almost no nonwhites, actually. In the black community they said, "Hey, we have enough drugs. Don't try to put our kids on more drugs," that kind of attitude.

And we slowed it down for a while but, in fact, it has gone back up, and now I think it's about 4 million kids, and many more girls. And of course, the kids figured out that you can grind up Ritalin, snort it with a beer, and it's the equivalent of having four beers. They're trading it.

It was just an astounding story, and I'd like to show you a short clip. These are some teenage boys in Maryland talking about Ritalin.

(Videotape played.)

DR. MERROW: That hasn't stopped. I mean, that still exists, but I think that's the old ADD. And as I spend my time wandering around the country, looking at schools, in a way, the behavior that is labeled attention deficit disorder I think is more -- arguably you could say it's the result of affection deficit. So I call it the new ADD, affection deficit disorder. All young people crave affection. We all do. But a lot of the time that is just not what they get. Now, at the upper end, a lot of these kids, wealthy kids, get stuff. They get their own Visa card. They get cell phones, computers, high-definition TVs in the bedroom, a BMW when they turn 16, and so on. And from early on, they're scheduled to the max with the private lessons in ballet and skiing and French and martial arts. Parents hire the private coaches to pay attention to their kids.

Now, that kind of ADD feeds on itself, because you are what you have, or you are what you wear, and so on. But of course, that kind of attention, lavish though it may be, is no substitute for the affection that kids crave.

Now, it's the other end of the spectrum. See, I think in public education we suffer from almost like a bipolar disorder. We have increasingly two separate worlds in public education. My state of California has 1,000 school districts. 400 of them have private foundations. Those private foundations raise as much as $4,000, $5,000 extra per kid. The other 600 districts do not have that, and those districts don't have art, music, physical ed, et cetera. So there's the comfortable, smug world of wealthy, suburban, upper-middle-class public schools, and the under funded, inefficient schools the poor are isolated in, and the schools of the poor are the worst off and pretty dreary institutions, crowded, not necessarily dirty, but just boring. Perhaps antiseptic, but no sense of life, and with the emphasis on repetition, machine-scored tests, and that kind of stuff. You know, the poor schools that are vibrant places -- in a way, that's almost a negative, because it means the poor are powerless, and these reformers have come in and taken over and turned it into a lively place, and that's a good thing on one level, but it also suggests to us how little control poor people have over that kind of education, not enough political clout to do it themselves or to reject the do-gooders.

I do think a strong case can be made that on one level this is the golden age of public education, and I would say about a third of our public schools are probably better than they have ever been, and they are the schools, you know, that the wealthy kids go to. But while we have some wonderful ones, the trend lines are pretty depressing. I want to focus on that other end of the spectrum, because I think you have a role to play. These schools are likely to have inexperienced teachers or veteran teachers nobody else wanted.

A few years ago, we followed two classes of first graders in a poor district in Washington, D.C. I personally am convinced that virtually all first graders can learn to read, and I was curious to see first grade reading. Kids want to. That is the currency of the language, of the culture. "Is anybody paying attention," that sort of thing. So we picked two classes right across the hall from each other, one taught by a young woman in the "whole language" method, the other a veteran who had been teaching forever and who used whatever worked. But you know how public schools are. "Close the door and teach." And nobody pays any attention to you. You don't watch anybody else. There's none of that stuff that a lot of you have in your schools. So the "Close the door" rule obtained here, and I'd like you to watch a short clip on how that year went with these two classes. Let me just say that we watched for the whole year, and at the end of the year, I got some books -- this may be in the clip; I can't remember. But let me tell you, just in case. I went to Bob Slavin, who's an education person, and asked him for some age-appropriate books for first-grade readers, so at the end, I took books into the class that the kids had never seen, to see if they could, in fact, read. So here's Johnny and the young woman.

(Videotape played.)

DR. MERROW: That brings back so much, just seeing that again. In terms of affection deficit, they were both affectionate, but Johnny was teaching the kids to read, which is a real form of caring for the kids. She was basically lying to them, as you saw. I'm sure for you school leaders that raised a whole lot of questions like, 'Where was the principal?' And the principal didn't know this was going on until she saw it on national television, at which point she sent all her teachers to a workshop on how to teach reading.

For us, as reporters, it was tough because we were watching her create handicapped kids. They were losing a whole year. The good news there is the next year, all her kids had Johnny, and we went back and did a second program, because we got very interested in what would happen, and they all learned to read. But that is not at all typical. By the way, the young woman's father threatened me after that was on.

But that's the wrong kind of attention. You know, "We'll fake it," if you will. "We're not going to make you do the hard work." A lot of that I think is low expectations. They don't really think these poor black kids can do this.

Michelle Rhee was the chancellor in District of Columbia who we're following on The NewsHour, as Joan said. She and her top professional development person said they believe that 50 percent of the teachers on her staff do not believe that the kids can learn. Fifty percent. That's about 4,000 teachers and change. And she is making plans now to bring in as many as 1,750 new teachers next year. So she's not willing to wait around.

I want to show you what it looks like in high school, because there, the whole emphasis gets to be on test scores. Got to get those test scores up. And the way you get test scores up is drill, drill, drill; not study real stuff. E.D. Hirsch said, "If you want good reading scores, read books." But for poor kids it's not that. It's just drill to get the tests up. So I'll show you this clip of a high school in Chicago.

(Videotape played.)

DR. MERROW: Here at Austin High School, on Chicago's west side, students will take a state test called IGAP, for Illinois Goals Assessment Program, in March, but preparation for IGAP began in October, six months before the test. How much time are you spending getting ready for the IGAP?

STUDENT: Every day.

DR. MERROW: You want to tell me about it?

STUDENT: Everything we do is IGAP. In every class, every subject, they teaching us about IGAP.

DR. MERROW: How much time do you spend in a day, let's say?

STUDENT: How long? About six hours? About six hours.

TEACHER: What are the four things we look for in characterization? Hurry up, come on, everybody. Everybody.

DR. MERROW: Austin High School is one of 109 Chicago public schools put on probation for low test scores. Five percent of Austin students read at grade level. If that number doesn't go up on the spring test, Austin High School might be closed.

TEACHER: Everything in my class gears towards the IGAP, whether it be a test question, the way I lecture, my bell ringers. The whole school is really in format with that, so that the kids will be bombarded.

STUDENT: They teach us, you know, what to do, how to do it, ask us questions, give us homework about the things that will be on the IGAP test. Like we got to do homework, he give us different things that will be on the IGAP testing, and then we have to figure out -- as a class we all participate in trying to figure out what is that. That's what we do in all our classes.

DR. MERROW: All your classes?

STUDENT: Including gym and music too. Because they have an ARM test about music on IGAP. That's what we do. (end of clip, Mary)

DR. MERROW: Can you imagine if you did that in your schools? Can you imagine how your parents would react? But that's pretty much the norm. And then you know, this affection deficit, as I was saying, that educators distance themselves from kids, maybe they're afraid of being sued, maybe it's because the classes are so big, maybe it's because they don't know how to teach because they're not trained. Maybe it's because they have to obsess about test scores.

But I think a big part of it is who is teaching these kids, because more than 30 percent of high school classes are being taught by men and women who haven't studied the subject they're teaching. It's probably higher than that. It's called out-of-field teaching. And it's easy to say that, "Oh, she's teaching something she hasn't studied." But I want you to see what it's like in this short clip. This is down in Georgia.

(Videotape played.)

TEACHER: Area is equal to 16 squared. Okay. Let's talk about square numbers.

DR. MERROW: In this ninth-grade math class in Cuthbert, Georgia, Elizabeth Jackson is explaining how to find the area of a square.

TEACHER: So what is the area of this particular square? 256.

DR. MERROW: That answer is incomplete. She should have said 256 square centimeters. During the period, Jackson solved several problems. Never once did she tell students that area is measured in square units.

TEACHER: The first thing I'm going to do is introduce your new vocabulary words for the week.

DR. MERROW: Just down the hail from the math class, Shane Miller is in charge of a ninth-grade English class.

TEACHER: The next word will be "strenuous." "Strenuous" is spelled, S-T-R-E-N-O-U-S. "Strenuous."

DR. MERROW: That's not how "strenuous" is spelled, but his students might never know it. They dutifully copied his error into their notebooks.

TEACHER: Let's look at "strenuous." Stren-you-us. (end of clip, Mary)

DR. MERROW: Can you imagine if you had that teacher on your faculty, what your parents would say? In defense of both of them, they're both coaches. He's a junior high school coach. She was a high school coach. The superintendent -- or maybe it was just the principal -- said, "You need to teach algebra, you need to teach" -- he was teaching history, math, and English to those kids in a poor part of Georgia. I mean, that really is affection deficit, when we're willing to do that to our kids.

Incidentally, I asked Ms. Jackson about this thing about square. And she said, "Well, you only say square when you're solving for the area of the square," which is what she told the kids.

I asked him about that subject, having seen him spell, and he said that wasn't his toughest subject. The toughest was math, and he was okay on the basic stuff, teaching high school math, but he had trouble with the more complicated stuff like fractions.

It's true. We just didn't put that in. At some point you say, you know, it's piling on, because the poor man, the poor woman -- she left teaching. I think he's coaching now. I haven't checked for a while. And they're put in this position of, "You have to do this," and teachers have this mentality, "Okay, put me in, Coach," instead of saying, "No, I'm a professional."

So you couldn't get away with it with well-to-do kids. And can you imagine what it's like to be that teacher or those kids? They don't know what they haven't been taught. I want to say one word about the tests, that they are mind-numbing tests. They are cheap, is what they are. They're cheap and they're for stupid, poor tests. For every $100 we spend on No Child Left Behind, we spent 15 cents creating the tests. The tests drive everything. Harts, which makes flea powder, bird seed, et cetera, spends ten times more testing its products before putting them on the market than we spend on these tests that we give the kids.

Now, exactly one year ago, I was at a school on Fort Bragg, in North Carolina, and I want to take you there, because I want to show you what a school for poor kids -- or at least not for Ivy League kids -- looks like where there is no affection deficit. About 300 kids in this elementary school, K through 6, I guess. They have at least one parent serving in Iraq or Afghanistan. The kids are scared, sometimes angry. Parents are going to help over there, instead of staying at home. And I kind of expected, well, military guys' teaching to be, "Suck it up, kid." It's not that way. It starts with affection. It's really a remarkable experience.

What they did is, they made the school a safe place for these kids. The mother of three -- we'll meet her. It's not in the piece, but she says her husband has just been deployed for the third time. "We don't need people at school to tell our kids to be strong. You know, they're already strong. They need somebody to let them know that being sad is okay, being angry is okay, being mad is okay." We produced a short piece for The NewsHour, and I really would like you to watch it in its entirety.

(Videotape played.)

STUDENTS: God is great, God is good. Let us thank him for our food.

DR. MERROW: For the three children of the Keeling family -- Shelby, age 10, Dayton, 8, and Austin, 5 -- life is about to change. Their father, Cory Keeling, an Army medic, leaves in the morning for the front lines in Afghanistan. It will be his third tour of duty. At bedtime, the children's fears come out.

STAFF SGT. KEELING: They I think are just now coming to the understanding of the danger. The possibility of death has come up.

DR. MERROW: How did it come up?

STAFF SGT. KEELING: Just -- Austin asked.

DR. MERROW: What did you say?

STAFF SGT. KEELING: What can you say? You tell them that you're going to come home.

DR. MERROW: Early next morning, the Keelings gathered with 350 other soldiers and their families from the 82nd Airborne in Fort Bragg, North Carolina, to say good-bye.

MRS. KEELING: You don't want them to hurt, you don't want your child to be sad, but you need them to be strong. I need them to be strong.

DR. MERROW: Then it's time to go. Staff Sergeant Keeling will be going on assignment for at least a year.

MRS. KEELING: When he leaves, his clothes, you know, his shoes, the laundry is gone. And I think he was here, and everything was great, and we argued, and pinched and poked, and drove each other crazy, you know, then, like, oh, if I could just have one more day of that.

DR. MERROW: A few hours after his father had gone, five-year-old Austin Keeling insisted on going to school. There he's greeted by principal Tim Howle.

MR. HOWLE: Hey, guys. What's up?

DR. MERROW: A retired major in the Army Special Forces. Austin's school, McNair Elementary, is located in the middle of Fort Bragg. It's one of 219 schools run by the Department of Defense with a total enrollment of nearly 100,000 students. Roughly half the students here at McNair, 178 children, have a parent overseas in a war zone.

MR. HOWLE: My job is to take care of these kids, take care of the families, take care of the teachers. We're consistency in the lives of these kids.

DR. MERROW: When Austin arrives in his kindergarten class, his teacher, Nancy Welsh, watches him closely.

MS. WELSH: He's a great agitator right now. His emotions bother him. He's also tired, and I know it's been a big week for him.

DR. MERROW: Right away Austin gets a fun assignment, to create a happy dream.

MS. WELSH: This is their security zone. This is where they can be a kid. I even say, "It's okay to be sad." I would be sad, too, if my daddy was far away, or, "I'm sad that your mommy is not here." So it's okay to be sad. But I say, "Let's try to feel better now."

DR. MERROW: Fourteen of the seventeen students in Mrs. Welsh's class have a parent serving overseas. At any moment any one of them might need some extra care.

MS. WELSH: You know, they'll say, "I miss Mommy," and I see a sad look on a face, so I say, "I'm sorry, I know you do." And I gave him a hug, and he hugged me back and held on. I try to do for every single child what they need. And they don't always need the same thing, either.

(Singing) My mommy is in the US Army. I am as proud of her as I can be.

DR. MERROW: Before parents deploy, Mrs. Welsh invites them to class for a special visit. Alisa's mom is deploying to Iraq tomorrow.

MR. HOWLE: I have made the point to be personally involved with all the kids. I know what caring and nurturing can do in education. I see it every day.

DR. MERROW: Is there a danger that all this nurturing is going to get in the way of learning?

MR. HOWLE: No. I believe you can't separate education and relationships. If you want to have a great educational bond, you have got to have a personal relationship with the kids.

MS. WELSH: If we just comfort the children all day, we would never get to the standards that we have to teach, and that wouldn't help the parents, to have a child who's not learning what they need to learn. So no, we don't lose sight of the academics at all.

DR. MERROW: Mrs. Welsh uses the children's questions to drive the lessons.

MS. WELSH: We had a globe, and Lauren's father deployed in the fall, and she just said, "Where is my daddy?"

So I showed her. And then, of course, other people wanted to know, "Where is my daddy?"

And I put up the hot spots of Korea, Iraq, and Afghanistan. They're not the only ones we talk about, but they're the ones that mean the most to the children. And states where their grandparents or aunts and uncles live.

DR. MERROW: Nancy Welsh says all of her students are progressing academically and almost half of them are beginning to read simple sentences. Throughout the day she uses songs to teach.

MS. WELSH: I write out the words to songs on big pieces of cardboard, and before we sing the song the first time, we read the words. They get so excited about going through a song. "There's 'for.' There's 'the.' Mrs. Welsh, it has the word 'he.' It has 'said.'" They don't realize that I put the songs together intentionally.

DR. MERROW: There are some things they won't learn from her.

MS. WELSH: My position is to teach the children, to love the children. I'm not a politician. I'm not someone who expresses opinions about we should be in Afghanistan or Iraq or Korea, or anyplace else, for that matter. I have such an influence on kindergarteners that I'm very, very careful about what I say.

DR. MERROW: Do you have politics? Do you feel strongly?

MS. WELSH: I definitely do.

DR. MERROW: Are you going to tell me?

MS. WELSH: I am not.

MR. WIELAND: Our policy for being over there is right. These kids hear that from me.

DR. MERROW: Gary Wieland has a different approach with his third-graders.

MR. WIELAND: We're going to do a classroom definition of Iraq.

DR. MERROW: Wieland has been teaching at McNair for 13 years. Before that, he was in the military for 30 years. He was wounded in Vietnam, and was awarded a Silver Star and a Bronze Star.

MR. WIELAND: How do you like this so far? A desert country in the Middle East. Does this cover what you have been saying? Now, how about this? Why is your mom or dad there? Why did they go before? Why are they in Afghanistan? What are they bringing?

STUDENT: Freedom.

MR. WIELAND: Yes.

DR. MERROW: I was in here for maybe 90 minutes, and I think there were at least three times when you made reference to the policy. You said, "Here's a definition of Iraq. It's a desert country in the Middle East where Americans go to bring freedom. Write this down."

MR. WIELAND: I didn't make that definition up. The students gave me that definition.

DR. MERROW: But you agree with it.

MR. WIELAND: Sure, I do.

DR. MERROW: Okay. But would it be okay for a teacher to say Iraq is a country in the Middle East where America is wasting $2 billion a week?

MR. WIELAND: You know, I spent a career in the military on foreign soil so that those people could say that.

MR. HOWLE: I don't ask them their politics. I really don't care about their politics. As long as you love the kids and you do the right thing by the kids, what's more important?

MR. WIELAND: It's not all about ABCs. It's about when a kid leaves here, what does he look like, as opposed to what the kid was when he walked in the door. Can he think independently? Can he solve problems? My kids blew the doors off the standardized tests that we take last year. I mean, I had reading scores -- that entire class was in the 95th percentile on a national norm. 93.3 percentile for math.

DR. MERROW: For Gary Wieland, it's not just about his students' academic success.

MR. WIELAND: They know that I'm a safe haven for them when something is wrong. They know that they can come to the old man and talk to me about it.

Who can tell me the first A list words?

DR. MERROW: Of the 17 children in his class, seven have a parent away from home.

MR. WIELAND: I have become their surrogate dad. They really know that I have got a relationship with them and that I'm going to stand in the gap.

DR. MERROW: Tedrick Philyaw's father has been in Iraq for six months. The day before he left, he participated in a symbolic exchange where he gave Mr. Wieland full parental rights for one dollar.

MR. WIELAND: He came in the classroom. I got Tedrick to stand up, and I handed him that dollar and I said, "When you get back, you owe me that." And I said, you know, "You're now my kid, little boy."

DR. MERROW: Renee Philyaw is Tedrick's mother.

Where is the dollar?

MRS. PHILYAW: It's here in the wallet. He had it in his will that if something happens to him, Tedrick gets that dollar.

MR. WIELAND: I'm touched. I told Tedrick's dad, "You take care of my country, I'll take care of your kid."

DR. MERROW: Gary Wieland stays in touch with Tedrick's father and several other parents, he's given out about 25 dollar bills and so far has gotten all of them back.

If a kid asks you the tough question, "Is my dad going to die, is mom going to get killed," what do you do?

MR. WIELAND: Lie to them. "Been there, done that. You know, they hurt me, but here I am to annoy you. Your dad is the best-trained soldier in the world. The folks around him are as good as he is. What's to worry about?"

MS. WELSH: We had a child here, not in my class, but another kindergarten class last year, whose daddy did not come back. So I do not want to tell them, 'Your daddy is going to be fine or your mommy is going to be fine', because I don't know that.

MR. HOWLE: I can't tell you that I'm going to be here tomorrow. You know? I can't tell them that their mom is going to be here tomorrow. But I'm going to tell you that no matter what,' there's always going to be somebody here that's going to take care of you'. And these kids are seeing it. They come into this building every day, smiling, doing what they have to do, learning and just going on with life. They feel safe, they feel secure, and they feel like somebody cares.

DR. MERROW: Tedrick's father is expected home this month for a two-week break. Mrs. Welsh says Austin is still adjusting to his father's absence. Cory Keeling calls home regularly from Afghanistan, where he's been on patrol but not in combat. (End of video.)

DR. MERROW: I'll bring you up to date. Tedrick's dad made it home safely. Sorry, I get really emotional when I watch that stuff. So much more went on that you can't put into these pieces. We actually did four podcasts, if you want to hear from her, from Gary Wieland, from Nancy Welsh, from Scarlette, and from Tim Howle.

But anyway, Tedrick's dad made it home safely and gave the dollar back to Gary Wieland, and Cory Keeling comes home next week.

That is what schools should be. The DOD is one of the largest school districts in the United States, 100,000 students. That's bigger than I think all but about 12, 20 school districts. And a lot of them are schools like that, that whole sense of affection with an emphasis on standards. True, they have a military ethos, but you don't see that. You don't see marching, et cetera, et cetera. And that's possible in our schools. They do not spend more money per child than most schools.

The Bush Administration budget, which is the largest defense budget in our history, has for the third year in a row cut funding for the DOD schools. Last year they cut the budget so that Gary Wieland, who was, you know, a Constitutionalist and a real right-winger, as you see, but a real patriot. When the Constitution was traveling through, he didn't have the funds so he could take his kids to town so they could see the Constitution.

So you talk about an affection deficit, it clearly starts at the top. But that sort of thing is possible.

The viewer reaction, by the way, at PBS was phenomenal. A lot of lefties apparently watch The NewsHour. We got some astounding mail. How dare we put a teacher like that, that propagandist, on the screen, et cetera, et cetera? You know, somebody said, "I wanted to choke the crap out of that reporter," he wrote me. I wrote him back, but I didn't give him my address.

Just a quick thing about Gary Wieland: You know, you see that he and I have the same color hair, are about the same age. My job is just to ask softball questions. You know, for the principal, "Does this affection get in the way of learning?" Duh. So he can knock it out of the park and explain it very carefully.

Gary Wieland didn't want us in the room. He's a Fox News guy. And there are Bush pictures up and he's a big Republican donor. He just didn't want us in the room at all. But he let us. The principal said, "You got to let them film." He's a terrific teacher, as is Nancy Welsh. Half of her kindergarteners are about to read, this in a country where we say let's have all third-graders reading. But he let us in the room, so on and so forth, and while we were wandering around setting up, there's pictures of kids on the wall, and one looked a lot like one of my granddaughters, and I guess I mentioned that at some point.

So we were sitting down for the interview, and I knew about the dollar. We try to know ahead of time what the answers are. I knew it was in the will, and I knew that he didn't know. And when I told him -- you saw that he was moved to discover, because in the full text he had said, "Oh, they probably just pissed it away on beer," or something like that. We cut that out.

But when I said, "No, he has it in his will," he was visibly moved by that. Then I asked him -- again, one of my softball questions, you know, "Is it tougher managing a bunch of rowdy third graders or running a platoon?"

Some question. I don't remember exactly what it was, but he looked at me -- I mean, "Do you consider these your children?" Some inane question, just trying to get him to open up. And he looked at me and he said, "You're on shaky ground, son."

Well, you know when somebody your own age calls you son, you're in big trouble, especially if they're a Green Beret. And I'm, oh, my God, what did I just do now? I knew he didn't like me anyway, left-wing liberal media, and he said -- I don't know if I'm going to get through this story -- he said, "I'm never going to have any grandchildren," out of the blue. And then he proceeded to tell us about his only child, who had died at the age of 19, just two years ago, three, four years ago, while she was in college.

Well, my producer was sitting behind me. She started crying. And I had a TA with us, as well, and she was behind, so I could see her -- because you don't want anybody else looking -- you don't want the interviewee seeing anybody else. You want to have total eye contact. That's what they learn in speech class. And I saw her start crying, and she sank down out of sight. Well, I cried in commercial. And it was the most astounding, just naked, moment.

And you got this sense of the kind of commitment that the guy was making for personal reasons, but it never got in the way of his standards. And that was what was wonderful. And then you talk about affection deficit. The wrong kind of affection is, "Oh, you're just wonderful and you're just wonderful," but not holding kids to high standards. Real affection means you expect the best from them. You don't berate them, but you don't just build their self-esteem. That's phony. But if you get a chance to go to the podcast -- I think you'll find them -- you can't get everything on the air, but you come back with all this wonderful stuff, at PBS.org/Merrow.

So what's to be done? What's to be done? We should have schools like that. We should have a lot more schools like that. We cut budgets for schools like that.

Let me try to wrap this up, and if you have any questions we'll do that. All kids -- rich, poor, in between -- need affection. How do you fight affection deficit disorder? By the way, I do think disorder follows from affection deficit. You get all kinds of antisocial behavior out of kids who are treated the way we treat poor kids. They learn to hate school, learn to hate adults, so on and so forth. We'll pay the price down the road.

Parents can fight affection deficit disorder, but not with an American Express card or medication, but with a hug and by listening. I think government can fight this new ADD at all levels, could end this affection gap, if you will, by restoring art, music, physical ed, field trips, recess, to the schools. The public schools could adopt a health model of schooling instead of a medical model, built on what you're good at. Acknowledge what you're good at. Nobody buys books that have titles of "I'm really terrible." The bestseller lists are full of self-help books like You're Okay, But You Can Get Better. It's the positive thing. Schools instead play a gotcha game.

I think independent schools can be part of a solution by building partnerships, expanding public/private partnerships, which I know some of you do. And I hope you would do more. In fact, the best public educators try to copy what you all do so well. So ideally, we just put you in charge of public education. You have got real jobs already, and in my being slightly facetious, I would say if we can't put you in charge, let's put the highway engineers in charge of public education, because if you think about it, the goal of a highway engineer, highway designer, is to get you to your destination. And so they build the lanes quite a bit wider than the car, just in case your attention wanders. They build more than one lane so you can go one speed and you can go at a different speed. There are different exits. It's not just one destination. Turn around and imagine if educators built highways. They would be this much wider than the car, there would be one lane, one destination, and as soon as you got off the lane, you hit a wall. Gotcha, take your license away, hold you back, go back to square one, so on and so forth.

So sorting kids into A kids, B kids, C kids, is something we cannot afford. We simply cannot afford it. Not only are we leaving more kids behind, we're leaving them insufficiently skilled without a strong sense of public purpose, and confused or angry. That is to say, this new ADD, widespread, is sowing seeds of social destruction.

So why am I talking to you about this? Well, I certainly don't want to leave you feeling good that you don't do this stuff. Or I don't want to leave you with a "That's not us" attitude, because I think what's going on should threaten you, because you can't build a wall high enough. A split society between haves and have-nots will eventually pull down the haves. There's no other option but to get involved and make this better.

So I want to give you quickly three reasons for optimism. One is, people are paying attention to this new report from McKinsey. It's called, "How the world's best school systems come out on top" and it's fascinating. If you haven't looked at it, please do. It's not done by educators. McKinsey & Company, 25 school systems around the world, including ten of the highest performing. What do they have in common? The old mantra here about small classes, higher salaries -- that's not it. There were three things they found. And I think these are rules you live by anyway. They are: Hire the best possible people and give them training, make sure that they're nurtured, don't just throw them in a classroom and close the door, sink or swim. That's part one.

The second part is to make it very clear to these teachers what you expect, but give them the tools to get there. So it's high expectations but also the equipment. So you hold people accountable, but they're equipped to do it.

And the third is, help right away for kids who start falling through the cracks. "Joan is having trouble in long division. Let's get some help." There are a lot of things that are implied by that. That implies that we trust the teacher who's teaching her. We don't have to wait for the standardized tests and wait six months for the results, because we hired those good people and we told them what the rules are, and so on and so forth. So that's one reason for optimism. I hear people talking about that. It's such wonderful common sense, and it's part of what you can do to spread that word. "These are the things you do."

The second I think is actually technology. You can actually drill down and see what's going on. I was in a math department meeting in Washington, D.C., in a high school with nine teachers and they had the data on how the kids did. There have got to be better tests, but the math chair could look and see how many kids were understanding probability, but can also look and see whether Johnny's kids got probability or did not get probability. So there's a whole vulnerability thing. There's an end to this "Close the door and teach the way you want to teach" and the technology is making that inevitable. I don't know if you do that, but that idea -- that's a reason for hope.

And the third is this incredible, incredible reservoir of public service, civic mindedness in young people today. The two districts we're following on The NewsHour, Michelle Rhee in Washington, D.C., and Paul Vallas, in New Orleans -- both of them, in Michelle's words, are being flooded with applications for people who want to come teach there. Flooded. And it's not just Teach for America, although that's part of it. There's a whole bunch of things.

So there is that reservoir that has been building up from seven years of bad leadership that people want to do something to make the world a better place. So public schools face huge challenges but they have, in fact, faced them before, with waves of immigrants, sudden bursts in enrollment, children whose parents are illiterate in two languages. You know, they've met these challenges before. Let's pray they can meet them again. But beyond praying, I hope that you men and women of such power and influence in your own communities will do a lot to make this change that we desperately have to have. Thank you very much.

If anybody has a question, I know there are things going on, so I will not be offended, but are there any questions?

The question is: What's going to happen to No Child Left Behind? Nothing. Not until we have a new president. And it will be reauthorized, but it will have a new name. Thank you all very much.

MR. GALBRAITH: Thank you to both of you, and I think that we'll remember your remarks and the introduction as long as NAPSG lives. Mark Hale, thanks for the technical help.

Would you please take an evaluation form and fill it in for as long as you're here? In case you're leaving early, they're there, but we really would like your feedback.

For the reception tonight, we're going to take a chance and have it outside but with heaters. The dinner will be moved inside, in case you want to dress accordingly, but the location for it is just so wonderful that I'd like to take a chance. So the reception at 6:30 will be outside. Dress a little warmly. I have heard that body warmth can be affected positively by imbibing alcohol.

And lastly, if you signed up for an airport trip, the plan is for somebody to contact you and say, "I'm going about that time, would you like to ride with me?" When that happens, do me a favor and cross off your name on the list, and then four or five people won't call you.

Thank you. See you tonight.
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