February 4, 2012
TECHNOS QUARTERLY Winter 1995 Vol. 4 No. 4
Interview with Luther S. Williams
By Carole Novak, Editor, TECHNOS Quarterly
Luther Williams is assistant director for Education and Human Resources
at the National Science Foundation (NSF). Prior to his appointment, Williams
established a distinguished record as a scientist, educator, and administrator.
One of his major contributions at NSF has been creating the Office
of Systemic Reform in 1992. The office is dedicated to supporting educational
systemic reform activities and improving the academic research capabilities
of states that traditionally have been underrepresented in the nation's science
and technology efforts. In fall 1995, TECHNOS talked to Williams about the
progress made through the Office's initiatives and the challenges still ahead
for American public school systems.
Since your appointment as assistant director, NSF has chosen a path that leads to school reform. Why?
I recognized that while NSF was supporting an array of notable projects, these projects were not necessarily consistent with the American K-12 school system. While math and science education standards were evolving, our programs focused on the professional development of math and science teachers, brought technology into school systems, or developed instructional materials. These activities are most effective when you periodically invest resources to enhance one part of a quality K-12 system. Four or five years ago, however, there were few quality K-12 school systems in America.
Three fundamental problems had to be addressed. First, challenging math and science education has been optional in the American public school for most of its history. We need to change the attitude that math and science are optional. Second, the existing infrastructure will not support the kind of school system needed today. We need to meet the demands of the workplace. Third, the reform ventures since the early 1980s have created chaos, not unity. We need to realize that simply implementing many programs may only increase the chaos level.
I decided we were going to create systemic reform programs that would require school systems to unify the policy, government, and fiscal components and add a coherent math/science educational sequence that is standards-based. This has to be organized as a continuum. The instruction youngsters receive in fifth grade must build on what happened in grades K-4 and provide the groundwork for grades 6-12. Otherwise, there's no point in investing in the fifth-grade program.
How do you manage to get everyone to agree that this is a role NSF should assume?
The NSF program requires the participation of the political leadership. If it's a state program, the state legislature is involved; if it's a city program, the mayor's office and city councils are involved. Connecticut is one of the states funded under the Statewide Systemic Initiatives [see "The Office of Systemic Reform, National Science Foundation"]. When it couldn't assemble this large group of players from the school system, the university, or the political structure, it created the State of Connecticut Math/Science Education, Inc., a body of leaders from the business community and others who are running exemplary programs, such as [Dr. James] Comer's School Development Program. They are responsible for meeting the demanding expectations of the NSF proposal.
You can't successfully apply to the NSF program if you're not willing to bring synergy to these district activities. In fact, we found that synergy characterized the most exemplary things Connecticut was doing. Plans should be comprehensive, but they must also be coherent.
You've also singled out the state of Louisiana as a good example.
It's done an absolutely remarkable job. Large sections of Louisiana are rural, but you also have suburban and urban schools, including those in New Orleans, which are dominated by parochial school systems.
The state created an incredible structure that includes the governor's office and the legislature, which matched the NSF monies. It's not so important that they do so, but what was important was their ownership of the process and their decision to reconsider the issue each fiscal year. What they've accomplished over five years is simply outstanding, and the ultimate results are now beginning to appear in the students' improved performance in math and science. We test student performance in the fourth, eighth, and twelfth grades. The results have been remarkable at each of these levels, especially in grades four and eight.
I suspect that the successes we've seen are strongly correlated with the high accountability NSF has built into these programs. These five-year awards provide money for one year and a promissory note for the subsequent four. At the end of each year, we conduct a comprehensive review.
With Louisiana, we operate under a cooperative agreement in which the state and NSF determined what the deliverables would be in the first year. If the state achieves 15 of the 16 deliverables, that's acceptable, and the second year of the award is triggered. If progress isn't acceptable, major changes must occur in order for the second year of the award to begin. We had to terminate the award to Rhode Island.
Are some of these deliverables test scores?
The ultimate deliverable is the test score. The first-year deliverables are based on the three fundamental problems. First, you have to agree that you're really going to have K-12 operations.
If a state does not already require that, one of the first-year deliverables is a revision of the state's graduation requirements for math and science education. Another first-year deliverable is to determine whether teachers have the basic competencies and, if they don't, to initiate major professional development efforts. A decent assessment system is also a first-year deliverable. You've got to get these capabilities in year one in order for them to be used in year two. Around the third year, the state must begin submitting student test scores.
And graduation rates might be a deliverable?
Absolutely.
Acceptance into college, or...
Workforce and college both.
There are three systemic reform initiatives, and the states, cities, and rural areas participate by choice?
That's right. By choice--and by competition. The opportunity to apply was extended to all sister states and all applied. As I have said, bringing order to the chaos in most states is a daunting task, and many of them could simply never get it done. We've been successful in these programs because many of the critical decisions needed for genuine reform have to be made before an award is granted.
We initially had 25 states and Puerto Rico. Two years later, we started the Urban Systemic Initiatives because the states with large urban populations were responding well to the statewide program but did not have sufficient resources for their urban areas. So we decided to concentrate on the cities with the largest populations.
One thing I've learned in working with states is that for a modest amount of money the foundation can really drive reform by requiring a comprehensive planning process even before an award is made. So we gave a grant of $100,000 to each of the 25 cities, and they spent a year in very serious planning.
The second thing I learned is that you can't really drive reform unless you engage the public. So the state or city school system has to develop public support and then negotiate a series of policy changes for tracking systems, etc. We had a competition among the 25 cities and initially made awards to nine of them. In 1995, we made seven additional awards.
One comment on the value of planning. You would think one of the major problems in Detroit would be infrastructure, right? Obviously, you can't provide technology-based education in a cost-effective way in a building constructed in 1950. During this planning year, the Detroit Board of Education ran a very effective grass roots-based operation and passed a bond issue with something like 60 percent approval--a remarkable achievement. For the first time in 27 years, the citizens of Detroit voted to provide $1.5 billion for infrastructure. The bond issue was prompted by the NSF award program because we kept stressing that Detroit didn't have the infrastructure to meet its goals. But with planning, the bond issue passed.
The city of Dallas also passed a bond issue for $300 million. And before their first-year planning was funded, both Cincinnati and Fresno passed bond issues. To summarize, citizens in seven of those 16 cities have elected to invest significant resources in their schools, an incredible development leveraged by our efforts. More importantly, those seven cities now have the means to sustain reform because the citizens have become players.
A city differs from a state in that it usually has a group that represents its leading businesses and industries. (I don't mean the chamber of commerce.) In the last 20 years, these groups have not been close to the school systems--certainly not inner-city school systems. However, because they are motivated by their workforce needs, these groups have come to think of their cities' school systems as likely places to find potential employees. As a result, interest in their school systems has increased dramatically.
For example, Texas Instruments is almost a co-manager of the program in Dallas. The company has contributed computers and instructional software, assisted Dallas schools with their infrastructure, and brought added accountability to the venture through its co-leadership. The Dallas Urban Systemic Initiative must meet two reporting obligations before it reports to NSF: one to Texas Instruments because of its major investment and a second to the local O'Donnell Foundation that gave the school system millions after the NSF award was granted.
How does all of this refer back to my comment about chaos? How do the efforts by Texas Instruments, the O'Donnell Foundation, and NSF equal a synergistic whole? The synergy is created when these efforts are guided by the program plan operated under the NSF proposal. Texas Instruments has simply assumed responsibility for the technology, and the O'Donnell Foundation is funding two other components of the proposal. So in a venture-capital context, NSF is simply contributing to one unified operation.
Rumor has it that it's getting very crowded on the Internet and that some universities have withdrawn their access for local schools. What can NSF do about that?
What we are increasingly doing is making awards to 'distributed performers.' Most of these performers are in universities, and access for groups of K-12 schools is an integral part of their jobs. We're making progress with a program called Networking Infrastructure for Education. This program seeks to implement models and prototypes so we can demonstrate how electronic networks, the Internet, and others can support education reform. This capability is needed, not only for rural areas but also for Detroit, Los Angeles, and Miami. We now support research and development that helps us understand how to implement large-scale and cost-effective networking. I'm talking not only about infrastructure but also about policy issues, training, learning tools, etc. The only difference between our effort and the efforts of others is in the product, which is education and training.
Would NSF ever pull funding from a university that removed a K-12 school from its network?
Yes.
Is the growth in the use of networking related to the decision to allow the Internet wide-area network to become basically a free market?
Yes.
Is it a decision that anyone at NSF regrets?
Well, there might have been some regret because there's a sense that it's ours. But I think that the federal government through NSF has served the government's role. We recognized that it was time to make the Internet public, since it was a public domain operation. Part of the concern now is that the increased use of the Internet occasions a more rapid response than we had anticipated. It's probably going to take three to five years for the Internet to achieve the steady state that truly reflects the best interests of the civilian, government, business, and education sectors. What I'm excited about is that as the Internet develops, we can link it with community-sited or even state-sited digital libraries.
And that's another way of helping schools that have little or no funding for technology.
The three systemic initiative programs represent incredibly important test sites because they provide the opportunity to learn how to help provide for school systems with limited resources.
What do you think about the Clinton Administration's call to redo our science policy with Science in the National Interest?
The most important part of this recommendation is the synergy required throughout education. First, all kinds of collaborations, partnerships, and linkages within research are important, as is including the public and private sector. Second, the broad issue of education is not a separate enterprise. One reason the three fundamental problems developed in school systems is because of the separation between education and research that occurred over the last three or four decades. Math, science, and technology education were treated as separate enterprises from the research that promoted them. This policy will continue to be useful in discussions on public policy, planning, strategies, etc.
Considering the present political climate, how do you feel about federally funded efforts to encourage diversity programs?
The Department of Justice has asked each agency to examine all diversity programs. We're in the process of doing so, which means we're answering questions such as: What are you doing? Why are you doing it? and Could you achieve this objective without such programs? For gender-specific programs, the answer is an easy 'no,' since there are no options. But the implied question to that answer is, what price would society pay if the program didn't exist?
I don't really know what's going to happen, but I think the environment in Washington with respect to diversity programs is very distressing and incongruous. NSF has made incredible progress in this arena, and all of our programs focus on solving a problem. If you want to improve the representation of minorities in science and technology, you need to set a baseline and establish goals. When the goals are met, the program is terminated. Although we've done very well, there's a distinct possibility that that progress will be disrupted. That's disconcerting.
Would you agree with the statement that America lacks the will to educate everyone equally?
You can find an answer by considering the American workforce. We live in the high-tech information era. That's the economic landscape; that's what determines workforce requirements. The affective components that bear on education suggest it isn't 1995 but is 1955--at best. Our challenge is to confront social-political constructs whose goals are incompatible with our programming. In some areas of the country, for example, citizens do not feel that most students need quality math and science education.
You're also bringing up the idea that our young people lack hope. I'm referring to what William Raspberry of The Washington Post wrote about young black men in particular.
Yes, that's right.
Is this your way of trying to give back some hope?
When I'm asked what we are trying to contribute through these programs, I have two responses. First, I'm responsible for ensuring that more Americans have the education they need to become quality performers in the country's scientific and technical workforce. Second, our agenda will improve the quality of life for many young citizens who have very few options or, to echo Bill Raspberry, who don't have hope.
I was in St. Louis recently visiting a new middle school. During the tour, several African-American seventh- and eighth-graders proudly shared with me their performances in math. What I found remarkable was that this was only the second or third time since they had been in school that they had performed with excellence. Now they were hopeful.
And it's basically simple.
It's not nuclear medicine! It's simply helping young people who understand--despite the fact that they might seem to be losers--the quality of life that more prosperous members of society have. Even if they appear to disdain it, it doesn't mean they don't desire it. Suddenly, these students were, in effect, telling me that they were of value and they were going to do well.
Part of that is something else you've spoken out about, and that is high standards. We might as well expect the best.
That's exactly what happened. One reason our school systems are struggling is that people have believed America's efforts to address equity-based issues should be made with indifference to standards and expectations. Most programs under desegregation orders were only transportation programs. If you're going to promote desegregation, you should require education-specific deliverables. Schools should know what they are expected to accomplish. Unfortunately, those monies are gone. But, as you said, young people will perform to the level you expect of them. It's almost criminal to lower the standards because many young people will never realize what their talents are or what they could do.
When your tenure at NSF is complete, what do you want to be remembered for?
I would like to be remembered for having established public K-12 school systems that provide young people with the math and science preparation they need to be effective and productive citizens and workers.
Are you feeling pretty good about that at this point?
Yes, I am. Consider these examples of the program's success. Although the Urban Systemic Initiative in Detroit has only been in place for a year and a half, you would think the initiative was in its third or fourth year. The major changes Detroit has made with the community's support are very gratifying. Almost every indicator of the existing Detroit school system was decidedly negative. Recently I was visiting with the leadership in Chicago to ensure that they understood the deliverables expected by NSF. Not only did they understand them, they also invited me to help them consider how our reform approach in math and science education could be expanded to all subjects. So we have the opportunity to do something rather novel in Chicago, too.
Click here to access the Office of Systemic Reform Sidebar that accompanied this interview.