Nancy Madden

If you want real change to occur, you don't need to be fighting against, you know, sabotage going on.

Yeah, it was horrendous.

Their PowerPoints had examples and we were not on their list of examples.

Our schools were told, you have to stop using Success for All. It's not on the reading first list. You cannot use it anymore.

We had a staff of 500 people and we fired half of them. It was just awful.

Er wurde von der Universität York gefordert, einen wissenschaftsbasierten Bericht zu starten. Nancy sagt, in England gab es mehr Unterstützung für ihre Arbeit. Und sie sagt, England war auch eine schöne Veränderung der Szenerie. Das ist das, was ich liebte.

And so we're talking about how would you change the schools?

At the time, Baltimore City schools were failing half of their high school students. I mean, they were just dropping out. And he said, this is wrong. This is not good enough. And he issued a challenge. Here you are, Johns Hopkins University. You know, you're so smart.

Hier ist, was sie ihm gesagt haben.

So we started with full-time pre-K for the language focus, because the first thing you have to do is get the language base laid before you even start thinking about letters and sounds and that sort of thing.

Sie waren interessiert in dem, was populär war.

Reed's a very odd place. I mean, it's where you go to be very intellectual and very disruptive.

Die Kinder kamen nicht zur Schule, also musste die Aufmerksamkeit beantwortet werden. Die Eltern waren engagiert, also musste man die Eltern engagieren. Sie mussten Tutoring haben, weil Kinder, die anfangen, hinterherzufallen, wenn man sie nicht zurücknimmt, damit sie die Grundinstruktionen übernehmen können, dann wirst du sie einfach immer verlieren.

Wir haben nicht viele dieser Konzepte entwickelt, wir haben sie zusammengebaut. Wir haben versucht, zu schauen, was die beste Praktik ist.

The disparities in opportunity for children were just so obvious at that time.

We were researchers. We did everything as a study.

Our first date was to go on a walk to sort of talk about how do we improve education?

There was an orphanage that he was a bus driver for when he was 16 years old. And, you know, we both as high school kids knew that there was just so much inequality of opportunity for kids that didn't need to be.

We don't want success for all to be the thing that everybody uses.

We have to maintain the expectation that kids really can succeed.

We have to remember that kids can learn. We can do better. There's a way to do it. You could be Steubenville.

I don't want to validate that approach to reviewing what instruction should be. It's the wrong approach. We need to judge what's the outcome. We need to look at what is the evidence of effectiveness.

What we wanted to do was show that the evidence could matter.