BTB: Of all the programs you’ve implemented in Atlanta Public Schools, what is the one you’re most proud of?

BH: I am most proud of Project GRAD, which is an acronym for "graduation really achieves dreams." When I came to Atlanta, I introduced the program with the help of the Ford Foundation and Lucent Technologies. Project GRAD is a program first introduced in Houston. It had been developed by James Ketelsen, former CEO of Tenneco Inc. in conjunction with the Ford Foundation and Henry Schacht, who later became CEO of Lucent Technologies and chairman of the board of the Ford Foundation.

When I first heard about it, I thought the results were too good to be true. So when Ketelsen, Schacht, and Steve Zwerling, also from the Ford Foundation, approached me when I was in Newark, I said, "I know there's no silver bullet. I know this thing couldn't be what it is. I want to go to Houston and see it." So I went to Houston and was blown away by what I saw. I sent my research people, union members, and parents. I became convinced that if we implemented this program with fidelity—because it was based on research-based practices—and if we really stuck with it, we would see tremendous improvement in students who are in what are considered the lowest-performing schools.

When I arrived in Atlanta, I invited members of the corporate community, the philanthropic community, and my board for a talk the day before I took office. I outlined this program and told them we would need to raise $20 million in five years to fully implement Project GRAD. Originally we chose three clusters in Atlanta—the lowest-functioning schools. Some of the CEOs told me not to go into the lowest schools right away, but to go into the middle group to make some wins. Atlanta had five superintendents in ten years so everyone was skeptical, particularly the philanthropic community who asked, "We need to give $20 million to this?" I remember my first visit to one of the largest foundations here. One man literally said, "Dr. Hall, we're tired of superintendents coming in with these big plans. We wake up two days later and they're out the door. Tell us why you think we should invest in Project GRAD." After encouraging them to see the gains for themselves, and sharing the data on the program, I told them I would establish systemwide targets as if this were No Child Left Behind. We would predict the gains we need to make in reading and math annually, and we'd move children from the bottom to the top. I said, "I can only meet those targets if you help with the implementation of Project GRAD." So rather than taking five years to raise $20 million, we raised it in three years, and we were able to begin to implement Project GRAD during my first year as superintendent. The program includes research-based components for teaching literacy and math as well as family support, discipline, and attendance components. Additionally, Project GRAD schools have social workers whose job is to link families to outside support agencies.

Because I was able to implement this program in the lowest-functioning schools, the entire system progressed more quickly than predicted. This past year 100 percent of our sixty-two elementary schools all made adequate yearly progress. The Council of the Great City Schools cannot point to any other urban school district that can make such a claim. We are very proud of Project GRAD and are beginning to see our graduation rates double and triple already. And to me, it's still early in the game. The children who started first grade when I came to Atlanta just entered ninth grade this year. Over the next three years I will actually be able to see the full impact of the program on the students who have remained in the district. The ones who've been there consistently from grades one through twelve will graduate in 2011. It will be something to see.

BTB: What is the one particular challenge to which you feel you've given a knock-out punch?

BH: Teacher quality is the single most important issue facing urban school systems. Even as we ask teachers to teach to higher standards, we have the challenge of getting appropriately trained teachers to come into urban systems and teach to the standards. In Atlanta, rather than bemoan the fact that we cannot get teachers from the colleges we want, we have invested heavily in professional development. The positive results our system has experienced come from of our investment in job-embedded professional development. For example, in Project GRAD schools we have math and reading facilitators, instructional specialists, and model teacher-leaders. That's what our teachers and principals tell us they value the most—people who follow up with them on the professional development that's provided in the context of their school. These staff members sit with them when they plan—they all have common planning time in all the elementary schools. They talk about data, what they're doing in the classroom, and how they can change their practice to get different results at the end of the day. Professional development—time for it and the quality of it—is key to turning around urban schools. I believe Atlanta has done an excellent job in showing that when you really invest in teacher quality, preparation, and training, you get good results, particularly in our elementary schools' literacy programs.

At the same time, we have invested in instructional professional development for our principals. To provide effective feedback, building-level leaders really must understand what's taking place in the classroom. Only then will teachers find those leaders credible when they receive their evaluations.

BTB: Is Atlanta Public Schools involved with national teacher certification?

BH: Yes, we have supported national teacher certification from the beginning. We give incentives to our teachers to be nationally certified, and consequently have dramatically increased the number of teachers with national certification. But, we don't have nearly as many as we want. In my balanced scorecard, where we measure different aspects of our performance, we actually measure the number of nationally board certified teachers we employ. It's one of our data points. In my senior cabinet meeting when I began to wrestle with the budget, and people were asking if we should continue to invest in the national board certification, I was able to point to the data and to research that demonstrates that national board certification is making a difference in student outcomes. I believe that all of our teachers need quality training to do their job well.

BTB: Some statespeople advocate for computers and technology to be one of the main sources of how instruction is driven. Do you agree?

BH: I believe technology is a tool that will help with the teaching process, but technology is not going to be a substitute for good teaching. Many of our schools in Atlanta are buying Prometheus boards and all of the other technological tools to help students respond more quickly to instruction. For math, we certainly have all of the graphing calculators, etc., that students need. We have computers in the classrooms and learning technology specialists in all of our schools. They help integrate technology with teaching, not replace teaching with technology. I still think there is a need for teachers to help engage kids in inquiries, figure things out, and work collaboratively to come up with solutions. Teachers direct lessons, facilitate discussion, and link learning to real-life experiences. All of that, in my humble opinion, cannot be done by technology alone, but we should be able to have technology help us. Of course, clearly for differentiated instruction, where a child may be finished or has mastered a concept, they can go on and do something else while the teacher is working with another group. But I don't think technology can replace teaching, and I don't think kids are going to respond very well if they only interact with some form of technology all day. Even though they love it, I think there's a need for students to have human interaction throughout the learning process in school.

BTB: If you had an endless budget to develop a program specifically in Atlanta Public Schools, what would it be?

BH: We are enhancing what we consider to be best practices. Right now, we've invested heavily in an instructional management system, and it’s very costly. We've given every single teacher and every principal in Atlanta a laptop computer so that, at any time, they can access their benchmark assessments. Information is disaggregated by student so they can look at domains to determine what needs to be retaught. Additionally, they can use formative assessments to really change the way instruction is delivered to ensure children achieve mastery of concepts. With the technology we have today, we should be able to do that, as well as add video clips of Atlanta teachers teaching to the standards by using the curriculum and researching concepts at any time. They can look and say, "Tomorrow I have to teach this class. Let me see if I have a video here of someone teaching it so I can really get a sense of how I should go about it." We want our teachers to have state-of-the art support that's user-friendly and continue to enhance their practice to become master teachers.

I also believe we have to examine how we compensate our teachers. A recent article in the Economist reported on a McKinsey study that looked at all of the countries that are out-performing America. The United States is ranked twenty-fifth of the twenty-nine industrialized countries in terms of math and science achievement. The study found that one of the distinguishing facts between the United States and other countries that have high achievement is that those countries attract their brightest and best people to the field of teaching. Here, the opposite occurs. Our brightest and best are going every place except into teaching. So we have to first invest in who we have, but we also have to make teaching a career that is viewed as equal to law or medicine. If we all say that education is the secret to the success of this country, then we're going to have to find a way to get more capable people into the field. We have Teach for America in Atlanta, but participants only make a two-year commitment. The program recruits people who have intellectual capital and who we want in education, and then we work with them on instructional methodology. But by the time they get going, they have the option to leave. We need to do something where our children go to Princeton or to Spelman College—to the top schools—and decide to teach without people looking down on them. I think those things need to be addressed.

BTB: As you look forward, what do you see as unfinished work in your district and how are you approaching it?

BH: Last year when I gave my state of the system address to the corporate and philanthropic communities, universities, civic agencies, and all the principals and key central office staff at Atlanta Public Schools, I compared my tenure to climbing a mountain. We had focused with such intentionality on literacy. I told them that we're safely at the midpoint of the mountain, but that the second half of the climb is always the most dangerous. It's always the toughest, and it's going to take everything we have to get to the top. And what we must take on, if we're ever to move up that second half, is math, science, and our high schools. We know we have just about closed the gap in our elementary schools. We are improving at twice the rate of the state at the elementary level, which means that we're catching up really fast. But the middle and high schools still have big challenges. And we have to look at K–12 math and science because, even though we have shown great progress at the elementary level, particularly in reading and language arts, math and science remain way below where they should be.

Some believe our elementary school teachers are not prepared to teach math and science when they come out of college. Many don't like it, so they avoid it. People who major in math and science do not come running into education because they can get much better salaries if they go into research or medicine. The standards are getting higher, and we're asking teachers to teach algebra and all of the subjects that students need to get into college. However those teachers have not been well trained to teach that content so the scores are lower. We'll never get up that mountain if we do not address these issues. So, I called on the community to step up. I asked for help and resources to provide the kind of professional development and incentives necessary to attract and retain the best teachers. This fall, the GE Foundation awarded a $22 million grant to the Atlanta Public Schools to address improvement in K–12 math and science. The Gates Foundation and The Wallace Foundation are also helping us with this critical work.

Thanks to the Wallace Foundation, we've provided leadership training for more than one hundred principals, and the Gates Foundation is helping us transform all our high schools into small schools with small learning communities. Early data clearly shows that this transformation in instruction and structure is working for us.

Right now, we're also putting together a middle school transformation plan. It's similar to the high school transformation plan. We know we have to show that we can change the lowest-functioning middle school. Therefore, we opened two single-gender academies this year. At our most troubled middle school, we have our sixth-grade girls in one facility and our sixth-grade boys in another. The 100 Black Men of Atlanta and Morehouse College have linked with the boys' school. The Atlanta Cluster of the Links, Inc. and Spelman College have partnered with the girls school. We had close to three-hundred applicants for each of the principal jobs. Now, there is a different ethos—a different culture—and students and staff have higher expectations. These are kids from the same neighborhood who were performing so poorly in a school with so much dysfunction. You would not believe these are the same kids. Next, we’re building two new schools for them, and we plan to grow the schools one grade at a time for grades 6–12. At the same time, we are redesigning all the other middle schools across the system.

We have a lot going on in Atlanta. We're moving very quickly, but we know it takes time. We can't overwhelm the system. We have to train people, bring them along, implement programs and instructional practices, and then continue to provide professional development and support.