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For Public Comments to the Commission, please click here
00088
1 glove with the White House initiative. They
2 are designed to be a resource for the
3 commissioners who are here to help us get our
4 job done.
5 So you all have met most of the
6 staff members. They are an incredibly helpful
7 group, incredibly hard working group of
8 people. They reflect Leslie's dedication to
9 this, and throughout the ranks. So I want to
10 encourage all of us, especially once we get
11 into committees, to feel very open and to
12 initiate contact with them. They will
13 initiate it with you, too. To initiate
14 contact with them. I think they are going to
15 be a tremendous help to us in giving us
16 feedback. They have an enormous amount of
17 data that has already been collected. They
18 can help show us the way at various times.
19 They can give us very good feedback from what
20 is going on with other agencies, what is going
21 on at the White House in terms of initiatives
22 that the President, the administration, will
00089
1 be scheduling at various times.
2 To the degree that we as a
3 commission can, in our own efforts, to fulfill
4 our mission, to the degree we can dovetail
5 along with other efforts that are going on
6 within the government, that is going to be
7 critical. As you all know, we have had some
8 various chats about the size of our budget,
9 which is not staggering. Maybe staggering in
10 its paucity. It is going to be critical that
11 we figure out ways to work with other agencies
12 and work with other governmental units,
13 governmental efforts, so we piggyback onto
14 those. I think we will increase our leverage
15 and our ability to be effective.
16 So these committees were going
17 to -- Pat is going to walk us through. We are
18 going to have a couple of functions. One
19 function is going to be a research function.
20 We are going to be looking for what are the
21 best practices out there, what are the
22 recommendations we want to put together.
00090
1 The other function which sort of
2 goes hand and glove with the research function
3 is a public awareness, a campaign and effort
4 that we are going to have.
5 The reason the research and public
6 awareness go hand in hand, obviously, part of
7 the whole, the macro picture here, is that
8 that needs to continue, the fact that this
9 commission even exists. The reception that we
10 had last night with the Congressmen and the
11 Senators and the leadership that was there.
12 Part of the part of the inherent
13 modus operandi here is to continue to raise
14 awareness for education within the
15 Hispanic-American community. As we are out
16 there collecting our research, and having
17 focus groups or surveys, or hearings in
18 various cities, we want to be cognizant of the
19 fact that publicity is part of that. The
20 awareness, the public awareness we can draw to
21 the issue, is part of the reason for this
22 commission's existence. And so that all sort
00091
1 of fits together as we are going about this
2 research function.
3 The next function we have, we are
4 going to be analyzing the data. And this is
5 sort of self-explanatory. I want to break it
6 down so we can be thinking about this as
7 committees. Finally, we are going to be
8 composing the recommendations that we want to
9 put together in a plan in the report, and
10 submitting those recommendations to the
11 commission as a whole.
12 I am going to turn it over to Pat.
13 She is going to talk some about these
14 committees. After we take a break, we will
15 come back and one of the things we want to try
16 to address today is what sort of membership do
17 we see on these committees and then, next,
18 what kind of time line do we see. Obviously,
19 we don't have a very long fuse for what we are
20 supposed to produce here. We need to start
21 thinking about a time line. When the
22 committees will be getting things back to the
00092
1 commission as a whole, when the commission as
2 a whole will be meeting and producing the
3 report we are charged with.
4 I will turn it over to Pat.
5 MS. MAZZUCA: Let's take a little
6 stretch here.
7 This is a dialogue. I want to be
8 really clear, both Frank and I, although we
9 feel very, very proud and honored to cochair
10 and facilitate, that neither one of our styles
11 are to tell you exactly what needs to happen
12 but, rather, also for all of us together to
13 figure it out. We have had some dialogue and
14 have some ideas but certainly none of what we
15 are proposing is written in stone. And we
16 need to hear from you. So please, at any
17 given time, as either one of us are giving
18 ideas for, really, for time's sake only and to
19 frame it out, just raise your hand and say, I
20 think you are all wet on that one, or we
21 totally don't agree, or we do agree, and then
22 we will take it from there.
00093
1 I did ask Desi to check on our
2 checkout time. She has had it extended. So
3 although we will take a break, as Frank said,
4 to stretch, we don't have to rush down there
5 to pack in six and-a-half minutes to get back
6 up here.
7 Talking about committees and
8 talking about where we go, each one of us has
9 a passion for something that is happening. I
10 see Chris and already I am energized to go
11 back and rewrite my school plan. I am
12 kindergarten through 12th grade. I didn't
13 open a can of worms with Mel Martinez here. I
14 was very good because I stayed quiet, because
15 I have had fantastically positive experiences
16 with kids doing well in bilingual ed.
17 Where do we go? We were looking
18 at committees based on looking at the family,
19 what is the function of the family and the
20 educational process. How does it impact?
21 When we are talking about exactly the
22 education gap, how does it work out, what can
00094
1 we do, and who would be best to serve on a
2 committee that we can look at, with the
3 family. Then we talk about the educator, the
4 teacher, the education center. Then we talked
5 about government resources and accountability.
6 We looked at that as being a committee that
7 would look at how does the Federal Government
8 impact on what really happens within the
9 family and the education system and how do we
10 monitor the accountability so what we are
11 doing is really making the positive impact.
12 Then, of course, and many of you here are the
13 community and the community partnerships. The
14 business corporations, beyond the business
15 corporations, as well. So that's why we kind
16 of put that as community partnerships.
17 Remember what Frank talked about.
18 Each and every one of these -- again, there
19 are four committees. Again, look at what are
20 the best practices, how are we going to ensure
21 that there is local control, that we are
22 looking at local control, flexibility, local
00095
1 control. How are we looking at whether we are
2 doing the research, the analysis. Again,
3 here, we are looking at right at Leslie and
4 all of the other folks that we have and
5 beyond. Some of the other commissions that
6 are going to be doing work that we can
7 piggyback on. So we can get the best data
8 available so that, when we are analyzing the
9 data, we make sure that we keep a wide focus
10 as we are narrowing down some of the issues
11 that we are really going to be able to work on
12 in our time lines. We are not going to be
13 able to do everything.
14 We are looking at our first report
15 coming out end of September, what that report
16 might look like. It may look like this is
17 what the committee feels, these are the
18 recommendations we have come up with after we
19 have been looking at the data. It may be
20 nothing more than that at that point in time.
21 That could be okay. However, the
22 recommendations that we are looking at or the
00096
1 data that we are analyzing needs to be data
2 that has broad perspective and is looking at
3 the nation as a whole and has everybody's
4 input in it so that we are making sure that we
5 have the pulse on all of the communities that
6 we are trying to -- that we are serving at
7 this point in time.
8 Frank and I thought, well, how do
9 we go about setting up committees? We felt
10 that we needed to ask you which of the
11 committees you would like to serve on, number
12 one. If you had any different ideas on how to
13 structure this. Just because we thought this
14 was an efficient way for us to organize,
15 because, obviously, much of the work is going
16 to be done at sort of the E-mail, through the
17 fax, through phone conferences, at the
18 subcommittee or committee level. We are going
19 to call it a committee. Right, Frank? We are
20 a commission. We are going to call it a
21 committee. We needed to hear from you on your
22 areas of interest.
00097
1 Again, let me repeat. We are
2 talking about families. We are talking about
3 educators. We are talking about the
4 government resources and accountability. And
5 we are talking about community partnerships.
6 So each one of us has a strength
7 and, I know, a bias. Let me hear how you
8 feel.
9 MR. HANNA: Let me add --
10 MS. SANCHEZ: Criteria.
11 MR. HANNA: Let me emphasize a
12 little bit about -- and Leslie has helped us
13 think through some of this. There are a
14 couple of ways we might organize. You might
15 say, well, should we organize based on
16 elementary education, higher education. Sort
17 of in a functional way, how does the education
18 system work. You might organize committees
19 based on that. However, the President has had
20 some incredible success in Texas with a broad
21 plan of transforming the cultural aspirations
22 and emphasizing that aspect. And I think
00098
1 building on that kind of success, the notion
2 here is that, as opposed to splitting the
3 committees into functions within the
4 educational system, maybe we want to think
5 about how the committees are broken up in
6 terms of constituencies within the community.
7 In terms of families, educators, community
8 groups. And in a way the government is not
9 really a constituency but they are a major
10 player. These are sort of the big players
11 within solving the problem. The families, the
12 educators, the community groups and the
13 government. And when we say government, we
14 are talking about not only Federal Government,
15 which is part of the monitoring process we are
16 supposed to go through, but also, obviously,
17 the local governments where most of the
18 funding takes place.
19 Also, I want to add with regard to
20 the community groups, that we sort of have
21 three categories there. You have the
22 corporate types of partnership that Chris'
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