Interview with Raymond P. Lorion

Karen Blair: Dr. Lorion, thank you so much for sharing with us your reflections on your own professional growth and your professional career. This will add greatly to our understanding of the evolution of teacher education at Towson University. I think a good place to begin would be in the beginning, so would you share with us some thoughts about your early social context: where you grew up, what you were thinking in terms of possible career choices as you went through school. Ray Lorion: Okay. I grew up in Worcester, Mass. I was in a family with five children. I was the middle with two older brothers and two younger sisters. Through the eighth grade, I went to a parochial school. I then went to a Jesuit-based prep school in Worcester on scholarship. Then I went to Tufts University on scholarship. K.B.: When you were in high school, did you have any sense of what you might be thinking of doing professionally? R.L.: Yes, I was pretty clear I was going to be a physician. K.B.: An MD? R.L.: An MD. Went to Tufts University in the pre-med program. I think I made it through three semesters and was dying of boredom. K.B.: Really? R.L.: I thought basically what I was doing was memorizing a whole bunch of stuff. We had a family friend who was a psychoanalyst. Went and sat with him because I had taken a psychology course. Went and talked to him about, “So, what’s the difference between being a psychiatrist and a psychologist?” His answer essentially was, “If you want to make a lot of money be a psychiatrist. If you want to make less, but know what you’re doing, be a psychologist!” So I switched to psychology. Made it really clear to the faculty that my interest was only in clinical psych; that I wasn’t interested in becoming a faculty member or a researcher or anything. Then left Tufts and went to Rochester. Actually, I started at the University of Texas Clinical Psych program in fall of 1968. I stayed for a semester. There were a number of things about it that I simply found distasteful. Dropped out; used to work for a home builder during the summers. I went back home and worked for nine months as a fulltime carpenter. Rochester had accepted me originally. When I called, they said that it was still open to go back there. So I went there in the fall of ‘69. Spent three years there. Completed my Ph.D. Was then completely ready to begin career as a clinical psychologist. In fact, I was being interviewed for a clinical position back in Massachusetts. K.B.: Did you have any opportunity to try out any kind of professional experiences when you were going through the doctoral program? R.L.: Sure. For much of the time it was a mix of course work and clinical work. I did internships, three of them. One of them in an outpatient VA clinic where I worked with returning Vietnam Vets. I then did a rotation at University of Rochester Medical School that involved working in the emergency room in psychiatry. Then I went to the outpatient mental health clinic. I finished my rotation in the public health section of psychiatry at Rochester. Again, my intent was to complete my doctoral work and work in a mental health setting and in private practice. I expressed those goals directly to my dissertation advisor and explained that I would like him to be my advisor because of his reputation of getting people out quickly. He had to understand however that I wasn’t interested in prevention; I wasn’t interested in an academic career. I didn’t even expect to work with kids. K.B.: So what were you looking for when you completed this doctorate? R.L.: I expected to be a full time clinician in an outpatient setting. I did some inpatient work. I didn’t find it particularly interesting. I thought being an ER “shrink” was challenging and very interesting. I was about to accept a community mental health position in Massachusetts. I got a phone call from my advisor saying his research coordinator had just taken another position and would I be willing to stay in Rochester an extra year and coordinate his community-based prevention project in Rochester City Schools. Apparently, that was the beginning of the end or the end of the beginning. Since then I’ve been involved in school-based mental health research and school-based prevention research. K.B.: One look at your professional history and it is apparent that you have been very much involved in communities and the health of those communities in a variety of positions with higher education affiliations at Johns Hopkins and Ohio and Maryland, Temple and University of Pennsylvania. It’s a rich history and we don’t certainly have the time for you to tell us about all of it, but are there certain highlights, things that sort of shaped you professionally that you could share with us? R.L.: I was doing this outpatient clinic at Rochester. Part of my agreement to stay in the research coordinator job was that I had to be a clinician. The medical school hired me one day a week to set up a low income mental health clinic with some other colleagues. It was working really successfully. In the middle of it, I read a book by Matthew Dumont from Harvard called The Absurd Healer. Dumont was doing the same kind of clinic at Harvard. What it pointed out was that he suddenly came to the realization that no matter what he did, the waiting room would never end. That really moved me from doing only clinical treatment to thinking about prevention. Much of my career then was involved in not only looking at what brings people at risk for mental health problems but more importantly what are the sort of secondary effects as they move along, what I’ve referred to as the pathogenic sequence. If kids are having trouble in school, that causes at least behavioral problems. That leads to turmoil with parents, etcetera. The dilemma was if you go into prevention, you have to keep moving along the pathogenic etiological pathway. That’s sort of: What comes before? Okay let’s work on that. What comes before and work on that. Inevitably, I ended up working with relatively young kids. Sort of the “Willie Sutton;” the reason he robbed banks is because that’s where the money was. The reason I got involved in schools is that’s where the kids were. My work at Rochester and Temple became how do we find kids particularly at risk, back in the 70’s for what was called minimal brain damage or what is now called ADHD. We identified ways to identify those kids pre-kindergarten. Then I became involved in the politics of prevention. I remember a discussion while I was at Temple with the superintendent in Philadelphia who said, “While we could reduce the number of kids identified as educationally handicapped by X percentage, it wasn’t enough because it would create a problem in terms of the distribution of special ed. teachers.” It was not economically viable for them to prevent a third or more of the cases. If they couldn’t prevent somewhere between a half and two-thirds, they weren’t interested. I then brought that work down to the University of Tennessee but got waylaid for a couple of years to go and work with the federal government as a visiting scientist and then as the Associate Administration for Prevention at what was then the Alcohol Drug Abuse and Mental Health Administration, and spent those two years and five years thereafter writing federal policy on the prevention of mental health disorders. I advised the Reagan White House for some years around the Office of Drug Intervention and the like. At Maryland, we were going to replicate the work of picking up kids’ early except the superintendent of Prince George’s County said I could do that but first I had to help him figure out how many fourth and fifth grade kids were involved with drugs so they could apply to the federal government for “Drug Free Schools” money. We began to look at what was the prevalence of kids’ involvements early with drugs. That opened up a whole set of things around physical development in girls. It opened up the whole issue of one of the significant risk factors at that time. The crack wars were going on in the early 1980s and we began to look at kids’ exposure to violence and kids exposure to community violence. We began to talk about community violence as an environmental toxin. It has atmospheric implications. It affected whether or not kids went outside. It affected parents’ willingness to allow children out of their sight. It affected kids’ sense of life expectancy. As we looked at kids early involvement in drugs, we discovered that while the federal government, at that point, was saying, “Just say no to drug use,” they never said, “Just say no to being involved in the sale and distribution of drugs.” In discussion with drug users and dealers, we found that one of the most effective prevention programs for kids below grade four involved the drug sellers. The sellers would use these kids as observers. They would also use these kids basically to carry the drug to the buyer and the money to the seller. If the kid got picked up, the kid could say, “I have no idea what’s in the envelope.” If the kid got picked up . . . because the kid had to attend school regularly, had to do well, had to stay out of trouble . . . they almost always got released. Then in our work with drug sellers, what we learned is that they had a career ladder. What they would do is pay the kids with money until it reached a point at which they then began to pay them partially in money and partially in product. The kids could either sell the product or use the product. They would regularly give kids samples. If they could move the kids into dependency, they didn’t have to pay them. Literally, then it was Darwinian. The really bright kids made it up the ranks. The less bright kids got arrested or something. That led us to start looking at the overall ecology of schools, how do you turn schools into positive safe sites. That’s really the work I did at Maryland. Then part of the time I worked with the prevention folks at Hopkins. The whole purpose of my going to University of Pennsylvania was to continue that work on exposure to community violence. They had brought in a group of us who had expertise in community violence, but they also were developing, at the School of Education, a Penn Partnership School in the West Philadelphia area. I was directing a doctoral program in school/community/clinical child psychology for the University of Pennsylvania. We combined education on ecological studies with training people specifically to then go into schools and be prevention experts. K.B.: You were at the University of Pennsylvania for? R.L.: About five years. K.B.: And then you get a call? R.L.: Then I get a call. K.B.: Somebody says, “Ray, do we have a job for you!” R.L.: Dr. Paul Jones called and said I had been nominated to be considered the Dean of Education at Towson. My first response, and I should always listen to myself, is “I have no interest in being a Dean.” K.B.: Uh-huh. R.L.: But then I called two people. The first person I called was Brit Kirwan, who’d been a friend, who was my provost and president when I was at Maryland. We stayed in contact because I was at Ohio and he was at Ohio State. He was one of the strong supporters of my going to Penn. So I called Brit and I said, “Brit, interesting conversation. Yadda, yadda. Why would I possibly want to do it?” He said that he had returned to Maryland. This was an absolute perfect job because of Towson’s reputation with schools. The fact that part of what he understood the president wanted from Towson was somebody who would open doors into Baltimore City schools. Then I called a long-term mentor and personal friend, which was Dr. Seymour Sarason from Yale. Seymour and I had worked together and been in contact for 30 years. In a nutshell, Seymour said, “If you want to change schools, you got to change teacher education.” Effectively he said, “Pal, it’s time to put up or shut-up,” which is why I decided to take the job. The other reality was that our kids had never left Maryland. My wife, who always has more votes than me on things like this said, “We’re going.” K.B.: Obviously, you considered this greatly. What did you envision doing when you came to Towson as the Dean of Education? R.L.: I was clear that I wanted to do three things. This was sort of the charge given to me by the president and the then Provost Brennan. One, in some sense, I had to work to change the culture of the college so that the college faculty were more involved in research and scholarship than they had been. Two, what I wanted to do was to begin to involve the faculty in the courses around issues not only of responding to kids’ school-based needs, but also to sensitize them to “what happens in schools often times is a ripple of what happens outside the school.” Thirdly, what was really clear to me was a real concern that Towson, which produced more teachers than any institution in the state of Maryland, had almost none of its students take jobs in Baltimore City. It seemed to me to be unconscionable. The other is that one of my colleagues at Penn, Richard Ingersoll, who was then beginning to do the work on teacher retention and attrition. I’ve been involved in the preparation of physicians and psychiatrists. I’ve been involved clearly in the preparation of clinical psychologists and lots of career clinical scientists. Had a real problem when I heard that 40% or so of teachers were out of the profession in five years. We weren’t talking about what I did, moving from job A to job B to job C, but always in the same field. We’re talking about people who went to an undergraduate program to become teachers and within five years decided, “I’ll do whatever else I can do, but I don’t want to do that.” I’m still working on the “we have to do something about reducing the attrition” partly because when people like me designed school-based interventions, whether they’re behavioral interventions or academic interventions, and they put them into schools that are particularly challenging, what you always find in the early times, the first three to five years, it typically works really well. What you then find is that you can’t sustain the change. It became really clear that you can’t sustain the change because the people you trained are gone. What you effectively have to do is keep starting again. We all know it takes at minimum three to five years to become a really effective teacher just like any other profession. We were bringing people in, spending lots of resources. We still do. Basically, we were losing 40% of our product. The fact is, particularly in the schools that I worked most closely with, which is inner city schools, low performing schools, part of the problem is you can’t create a strong school if you keep changing the principal. You can’t create a solid body of teachers if you keep changing the principal. If the teachers leave, the parents have no reason to believe the school cares about their kids’ education. We’re really clear that teachers don’t decide to leave in April and May to leave. They decide in October and November and then they just sort of tread water in many cases. A parent goes back and says, “Where’s so and so that taught my last kid?” The answer is he or she is gone. Parents very clearly say, “What makes you think we’re going to believe you care about our kids?” That’s been, I think, the things I’m hoping before I get out of here, that we will have made some headway on. K.B.: Would you share with us some of the things that you’ve done, and you’ve established as Dean, that have connected us more with city schools and that community? R.L.: One of the things, and it was sort of serendipitous that I was involved with it, is what’s called the “Cherry Hill Learning Zone.” Cherry Hill is a low income, predominately African- American community in Southeast Baltimore City. It has a long history of being essentially isolated both geographically and culturally from the city and economically from the city. You have to go across bridges to get in and out of it. At one point, it was a relatively effective working class, African-American community with about 20,000 residents. It was designed in the late-40s as a place for returning World War II Vets to be employed in the various factories in Baltimore. We became involved with setting up a program in the high school. To do that we really needed to get involved in the pre-K to eight schools that fed the high school. That meant the discussion went from talking to the high school to talking to the public schools. We then talked to the principals. It is a unique community. It has four K-8 schools within a two-mile circumference. It’s about a half a mile between any school to any school. When we talked to parents and teachers, the issue for schools became whether the community supported the schools. That led us to talk us to Baltimore City about their support of the community. Ultimately, we developed a contract that Towson’s President signed, the mayor signed, the current superintendent of schools signed and the community agencies, including the ministers, etcetera, signed that Towson would go in as a partner in what was a community wide intervention around improving schools. We probably gathered about 2.5 million dollars of outside money, including a congressional set aside. We’ve had some success. When we started all four K-8 were in restructuring. At this point, one of them is closed. The other three are performing pretty well. Most importantly, what we’re now in is discussion about creating the neighborhood as a focus for preparing teachers for urban schools. Literally the city is going to rebuild all the schools from the ground up. They’re either going to gut and renovate the schools or put in new schools. They’re now talking about doing the same with the high school. Over the next couple of years they’re talking about creating a campus. In effect, they won’t be three separate K-8 schools. What they will be is an integrated approach. One of the schools may deal with kids as early as two years old and go up to second grade. Two of them may be 3-8 schools. They will then, ideally, prepare students who are highly competitive for the all the competitive schools in Baltimore City. There will also be a content-focused high school (e.g. STEM; environmental sciences) that is going to be built. We’re discussing what the focus will be. They still see Towson as a real partner. Part of the agreement we’re discussing now is to turn that specifically into a place to train urban teachers. We would put interns from Early Childhood through Secondary and Special Ed. into this particular community. The city would use it to not only train pre-service teachers and then employ them but it would also use it to refresh teachers who are struggling in other challenging city schools and create new models for how you involve parents and how you fill in the educational gaps in the parents, which is a real problem in much of the city. K.B.: Ray, then would that involve a certification or coursework for the pre-service teachers who are involved? R.L.: I think we have to talk about what that is. Part of what we will be doing is involving some of what we’re learning through the Breakthrough Center work and the turnaround process that the state is leading. Baltimore City, Prince Georges County and Dorchester County are going through this process as part of Maryland’s Race to the Top grant, which leads into the second group that I’m involved with. Some years ago Brit Kirwan called and asked if I would work with the State Department of Education because they had received 250 million dollars from the federal government from Race to the Top, five million of which was targeted for evaluating, using formative and summative methods, all of their Race to the Top efforts. One hundred and twenty-five million of the money gets distributed among the school systems and the remaining125 million are for specific MSDE (Maryland State Department of Education) projects. I agreed to design such a research center as long as it was a USM Center and not just a Towson Center. It had to involve faculty and educational scientists and social scientists from across the system’s institutions. Right now we have probably 40 people involved in various research and evaluation projects. The intent is to create an entity that will last after 2014. My fantasy is that it will become the evaluation unit for MSDE. More importantly, it will also be an entity that any school system can call on to come in and do either formative or summative research, to do a needs assessment. When they write grants, they have to write evaluations. We could do that. We’re developing a large set of longitudinal data sets that will, in fact, allow them to document the impact of interventions on attendance, student outcomes, teacher retention, etcetera. Those will all be in place within a year. That’s one of the things you have here. I have also, for at least 12 years, been involved with Rosalynn Carter Institute for Caregiving out of Americus, Georgia. I’ve had the good fortune of working directly with President and Mrs. Carter during that period. My role is really to work with them around caregiving as a preventive intervention and also, given my background in evaluation science, work with them about how you evaluate caregiving. Mrs. Carter’s particular interest is in creating legislation that will support caregiving efforts as part of any kind of national health focused intervention. K.B.: Great. You also, for a long time, this is for your own professional growth, have been involved in work in South America. R.L.: I’ve had an appointment at Catholic University in Santiago, Chile since the mid to early 90’s. Initially, it was to go and work with them to develop a master’s programs in Community Psychology. Catholic University is the largest university in Chile. It’s a comprehensive university. It has a medical school, a law school, a school of public health. Part of my role has been to work with all of those entities and with the Chilean government around both preventive interventions and sort of university community partnerships. Some of the things we’re really proud of is we were able to change laws in Chile. In the past if a woman was physically abused, in an abusive relationship in a marriage . . . Chile is a Catholic county and does not allow divorce . . . not only couldn’t she get a divorce, if she left her husband, he could send the police to arrest her for abandoning him and she would be returned to him. The other is that the emergency rooms didn’t have a protocol for child sexual abuse since, in a Catholic country, that doesn’t happen. We were able both to change the laws about a husband’s right to demand that the police return his wife but also worked with a group of Chilean leaders, including the wife of the president, to make divorce and separation more feasible. We spent time learning about the Chilean health delivery system, which is based upon community clinics, but the other is that they develop natural social networks as one of the providers of health care. One of the interesting visits was to one of these community clinics where all of the babies born within a fixed period of time, and usually it’s somewhere between 10 and 15, when they have well baby visits, all 10 or 12 or so babies come on the same day at the same time. Mothers are around the table like this. As each baby gets examined by the pediatrician, the examination is discussed openly. Every mother gets to know what a symptom looks like. Every mother gets to know what she could do in the event that this happens. Every mother learns when to call the pediatrician. What’s really important, and what the pediatricians talked to us about, was the fact that what was created was, if I’m one of the mothers being able to say, “Hey, your kid had what I think my kid had.” Call you up and visit you and say, “What did you do? How did it work?” The physician said there aren’t enough physicians. We have to expand the health delivery capacity of folks. In some sense, part of what they were doing is just building skill sets in the community. That’s a model that we then expanded in a couple of ways in some of the projects we did in Chile. I think I’m going back there next year for an update. K.B.: Once again it sounds like you’re building communities, communities of mothers. R.L.: Uh hum. K.B.: Dr. Lorion, you have now been the Dean of the College of Education for nine years. What lessons have you learned about running a college of education? What things have presented themselves or made themselves apparent or added to your understanding of preparing teachers? R.L.: A couple of things. One is how critically important it is to trust the faculty. I think from the time I got, here having spent my career in medical schools and in research institutions, I was amazed at how many courses faculty taught. I was amazed at how many other responsibilities they accepted, and particularly, how committed they were to their students, etcetera. A dean doesn’t change a college. What a dean ideally does is to provide resources to the faculty and then gets out of the way. Second is that if you’re going to change the college, you have to bring different people in than are here. One of the things I think I’ve contributed is changing the expectations for what incoming faculty would look like. Using my background to help them write grants, to help them think about research both individual and collaboratively. I think the other is the notion that the College of Education here, teacher preparation here, is a campus wide activity. It is not only a College of Education activity. Towson is unique, I think, nationally, because most colleges, most institutions that started as normal schools and state teacher’s college and then became universities, do all they can to hide their histories. They certainly relegate the College of Education and teacher preparation to a lower status. The reverse is true here. Everybody acknowledges that the teacher preparation is Towson’s sort of defining, both responsibility and its defining source of excellence. The other is that we can’t do what we do without partnering fully with the State Department of Education and with local school systems. I think you heard me when I got here asking whether we had such confidence in the students we prepared that we give school districts a three year guarantee. If one of our products, our teachers, was encountering some trouble, principals should be able to call us and get somebody to come watch the classroom and make some observations. I’m still working to try to get teacher preparation be a five year process, two years at the university and three years in the field. School districts are more involved in the preparation and we’re more involved in the induction and retention. K.B.: Is that by law that the state of Maryland prepares teachers in a PDS [Professional Development School] setting? Your idea sounds a little bit like an extension of that concept. R.L.: Yes. The other thing that the state of Maryland has recently passed in the last couple of years is first, not only that it’s going to be a three year pre-tenure period instead of a two-year pre-tenure period, but every school system has to have an induction coordination officer. There are very strict rules for how much mentoring and from whom they receive mentoring during their first three years. Part of what we need to do is restructure professional development schools so they fit that mentoring model. In effect, every school that hires new teachers is required to provide that sort of support. I think we can do something to help that. We’re a part of the Cherry Hill Renewal Proposal, which is, in fact, to create what we’re calling a Professional Development School Learning Center. The professional development will be not only for pre-service teachers but for everybody, in this case, in that campus, but it would also be a hub with teachers from schools in the neighborhood and relatively close. Other schools will come and participate in professional development. We’ll have a set of those hubs across the city and across the county schools, etcetera. I think that we’re developing both that model and what the budget will look like for it. I think that’s the other thing I learned, that part of what a dean’s job is to do is to understand budgets. Towson, unfortunately, has a history of saying we will do something without acknowledging that to do something you either have to not do something or, more likely, what you have to do is bring in resources. Resources may be people, it may be money and it may be releasing faculty so that they can do things. Part of my job is to manage the money and the resources. K.B.: Well, Ray, what have we forgotten? What do you want to say that didn’t get asked in a question? What did we miss? R.L.: I think for me the biggest difficulty, I mean, clearly it was a legitimate concern when I got here, was the fact that I spent lots and lots of time in K-12 classrooms, but I’ve never been a teacher. I’ve been an observer of teachers. I’ve been somebody who was brought in to sort of solve problems that were going on with kids or with teachers or with parents in schools, but I’ve never been in front of the K-12 classroom and taught. I think there are goods and bads about thinking about a Dean of Education who doesn’t have that background. On the other hand, because I don’t have that background, I don’t take things for granted that people who have it take for granted. One of the things that is interesting is, as you pointed out, I’ve been here for nine years, which for me is a long time. Interestingly, I have no interest in looking anywhere else. Although, I was clearly incorrect when I said I don’t want to be a dean, I’m absolutely certain I don’t want to be a provost or a president. It’s been a fun nine years. It’s gone faster than I thought. I think I’ve learned a lot. I think I’ve contributed something here. I think before I finish, which will be about three or four years from now, Cherry Hill will be up and running. Ideally CAIRE, which is our research center, the Center for Application and Innovation Research in Education will be a freestanding entity. The really nice thing about that is we have faculty from across the campus who are collaborating on school-based policy research and intervention research, which is something that wasn’t happening before. More importantly, we have people from across the system, including Morgan, Loyola, etcetera. We have people at western Maryland and eastern Maryland. It’s getting set up. K.B.: We have one last question we ask everybody and I think that, although you haven’t been in front of a classroom of kids Pre-K through 12, you certainly have been a teacher for a very long time. What kind of advice would you give to someone who is considering a career in teaching? R.L.: I’ve sort of been a teacher. I have never taught, in 40 years, more than two courses in a year. I think in my entire career I’ve taught no more than two undergraduate courses. The vast majority of my time was teaching professional courses either around research design and evaluation science or clinical interventions whether it be individual therapy or other therapeutic modalities. It’s almost always been with graduate courses with doctoral students in highly selective programs so that it was not only appropriate, but effective, to put a huge burden on them to teach, to learn and to participate in the instructional process. I think somebody who wants to teach in a K-8 ought to start by doing tutoring, number one. What they have to do is understand. I used to teach school consultation. My instructions to my students drove them nuts because my instruction was, “I want you to go into the classroom.” They were going to spend either a semester or a year. I want you to go into the classroom. I want you to sit in the back of the room. I want you to do nothing and say nothing until I tell you otherwise. We’d meet together. It was usually six to eight students. They’d talk about what they saw. Until they got to the point where they were absolutely appreciative of how complex teaching was in K-8, particularly in challenging schools, and how much like a conductor of an orchestra a teacher was in terms of what was going on there and what was going on there, etcetera. Until they had a real deep appreciation for a teacher as teacher, my point was that they had absolutely nothing to offer a teacher as a consultant. Part of somebody who wants to be a teacher ought to really get to know it before and get to know it partly because the seductive part is to watch somebody who doesn’t know something, learn something. I think the other thing is that we have to be more candid to our students about how long it takes to become a teacher. The notion that you do two years, the junior and senior year, you walk across the stage and you’re now ready to be an effective PreK-12 teacher makes no more sense for that than when I was preparing new clinical psychologists or psychiatric residents. You really have to have the experience. You have to have been exposed to a variety of things. I think the other thing actually, regardless of what population, is you have to like the kids and you have to listen to the kids. Kids tend to have a good sense of what they need and they pick-up quickly whether you like them, respect them. We all know that teacher expectations have a great influence on student outcomes. Lastly, they really have to understand the culture of the school community. If you’re going to teach in a school, you got to walk around the neighborhood. If you’re afraid to walk around the neighborhood, you have to wonder if you should be teaching in that school. That fear comes out when you meet a parent. That fear comes out when you drive into the neighborhood and you make sure all your windows are closed and your doors are locked. It comes out when you hustle out of the building and drive away. It’s a hugely different interaction with a parent if you go to their home and knock on their door and have tea or coffee or water or something. I think one of the things that we would do when we were training folks to work in mental health at Temple is that I would make them take the Broad Street subway from the beginning to the end so they could understand how public transportation worked. That was at a time, if you came in late for the appointment, all you got was the rest of the time. I wanted them to understand how impossible it was to get anywhere on time. I also made them go to Temple Hospital emergency room and Chestnut Hill Hospital emergency room to see how differently people were treated by professionals, and the lack of respect that people had, so they could understand why people came in angry, not expecting help, etcetera. I think we need to do that in teacher preparation, too. I think our students should write kind of history and kind of community description in terms of the neighborhood they’re going to teach in. They ought to have the kids take them for a walk. I think that’s what I would do. The other is that every good teacher has a group of parents that gets renewed every year who are important advisors and consultants. One of the things we tried in Philadelphia at Penn was to promote kids the last two weeks of the school year rather than the first two weeks, because they don’t do anything the last ten days anyways, for the most part. Let fourth graders become fifth graders. They get to meet their new teacher. They get to own the new environment. They spend those last 10 days understanding what they’re going to learn. They can go home with a note to the parent of here’s what you’re going to want to cover this summer. They come into school knowing the teacher, but that means you have to have stable teachers. Those are some of the things I think are important if you’re going to be a teacher. K.B.: Thank you very much. R.L.: You’re welcome.