I want to thank TASA for inviting me to be here and to share some thoughts with you – and, to all of you who have traveled here from all over the state, welcome to Austin.

Let me just ask, how many of you graduated from a UT institution?

I know I speak for everyone associated with the UT System when I say we are tremendously proud that so many school districts around the state have UT Alumni

I must confess, it is a bit humbling to stand before all of you who have made education your life’s work – when the second year of my second career as an educator has just begun.  But I want you to know that an appreciation, a reverence in fact, for education and educators has always been part of my DNA.  My mother taught elementary school – and in fact, I come from a long line of teachers on my mother’s side.  My father so prized education that after he joined the Army Air Corps in WWII he didn’t have a chance to finish his bachelors until after he returned 26 years later – and then went on and got a Master’s too.  My sister Mariana followed in Mom’s footsteps and became a teacher, and my other sister Nan recently earned her doctorate.

And while you might say I joined the family business a bit late in life, the fact is my 37 years in the military – which took me to virtually every corner of the world – taught me a great deal about the transformative power of an education.

I have been to parts of Africa, Asia, Afghanistan, and the Middle East, where survival against the elements is a daily challenge – and still, parents are desperate to get their kids educated, and are finding ways to make it happen.

I’m sure you know that in many parts of the world, the pursuit of an education comes with great risk. Just last week, the Pakistani Taliban attacked a university campus, killing about two dozen students and faculty.  In 2014, the same group killed 145 people, mostly children, at another Pakistani school.

Two years before that, they shot Malala Yousafzi, the young advocate for girls’ education, who not only survived but was honored with the Nobel Peace Prize.

The barbarians of the world target schools because they know that education is the most powerful threat to the perverted worldview they want to spread.  Education buys down bigotry and hatred, promotes dignity and respect, and creates opportunity and hope.  Everywhere I’ve been in the world, I’ve seen kids willing to brave any risk, overcome any obstacle, just to attend school.  The school might be nothing more than a patch of grass under a tree, as I saw in Chad. 

It doesn’t matter.  They know that in fighting for an education, they are fighting for their lives, for their future.  Make no mistake, the stakes are just as high for the children of Texas. 

It is tempting to conclude – as I stand here, surrounded by the brightest, most committed professional educators imaginable, knowing that none of our state’s children are going to be attacked by the Taliban on the way to school – that the future of our kids, and our state, is assured.

But I don’t think anybody here believes that.  We cannot sugarcoat the fact that far too few of our state’s young people are able to make the leap to higher education.

If we start with 100 8^th graders, only 68 will receive a high school diploma.  Of those 68 only 50 will enroll in college.  And of those, only 20 will graduate.  Twenty out of 100 actually understates the problem dramatically in many parts of the state, since a child from an affluent community is seven times more likely to graduate from college than a child growing up in poverty.

In a polarized economy, where the gulf between those doing well and those struggling to make it grows wider every day, the fact that 80 out of 100 Texas children fail to earn a degree should be unacceptable.  It’s also, I believe, completely at odds with how we see ourselves as a state and as a nation.

The good news is that the people in this room can – and will – do something about it.

I told you a little bit about what I saw in my 37 years traveling around the world as a Navy SEAL.  Now let me tell you some of what I’ve seen as I’ve traveled around Texas over the past year.  In school districts from El Paso to Tyler to the Rio Grande Valley, I see bright, enthusiastic, determined kids overcoming formidable obstacles.  I see teachers heroically playing multiple roles in the lives of an ever-more-diverse student population.  I see administrators who are constantly asked to do more with less.  I see bright young adults showing up at our universities, who are full of hope and promise but who – for a variety of reasons – are simply not ready.  I see others who are ready, but for lack of support, fall through the cracks, and never complete their degree.

Not coincidentally, I see two systems of education – pre-K through 12 and Higher Ed – seemingly inhabit separate worlds.  I see fabulous public universities within walking distance of struggling elementary, middle, and high schools.

I see a lot of questioning.  Higher Ed folks asking the school districts, why do the kids you are sending us need so much remediation?  The school districts, for their part, wondering why so many of the kids they worked so hard to get to college never get a degree.

That’s what I see today, and what I see on the horizon is an even bigger challenge, because Texas is growing fast – and in fact we are one of the few large states in the country with a growing 15 to 19 year old population.

So we need to embrace the fact that – whatever combination of factors got us to this point – the future of Texas is in our hands.  The state we call home is going to rise or fall based on our ability to work together – in true collaboration – to ensure that every Texas child has a fighting chance for a good education and all the opportunities that flow from it.

Let me talk about an area where our interests could not be more intertwined:  Teacher Quality.  You rely on us to provide you with a steady stream of well-trained educators, and we depend on your teachers to make sure the students you send us are college-ready.

We believe that formal, university-based preparation represents the gold standard of teacher preparation – and again, it is gratifying to see the impact our schools of education alums are having on districts from one end of the state to the other. 

But here’s where I want to enlist your help.  We need you to let your brightest students know that teaching is a great profession – a heroic profession – and they ought to consider it.

Plant the seed early.  A kid who loves learning, chances are, will love teaching.  Send even more of your best kids to us, and we will return fantastic educators to you.

In addition to driving teacher quality, Higher Ed has a responsibility when it comes to researching best practices in education, and disseminating what we learn back to the public schools.  Part of how we do this is through charter schools created at our universities.  The UT System operates a number of public charter schools – and I recognize that this is not a popular concept with many of you.  But the concept is not as new as it seems.  The charter schools we operate today actually continue a tradition of university lab schools, which date all the way back to the late 19^th Century.

I believe we can, and must, use charter schools as laboratories, to experiment with new teaching approaches and innovative delivery methods.  The goal being not to compete with, usurp, or threaten the public education system, but to find new ways to help it.

After teaching and research, the third area where I think we ought to be doing more for our public schools is Service.  As universities, we have a responsibility to our local communities beyond educating the folks who show up at our door.  We cannot sit back and wait for them, hoping that they are ready.  Because too many never show up, and too many of those who do are far from ready.

We want to engage with you earlier in the process, because we know – as you know – that kids who fall behind are, sadly, more likely to fall farther and farther behind than they are to catch up.  We also know that reading is key, that a child who is not reading up to level by the third grade is going to face an uphill battle throughout his or her academic career.

The UT System possesses an enormous amount of intellectual talent that can be unleased in communities around the state to improve the quality of education.  Were we to combine that with all the talent of the other state university systems, I believe we could have a dramatic impact on Texas.

Many of our fine educators are already engaged with their local public schools.  But the harsh truth of the matter is we would have far more engagement if we as a system provided more of an incentive.  If we put our money where our mouth is when it comes to Service and valued it on par with teaching and research when it comes to things like tenure and promotion.  That’s a controversial thing to say in Higher Ed, but it’s something we need to look at – and we will.  Because our responsibility is to use the resources and talent we have to provide maximum benefit to the state of Texas.

That’s actually an epiphany I had several months into my tenure as Chancellor – that my job isn’t really about the institutions of the UT System.  It’s about Texas – about improving the human condition in every town, every city, and every school district. 

What that means, is that everyone in this room is my partner, and I am yours.

A few weeks ago, I presented my vision for the UT System to our Board of Regents.  Included in that presentation were eight of what we call “Quantum Leaps” – initiatives where we see a real opportunity to make a huge difference for Texas and indeed the world.

The Quantum Leaps touch everything from brain health to national security, and there are two common threads holding them together.  The first is our determination that in addition to our teaching, research, and health care responsibilities, we have a duty to apply the resources and talent of the UT System to the world’s most pressing challenges.  The second is the realization that to do that – and to make the most of our many strengths – we must, to a degree never before imagined, engage and collaborate with each other, and with the world at large.

Because nobody ever made a Quantum Leap alone, or while sitting on the sidelines.

The very first Quantum Leap, and the one I’m most passionate about, is called the Texas Prospect Initiative. It’s all about building a bigger and stronger bridge between Higher Ed and pre-K through 12.

As many of you know, the UT System has a number of great programs, from Early College High School, to Dual Credit, to Math and Science Academies, and our own elementary schools.  But in my view we are not well coordinated to maximize our support.

So our vision is to work with the school districts, along with civic leaders, the legislature, community colleges and any other interested parties to become much more actively engaged with pre-K through 12.

Generally speaking, we plan to focus on four areas:

• ensuring that all our college preparatory programs meet the standards necessary to ensure their students can enter higher education;
• developing a UT Literacy Institute to dramatically improve elementary level literacy, and offering it first to the largest, urban, Independent School Districts;
• making sure the high school counselors in Texas have the resources they need to provide advice and direction to each potential college student; and
• shining a spotlight on our schools of education to ensure we are graduating the best teachers in the nation.

Those are our guiding principles – our roadmap, for the time being.  They don’t really amount to a plan – more like a plan for a plan.  And that’s by design.  Because any plan I presented to you today, without your involvement, would be doomed to fail. 

My colleagues and I don’t have the answers.  But here’s what I know.  I know that we – and by “we,” I mean the state’s entire public education system, from pre-K through college – can and must do better.  Our state’s future depends on it.

I know “we” have a big, complex challenge on our hands.  And if there’s one thing I learned in the military, it’s that the only way to tackle a big, complex challenge is through collaboration.   My last few years in Special Operations, we were fighting a terrorist network that stretched from Iraq, to Syria, to Kuwait, to North Africa, to Pakistan and Afghanistan. 

We had to build a network to defeat their network.  No more working in silos.  We connected special operations soldiers to conventional forces to the intelligence community to operations to analysts back home. 

We constantly communicated, through a disciplined battle rhythm that for me included six videoconferences a day.  This ensured that everyone was well informed, and that every perspective was brought to bear on every situation that came up.  By forcing relentless, continuous engagement – there was no opting in or out, you were either a zealot or a martyr – we were able to make better decisions faster, and execute those decisions more successfully.

What I’m driving at is if we want to tackle the tough, complex challenge facing us, we can’t operate as if we’re on different teams.  We can’t wait for the other side to reach out.  We need to engage continuously.  We need to create a battle rhythm that brings the most, and the best ideas to the surface, does it quickly, and then lays out a plan to execute those ideas. 

You know your districts.  You know the kids.  You know their parents.  You’ve seen what works and what doesn’t.  So we would be crazy not to seek your guidance.

So, to get the ball rolling, here’s what I propose.  Dr. Rue (Karen Rue, TASA president and superintendent of Northwest ISD near Fort Worth), I assume you are here.  I would like to request that you quickly pull together a team that can present a report or a white paper to me, by May 1.  The title of the report will be “How the University of Texas System Can Better Serve the School Districts of Texas.”

I am looking for bold ideas!  Nothing else will do.

Make no mistake; it’s going to be hard.  If it wasn’t hard, somebody else would have done it.

And if you remember nothing else from these remarks, remember this:  There is nobody else. 

It’s up to the people right here in this room. The future of Texas really is in our hands. 

It may sound a little scary, but if that doesn’t motivate you to get out of bed and go to work each day, I don’t know what will.

I want you to know you can count on the University of Texas System, and on me. 

I know we are going to do great things together in the years to come.

In the meantime, I want to thank TASA, again, for inviting me to be here with you. 

I can’t tell you how much I appreciate your leadership and all your hard work on behalf of our kids, and the great state of Texas.

Thank you all very much.