NECC 2000

Craig Barrett
Atlanta, Georgia, USA
June 27, 2000

JOHN RICHARDS: Good morning. It's my pleasure to introduce Dr. Craig Barrett. He's president and CEO of the Intel Corporation.

Intel started in 1968, and yesterday's speaker talked about Moore's law, that the pace of microchip technology change is such that the amount of data storage that a microchip can hold doubles every year, or at least every 18 months.

Gordon Moore was one of the founders of Intel, and that company has probably done more to make that law true than any other company in the United States or perhaps the world.

The 8088 processor in the early IBM PCs ran at 5 MHz. The original Pentium was at about 75. We're now looking at gigahertz speeds. And what that means for education is what I believe our morning keynote is about. Because the real question is what does speed, what does all this speed mean for education? If all we care about now is content and bandwidth, we care about that because we take speed for granted.

Dr. Barrett received his Ph.D. from Stanford in material science, and taught at Stanford until 1974 when he joined Intel.

This year, Dr. Barrett was appointed by U.S. Secretary of Education Riley to serve on the National Commission on Mathematics and Science Teaching for the 21th Century.

It's my pleasure to introduce virtually, at first, Dr. Barrett.

(Applause.)

CRAIG BARRETT: Good morning. It's a pleasure to be here talking about one of my favorite subjects, and I think perhaps one of the subjects which is most important around the world today, and that has to do with educating our young people and preparing them for a meaningful place in the new economy.

And I want to start my remarks off this morning talking a little bit at the high level on what we expect in the future, what sort of vision or image we have, and how important education is going to be for people to participate in that vision, participate in that image.

And I want to start off with just a very simple vision of the future, that within a few years around the world we'll have something like a billion connected computers. And these computers will each individually allow a person access to essentially all of the information in the world, all of the information which has been compiled on the World Wide Web. It's really the first time in human history where sitting at one place you can have access to essentially all the world's information.

These computers will allow us to communicate with a billion others, and they'll allow much of the world's commerce to be conducted.

And this is a dramatic change. Five years ago, the thought of connected computers was rather vague. Today, we have about 250 million or so connected computers. Going to a billion or more connected computers in the future is really a sea change.

It's a sea change in a number of respects. It's perhaps representative of this thing we call the new economy, and I want to spend just a few minutes talking about the new economy and what it means to all of us and what it means in the educational process.

Perhaps the simplest way to talk about the new economy is to talk about it in terms of market capitalization or the value of ideas or creation of products. And I picked here just three companies as an example: Intel, Microsoft, and Cisco. These are they prominent companies in the area of high technology, in the area of basically hardware, software, and networking.

The combined market capitalization of these three companies, which has been achieved primarily in the last ten years, is -- at least yesterday it was something in the range of $1.3 trillion. The way the stock market works, I'm not sure where it will end up today.

But if you think for a moment, the creation of $1.3 trillion of wealth, of market value, this is something of the order of $200 billion more than the sum total of all the precious metals that have been mind in the history of mankind. And in the space of ten years, creating that amount of wealth, when it's taken thousands and thousands of years to mine all the platinum, gold and silver around the world.

This is an idea of the concept of knowledge in an industry, in an economy which is driven by knowledge. And it's not just with regard to market value creation. We know that the creation of jobs in the high-tech industry, they pay substantially higher than the rest of the manufacturing world. We know that the high-tech industry has been the driving force for the U.S. GDP growth over the last decade. We know essentially everything that is driving today's economy has its roots, its foundations in this high-tech area.

And if you take it the next step down, you find that education is really the foundation for this whole high-tech economy. Education is the foundation for the new economy. And I would like to spend the first portion of my talk really describing how we're doing in this space, what we need to do to be more successful, and what we need to do in this economy to maintain a preeminent position around the world.

As a hint, I'm going to suggest we're not doing particularly great in terms of the ability to educate our young people to be successful participants in this new economy.

The agenda I want to follow is very simple. I'd like to talk for a few minutes about technology and education, then talk about this concept of connected computers or really computers and communication, and then we'll talk a little bit about teachers and technology and make a few projections for the things we ought to do in the future.

Along the way we'll do a few demonstrations of what you can do with connected computers; perhaps not new to all of you but I think it graphically demonstrates the value of the technology.

We've already heard a little bit about Moore's law, but I wanted to briefly describe the two laws that really drive the high-tech industry and, in parallel fashion, look at their impact on education.

Moore's law, simply stated, is that you can double the number of transistors, integrated circuits every 18 months or double the amount of computing power. And what we've been able to do over the last decade is put the power of a supercomputer on the desktop. So when in the future we have these billion connected computers, we really are providing, in essence, free computing power to everyone who sits in front of one of those computers and allows them to do things that were clearly unimaginable only a decade or so ago.

The second law is equally important, and that is something called Metcalf's law. It was also formulated about 30 years ago, and really has to deal with networks and basically says the value of a network is roughly proportional to the square of the number of nodes. And if you do the mathematics properly, the square of the number of nodes is the good measure of the sum total of the interaction between the nodes on the network. If you have n in nodes you can have about n squared individual interactions between different nodes or different parties.

And when we're talking about an array of a billion connected computers, we're talking about a network which is huge, immeasurably large, and therefore has immense value in its use to the participants.

So as I go through the presentation, I will come back to these laws and try to show their impact on the educational process.

Now, the U.S. is a leader in the use of technology in our education system. We have spent something in the range of $40 billion so far. We have the highest number of connected schools and connected classrooms, the best ratio of students to computers anywhere around the world. And very simply, if you assumed apriori that investing in technology is good and that it can help the education process, you would think that there would be a substantial return on this $40 billion investment.

You'll get a sense as I go through my presentation that my engineering background will come out, because I tend to deal with data in a very pragmatic fashion. I like to look at the bottom line; I like to look at results. So when I say that we've invested $40 billion and we want to look at the return on the investment, what I would like to do is look at the results that we've achieved, especially in the area of math and science.

And if you look at those results and you look at the Third International Math and Science study, the so-called TIMS report, and you look at the results of our young people as they go through the education system and compare them to their international counterparts, international counterparts in developed or developing economies, you find disappointingly that the longer our children are in the system in the United States, the worse they do relative to their counterparts. Fourth graders do reasonably well. By the time they're in the twelfth grade, in math and science we rate relatively near the bottom of the industrialized world. And this is for a system that has the most significant investment in technology, and this is for an economy that is driven by technology. There seems to be a disconnect here somewhere.

And, in fact, the disconnect progresses. Not only as you go from the fourth grade to the eighth grade to the twelfth grade, but if you look at the university system, and you make the simple assumption that the most important engineering graduates we have to take place in this new economy, this high-tech driven economy, are people like electrical engineers, computer engineers, systems engineers. You just take those three categories and you look over the last decade, the number, the absolute number graduating from our universities has declined about 20 percent.

So the feed corn that we need to keep the economy going is disappearing. And, in fact, this gives rise to debate on whether we should increase the number of H1B visas. How can we import the talent to fill the jobs necessary to keep our economy running? This monotonic decline over the last decade I think is perhaps one of the most frightening statistics that we have to look at as we go forward.

Now, the economy does create jobs, lots of new jobs. The problem is that we're not providing the people to fill perhaps the most important of those jobs. So in a simple sense you can say what we have is a growing technology graduation gap.

This is not new and just unique to the United States. Last week I was just in Ireland, France, and Germany. They have absolutely the same issue. Their university systems are not graduating sufficient number of high-tech graduates to fill the jobs there as well. There you have their equivalent of H1B visas where they're importing workers from other countries to satisfy this need.

What I want to do is spend the rest of my time talking about how we might turn this around, how we might close this graduation gap, how we might achieve better results in the K through 12 system with our young people as they go through our public and private education system, and how we might use technology to facilitate that.

Even though I perhaps sound a bit negative on the use of technology, from a bottom-line result I think it still is one of the best opportunities we have to make advances in understanding of math, science and other subjects with our young people, and also to get children interested in higher education in the area of engineering, math, and science.

But let's go back for a minute and look at this concept of connected computers and what that means and Metcalf's law. If you look at the network that we have today -- and this is a representation of it. This is a simplistic representation with, perhaps, only six nodes in it and those nodes are students, community, teachers, business, parents, and information. Obviously there are many more than six nodes and we've just chosen to clump them into these large categories. But if you look at the potential interactions between these nodes, you see that there are a great number of them.

And research has shown, clearly, that when you have interaction between the various constituencies in the education process, especially parents and teachers and students, that the students do better. Their test scores are better, their interest in education is higher, their attendance rates are better, their graduation percentages are better, their advancement on to higher education is better.

So this concept of an education community being interconnected and interconnected very simply with computers and connectivity, networking, I think is very key to improving the education system. It's basically using our inherent high-tech strength to our advantage here.

And there are wonderful examples of this around the U.S. And what I want to do today is just show you a couple of examples of what technology can do, how we can use it, and we'll do two kind of back-to-back demonstrations up here: one directly showing the interaction between the constituents -- parents, teachers, administrators, students, schools, and then a little later we'll show one where we bring content into the system and how importing content or information into the educational process can be a great advantage and stimulate young children for success.

But to start off, what I want to do is look at just the local school area. And I'm going to have someone come up and help me out in this demo, and that someone is Patty O'Neill {sp?} who is the school technologist at the Bright Star Elementary School in Douglasville, Georgia. And Patty is going to come up and tell us a little bit about a video we're going to see and then a little bit about what's going on in her school district and a little bit about, really, how easy and straightforward it is to try to integrate this capability into the educational process.

So Patty, why don't you come up and join me and say hello to the crowd that we have out here.

(Applause.)

CRAIG BARRETT: Good morning.

Why don't you give us an idea of what we're going to see on this video.

PATTY O'NEILL: Okay. I'd really love to.

The first thing we're going to do is we're going to go to New Jersey, to Summerville High School. We're going to see how the folks there are using the Internet to post the students grades online. Then we're going to come back south to Georgia, which I have my school, Bright Star Elementary, and you can see how we're using our Web site to involve the community, and I'll give you a little tour.

CRAIG BARRETT: Great. Let's roll the video, please.

(Video playing.)

››At Summerville public schools, the use of familyeducation.com and mygradebook.com has fostered that goal of increasing communication among all of the stakeholders of the school district.

››This is really the first program that's been implemented that had to do with technology and grading and trying to bring the students and the parents and the teachers closer together.

››I get the information directly. I get exactly what I need to know. If there's an issue, I can automatically write to the teacher and tell them what I'm feeling, what I'm looking for, and then I get information back. You know, there's a really great dialogue.

››The parent gets an e-mail that says the grades have been updated with a link. And they click on the link and it goes directly to their student's grade summary.

››The improvements I've seen are his grades are increasing. He's studying a little bit more because I know when his tests are coming up so I can say, "Hey, Chris, have you studied tonight?".

››The technology has helped with the parent and the student relationship because the parents know that there's homework assignments due or quizzes coming up or tests or projects, and I think that they're more aware of what we're doing?

››If my mom has access to my grades at all times, that -- you know, she knows how I'm doing. I think it's good.

››When parents are involved a little bit more with their grades, the kids have a heads-up. They know that they can't just slack off because they know mom and dad are watching them very closely. And I think that's a good thing.

››I felt that using technology in the school would enhance the communication with the parents. As more and more parents have technology access in the homes, I wanted to take advantage of that to provide better communication with the families.

››You are really doing your school a huge disservice by not staying in touch with the rest of the world and doing your own Web site for your own school.

››Our superintendent encouraged us last fall to create a Web page for our schools.

››I can just look and find out anything I want to know about the school because they've kept an up-to-date Web page.

››Having that newsletter information posted on the Internet, parents are more often to tap into that at work or wherever they might be when they have a spare moment.

››As a parent, my husband and I found it invaluable to be able to go to the Web page and pull up his homework.

››If she's having difficulty with math, I can actually go to that site and look up something specific about math and see how I can resolve the problem for her.

››I can be in contact with the school 24 hours a day, know what's happening in my child's life.

››The parents are just better able to reach out and touch the things that they feel like they need to touch for their child.

(Video ends.

CRAIG BARRETT: I think I'm impressed with what I saw from your Web site. Maybe you can tell the audience a little bit about it.

PATTY O'NEILL: All right. We'll start with our home page here. You can see my principal, Marian Dolan; my vice principal, Dale McGill, welcoming everybody to our site.

On the left-hand side you see all the important links to all the information that's contained within our Web page, like the calendar, the lunch menu, community interest pages, and all of the classroom pages from pre-kindergarten down through the fifth grade.

CRAIG BARRETT: You've got a lot of information over in that side bar. What gets hit the most? Where do people go usually on this site?

PATTY O'NEILL: Well, I would say the children probably go the most up to the lunch menu.

(Laughter.)

PATTY O'NEILL: They like to know what's coming up for the week so there are no surprises.

The community as a whole, and probably some of the board members, they like to go to the calendar to see what kind of events that we have scheduled at Bright Star.

The most used pages would have to be the homework page and the e-mail page. Let me give you an example.

We're going to come down here. We're going to go to the third grade, to Cindy Burnett's classroom page. You know, a lot of parents have told me that it's hard to believe but those homework assignments don't always make it home. Once in awhile their child may miss school for some reason. They say it's an awful lot easier to just drive past the school, go home and turn on the computer and keep their children updated. So what they do is they log onto the child's homework page like this, and they find out everything they need to know to keep their child from falling behind.

Now, this is Cindy Burnett's homework for the last week of school. She started off listing the spelling words and the words of the week, and you can scroll on down. She's got any kind of important reminders, and the math assignments, just all the different assignments.

Now, sometimes a child can get home and they might not understand all the assignments. And you saw this on the video with Mia Reid. Mia and her mother were able to log onto the Internet, and they were able to go to the homework page, and then they could read an explanation that the teacher had posted about a particular assignment. Then if Mrs. Reid needed further clarification, all she had to do was e-mail the teacher.

CRAIG BARRETT: You said something about the board members coming to your home page. Who else in the community comes to the home page?

PATTY O'NEILL: Well, that would be up here in our community interest page. All right. For community involvement, all of our partners in education, business groups, and community groups can come here to see how they can help out within the school system or in one of Bright Star's programs, like our mentoring program.

Also, our local citizens are the people that vote for our school board members. So they can come to our site, become familiar with what's going on with the schools.

CRAIG BARRETT: Patty, I like the layout of your site. I think you either spent a lot of money on it or you're a pretty smart Web master yourself. Which is it?

PATTY O'NEILL: This is what I like. It makes me look like I really did spend a lot of money, but it was all free. It's a free tool from Family Education called Web Create.

When I log in to edit a page, this is the first thing I see, all these different choices of different things I can do.

You can see how easy this is and how quick it is to learn. You can just choose from viewing a list of your pages, you can add teachers in if you wanted to get the teachers to do more on their site. You can get everybody a free e-mail account. You get online support.

What we're going to do here, and I want to show you this because this is really true. There's no reason that anybody out here doesn't have their own site. You go in to modify the site. This is what I see. This is the template for the homework page back on Cindy Burnett's page. You type in the text. If you want to, you can choose a graphic, then type in the homework, and that's it. You just aim and shoot.

Then you can go to the preview page and see what you've got. I have a lot of things that I have to do at Bright Star so I don't always have a lot of time to spend on the Web like I'd like to. And it's important to have a tool like Web Create to keep things updated quickly.

We're a valuable resource in the community and we'd like them to visit our Web page often.

CRAIG BARRETT: Super.

PATTY O'NEILL: Thank you.

CRAIG BARRETT: Thank you, Patty.

PATTY O'NEILL: Thanks so much.

(Applause.)

CRAIG BARRETT: I think that's a very simple example of the connectivity you can get, how easy it is, how simple it is, and how much it can impact the various constituents who are involved in the education process.

I want to move next to a slightly different example of bringing content into the system. And we're going to use here as an example Classroom Connect. And I'm going to have two of the superstars from this organization come up and join me, John Fox, who is an anthropologist and archaeologist.

JOHN FOX: How are you, Craig?

CRAIG BARRETT: Good morning.

And Dan Brutner {sp?} who is listed up here as the expedition leader, I guess the lead honcho. Actually, Dan is kind of an interesting guy because I'm a cyclist and he's also a cyclist, but he puts me to shame. He cycled across five continents, I think; right? And I just want to ask you, the farthest I've gone is across one state in the United States, Arizona. What's it like to cycle across Africa?

DAN BRUTNER: It's pretty hard, but I'll tell you what. Anybody who has made it from the street down the escalator and into this conference hall is endured most of the rigors of Africa.

(Laughter.)

CRAIG BARRETT: Maybe we should have handed bicycles out.

But anyway, this whole issue of online adventures and the quests and beaming this information back into the classroom, why don't you tell the audience exactly what you do and how you do it.

JOHN FOX: Well, Craig, research teams travel to various parts of the world to explore the wildlife, the cultures, and the history. The kids direct us as we send back reports, images and videos every day. And the result is a fully interactive, realtime learning experience.

DAN BRUTNER: You know, when you think about it, expeditions of the past 500 years have always worked the same. A group of people go to some far away part of the world, they endure hardships, and then they come back and tell us what they found. We can read their account or maybe see a documentary.

But what Classroom Connect figured out how to do is not only take kids along but to put them in the driver's seat; to actually let third graders direct Ph.D. archaeologists or world-class explorers to really solve a mystery. And the key, of course, for making that happen is using the Internet.

JOHN FOX: Over the past five years, we've been joined by almost 10 million students on four continents. We've explored the collapse of Mya {?} civilization, environmental threats to the Galapagos Islands, and human evolution in Africa.

DAN BRUTNER: The model for all these quests works the same. Through a voting mechanism, kids will tell us where to go each week to gather clues and information. Then we engage their higher-order thinking skill to synthesize all this information, and they need to come up with an answer to the mystery, the real live mysteries.

Along the way, we produce materials where their teachers can meet curricular and national standards in eight different areas by using the program.

JOHN FOX: Each week, in "Get a Clue," a feature that I write, kids help me to gather and assess evidence to investigate real scientific problems. For example, on Asia Quest, we travel together thousands of miles across China to find out if Marco Polo ever made the journey 700 years ago.

Well, kids in the end, God love them, decided that he didn't make it. And this made breaking news in the papers.

DAN BRUTNER: A few years ago two professors from Stanford summed up about 15 years of research on what motivates kids to learn, and they essentially boiled it down to three ingredients. If you can create a learning environment that fosters curiosity, one that challenges students and one that gives them some control over their learning and environment, the amount of time they'll spend in any given subject matter and the retention of that subject matter goes up exponentially.

And it's these three ingredients on which we build the quest.

JOHN FOX: In the field, we have anthropologists, biologists, photographers, but the most important members of our team are the young explorers who join us every day from classrooms across America.

And in fact, we have some of these explorers with us today. Teacher Kate Sutton and her middle school kids from Nevada, not Nevada, Iowa.

DAN BRUTNER: How are you doing, Iowa?

JOHN FOX: Hi, Kate. You guys there?

KATE SUTTON: Good morning. Glad to see you.

JOHN FOX: Good morning, Kate. Have you got kids there?

KATE SUTTON: Yes. Let me switch it over to them.

DAN BRUTNER: The last time we saw these --

JOHN FOX: Hey, guys.

DAN BRUTNER: The last time we saw these kids we were on the rim of Africa's Ngoro-Goro {sp?} crater.

During the expeditions, in addition to what we do live online, we connect with Iowa via a fiberoptic network. Susan Schraeder {sp?} and the Heartland Area Educational Association along with Iowa Public Television and the Star Schools Program set up a system where we can link to them via satellite dishes. And it all boils down to for a half hour every week during one of these expeditions, they can see us and we can see them. And what I'd like to do now is give you a little taste of what the folks in Iowa saw during Africa Quest.

(Video playing.)

››Africa Quest. An interactive expedition with bicycles, satellites, and the Internet come together to bring far-off people and places home to schools in the U.S.

Our team of scientists and adventurers consult with the online audience to determine which mysteries to explore and what sites to see.

We're in Kenya when we show this guy how to ride a bike.

››Was it fun?

››It's good. I like.

››And we're in Tanzania when we see these young Masai warriors.

We come face to face with wildebeest (inaudible) and buffalo. We watched (inaudible) having lunch.

This week, Samburu {sp?} warriors are the stars of our weekly video conference to Iowa.

››If you're a warrior you must complete certain acts. You must do various rituals, and you must live as a warrior does.

››Connections, with animals and scientists, our past and our future, with our North American Internet audience and our African hosts are the point of Africa Quest?

››Good news. The children had a bake sale. They raised $70 last night and they're going to have a bake sale tonight. I'm very proud of my class. Let me know where to send the money, please.

››A lot of times as I'm cycling past, people will make a gesture of respect. They'll give me a fist and they'll bring it to their heart or they'll do this (indicating), which means respect.

››The thing about Africa Quest is that it's personal. Between the Africans and us, among ourselves as a team, and in even the way we try to share what we learn over the Internet.

It's about smashing stereotypes, respecting other cultures, and using the world's most modern equipment to probe some of its oldest questions.

Our online audience lets us know how we're doing. Students are doing more research about Africa, (inaudible) the tribes, and students are developing a sense of world community and caring.

I think that's pretty cool.

(Video ends.)

JOHN FOX: It's fun to see that again.

You know, one of the things that strikes me, one of the hardest things about being in Africa for us, and probably for you, was seeing the incredible poverty and hardship that a lot of people still suffer there. But I understand that you guys figured out a way to step outside your classrooms and make a difference for at least some of those people. Maybe you could tell us about that.

KATE SUTTON: Well, we saw an article in our local newspaper about the victims of the (inaudible) bombing. Talked to the head of the Red Cross (inaudible) friendship box.

JOHN FOX: That's great.

KATE SUTTON: And these friendship boxes (inaudible) pencils and rulers. (Inaudible) through the Red Cross.

JOHN FOX: That's wonderful.

DAN BRUTNER: That's just a whole number of different things that the kids did to transcend the walls of their classroom, including bringing Kenyan runners from Iowa State University to their school.

But I'd actually like to bring Kate back on for just a second and ask her to talk a little bit about how this program really affected teaching and learning in the classroom, did it make a difference.

KATE SUTTON: I think it made a big difference. We were able to put our textbooks away and focus on the quest. And keeping in mind any national state or district standards, we can easily adopt the quest to the different things that we want to teach in our classroom, be it a research project or a descriptive narrative piece of writing. And we really believed that the kids become mini-experts in the area that we're studying when we're done with the quest.

DAN BRUTNER: I've got to tell you, it's so gratifying to see these guys on this huge stage here at NECC. When we're in Africa or in the Galapagos, we see them on this tiny little screen about the size of this remote. It's a very gratifying thing.

The quest transcends borders and they go back in time. They create a learning environment that encourages curiosity, one that challenges kids and one that gives them control over their learning environment.

I think this all adds up to motivation. And when it comes to teaching, that's more than half the battle.

Thanks a lot for joining us again, Iowa, and we'll actually see you guys in about four months when Classroom Connect will host another quest, an Australia Quest, which I'd like to invite you all to join on, and that will be in October.

JOHN FOX: All right. See you in the outback.

DAN BRUTNER: Thanks, Craig.

(Applause.)

CRAIG BARRETT: I think it's clear that connecting students, connecting the constituents in the educational process can lead to better student performance.

I'd like to turn my attention now to the issue of what goes on in the classroom and what impacts the ability to transmit information about math and science and for the young people to comprehend that. And I'd like to use this graphic to start the discussion, which is really suggesting that technology literacy is a prerequisite going forward for people who want to be participants in the new economy.

And as soon as you accept this premise, then you have to ask yourself, well, how competent is the average teacher? How comfortable is the average teacher to use technology in the classroom? And if you look at the various polls and studies that have been done on this topic, you find that some 80 percent of the K through 12 teachers feel uncomfortable using technology in the classroom. That may be because, on average, ten-year-olds know more about computers and connectivity than most of us adults. And it's probably not a fair statement to make to this audience where you're all here talking about computers, communication, and education.

But on average, most of our teachers in the K through 12 area feel terribly uncomfortable with technology and using it to integrate into the curriculum. And this has led a number of companies to get involved in trying to make technology more useful, more usable, more familiar to teachers. And we find people like Intel, and others, doing innovative educational missions or trying to be a force in improving math and science, trying to get those TIMS scores, that I mentioned earlier, up; trying to promote the effective use of technology in the classroom; trying to broaden the availability of technology; trying to get minorities, children from underprivileged neighborhoods, everyone to get more comfortable with technology and to use it as a capability, as a tool to promote learning.

Now, if you're an engineer and you say, "Fine, I want to solve a problem," one of the first things you usually ask yourself is what problem am I trying to solve, what metrics do I use to measure the solution. And if you look at this issue of math and science in the K through 12 region and why our children do not do well on an international comparative basis, you have to ask yourself, all right, what problem am I trying to solve, where can I have an impact and what should I focus on and how do I measure what I'm focusing on.

And I think it is one of the most complicated problems that we face in the United States today, this issue of math and science education, and education of other topics in the K through 12 region.

If you look at the availability of teachers, you find by and large we have a shortage of qualified teachers. Somewhere between 25 and 50 percent of our teachers are teaching subjects in which they're not certified or they didn't even minor in in their educational process.

If we look, we find that although we're improving in the area of metrics in standardized tests, we don't necessarily have curricula that match the tests that we're running. My state of Arizona is a prime example of this where we're instituting a test which has required passage for graduation in high school in the year 2002. Last year they tested the sophomores two years before they're due to graduate. We only have two years of required math in Arizona. Ten percent of the students were able to pass the test for graduation. The immediate discussion is to lower the standards or remove the test. Very little discussion on how to put curriculum in place to allow the students to achieve mastery of the subject we want them to achieve mastery of.

We have teachers that are uncomfortable with technology. This is perhaps not surprising. The personal computer and connected computers have only been around 10 or 15 years in any volume. Many of our teachers were educated well before that.

We have the fact that technology is often not integrated into the curriculum. Technology is taught as a subject in itself. We have a computer laboratory where you go to learn about computers. We don't necessarily do the sort of things that Classroom Connect was talking about, bringing content in and using the content in the computers to stimulate the educational process, to use it fully integrated into the course work.

And lastly, we typically don't reward performance. We don't reward those teachers who go out of their way to learn the capability, learn the technology and move forward.

Now, if you list these as perhaps root causes or problems to be solved and then look at what a company like Intel or a group of companies can do to help solve these problems, I think it's best for us to try to focus in specific areas. And I want to spend the rest of my time talking about areas, really, three and four on this and how to make teachers comfortable with the technology and how to get technology integrated into the curriculum and not spend my time on the other topics, which are equally important and necessary for a total solution to a problem, but limit my discussion to something that we can have an immediate impact on.

Intel, in conjunction with Microsoft and others, has been involved in a program called Teach to the Future. This is a program which really provides a short course to teachers, not to learn technology but how to integrate technology into the learning process. Basically a two-week course to train teachers, show them how to use technology, how to create content, how to find content on the Web, how to find other's best-known practices, best-known techniques, and to search the world for information, not just their local school or their local school district.

Through this program we hope to train 400,000 teachers over the next three years, 100,000 of them here in the United States. It's a relatively aggressive program, but when you look at the fact that we have some 2.5 million, or so, K through 12 teachers in the U.S. with an appreciable turnover rate of 10 percent or so per year and 80 percent of them are uncomfortable with technology, you have to start talking about training millions of teachers over a few-year period to have an impact, not just 100,000. But we think this is a good start.

As I said, we're doing this program not just in the U.S. but we're doing it worldwide. And I was just in India about four weeks ago and had a chance to sit down with some of the teachers there, and these were middle-aged teachers, predominantly females, no computer literacy. And after a two-week course, they were able to, in fact, create content, integrate content into the program and achieve wonderful results.

In discussing with one of the teachers there what they went through in this process of becoming not only computer literate but using computers to help teach, which I think is the key issue, they created this little chart of the stages that you go through, everywhere from computer pain, "Oh, please, don't make me sit in front of that keyboard. I might do something wrong," and the first thing you teach them is alt control delete, and if that doesn't work, you pull out the plug.

(Laughter.).

CRAIG BARRETT: Computers really aren't that foreboding. But then when you show them the content that's available on the Internet, what technology can do for you, how you can be comfortable in a relatively short period of time, how you can create content in a short period of time, and then the amazing reaction you get from the young people that you put this content in front of, they're sold on the process.

This is a country where they don't talk about students per computer; they talk about computers per thousand schools or thousand schools per computer. At last count, there was something like 2000 schools per computer in India. But they've also taken a national goal to become a software leader in the next ten years, to basically become the software powerhouse. And they recognize to do that that they have to train their young people in science and math and technology to achieve that. And they're well on their way to that goal.

This is something I see continuously as I visit about 35 countries a year. Everywhere, people are recognizing the same thing: You have to integrate this technology, you have to have technology literacy in your young people if you want to be successful.

Now, another thing that we're doing is not just training people how to integrate the technology in the curriculum but, in fact, providing a resource to find technology or how to set up technology in a school, how to manage technology, how to find best-known practices. And this is something called the Intel Education Destination Web site. And this is the home page of that Web site. It just went online Monday. It's going to be showcased to my left, to your right, during the breakout period. It shows how to plan technology, how to use technology, how to find content on the Web, how to integrate it into your curriculum, how to use it as a tool to teach.

We would love to have your feedback with this effort. This is a Web site that has been created for teachers by teachers, and we need your feedback to see if we're meeting your needs.

We haven't done this by ourselves. We've done this with a number of partners, with ISTI {sp?}, ICT, ZDNet and others. Basically, it's designed to help improve the use of technology in the educational process. We need your feedback and we hope we can get it.

Let me try to briefly conclude here with a couple of comments. One is I don't think there are any silver bullets in improving math and science scores for our young people. There are a series of very complicated problems that we have to solve, and anyone who says, "This is the solution," or just hooking every classroom up to the Internet is the solution or a computer in front of every child is the solution I think are sadly mistaken. There are no simple silver bullets that you can buy. There's a lot of hard work that needs to be done.

Technology is absolutely an integral part of that solution, but it is just a tool to be used wisely. It is not something to be used unto itself. It is not the total answer.

The place that we have to start the solution process is really with those two and a half million teachers. We have a saying at Intel that computers aren't magic but teachers are, students are. And you really have to ignite that magic in the teachers, to instill them with enthusiasm and the capability to move forward with the technology, to get comfortable with it. That's where we have to start. That is, I think, perhaps the most important thing that we can do as a nation if we really want to improve this educational process.

Yes, bring technology along, but let's make the teachers comfortable with that technology and able to use that technology effectively in the classroom.

And we have to build on known successes. There are wonderful successes in the educational process. You all know of them. We see them every day. The real task here is to replicate those, to make those best-known practices, those best-known techniques available. And this is what the Internet, this is what our connected computer network can do. You can catalogue these. You can have instant access to these. You can have teachers use it as resource material in their daily teacher preparation. This is where we can use the technology as a tool; I think can be a very, very key use of it.

Let me simply summarize. We do have a new economy. It is knowledge driven. It's not natural-resource driven, it's not wage-rate driven. It's driven on the basis of knowledge, and the work force has to be comfortable with technology, has to be comfortable with problem solving the technology literacy.

We have a technology graduation gap in this country. You know, we can't expect that we will graduate people who are unfamiliar with technology and they can take their rightful place and help drive the U.S. economy forward or the economy of any country forward any more than we can expect that Bill Gates is going to hire history majors to write software or Intel is going to hire English majors to design microprocessors. We need technology majors if we are going to have a knowledge-based technology-driven society. That means our young people, even if they don't major in technology, have to be comfortable with it. And if they're comfortable with it, I think we can move a long way in closing this graduation gap.

I want to reiterate the concept of using technology as a tool, not as an end point. We need to have standardized tests and metrics, curriculum which are aligned towards those standardized expectations, and then we use technology to help achieve those expectations.

Our initial focus has to be on teachers rather than students, and we have to build on the best-known practices or success. And if I can ask for one other thing is that as we all approach this problem, we do it with a bit of an engineering perspective. And in the engineering world, we have very well-documented, established problem-solving methodologies. One of them happens to be the plan-do-check-act cycle, which if you ever want to accomplish something in life, a change in some system, you plan what you're going to do, then you go out and do it, you monitor with tests and metrics what's happening, you assess those results, and then you act to change the system to get the result that you want, and then you cycle through this plan-do-check-act, or PDCA, cycle over and over and over again. This is the basis for problem solving, it's a basis statistical process control, it's a basis for all standardized techniques for improving something as you go forward.

So I'm asking that we use this type of problem-solving cycle if we want to solve something as complex as the educational issues that we face going forward with this technology issue, with this new economy, with this knowledge-base society, in this ever-increasing graduation gap that we have.

Now, I have really two honors here today. One was to talk to you and give you my views. The next honor I have is to introduce the next speaker. And the next speaker is the U.S. Secretary of Education, Richard Riley.

And I just want to make a few comments about Secretary Riley. First is that the Christian Science Monitor said that many Americans regard Dick Riley as one of the greatest statesmen of education in this century. David Broder, a columnist for the Washington Post, called him the most decent and honorable public person -- excuse me, one of the most decent and honorable people in public life.

Prior to his current position, Dick Riley was a state representative in South Carolina for four years, a state senator for ten, and then governor of South Carolina. And as governor he was so popular that the people voted to amend the state constitution to enable him to be the first person in modern South Carolina history to run for a second term. And during that term he won national acclaim for his highly successful efforts to improve education with a comprehensive educational reform measure.

He's been Secretary of Education since 1992, clearly the highest education officer in the U.S. He's helped launch a number of historic initiatives to raise academic standards, to improve instruction to the poor and disadvantaged, to expand grants and loans to help more Americans go to college, to improve teaching. He helped create the Partnership for Family Involvement in Education, which today has over 4,000 groups participating, and he's also helped win major improvements in the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act and also helped get the FCC to give schools and libraries deep discounts for Internet access.

Ladies and gentlemen, please join me in welcoming Secretary Richard Riley.

(Applause.)

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