Thank you for inviting me here today.  I appreciate the leadership of Dean Jane Close Conoley and I’m honored to be sharing the stage with Delaine Easton.

As you know, education is one of my top priorities. So days like today and events like this are especially important and gratifying to me. I always enjoy my visits to UCSB. This campus and the people that work here hold a special place in my heart.

My husband Walter was a professor here and I’m a proud alumna of the Graduate School of Education. We’re very lucky to have such a wonderful, world class university right here on the Central Coast. But we’re especially lucky to have the Gevirtz Graduate School of Education.

For years Don and Marilyn Gevirtz recognized the critical importance of teachers to successful education. Because research clearly shows that the single most important factor in a child’s success in school is the quality of the teacher. So we are fortunate that many of the best school teachers on the Central Coast got their start right here at UCSB and the Gevirtz School.

But training the next generation of school teachers is not the only thing the Gevirtz School is known for. It also promotes innovative research to help influence public education policy. And this is something that I want to talk to you about today.
 
I don’t have to tell you that universities are a natural breeding ground for innovation and entrepreneurship.They are idea factories. They’re places where professors and students get to work in partnership with businesses, agencies and organizations to generate, investigate, and produce new ideas, processes and technologies.

Here at UCSB there are several nationally recognized research and education centers that serve as a resource for policymakers at the local, state, national, even international levels. I’ve been honored to work with just some of them as a Member of Congress: the Center for Nanotechnology in Society, the Bren School of Environmental Management, and the Marine Science Institute.

As a policy maker, I’ve relied heavily on the research put forth by these outstanding research centers, and their faculty. For example, as many of you know we’re fortunate to have the Channel Islands National Marine Sanctuary located right off our coast. The Sanctuary’s staff spent almost a decade deciding how it was going to protect certain areas around the islands from overfishing.

The scientific consensus – produced largely by UCSB professors – was to establish a network of marine protected areas, called reserves, around the islands. Many of the professors from the Marine Science Institute, working with state and federal agencies, helped to design the network of reserves. Over the years I met with these professors.  I talked with them about their research.  I read their reports. Some of them even testified before Congress on the subject.

And at the end of the day, when it was time for me to make a decision on supporting or opposing the network of reserves, I looked at the evidence.  I looked at the science – the data – which proved that if the fish were going to survive we would need larger, not smaller reserves. So when the network was finalized last summer, it was a time for great celebration. 

And it’s great to know that the professors and researchers here at UCSB, who put so much into this effort, contributed to the great success. While having a keen sense of procedure and politics is also important to driving public policy, the foundation is research. You need to have the facts and figures to make good solid decisions.

In addition to relying on our research institutions, it’s important to experience as much as you can first hand. That’s one of the reasons why, I enjoy touring our communities, talking to people, asking questions and seeing problems with my own eyes.

So this past year, with the start of the reauthorization process of No Child Left Behind, I did a little bit of my own research. I wanted to hear directly from teachers, parents and administrators, those working under NCLB on a daily basis, about what was and was not working. I toured schools up and down the Central Coast, at all grade levels. And boy did I get an earful!

But it was extremely important to see what is really working for our students.  Not only did I get recommendations from our educators, but I got to see how this bill truly affects our local schools. Like the pressures schools face under inflexible guidelines. How the “one size fits all” approach does not work for all schools.

And I got recommendations on better ways to measure proficiency that could serve not just some of our students, but all students. These recommendations helped me focus the priorities for our community. And I was able to relay them directly to the Chairman of the Education and Labor Committee, Congressman George Miller for his consideration.

As the reauthorization process continues, I will rely on research produced by our leading academic institutions as well as and my school tour experiences from last year to guide me. Because I believe it is vital to incorporate both research and on the ground fact-finding when developing well-rounded public policies. The more we can strengthen the partnership between research and policy, the strong our laws will be. 

Thank you again for inviting me to be a part of this important discussion.

Pictured above: (center) Congresswoman Capps meets with Central Coast firefighters to discuss emergency preparedness.