 We're about now to launch a panel which will look at issues of the economy of health care and education. There'll be another set of panels in the afternoon after lunch and we are going to hear from five members of this panel. I think that the way we may want to proceed is that several folks want to speak from the podium as before they engage in the panel. So I'll ask people after they've finished their few minutes of introductory remarks to go up onto the stage so that our panel will be convening as we speak. It will be materializing before our eyes. And I'm thrilled to begin this process with Jeff Fox who is the principal founder of the Economic Policy Institute and his first president from 1986 to 2002. He's now the Institute's Distinguished Fellow. Also serves on its board of directors. The Economic Policy Institute is an event cosponsor and the nation's leading think tank on political and economic issues. Prior to starting the Economic Policy Institute, Jeff was the co-director of the Center for Economic Alternatives. He is a former economist for the U.S. Departments of State, Commerce and Labor. That's a lot of getting around. And former director of economic development for the U.S. Office of Economic Opportunity. I will note that among his degrees is one from George Washington University, also one from Harvard, but who's counting. His most recent book is the Servant Economy where America's Elite is sending the middle class. In this book he observes that after World War II the U.S. could afford a prosperous middle class, a military and a booming economic elite at the same time. But in recent decades those have been competing with the middle class. Always losing. Join me in welcoming Jeff. Thank you very much. Thank you. Thank you very much, Linda. And good morning, everybody. I'm going to use my 10 minutes. I know it's going to be 10 minutes because she's got a buzzer there. To give you a little bit of a perspective of someone who marched with Dr. King from Selma to Montgomery, Alabama who worked in the war on poverty and who in 1976 knocked on doors for Fred Harris in his campaign to become President of the United States, which didn't quite make it. Over a half of century, obviously, there's been a lot of changes and I've seen them. And as people have said, many for the good. I can remember, I can remember when in this town someone like Barack Obama could not be served a cup of coffee at some places. And I can remember when he could not get a job at Safeway Bank and groceries. So things have changed and as we all know in this room, things have also gotten worse. I want to talk to this phenomena about how things got better for 10 or 15 years and then stopped and ask the question why. Well, there's a lot of reasons, but there's an economic reason that I think that we all have to be aware of. At the time of the Kerner Commission, the economic problem seemed relatively simple. The New Deal social contract had created an escalator for the working class and the poor. That is, as economic as the economy grew, people went up the escalator in wages and income and opportunities. Now, access to the escalator was limited mostly to people who were white. So there were two tracks to those, that original strategy. One was the civil rights track to deal with the race barrier. The second was the anti-poverty track to deal with people's, giving people skills to move up into the middle class once they got access to this escalator. The white resistance was fierce, as Congressman Scott said. And you know, there's this cliche that you can't legislate what's in the heart, and it deals with issues of racism. But the Civil Rights Act did legislate the conditions that changed what was in many people's heart. But forcing, forcing people to work together, to go to school together, what it did was narrow the distance that segregation had produced over those centuries. Not everywhere and not in everybody's heart, certainly, but enough to make progress. But then after the 1970s, something changed. Yes, globalization, automation in the economy. But what really changed was that instead of policies to keep that escalator going up, so that economic growth could be widely shared, policies were implemented in the political move to the right, deregulation, privatization, tax cuts for the rich, so-called welfare reform, so that growth continued, but wages stagnated. And the US economy became an engine for creating low-wage jobs, dead-end jobs, and keeping people stuck in poverty. And that's why over the last decade or so, those charts have gone down. And in many ways, things have gotten worse. Now, white people were still obviously privileged in this society, but working people and poor people of all races now were walking up a down escalator, which made everything for us a lot harder. The investment that promised or recommended by the current commission never happened. And as these funds became increasingly inadequate because of the drift to the right of our politics, something else happened. In implementing those policies, the resources got concentrated on fewer and fewer people. The logic was after all, if we only have a certain amount of money in our budget, let's concentrate that on the people who are worse off. That makes compassionate sense. It makes programmatic sense, but it didn't make political sense. Because what we did was when, as people were falling off or getting to the bottom of that escalator, and the needs were growing, we were shrinking the population of beneficiaries. So the right wing turned on that and used the anger and the raw anger that was channeled increasingly by that phenomena to anger at the poor. Not the rich, who were getting richer, but the poor. After the 2016 election, there was a question asked of a woman who was a social worker in the Midwest in one of those counties, one of those election districts that turned from Obama to Trump. And she said, she was asked why she voted for Trump. And she said, I can't afford on my salary enough money to pay for daycare. I work in a daycare center, and I'm not eligible because I make too much money. I'm not eligible for the benefits that go to the really poor. And so I'm pissed, etc., etc. Well, as Congressman Scott said, it's really not that we don't know what to do. I mean, we've accumulated the evidence. We've studied the poor to death. We've studied inequality to death. We know how to give people skills and education to become productive citizens. We know how to create good jobs and provide decent healthcare. We know what promotes racial justice and what does not promote racial justice. But we also have not created the majority that we need to do what we know how to do. James Baldwin once wrote, not everything that's faced can be changed. But nothing can be changed if it's not faced. And I think one of the things we need to face in this 2018 economy is that class inequality is an incubator of racial inequality. So we need two related tracks, race-sensitive programs to deal with the racism that's still within us and around us. And class-sensitive economic policies that gets the escalator moving back up again. Now, I know the prospect seems grim. But note, the down escalator in this country is producing more and more people in economic pain, more and more people. So Martin Luther King's dream of a multiracial majority, in some sense, may be closer to a potential now that it has been in a long time. Now, can the spread of inequality translate into a multiracial majority for race-sensitive and class-sensitive policies? I don't know. But I know there's no option but to try. And I think that if you look at the evidence, then this is all about evidence-based policies. I think if you look at the political evidence, there may be more hope for reversing that escalator for all working people and poor people than we've thought. Martin Luther King taught us, and I think he was right, that you cannot achieve racial justice in a fundamentally unjust society. Thank you. Many people here who need no introduction, but we give them an introduction anyway. And many of you know Jared Bernstein, who is a senior fellow at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. He's also the former chief economist to Vice President Joe Biden and served as deputy chief economist in the U.S. Department of Labor from 1995 to 96. He's author of a number of books, including most recently The Reconnection Agenda, Reaniting Growth and Prosperity, which looks at the disconnect between economic growth and the immobility of those on the wrong side of the inequality divide. He offers concrete policy solutions to break what he calls the economic shampoo cycle, bubble, bust, and repeat. He is a regular contributor to the New York Times and the Washington Post, where he writes on labor and the economy. Join me in welcoming Jared Bernstein. Thank you. Thanks for the nice introduction, and thanks for the current team for helping me produce this chapter. You know, Linda said that I focus on concrete policy solutions, and that's what I'm going to do for the next 10 minutes. If this gets a little listy, I kind of apologize, but I also kind of don't. And the reason I don't is because I actually was asked to write the chapter for the fourth. I'm old enough to have written the chapter for the 40th anniversary of the commission. And as I wrote in my introduction to this one, it's not enough. So I think in the last chapter I did what a lot of economists do. I presented a bunch of pictures about what's wrong, and then maybe with a paragraph at the end, saying somebody ought to fix it. And in this case, I said, that's not enough. No more nibbling around the edges. Those who believe that racial economic injustice has hardly been rectified must move an agenda that we've been pushing for many decades. And that diagnosis should inform our prescription of a policy agenda that could really make a difference. And that's what I'm going to try to tick through in the next few minutes. In many ways, I think I'm trying to really following on from the wonderful speech by the young woman who was born in 2007, who suggested and I thought you just nailed it that we need to invest in fixing this problem, but invest in what? And so that's what I wanted to talk about. I want to start with the idea of direct job creation. When the Kerr Commission wrote their report a half century ago, they noted that employment is a key problem. Many others on this dais have said that. And yet despite, this is from the original report, yet despite continuing economic growth, declining national unemployment rates, which we have right now, growth, declining unemployment rates, the unemployment rate for Negroes in 1967 was more than double that of whites. I wrote this chapter in May of last year. The ratio of the black to the unemployment rate was two. That ratio has remained incredibly consistent over these years. Now, ask yourself, those of you who follow the economics of the way policy works these days, what happens when we have a massive credit failure in this economy when the banks were sitting on all these non-performing loans and the credit system threatened to freeze up? Pretty much everybody immediately says, aha, Federal Reserve, lender of last resort, we must have credit flowing. That's kind of liquidity is the lifeblood of an economy. That's the credit must circulate. And therefore, we have a lender of last resort. Well, if we're talking about a ratio of black to white unemployment that has been immovable since the data began, really, back in the 1970s, then we need an employer of last resort to fix that market failure. And that calls for direct job creation. In the interest of time, I'm not going to give you the details of these policies. I'm just going to tell you that I think they're important. And then during the panel, if we want to explore, what do you mean by direct job creation? There's actually a continuum of direct provision of public service employment, all the way to the other end of continuum of programs that subsidize employers to hire disadvantaged people. And I will tell you something really interesting. Bob Rubin, who's a guy I know and have worked with and like over the years, but Mr. Centrist Democrat recently had an op-ed in the New York Times saying, you know, we really need some kind of a subsidized employment program. So I tell you, and I go up to the Hill, I talk to members of Congress, I tell you that this is an idea that's gaining strength with Democrats. Okay. Maintaining full employment. This is something Martin Luther King, Jr. recognized just towards the end of his life, you know, the full employment campaign was so embedded in his work. And there are four pieces to maintaining full employment. Now, first of all, what do I mean by full employment? I mean an unemployment rate that is low enough to create pressure on wage growth. And not just for those at the top of the scale, but for those at the bottom of the scale, disproportionately minorities are demonstrably helped more by low unemployment than are those with higher incomes. And so achieving and maintaining full employment has always been central to my work. And in that sense again, I'm just echoing Dr. King. Fiscal policy, monetary policy, I mentioned direct job creation and trade policy all plays a role in maintaining full employment. Let me just give you one tidbit on this. So the Federal Reserve, which is a very important institution when it comes to maintaining full employment, currently believes that the natural rate of unemployment, what they call the natural rate of unemployment, I mean the lowest unemployment rate they believe to be consistent with stable inflation is 4.6%. Now the current unemployment rate is a half a point below that. And in fact, inflation hasn't been accelerating if anything, it's kind of been flat or decelerated, maybe a little bit of movement lately, but you sort of expect that at this point in time. And yet, you know, they're on an interest rate rising campaign based on this idea that inflation is right around the corner. And remember, that ratio of two. So if the unemployment rate is 4% for overall, three and a half, in fact, it's three and a half for whites, it's about seven, actually about seven seven right now for blacks. So there is an inherent bias that sustains that I think unforgiving ratio if we get this idea of full employment wrong, and I would argue that we have, because even by standard measures, standard measures which I disbelieve, I think they're biased up, we've been at full employment only 30% of the time since 1980, only 30% of the time since 1980, we've had unemployment rates that are below this alleged natural rate. So no wonder we've had so much wage stagnation, particularly of lower income folks. So I think maintaining full employment is really important. We also have to worry though about job quality, as someone said earlier, Jeff was just saying, it's not just enough to create employment. And in this sense, higher minimum wages are important. Now about 31 states have realized that and have acted on their own. So at this point, the federal minimum wage, which do people know what the federal minimum wage, I suspect in this room they do, $7.25 an hour, which is just shameful, it's really the southern minimum wage at this point because those are the states that have resisted raising. So that's part of my job quality agenda is raising the minimum wage. And I can say more about that in arguments about levels and where to set it. Expansion of the earned income credit and the child credit, these are very important wage subsidies. I think we're gonna, there's others here to speak about healthcare. Let me just give you a statistic though. The Affordable Care Act and particularly the Medicaid expansion and the subsidies for premiums for people who gets healthcare in the non-group market lowered the African-American uninsured rate by a third from about 19% to 12%. So that was a real accomplishment and again, disproportionately helpful to lower-waged people. I stress in my chapter the need for something new. So thus far, well the direct job creation thing, we've actually done a fair bit of that in our history. I'll be happy to talk about it later, but I've talked about a lot of things so far that we do, we have minimum wages, we have an EITC, we have a child tax credit. Here's something we ought to have that we don't and that's a child allowance. I propose in the chapter, actually I hitchhiked off of a proposal that was developed by some scholars at Columbia University. I propose a child allowance that's $250 a month or $3,000 a year and black poverty rates for kids which are three times white rates. So 36% for black kids, 12% for white kids reduced by 40% by this child allowance idea. Now it costs 190 billion a year and that's not chicken feed, believe me, but about half of that would be offset by consolidating other programs. I talk about a housing idea, particularly Housing Choice Voucher expansion that was developed by some folks at the center on budget and this one by increasing the subsidy in the catchment area which that subsidy, housing subsidy can be applied for, this would allow people to move to low poverty neighborhoods which they can't really do right now based on the way the subsidies are currently set. I have education and some criminal justice reforms with our other people on the panel who can speak more about that and I do have a section about reparations because I don't think a policy chapter in this sort of book can leave that out and there I just kind of echo Tana Hisi Coates who I thought made strong and compelling arguments for ways to consider that, ideas to consider reparations and I'm happy to talk more about that. I'm not, by the way, just to be clear, I'm not this diminishing education or criminal justice or the reparations idea, it's just that there are others on the panel who can say more of that and I wanna get out of the way and let them speak. So finally we need a way to get from here to there and that's where I think my work connects nicely with Jeff's and actually Jeff and I were just in the men's room chatting and we came up with a really, I think a neat way to think about that that we can talk about on the panel if you like. So thanks very much. So many great ideas and we're about to hear more about health policy from Herbert Smitherman Jr. Dr. Smitherman is Vice Dean of Diversity and Community Affairs and Associate Professor of General Medicine at the Wayne State University School of Medicine. He's President and CEO of the Health Sciences Centers Detroit Foundation, which brings healthcare services to the medically underserved areas and populations of Detroit. His research and expertise focus primarily on creative sustainable systems of care for urban communities. He's devoted his career to working with diverse communities to develop urban-based primary care delivery systems that integrate health, social goals and the concerns of the community. He's co-author of the 2007 health policy book Taking Care of the Uninsured, A Path to Reform, which uses research-based evidence to describe policies centered on collaborating, coordinating, implementing coverage and organizing care for the uninsured. Dr. Smitherman. Okay, first of all, thank you. Can you hear me? Am I on? Am I on? Yeah, I got her. All right. First of all, thank you for inviting me. I'm a practicing physician in Detroit. I am a faculty member, I'm a scientist. And so my decisions on an everyday basis are typically based on data and based on evidence. So this whole idea of sort of fake news and sort of alternative facts have been an enigma for me. It's been extremely challenging. So I'm gonna preface my comments by first stating, I'm gonna talk about facts. Okay? No alternative facts and no fake news. I think what it seems like fake news is, you present actually peer-reviewed data and if somebody doesn't like what they hear, they just call it fake. So fact, ratio and ethnic disparities in the United States in healthcare do exist. And these disparities are consistent. They're pervasive. They're extensive across a range of medical conditions and healthcare services. And they are associated with worst health outcomes. And people talk about, well, infant mortality rates over the last 50 years have improved. We've seen them come down. Well, yes, they have. But 30 years ago, the difference between African-Americans and European-Americans was 1.8 times. And now it's 2.5 times. Even though infant mortality rates are declining, the gap is increasing. Life expectancy. Life expectancy is rising for most ethnic groups. But the difference and the gap between black and white and people of color is rising. Mortality rates, if you look at mortality rates for African-Americans, mortality rates were 60% higher in 1950. African-Americans versus white Americans. And currently, they're 60% higher. So when we look at, and I've looked at over the last 30 years, probably read 600 peer-reviewed published pieces of literature on health disparities and income inequalities as it relates to health. And that only represents a fraction of the published study that investigate racial and ethnic disparities and access to care. And I've looked at large databases, regional databases, national databases. It doesn't matter whether you're talking about cardiovascular disease, diabetes, renal transplant, cancer, cerebral vascular disease, HIV, AIDS, rehab, maternal child health, prenatal care, mental health. It doesn't, hospital-based health, it doesn't matter. These disparities are pervasive, they are persistent, and they are very, very real. What's driving this? Well, if you look at what's driving a lot of these disparities, it's not what I do. Every day I practice medicine, I see patients, I deliver healthcare, provide medications, et cetera. That impacts health about 25%. 60% of what's driving health status in the United States are social determinants of health. Social determinants of health, what is that? That's unemployment. That's educational attainment, food insecurity, housing insecurity, transportation, unsafe communities, pollution, behavior. And when we talk about behavior, I'm not talking about just consciously chosen decisions that people make. I'm talking about a composite expression of the social and cultural circumstances and the conditions that constrain behavior. When you talk about a child born in my community who lives in abject poverty, who has a poor school system, who is housing insecure, whose water and electricity are oftentimes off, this is not a chosen behavior. And that's a real story. So what drives health status? We're talking about social determinants of health. And social determinants of health are associated with social economic differences. That tend to diminish significantly. And in a few cases, disappear altogether when these social economic factors are addressed. There are a lot of studies that show and strongly show that addressing racial and ethnic gaps in insurance, health insurance, in jobs and educational attainment are some of the most important factors in narrowing racial and ethnic gap in healthcare services. It's clear that people in each ascending step, as you increase social economic status, as you increase income, life expectancy in most westernized countries increases, especially in this country. So the issue of health, I say that people talk about it's a right, it's a part of the reward system. First of all, health is a precondition for achievement in any society. And in my opinion, therefore cannot be used as a part of the reward system for achievement. No real social economic advancement can happen in a society if people don't have basic healthcare. Children can't learn appropriately in school if they are not healthy. One cannot be effective on a job if you're not healthy. One cannot fully and appropriately contribute to society if he or she is not healthy. Therefore, health is a prerequisite for a person to effectively participate in advance in any society. So when you look at the drivers of that health, that is social policy which drives health policy and the links between health, wealth and income, which are inextricably linked as wealth and income go up, we see health status go up. Well, let's look at some of the policies that have been put forth over the last several decades and we can begin to understand why we have challenges. And let's see if this helps social and health policy. Cuts in Medicaid and Medicare. Cuts in care to the disabled. That helped improve inequities. Cuts to mental health care services. Cuts to nursing home care. Cuts to community health centers and federally qualified health centers. Cuts to medical research. Cuts to women's health. Cuts to Planned Parenthood. Cuts to the food stamp program. Cuts in subsidies to mass transit. Cuts in school lunch programs for inner city kids. Cuts to funding for job training in urban areas. Cuts to school loan programs for minority children. Cuts to college aid and Pell grants for disadvantaged students. Cuts in after school programs for inner city children. Cuts to public education. Cuts to social security. Cuts in housing resources for poor families. Fighting rises in minimum wages. Cuts to state funding for colleges so college education is no longer affordable for low and middle income families. Bank home for closures. No effective wage increases in the middle class over the last 30 years. Lower corporate taxes and lower individual taxes on wealthy and increasing effective individual taxes on the middle class. Scaling back tax credits. Cuts to head start. I mean, I can go down the list. These are current or over the last 30 years public policies proposed. And when people say, well, why haven't we seen some of these health status and some of these indicators go up? You can't go up when you implement a policy and then the next year you cut its resources and you cyclically go through increasing dollars and cutting dollars. Increasing dollars and cutting dollars. We end up with where we are today in America with no consensus on what it means to have a baseline set of services and care for every single American to which no American family goes below. No American family. So there have been significant increases in income inequality during the past decades. And there are lots of reasons for that. But I'm gonna just briefly end with what I believe are as a physician how you can help me improve health status for my country and my community. And I can also say that 20% of American kids go to college, 80% don't. And so what's the American dream for the students, the 80% of the students who don't go to college? What's the public policy to move them forward? So here's, I would say, as I was in my room yesterday here, five ways I think you can help me improve health status. First, we invest 1% of GDP towards infrastructure building in the United States. We can go a long way to solve the problem of poverty in the United States because not only will we put people back to work, this investment in work will generate at least 2% increase in GDP. Poverty related crime in the US costs 1% of GDP. Why can't we put that investment in infrastructure, build the country, employ people, and have that investment, the roads we build, the bridges we build, the fast trains we do, bring it up so that we employ people and rebuild our country at the same time. Number two, education. We decided as a country to make K through 12 free for all Americans, but in the 21st century, high school diplomas for students are not ready, they are not ready for the workplace. We need to expand this free education K through 14. That is two years of community college for the 80% of kids who don't go to college to develop a skill that is functional in our society today. Number three, expand healthcare. It's the largest, most significant deficit that a family faces. It is the number one reason for personal bankruptcy. It can destroy a family if your loved one develops cancer and you don't have health insurance. Cancer does not automatically mean you get health insurance. And a cancer diagnosis can be millions of dollars and bankrupt you in the span of a month. We need to protect families if we don't protect our families with stable healthcare policy. And I think the Affordable Care Act is a great start with Medicare and the association with Medicare and Medicaid. So sustain those programs and stop trying to cut them. Increase the minimum wage to $15 and allow it to float with inflation. That's number four. And number five is affordable housing. If families don't have a place to live and I deal with this every day as I see patients, people don't have a place to live. It destabilizes their entire life. Housing is a fundamental issue for sustaining people in a society. Those are my five suggestions and I'll answer any questions at the podium. All right. We are shifting to education. And Diane Ravich who has been in this business for a very long time and has thought about every issue there is I think in education is with us. She is an author of one of the chapters of the book. She is a historian of education and educational policy analyst and a research professor at New York University's School of Steinhardt School of Culture Education and Human Development. She served as the assistant secretary of education under President George H.W. Bush's secretary of education, Lamar Alexander from 91 to 93. As assistant secretary, she led the federal effort to promote the creation of voluntary state and national academic standards at that time developed by the educators, associations who were coming together to use their knowledge to create those standards. Alexander's successor, President Clinton's secretary of education, Richard Riley, appointed her to serve as a member of the National Assessment Governing Board which supervises the National Assessment of Educational Progress. In an often cited 2010 Wall Street Journal article Why I Changed My Mind About School Reform, Diane noted among many other things that the best predictor of low academic performance is poverty, not bad teachers. Her best-selling book, released in 2010, is The Death and Life of the Great American School System, How Testing and Choice Under Mine Education. Diane has always been a provocative and clear thinker, a person deeply committed to public education. I'll be surprised if she doesn't talk about her own public education in Texas in her speech today, and the contributions she's made over many, many years. Please join me in welcoming Diane Ravich. Well, thank you so much. It's a great pleasure to be with you. Now, I have something in common with Chanuri, wouldn't mention that. I'm a graduate of the Houston Independent School District also, but when I graduated, the schools were completely segregated, and they may by now have resegregated at a time. And I don't wanna bore you with my own story, but I worked in the first Bush administration, and then over time had a great change of mind, change of heart, and became very critical of the things I had been advocating. For example, I don't think that higher academic standards have anything to do with reducing poverty. And I think that testing is actually discriminatory towards kids who are poor, and minority kids, but I won't go into that just yet. Let me say that I think we are living with the most reactionary government of my lifetime. And having grown up in the South and gone to segregated schools, I found it puzzling to wonder over the past, I don't know, 40 years or so, what happened to all those racists? And they're back. They didn't go away, they didn't disappear, they weren't converted. So today we have enormous inequality of income and wealth. I was reading something this morning that said that the Walton family alone has more wealth than 137 million people in this country. There's something terrible about that. We also lead the advanced nations of the world, number one in child poverty. So when people quote test scores, and they say, but we're only 12, we're only 14, we're only 16. I said, let's talk about what percent of our kids live in poverty compared to the other countries. Let's talk about how many of our children have access to early, high quality early childhood education. Let's talk about prenatal maternal care. And we're ranked somewhere along with Somalia in terms of prenatal care. So where do we look for hope? I ask myself that question frequently and I've lived a long life. I looked to the early civil rights movement. I looked to the men and women who met in 1930s, even earlier, 1940s. It must have looked even more hopeless to them than it does to us now. Because we have a chance in 2018 to put the brakes on, to some extent, to this insane administration. And in 2020 to throw them all out unless the Russians intervene again. But the civil rights leaders of the 30s and the 40s planned and strategized and they never gave up hope. They won cases in graduate schools, the right of black students to enter what had been white institutions. They won cases in higher education and then ultimately they won the Brown decision which was a crucial decision in this country's history. So I can't go forward without mentioning something that hasn't been mentioned yet and that is the importance of dark money. Five years after the Kerner Commission report was released in 1968, an organization was created called the American Legislative Exchange Council or ALIC. ALIC is probably the single most important organization in the country right now. It has 2000 state legislators that belong to it. It's sponsored by major corporations that all of us buy stuff from and it writes model legislation. And if you wanna understand the importance of ALIC in terms of advancing deregulation of everything and libertarian ideal of a free market everything, there are two books I recommend to you. One is Nancy McLean's book Democracy in Chains which is chilling. And it's about the stealth attack of the radical right on American democracy. And Gordon Laffer's book, that's L-A-F-E or the 1% solution. Gordon Laffer describes how using ALIC model laws, this libertarian philosophy has been carried state to state by the Koch brothers, by the DeVos family and by other people who are funding this attack. An attack on our democracy, an attack on social security, an attack on Medicare, an attack on unions, an attack on civil rights, an attack on public education. And the only viable strategy to stop this is democracy. We have voters, they have a lot of money but we have the votes. With the Kerner commission and I think being that we're meeting about the Kerner commission report I should say something about it. What's interesting about the report to me was that it didn't pay much attention to education. It focused on root causes. And one of the great grievances that I have with this current billionaire-driven so-called reform movement is it totally ignores root causes. The root causes that the Kerner commission focused on were racism, segregation, and poverty. Education was not a root cause. It was a consequence of racism, segregation, and poverty. And the main recommendation of the Kerner commission report was to eliminate all forms of segregation in schooling. To eliminate both de jure segregation and de facto segregation. At the time the report came out the schools were rigidly segregated. Most white kids went to mostly white schools, almost 100% white schools. And most black kids went to schools who were mostly black schools. In some cases, intensely segregated schools certainly throughout the South. And the schools attended by black children were inferior in many respects. They were older buildings poorly maintained with older textbooks sometimes discarded from the white schools. They were unequal in every respect. And after the Brown decision, the Southern governors had an answer. And that was school choice. School choice they said would be, who could object to that? It would beat the requirements of the Brown decision, let the children choose, the white kids would choose to go to white schools, the black children would choose to go to black schools, or they would be too intimidated to go to white schools, or they would be excluded by force and violence. And then came the passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act championed by Lenin Johnson. And it included something called Title VI. Title VI said there would be no federal funding of racially discriminatory programs or activities. And although the South opposed the Civil Rights Act, they weren't too worried because there wasn't a lot of federal funding and education. But then came 1965 and the passage of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act. And there was federal funding. And suddenly the Office of Education, there was no Department of Education, but the Office of Education and Health Education and Welfare was tough. And they said to the Southern states, which needed the money desperately because they were very poor, you will not get federal funding unless you desegregate. Forget about school choice. You're not, a school choice plan will not be funded. And so they began to say, show us the numbers. What percent of your kids and what percent of your staff are actually attending schools with people of the other race? And they didn't get, they did not get the money unless they could prove the numbers. And the numbers began to really change. And what happened that was so interesting in terms of the dynamic was that the federal courts, even in the Deep South, went with the federal government and together the courts and the administration struck down the choice plans, refused to accept excuses and insisted on real desegregation. And they worked together very well. The Supreme Court was on board, at least for a long time. In 1971, the Supreme Court, even with a Chief Justice appointed by President Nixon, approved the Charlotte Mecklenburg Metro desegregation plan. 1973, it approved a desegregation plan for Denver, which had not previously had de jure segregation. But then it kinda came to a screeching halt in Detroit with the Millican decision where they said that Detroit and its surrounding suburbs could not be merged, unlike Charlotte Mecklenburg. And so the Detroit would have to solve its problems on its own, which it could not do because of white flight. And then by the early 1990s, the courts were in full retreat. And Nicole Hannah-Jones wrote an article recently in which he said, there were some 750 school districts that were under court order to desegregate. But over time, the courts began backing down. And the districts, many of them forgot they were under court order and the courts didn't enforce the orders. And so there was this long retreat that began in the early 1990s. And the high point for desegregation, Gary Orfield has written, was 1988. And as Linda mentioned earlier, what happened at the high point of desegregation was a dramatic decline in the achievement gap between the races. And what we have seen since 1988 is a retrenchment in desegregation. And in many city schools, segregation is more common than desegregation. What we've also seen is in contrast to the late 1960s, inaction by the US Department of Education, inaction by the federal judiciaries, the policymakers simply gave up. They said, there's nothing we can do. And the courts went into retreat. And it became the common wisdom that we tried and it failed. But it didn't fail. Rucker Johnson, who is a professor at Berkeley, has done paper after paper showing the impact of racially integrated schools on the children who attended them, on the young people who attended them. Black students who attended integrated schools, he said, are likelier to graduate from high school, likelier to enroll in college, likelier to graduate from college, and likelier to lead healthier and more successful lives. It doesn't get any better than that. Why did we stop doing it? And why do we say it doesn't work? But people said, well, there's nothing we can do because of housing segregation. But as Richard Rothstein demonstrated dramatically and powerfully in his book, The Color of Law, housing segregation didn't happen by accident. Housing segregation was created by the federal government and state governments and municipal governments. It was not accidental and it was not a matter of choice. So it brings us to the present where I have to say that the Obama administration made a fatal error in education. And that was that they had $5 billion of discretionary funds with which to spend on whatever they wanted to do. They could have taken that $5 billion and had a competition instead of the states. We will fund the most ambitious and likely to be effective integration plan that you can come up with because the data, the research is clear that this is the most powerful way to help children achieve more in school. But instead they came out with a race at the top which said, we want higher test scores. We want charter schools. We want teachers to be judged by the test scores of their students. We want schools closed in neighborhoods where the test scores are low. And guess what? The charter schools turned out to be more than 90% non-union and have been heavily funded by the same dark money that I mentioned earlier, the Walton Family Foundation, the Devos Foundation, all these right wing groups have poured money into charter schools now into vouchers because it's a way of killing unions. We're not about to have a court decision that's going to try to administer the last blow. A recent study from the Economic Policy Institute said that it's a Janus decision which is the one before the Supreme Court right now. If it goes against unions, the group that will be hurt most will be black women because they are the largest group represented by public sector workers. The charter schools that were championed by Obama's race to the top and now by Betsy Devos are more segregated than the districts in which they are located. And so now we have this full-fledged privatization movement. Let's get rid of public education. And that's what you hear from Betsy Devos every day. That's her only policy idea, is let's get rid of public education and replace it with privately managed schools. We know from experience from around the world that privately managed schools are more segregated. Wrap up, sorry. I was in New Orleans a few years after all the schools went charter and black women sit up in the audience and she said first they stole our democracy and then they stole our schools. So now under Trump and Devos, the Southern governors are finally getting what they wanted in the 1950s and the 1960s. School choice, for the first time in history, the U.S. government is on the side of the Southern governors of the 50s and 60s. Minority students are enrolled in schools called no-excuses schools where they're taught to conform they and to their being, it's a form of neocolonialism. So I think that there's very little we can expect from the federal government over the next three years but it's a time to build for the future, to strategize this as civil rights leaders did in the 30s and 40s and to ask the question if black students are only 13% of the student population, why must they be walled off? This is insane. We have to have hope, we have to have determination and this is the beginning, I hope, of what will be a long and steady rebellion. Thank you. Thank you so much and last but not least as we get this panel going is John Jackson. John is president and CEO of the Shot Foundation for Public Education. He took this position in 2007. After seven years in leadership positions at the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, during which he served as his chief policy officer and prior to that the national director of education. At Shot, John leads the foundation's efforts to fund and advocate systemic change to address the disparities poor children and children of color face in our nation's schools. Previous to his work at Shot and the NAACP, John was appointed in 1991 by President Clinton to serve as a senior policy advisor in the Office for Civil Rights at the U.S. Department of Education. Where is John? There he is. Please welcome John Jackson. Well, I'm glad that I'm here today and that we're all here today having this conversation because I don't know about you. I don't intend to be here 50 years later talking about the 50th anniversary after the 50th anniversary of the Kerner Report because it's clear today that 50 years after the Kerner Report, parental income remains the number one predictor of student outcome. Parental income, not whether or not the school is a traditional public school or charter, not whether or not the school is unionized, not whether or not the school has high standards but parental income. And it's clear that while we have had a national dialogue over the years around closing the achievement gap, essentially what we are looking at is the product of clear and consistent opportunity gaps. Opportunity gaps that throughout American history and localities, policies and practices, they've been baked into the local policies and practices that are at best baked into at a point of implicit bias at worse racism and hatred. And what are we talking about? Implicit bias, access to affordable housing, access to livable wages, access to public transportation, health care, these are all of the policies that are necessary to provide students an opportunity to learn. We've approached it as if we can provide students an opportunity to learn by only looking at what happens in the learning setting. When in actuality, it takes both a healthy living and learning environment to provide all students an opportunity to learn. My grandmother used to tell me if you walk past a river and you see a fish barking and a duck laughing, don't ask what's wrong with the fish or the duck asks what's wrong with the river. But we've only critiqued what's the problem with the students? What's the problem with the parents? What's the problem with the teachers? We haven't critiqued the system. And even more, once we separate ourselves from the words that we have learned at fine institutions like George Washington and others, at the core of it, I'm reminded of what a colleague told me. Racism is nothing but institutionalized lovelessness. The question is, do we love our young people enough to institutionalize the policies and practices that are necessary to create the types of loving systems that will provide all students an opportunity to learn? So as hate and racism is a dominant theme in our national dialogue today, last week, the Shaw Foundation, we launched the Loving Cities Index. And the Loving Cities Index is an analysis of the supports that cities and localities are offering our young people and the cross-sector supports. We did this analysis to look at not what we would call the thermometer data points, those data points that tell us what the existing climate might be. So for example, if we look at the issue of out-of-school suspension, we might say that a city suspends 70% of its students. That's helpful to know. That's a thermometer data point. But we also need to begin to look at the thermostat data points. And those are the data points that much in the same way that you're a thermostat at home, you manipulate it in such a way to produce the ideal climate. We need to know how are those thermostat indicators working within localities. So if we know that the suspension rate is 70%, or we know that restorative justice actually helps reduce that, we need to know what percentage of the schools in my locality are practicing restorative justice. And that's what this index is about. Taking an assessment of the supports that are available, the cross-sector supports that are available for students in localities and 10 cities across the country. Our goal is to over the next five years enroll and engage over 50 cities and hope to impact the national tone. So we started with 10 cities, cities like Baltimore, Minneapolis, Buffalo, Chicago, Philadelphia, Little Rock, Charlotte, as a way to begin to engage cities in the dialogue and the recognition that it takes a cross-sector approach to provide all students an opportunity to learn. And what we found out is on average, the cities only provided 42% of the supports that are necessary to substantively say that all students have a fair and substantive opportunity to learn. The range was from 52% in Minneapolis to 39% in Charlotte. The supports that are necessary to provide all students an opportunity to learn. So if there are a few recommendations, I would say the first is this is clear evidence that it is time that though we are in this unique political moment right now, and I do wanna call it unique, I reject that this is the norm. We are in a unique political moment. We will see a new day. And a new day is coming pretty soon. And in that new day, if we don't have another frame or another way to begin to think about to offer our young people, then we would have lost an opportunity. And so it is time for us in the new day to transition from a standards-based reform agenda where we ask what are the right standards, what are the right test scores? What are the right thermometer indicators to a supports-based educational agenda? Ask the question, what are the right supports that regardless of where a student is located? What's zip code? How do we align those supports and how do we use the only mandatory institution, our public school system to deliver those supports? Transition from a standards-based to a supports-based. Secondly, I think it's time that we challenge the notion, again, that we can provide students an opportunity to learn by only critiquing what happens within the learning space. But indeed, it takes a healthy living and a healthy learning environment to provide all students a fair and substantive opportunity to learn. And we must begin to assess the supports that are available and create the types of cross-sector tables in order to make that happen. It's not just mayors, superintendents, it's not just superintendents and educators and principals, but it's also mayors, county commissioners, all they have the responsibility to provide students a fair and substantive opportunity to learn. And third, if we're serious about closing the opportunity gap, it's about our relationships. It's about creating loving partnerships. And so we need to create new language. And the language of love is not accountability, assessment, and standards. I don't know about you. I've never had a loved one lean over to me and say, I love the way you assess me. Or you had me at accountability. But indeed, it's about care. When we talk to parents, and Zakiya knows this, and parents and students, they ask, does this system care for my students? Are they committed to my students? Will they provide the capacity and the stability necessary? And so those are the things and the domains that we measure in the Loving Cities Index. Care, the types of access to health care, healthy food, stability, access to affordable housing, access to transportation, commitment, access to the types of AP courses and advanced placement courses, and capacity, resource equity, addressing issues of economic stability, because it is going to take new language to create a new day. And the language is not the language that we've used in the past. You can fake standards. You can manipulate assessments, and they have, but you can't fake love. You can't, you cannot fake care because it's an action word. It requires that you take some level of action. And as my daughter reminded me, my 15 year old daughter, she said, daddy, if you love me, you will drop me off at this dance. Now I use that in Jess, but what she said was, if you love me, I should be able to see it, feel it, and know it. And our greatest tragedy since the current report is our young people don't feel that we care. They don't feel that we're committed. And that's our challenge. So as we take the next step toward the new day, we have to work to provide all students a fair and substantive opportunity to learn and let them know that we care through the loving systems that we produce. Thank you. I want to give folks in the audience the opportunity to ask most of the questions of this panel. I'm going to start us off with one, but I want you to be thinking about what you want to ask. And we'll give you that opportunity in just a moment. You'll have to use your teaching voice in the, your outdoor voice in order to be heard at this setting. But I want to start, actually, Jeff, with one thing that you said, which I think we can all respond to. I mean, you noted that as policies began to target the very poor, they often stimulated resentment from the not quite so poor who could not access the policies. They also inadvertently promoted segregation, because, for example, Head Start programs targeting very poor children end up being economically and often racially linguistically segregated and so on. So are there strategies that could address inequality with an integrative approach, and around which we could promote solidarity? And I want to open that to all of the members of the panel. Well, let me just say it's no accident that social security turned out to be the best anti-poverty program we had economically. And social security, obviously, is a universal program. It's going to cost money. I mean, it's cheap to say, let's just take care of the worst cases. Let's just take care of the people who can't move, right? But when you do that, I was taught about politics that you want to unify your friends and divide your enemies. And in a way, what we've been doing under all this pressure and the way we've responded to it, and these are Democrats as well as Republicans. This is all about Trump, is that we've been dividing our natural constituency, because we haven't had the courage and we haven't done the mobilization to get the resources we need for programs that cover not just the very, very poor, but the poor, the working poor. And what I think, because of my metaphor of the elevator, I just think is a growing majority of people in this country. And that's what I think is the political good news from the bad news. Let me just ask if others want to say something about this. Yes, Diane, and then I'll come over to Jared. I mentioned the Nancy McLean book, and she describes the right wing libertarian attack on Social Security. And she said that they said, the problem in Social Security is it's universal. No one wants to get rid of Social Security because everybody gets Social Security. But what if we say that there's a cutoff age and the people below that line, you'll never see your Social Security. It's all going to run out. And so the old people will get it. Let's say you'll have to work long. Let's start putting all these qualifications on. And that was their game plan, was divide and conquer. And it's brilliant. And this is why I urge you to read the book, because it's the first time that I understood that the great genius of Social Security is it's a universal program. So I'm going to take a slightly different tack, although I completely agree with these universal points. I want to talk about the way the overall or the macro economy doesn't work for everybody in a similar spirit. And by the way, I should note, I just saw Joe Stiglitz over there who has forgotten more than I know about this. I hope he talks about it as well. The idea that the, I think one of the themes that I tried to get at in my sprawling policy talk is that we need to be motivated by the fact that even at full, even as we close in on this notion of full employment where most people who are seeking jobs can find them, at least by the national statistics, there are pockets of disparity that all the other speakers have spoken about very eloquently. So even when it's working by standard definition, it's not working for folks who are left behind. And therefore, we need to really change what our, I think the economics profession, really needs to change what our understanding is of full economic capacity of full employment. The notion that it's okay to tap the economic growth breaks when African-American unemployment rates are still in levels that we would say are recessionary if they befell whites. So I'd like to try to expand this beyond, yes, universal social programs, but actually not just a public sector, but a private sector, an overall economy that was also had these universal characteristics. You know, that reminds me of something that Dr. Smitherman noted, which was that you noted improvement in trends like life expectancy and so on, but increasing of gaps. The same thing is true in education. You can see growth in high school graduation rates, but growing gaps. Growth in access to college, but growing gaps. Same thing with achievement. Some growth, but growing gaps. Why do you think that the gaps are growing? And, you know, what should we be doing about that? And I'll get, I'll open that up. Well, I think that the gaps are growing because we have these differences in policy. We don't have a consensus on what is a baseline level of air services ports for American citizens. So we will go all the way to the bottom where someone has no housing, no food, no shelter. Their kids are, there's no floor. There is no floor. And so until we decide as a country and a same country that we are gonna devise a floor, I think we will continue to see the significant gaps that we don't see in European countries where we have, there are only two countries without universal health coverage. That is United States and South Africa. All the other westernized economies have global health coverage for all of its people. And you see, we are ranked, compared to other nations, we're ranked of all the world, major world economies, we're ranked 37, it's almost the last. And we spend almost 60% more than Europe and Canada on health care. So we spend lots of money and we are ranked very, very low. And it's because of all of these pockets where you have huge parts of our society that really have no floor and they are a part of that evaluation. And until we create that floor, we will continue to have these huge disparities in gaps. John, that's similar to what you were saying about the education environment in terms of levels of care. Do you wanna add anything on this question? Yeah, I think it's been clear that where there are places where our young people needed support, we provided standards. Where there were places where we needed housing vouchers, we debated about school vouchers. And the supports that are needed, it's not rocket science. Like you said before and others have said, we've been there. The 1964 Civil Rights Act, the Housing Act, the Voting Rights Act, those are things that provided supports to communities that needed as a part of the war on poverty. But somewhere in the early 80s, we shifted from a war on poverty to a war on people. Under the guise of the war on drugs, under the guise of welfare to work so that this doesn't become partisan because that happened in a Clinton administration. And today we're still in a war on people. And I think we've got to shift back to we were not against flesh and blood, but principalities and identifying those principalities and those policies that are keeping our young people from the opportunities that they need to thrive. Yeah, and then I'm gonna encourage people to raise their hands if they wanna ask a question. I think we also in the many sectors of society and in business, I mean for silo. And so until we, I can't solve the entire medical health delivery system cannot solve the health of the United States without partnering with the education system, without partnering with transportation, without partnering with recreation government and business. We can't do it alone because most of us driving ill health status is not what we do. So how do we find ways to break down these silos and come together as professionals across the board to really begin to solve a lot? I can tell you as I treat someone with congestive heart failure or who's had a recent stroke and I send them out after treating them at a high level in a high level academic medical system into a community where they are food insecure, they are housing insecure and they cannot afford the medications that we have just prescribed. We will not change the trajectory of their health status. We will not. Thank you. From the audience, yes, in the red shirt. Yep. Sure, well first of all, to really learn about this, go to the CBPP website, CBPP.org and read the work of Barbara Sard and her colleagues who've written about this. But it's actually a fairly simple idea. The subsidies for housing under section eight are constricted by zip codes. So you essentially are setting the level of the subsidy by a fixed geographical catchment area. If that catchment area is a high poverty area, guess what? People are just gonna end up in high poverty areas. So expand the catchment area to include low poverty areas and you're basically tapping the same formula that John was mentioning, which is by helping people move to more integrated places, research is very solid on this, their outcomes of their kids later in life are notably improved and it actually matters, especially for young kids. Once the kids are a little older, the elasticity there is less potent. Thank you. Thanks for the succinctness of your answer. I just want to know we have about 15 minutes, so I appreciate people being able to be very pointed. Yes ma'am. She loved it. Then why do you have things up on the table? Then why do you have things up on the table and those are the go-karts? While it's a thing? Thank you. John, you must start this one often. Yes, and I think that it starts with, as I mentioned, the public education system is tremendously important in addressing opportunity gap because it's the only mandatory network of institution. So it's a platform. The situation that you outlined is a situation that has to be dealt with and at the locality level, we've gotta begin to ensure that we align the supports. But I also want us to recognize that the situation that you outlined is and should be at abnormality because the public education system educates over 90% of our nation's young people every day, over 90% in the past and today. And quite frankly, the public education system, if you look at it as a public system, has been a pretty successful system. Think about it, I'm a product of Chicago Public Schools. How many of you are graduated from a public school? Right, so unless we're just a group of self-professed failures, there's some success in our public education system. Now, do we need to address the challenges that you just outlined? Absolutely, but this narrative that our public education system is failing doesn't engender the types of momentum that we need to get people to invest and support and take care of the situations that you're talking about. One final note, in addition to why our public schools are so important, it was our public school students and graduates in the 50s and 60s of various generations who led to many of the policies by marching and sitting in, who led to many of the policies that we talked about in the war on poverty. Today, it was public school students and public school graduates who told the country in the face of racial injustice, Black Lives Matters. It's public school students right now, dreamers, who's telling the country that we are unique not because we can build walls, but because we can build opportunities for diverse individuals. And right now in Florida, it's public school students who are telling this country, after that tragedy, enough and never again. So we've got to value what our public school system provides, both to our democracy and our social justice change opportunities. Okay, we've got- Lenny, can I add? Yeah, one thought's there, and then we've got three hands and I'm gonna try to get in at least before we have to close. Okay, I'll try to say this quickly. Sheila, you may have done exactly the right thing at that moment. Unfortunately, this idea of closing schools to make things better has become a policy. And 99% of the schools that are closed, maybe 100%, are in African American and Hispanic communities. And they are wiping out the communities, gentrifying the communities, displacing the children. Chicago now has a tremendous out migration of Black families and the schools, and there are neighborhoods in, Black neighborhoods in Chicago that don't have a public school or a public high school because it's policy. School has low scores, close the school. I once heard a man sitting next to me, right here, at a conference, and we were talking to a bunch of foundation people, and they said, well, what do you do with the failing school? And he said, I've just visited education ministers around the world. And I asked them that question, what do you do with the school where the scores are low? And they said, well, we give them extra support. And he said, but what if you give them the extra support and they still have it improved? And they all said the same thing, we give them more support. I thought that was a pretty good answer. Well, and we do have a lot of experience actually over decades of investments of the right kind in New York City, the community schools movement, the empowerment zone that dramatically improved many schools, we have some strategies to do that, which ESSA is calling on communities to do when a range of indicators show that the school is failing that states and communities now need to have a strategy for improving the human capital investments, the curricular investments, the wraparound services investments. I wanna be sure we get other questions and we've got three that raise their hands at the same time, you may start. Well, just one quick one, states can raise minimum wages. So can localities. Now there's one wrinkle here that people need to be aware of, which is when some very conservative state governments put, what do they call it, when they prohibit their localities from raising the minimum wage, what's that word? Preemption, sorry, senior moment. So we have to be mindful of fighting back on preemption, which by the way is a very transparently hypocritical move of those who really profess to believe in self-determination politically. Well, I think it is, I think the narrative is a big part of what we're facing here. And the attack on the public schools is not just an attack on public schools, it's an attack on the public. That's right. And that word has been transferred to attack on the government. And of course, government has been part of the problem as Rothstein and others have shown. So we've gotta get back this notion that the government is our instrument. It's not this thing out there that we have to dodge and worry about. But the government has traditionally been our instrument for social justice. And one of the things that I've observed being liberal for a long, long time is that, especially during the democratic era that started with Clinton, started with Carter actually, who started this notion of the liberal saying, well, government is not the answer. And that has undermined a lot of support for things that make sense. And if the government, if these programs are not providing enough for everyone who needs it, the answer is not, see the government screwing up, the government, the answer is to make sure that that government does what it's supposed to do in our democracy. Yes, sir. Did we have another comment on that? I would just go right ahead. 10 seconds would say, we also need a very clear message. I think we need to crystallize all of the things we are talking about in very succinct messages to the public because they don't understand. We're dealing with very complex issues and we deal with them in very complex ways, but we need to translate that in something that is easily digestible by the public. Because I can tell you, the other side comes out and says, you know, we had a shooter, we need to arm the teachers. They have very, very succinct messages that seem to resonate. We need to have our message just as strong and just as clear. So here's a suggestion for that, I don't know if it's any good, but it's just a suggestion. So I think there's a polar way to frame this. One is a theory of government in which you're on your own and you better be armed and your teachers better be armed because everybody's out to get you. And the other is we're in this together. And that to me is a framework that could be useful. I think the challenge there is that conservatives are very effective, especially on the racist side, of saying, well, okay, if we're in this together, that means that you white person are in this with a black person and a Mexican and a Pakistani, how do you feel about that? So we're in this together, has to supersede the deep racism. And that's a big challenge. I'm not gonna solve that one for us. Yes, sir. So much. Well, I grew up in a separate but equal world. And I can tell you, it doesn't work. I like this world better than the one that I grew up in. It also happens to be backed up by very, very strong evidence, particularly that minority children of any race have more successful lives when they're educated with their peers who are of other races. I see this as a global issue, which is that we are all in this together. And if we wall ourselves off from people who are different from us, we will not have any fellow sympathy for them as we are together part of the solution. It'll be what's good for me and what's good for you. I mean, this is what we hear from Trump all the time. America first, America first, me first. That's exactly the mentality we have to get away from. Where we are all in this together, we're all in paddling in the same canoe. And if we stop paddling, the canoe's gonna go over. I'd just like to note that I have been working a little bit with the New York state regions who had a presentation just very recently from a group of students in New York City who have raised up the integration question, have talked about their segregated experiences, both white students and students of color in New York City schools and are proactively agitating for integrated zoning patterns and other strategies to enable their schools to be integrated. So I think like we're hearing from students now about gun violence, we're gonna be hearing from students about a lot of these issues that affect them and their long lives, hopefully, very, very profoundly. We have time for just one last comment. I'm gonna let this gentleman ask a question. I'm gonna let the panel make answers and then we're going to go to lunch. So be mindful that we are standing between this group and their lunch. Let me just say briefly, probably no one in this room except you and me know what SA is. It's the reauthorization of George Doeview Bush's No Child Left Behind Act. It's a little bit less punitive, but it's still very punitive. It maintains high-stakes testing. I think that high-stakes testing is a disaster for our schools and I won't go into all the reasons why, except that it labels children very early on and it says, you're the successful when you're heading for Harvard. You at the bottom, you're going nowhere and we have to stop labeling kids. I think what John was saying, John Jackson was saying, is we have to have a culture of care rather than a culture of labeling and stigmatizing and I'll just tell you quickly and this week we can go to lunch. I debated this with Arnie Duncan's assistant secretary for communications who is known as Arnie's brain. And I said, all this high-stakes testing has gotten out of control and he said, you measure what you treasure. And I said, I don't think so. I treasure my family. I don't put test scores on my family. I treasure my pets. I love my dog and my cat. How do I measure them? How long they are or how much they weigh? I mean, there are a lot of things that I love that I don't know how to measure. What do you measure that's so important that it's more important than your family and the things that are precious in your life? We are measuring what's least important. Yes, thank you. And I'm gonna leave us on a note of optimism, I hope. I recently heard someone say that, they're optimistic, which I can relate to because they're short and from this perspective the glass always looks half full. So, you know, other people may look down and it looks half empty. But I will say, I agree with everything that Diane said. I think it's also true that some states in their ESSA plans, now that you all know what ESSA is, are trying to move forward on a support's agenda. They're measuring things like exclusion from school so that they can address discriminatory exclusion from school. They're measuring school climate so that they can improve the quality of school climates. They are measuring things like graduation rates and test scores, but they're also putting in place more thoughtful local assessments that are more authentic and meaningful to kids. So there are some states that are gonna use this opportunity. Not every state will make the same kind of progress, but we need to be vigilant in taking account of the opportunities to make progress. There is actually a part of ESSA which requires states to look at the degree in which each district integrates its schools and how much disparity there is in access to a variety of resources and to a desegregated environment. So I think as with all of these kinds of public policy, if we take advantage of what is there, we can make some progress and then we have to continue to work to improve the policy itself. And on that note, thank this wonderful panel. Thank you. Thank you.