 But awkward mobility would remain a challenge. It would take five generations for a child born into a low income family in the US to earn the country's average income. The OECD found that many children born into poverty around the world are trapped on the lowest rung of the social ladder. They have, quote, less chance of moving up and improve their occupational status and earnings as compared to previous generations of their family, equally troubling their parents' income, quote, will be one of the main factors for the main factor in explaining their own earnings. Only one in 10 people born to low-educated parents in the country's the OECD exam go on to college, compared to two-thirds of children with highly-educated parents. Likewise, about a third of those born to manual workers will become manual workers themselves. The organization said that upward mobility tended to be better for people born between 1955 and 1975, the year before I came to be. Hello and welcome. I'm Kristin Motti from the Boston Public Library. Thank you for joining us this evening for this talk featuring Joe Napolitano and her new book, The School I Deserve, Six Young Refugees and Their Fight for Quality in America. Joining her in conversation will be Megan Woolhouse. Joe Napolitano spent nearly two decades reporting for the New York Times, the Chicago Tribune and Newsday, before winning a fellowship in support of her reporting on immigrant youth. Her first book tonight is the result of that. Born in Columbia, Napolitano was abandoned at a bus stop by her birth mother when she was just a day old. Placed in an orphanage, she nearly died of starvation before she was adopted by a blue-collar family from New York. She was raised by a single parent and is a first-generation college graduate. She is a current Education Writers Association Fellow and a recent recipient of a grant from the Fund for Investigative Journalism. She joins us from New York City. Meg Woolhouse is the K-12 education reporter for GBH News here in Boston. Her extensive background as a journalist includes 13 years with the Boston Globe. Please join me in welcoming Meg Woolhouse and Joe Napolitano. Thank you for being here. Thank you. Thank you, Kristen. Joe, I'm so excited to be here with you tonight and to get to talk with you about your new book because to me it seems to be the epitome of really excellent journalism. So congratulations on this. It's a wonderful book and I highly recommend it. I'm wondering if you can give us a brief synopsis, a sort of overview, because it's a story of a civil rights battle. It's also a tremendous David and Goliath story. Can you talk a bit about that? Sure. I mean, the story, the book really examines the national nationwide battle on behalf of immigrant kids trying to get into our public school system. And sometimes they're met with a lot of resistance from districts who feel they're unlikely to graduate. They're, you know, they're taking too many resources. We already have enough issues with our own kids and we can't take anyone else. So they do meet a lot of resistance and often don't have the tools or knowledge to fight back. Within that national phenomenon that's going on, that's popped up in many places around the country, was one very incredible, tenacious, unstoppable young lady named Khadija Issa who went through that experience in the Lancaster School District back in 2015. Khadija had come from Sudan. She'd actually, she was born in Darfur and at age five walked on foot with her family over to Chad where she remained in a refugee camp for about a dozen years before learning she was coming to the United States. And upon learning that the whole purpose of her coming with the family was for education specifically. And so when she came to the States and was rebuffed by the district and refused enrollment, it was absolutely devastating. And so that's kind of where the story begins. You know, can we talk more about Khadija because it's just so tremendous what she went through. Is her father still in Sudan? Is that right? Well, what happened with Khadija is that, you know, when she was escaping Darfur on foot, it was her mother, Maryam, her father, Adam, her sister Norsham and Khadija, so a family of four. They walked on foot over to Chad, lived in the refugee camp and her father had found work at a nearby farm that was about an hour's walk away from the refugee camp. And so he would do that for very little money, like five or so dollars a day. He would walk an hour each way, do the farming, which was backbreaking and difficult and come back. And he had to cross a real, a narrow little waterway every day on that trip. And one day that narrow waterway was actually like a swollen river and he drowned. So years and years later, her mother remarried. And so her partner is now still in Darfur. So and the relationship is quite strained, honestly, because they've been separated for many years. So I'm not sure that they're going to be reunited. What was the family's reaction, the mom and Khadija's reaction when when they did get this chance to come to America? You know, as a kind of ethnocentric American myself, I would think any refugee who learned they were coming to America is just doing backward cartwheels about that. But that's actually not true. You know, refugees who live in these remote areas around the world, they really want to return home. That's the whole point. And that's why people go to Chad, you know, they don't want to go far away. They want to go back to their culture, language, food, family. And so it was actually quite heartbreaking to learn they were coming to the United States because they knew they would spend many years here living in poverty and would not be able to afford a ticket back to see family. So that meant that's why the first chapter of the book is called the longest goodbye. You know, they had found out about three years before they left that they were being relocated to America. And you know, it was sad, but yet hopeful in the sense that, OK, finally we'll have a consistent schooling because for many years, the kids only went to school like three months out of the year. When Khadija landed in America in 2015, she had very little education just like her mom. So you know, schooling was really the driving force here, that that chance for an opportunity for a child. The only opportunity you have is through school. So you talk a little bit about the activists who embraced her cause and what motivated them. So there were, you know, when refugees come here, they have like resettlement workers who help the families with enrolling in school, finding work, enrolling in language classes. They set them up with an apartment, a modest place. You know, we're not talking penthouse in New York City. We're talking, you know, cheaper cities to live modest places that are kind of barely furnished with what people can kind of cull together. And so it was one of those folks working with the family, a woman named Elise Cheson who's really remarkable. I think they don't call her the firecracker, I forgot what they called, but the attorneys refer to her by the name that she kind of started this whole thing. She had observed that some of the people she was working with, some of the refugees were having the older refugees in particular, the older teen refugees were having a hard time enrolling in the district. And she fortunately was very new to her position. And so she was really, you know, stunned by that, where some of the other refugee people had refugee kind of assistance folks had kind of known there were problems and just kind of hoped it would get better. But she was just appalled, you know, she was new to that job and just could believe it and tried over and over to work with the district and get them to admit the kids and the district refused. So after having no other option, she eventually reached out to the ACLU. It's amazing because there was really a window of time where they had to take action and move very quickly on behalf of not just Cadizia, but all of these kids. Maybe you can talk a little bit about some of the other kids and their circumstances, because some of them are pretty horrifying. And, you know, before ending up, landing in Lancaster, Pennsylvania. Yeah, it's a beautiful place, by the way. Absolutely stunning place. If you ever get a chance to visit, it's really rural at the county level and an urban little tiny Brooklyn at its center. So yeah, the kids, you know, when you're a refugee, that means not fun things are going on back home. You know, one of the other kids, Muhammad, his family had experienced, you know, his father being murdered in Somalia. And the family feeling, oh, my God, we got to get on the run within 24 hours because he had spoken out against some of the militant groups there. And they had repeatedly asked him, you know, give us your sons to join our military, give us your daughters to marry our soldiers. And he refused and upon that refusal was eventually killed. And so the family was like, you know, we got to get out of here immediately. And so they sold their house just for enough money to buy tickets to Egypt and left and stayed as refugees in Egypt. I think another kind of interesting fact about refugees, I think we all think of refugees as living in an encampment like Khadija and her family did. Like you'll see the white tents, like the UN issued tents and everyone who lives in these Spartan conditions. In other instances, a family will be relocated to a major city like Cairo and they will just live in the city. But they are refugees and are recognized as such. But that's, I think, a really very different experience. So our refugees have a lot of varied ways in which they are made to live. So talk about the schooling that they experienced, because there were some shocking aspects of this, they were sent to a for to a for-profit public alternative school that for some of the worst behavioral problems within the district. Why do you think that decision was made? And can you talk? It's fundamental to everything that that ensues. So the district essentially refused Khadija and several other students. And so some of those students just heeded their, you know, what the district said. I mean, you have to remember refugees, many don't always know their rights. Some look at the school district as an extension of the government and in their homelands, disobeying the government could lend you, you know, in a very bad place. And so some of them are like, OK, you know, that basically the government is saying I can't go to school. Others like Khadija pushed back and said that doesn't sound right. Something about that sounds wrong. I know I'm eligible. You know, I don't know the law. I don't know. But but this just feels wrong. And it's not the America I know that I heard this reputation ricochet around around the world, you know, that this America is not living up to what I expect. So she pushed back and with the help of some advocates got the district months and months after they arrived. So months of their education was squandered and lost. And imagine if you have your own child that five, six, seven months of your child's education just does not happen. So that's what these kids were experiencing. So eventually they many several were enrolled, but they were enrolled in one of the district's two outsourced schools, Phoenix Academy, Burley Academy on the district was for kids who had real serious, very serious problems and some maybe even, you know, record issue, you know, some some really serious things. Phoenix was more for kids who had struggled in the mainstream school, maybe had become pregnant, maybe had dropped out of many classes or had flunked out of many classes. And they just needed that last chance and it was called at the time a last chance school, you know, the kid has exhibited, you know, a lot of problems up until this point, not bad kids, you know, but just had really struggled with with their education. And this was considered a good alternative for those kids because it was a very pared down school. It offered the the essential curriculum without any frills. And it was very kind of, I don't want to say militant, but extremely disciplined in how it was run. There was no room for error for the kids. There were kind of men who walked around and I was there, by the way, I spent an entire day at the campus in 2016, men who walked around who were like they were kind of monitors, but they looked like bouncers and they would just kind of walk around the building, poke their head in a classroom, you know, lay eyes on a kid. And it was, I wouldn't say it was just like menacing, but it was certainly, I did not experience that in my high school, but I had large men walking around poking into my AP English classroom, putting their eyes on me. I mean, it was, I don't think that most children experienced that. Did they have to wear color coded shirts? Students have to wear color coded shirts that reflect their level of kind of discipline or the level of their obedience just to the many, many, many rules. I mean, the Phoenix Handbook at the time, back in 2015, was just rules for the kids with a very small section about the kids rights. And there's arguments about whether Phoenix is appropriate for any child. Some people look at it and say, I don't know what kid would do well in there. I talked to parents who said, actually, you know, that my kid is on his last chance. Like this is his last hope for graduation. I have not, however, met anybody other than the district that thought this was an appropriate place for refugees who speak not a word of English, you know, that and who are not, you know, given the English language support that they need to succeed educationally. So the the court proceedings roll along and and you disclose in the book that that these students are actually sitting in classes, unable to speak the language in which they're being taught. Can you describe what the environment, the learning environment was like for these refugee children? So according to the refugee kids, they were in classes that they could not name in court. So imagine asking your child, what classes are you enrolled in and they could only recognize math, you know, anything else. They had no idea. The teachers, some of whom were great, you know, something they're bad teachers or anything, but they didn't make the effort. According to the kids, they were not the children say they were not offered translation services. Now, Camelot Education, which runs Phoenix says, well, that's not true. Well, then these six kids perjured themselves, you know, I just refused to believe that they had all these wonderful things and ended up fighting a federal lawsuit, you know, so they say I was in a classroom. I did not understand a word my teacher said, except for my ESL teacher, that's the only place I was able to have a glimpse of what was happening academically. Otherwise, I literally sat through an entire 48 minute period or however long it was, not not understanding a word. And the judge saw that, too. How did the judge see through the district's arguments that these children were being, you know, adequately educated? The judge, I thought was was he's got a bit of a reputation among the attorneys that argue before him. He's a very polite, soft spoken, law and order kind of guy. Really, really keeps like a gentility about him and in the courtroom. He's a very, very well respected, but he's also known to be a bit conservative, Antonin Scalia quotes all over the office. He is a he really despises activist judges. He does not like a judge who has a case come before him or her and says, well, the law says this, but it should say this. So I'm going to rule about what it should be. He thinks those people should run from political office, that they have no business on the bench. So he felt his job was to look at the law. What does the law say? And see whether or not this case was was, you know, in line with what the law was outside of that, though, he showed incredible compassion for the kids who was blown away by their experiences. And he was also blown away by the school district's argument that it could pick and choose which students it believed would be successful in the district. You know, he just was really like, and you can see him trying to figure out a way in which that argument was sound. He's like, I'm really trying to figure out how it is that you can pre-choose, you know, before the child is in the school or even after, just say a certain class of kids, you know, is unlikely to graduate and therefore we're not going to extend them, you know, an invitation to come to the school, you know. So I think he saw that and he also questioned at one point. It was like a Shakespearean soliloquy. He kind of questioned like, what is the value of getting a diploma if the child doesn't learn? Because that was another element of the story. Some of the kids felt that they were pushed through Phoenix very quickly without learning the material at all. I mean, kids, they were like, I'm illiterate. One child who was in the courtroom testifying did not realize he was graduating that evening. Like he didn't understand that, oh, I'm done with my education now. I mean, if you don't understand your classes, it makes sense. You might not understand why you're standing there with a diploma in your hand and you can't order a pizza. You know, you have no communicative skills in English. So they felt that we are just really being pushed out, totally unprepared for the military, for work, for whatever we might want to do for college. And the other thing too, I know some people may say that, oh, you know, they can learn English at the community college level. Well, that costs money. You know, they're eligible for a free public appropriate education, K through 12. You know, Cadizia, who has gone on to do higher education, unsurprising, has spent years at the community college level, paying thousands of dollars to learn English. And what does that mean? That means her nursing studies are put off by years by that. And that's if you know anything about community college, you know, most people don't graduate in two or four years. It takes a person who speaks English, a Native American person, I mean, I should say a person born in the United States who speaks English often takes years to go through community college. People drop out because of transportation costs, money, you know, things like that, they have to take care of a child or a sick parent. So they're kind of in and out anyway. So imagine adding on, you know, years of paying to learn English, something they could have done at high school. Yeah, how did her family support itself during this time where the advocates helping them along? And how did you get to know everyone so well too? It's a twofer. Oh, yeah. So the advocates help set people up with jobs. So Cadizia's mom works her butt off as a hotel maid. And that was a good job because the guy who ran the hotel was very flexible. So when one of the kids were sick, you know, he allowed her some flexibility, but on the downside, when the hotel wasn't full, he might cut her hours. You know, so when you don't have, you know, a strong education, you end up in jobs that where you're very vulnerable, you could be easily replaced. It's a low skill job. So, you know, you're not really calling the shots in that environment. Cadizia observed that and said, no, no, no, you know, that's not going to happen to me. I want a job where I'm calling the shots and nursing, not only does it appeal to her loving, sensitive, caring nature, but man, I don't know a place in the world that doesn't need a nurse. I mean, so she felt, you know, I need to get skills. And she really, she believed in her heart that was the only way to really help the family was to get a good paying job, not to go work at one of the local poultry plants. You know, that was not, you know, it was going to be a job much like her mom's. Yeah, I can imagine her mom during the pandemic wasn't seeing much hotel work, right? And it's also physically very demanding. I mean, she's a woman in, I want to say she's about 40 now lifting up huge hotel beds and talking, I mean, this is a very physically demanding job. And that's not something you can do forever. Are you going to do that at 60, 65? I mean, people do, you know, but it's tough work. Tough work. Let's take a pause and see a photo of Khadijah. I think we have one of her studying. Yeah. So Khadijah really loves education and studies. So I'll give you an example. When she was finally enrolled in the appropriate school and was able to take her nursing classes, she was so diligent. This is at the high school level. As you know, some high schools offer specialized learning and kids area of interest. So she had done some nursing stuff, but she was so diligent that she would take her, her quizzes over, let's say about the muscles in the body, muscles you and I have never heard of and would never be able to name. She has to know all of them and she would take the test until she scored 100, you know, 80 wasn't good enough. 90 wasn't good enough. She would take it over and over and over. There was one class where she had to disrobe a dummy, like a model, because that's something nurses have to do to disrobe a patient to serve them and whatnot. And the teacher said, look, you just have to disrobe half the body. You don't have to do the whole thing. And she insisted, no, I'm doing the whole thing because when I'm actually a nurse, I'm not going to disrobe half a patient. She did like everything she did, she did to the standard at which she would have to do as a professional nurse. She's pretty amazing. And she seems wonderful and there's there. She is that's with her mom, Maryam. So eventually, you know, the kid, the case went to federal court in the summer of 2016 in the swing state of Pennsylvania. This was a very hard time to make the argument that a Muslim African refugee should have the same educational opportunity as every child in America. That was a very tough moment, as we all know, but that's what Khadijah did. And so the judge and his initial decision said, I mostly agree with you. So I'm going to put I'm in an order that the kids be put in the mainstream high school, which was called McCaskey. So that would allow Khadijah to ultimately do her nursing classes and whatnot, be to pulling them out of Phoenix, putting them in the mainstream high school as the case went on. And so the case went to court a few weeks before Trump's election. It went to the appellate court after he was elected. And the decision was rendered, I believe, after he took office. So it was a pretty remarkable thing. And what judges in both both instances, both Judge Smith, who would decide the initial case and the appellate court, their rulings really, really took my breath away and will have a profound impact on immigrant children in that state and elsewhere. I want to go back to one point because I guess I just continue to wonder why the district was so obstinate about the fact that she would not be allowed into this one school. I mean, wouldn't that be an educator's dream, a student who's striving, who wants to achieve, should be, you know, wants to be challenged, should be allowed to? You know, the district says, look, we serve a lot of immigrants and a lot of refugees and they do. Their experience was that these children don't graduate at the same rate as their peers. And they feel like, why would we allow children in who will not reach their graduation, who might leave to go find work or start a family and whatnot? That will hurt our graduation rate. The point of public school is to graduate a child. And that was a bit of a point of contention. I think educators listening to this and around the country who read this book might ask themselves, what is the point of education? You know, because the judge said to the school district, wouldn't it be great if the kids learned English at the high school and maybe they don't make it to graduation, but they learn the culture, the language, the food, how we interact with each other here? And the district said, absolutely not. That's what our community literacy centers are for. You don't come here just to learn English. You come here to get a diploma. And I think that's a really fascinating, you know, kind of push back and forth between the school and the judge. It it's it sounds it's extremely interesting and it's very now interpretation of what in education should be. So what are the broader implications of the judge's ruling? So, you know, the district felt like, look, we are the district, we are run by a, you know, the school board. That's who we answer to. And we decide where we place the children in our district. We don't need a judge to tell us who has nothing to do with education, what we should do with each child. Sometimes we get a big ton of immigrants coming in at one time and we need to put them, you know, appropriately in our decision. The judge basically said, you need to meet certain standards to prove that you're adequately educating these kids. And one of those measures is called the Castagneta standard, which has like a few different criteria. Are you giving the kids a way to actually learn English? Are you reassessing that program to make sure it still works? There's like three or four elements of it. And so he was, you know, he was like, no, there's more to be done here. I mean, literally letting the child in to his campus, as you did with Phoenix, but they're not learning English. They don't have translation services. They don't know what classes they're in. That's not enough to meet our obligation to these children. So that was what he was saying. And I would say, you know, any district that continues this kind of behavior and there are many that have been accused of this around the country, I think should take a very close look at this case because I don't know that they want to be on the losing end of a multimillion dollar lawsuit. So I feel like this is kind of this is this this book and this information needs to be known by educators. People are watching this. This case was lost by the district. And this is not a rich district. So this was, you know, not a fun thing to lose money on this type of thing. So, you know, people are watching and people care about this. Well, do you think this is happening and in in districts all around us all the time when we just don't know about it? I do think that. I think that it isn't because you have to remember to we're kind of in an era where we're a little bit more welcoming of immigrants right now. But put yourself back in twenty fifteen, twenty sixteen where Mexicans that were coming over were rapists, but maybe some were good people according to Trump. You know, this is a lot of really hateful rhetoric around this group. So you have a group that doesn't know the laws. Their parents don't know the laws. They have few advocates in the community that are willing to speak up for them. So that's a really fragile position to be in. And the last thing you want to do, particularly if you're undocumented, of course, Khadija wasn't in that camp. Khadija was a refugee, you know, sanctioned by the United States. You know, we knew she was coming. We are helping her out. But other children who are undocumented mean the last thing you want to do is, you know, really cause a ruckus and bring attention to yourself. Well, and that makes me want to talk about another piece that you did that was a finalist for the Education Writers Association Award about sidewalk schools on the border on the U.S. border with Mexico. Can you talk a little bit about that piece and the connections that you see between these two stories and where that takes you, what you want to say about children and education today? You know, I feel like when we look at kids coming across the border, we see them as a loss. You know, they're all be dreckled and they're hungry and they're, you know, we have pictures in the media of them kind of like their handout raised and despair. And I wish we would talk more as my story did. And that was kind of why I was so proud of it. More about the agency these children have the diligence they have around schooling. And these kids want to go to school. When I visited McAllen, Texas a couple of summers ago, and by the way, I lived in McAllen, Texas for three years right before I got my New York Times job. I, you know, when I went to visit in 2018, you see children sitting on the bridges linking Mexico to the U.S. on the Methamoros Bridge, on the bridge from Brownsville to Methamoros and other bridges with books in their hands, with scraps of paper, with a little notebook and a pen. And then maybe one little girl was tracing an outline of her hand. Others were writing words and they don't have textbooks. They're just writing words they already know to try and perfect, you know, like any little scrap of information that can improve their education, they're very, very eager to do. And so I feel like we need to change the way we look at these kids as like this drain, you know, they're coming to take from us, they're not giving us anything, you know, that is so false, you know, you have a lot of kids just absolutely, they've traveled the world just to get into a decent school with updated textbooks and loving teachers, like that's their dream, this basic thing that we have here. Kids, these kids want to learn. And, and I was so moved by that and by, you know, the idea of these kids sitting, hot pavement, you know, on their bellies just for the chance to go to school, maybe leaving, you know, a, you know, a home wasn't even home, they didn't even have homes, in my understanding. Like the science of law school was more like an encampment, kind of similar, I would say to what Confucius was experiencing like literal tents, though, kind of like outdoor sporting tents that were continually flooded, playing by rats, all kind of really, really difficult situation. But the kids would come out every day, even during the pandemic, they didn't want to stay at home, the schools actually struggled with them like, no, you have to stay in your tent. The kids were like, I don't want to. So it was really, you know, back and forth, but these kids really, really want to learn. I mean, before that school was established, kids would spend all days, and this sounds like a cliche here of like a country song or something, literally kicking rocks at the foot of the bridge on the Matamoros side. There's no soccer balls, no, just literally nothing to do. And so that's why school is like, oh my God, we get a chance to go to school. I mean, I talked to kids like two, three, four years old who are excited about it. And kids, you know, I talked to a girl who was clearly remarkably gifted academically. Whoa, this kid sounded like she was 30. I mean, she was really intelligent. Her mother said, that's why we're eager to come to the US. I think they were from the Northern Triangle. She's like, my daughter is gifted, and I need to get to her school that could meet her intelligence. And I hope they find a good one because she was very smart. Well, I think parents who are listening to this will probably be telling their children tonight to be more grateful. Yeah, I mean, look at the opportunity these kids will do anything to get some of our own children. Of course, I think all children around the world are our own children. But some of the kids who are born and raised here might kind of turn their nose up. I mean, Khadija walked across the world to get this chance. Tell us a little bit about your story. These kids are not familiar to you. Yeah, so I was born in Bogota, Columbia, and a day later was abandoned at a bus stop by my birth mother, who apparently handed me off to a stranger and said, you know, I'll be right back. I'm going to get her blanket and she never returned. So that stranger stood there for a long time before taking me to a police station. And I was ultimately put in an orphanage. And that orphanage is actually really well known. But I didn't do too well there. I stayed there for about three and a half months and was barely fed and gained very, very little weight and was in really bad condition. Ultimately, I was adopted by a blue collar family from Long Island. I used so I came up here and physically was made whole pretty quickly. My mom I'm from a very, very Italian family. And my mom just kind of skipped over the baby food and like put lasagna in a blender. My one of my dear friends calls us a meatball IV. And my health, you know, I was called butterball when I was a baby because I became so fat. So I, you know, my health was restored. But unfortunately, my family was really fractured and my dad had abandoned us a few years later. So my mom was no college education, but a very, very, very strong work ethic expected me to live up to my academic ability, no matter what what was going on at home. So I got into Northwestern and then years later won the Spencer Education Fellowship to Columbia University where they paid me more than $80,000 to attend. And to to write this book. Yes, exactly. Research or write this. Fantastic. So I'm hoping that you can read a little bit from the beginning of the book. And I just want to remind anybody who's listening to put questions into the Q&A and I'll after Joe is done reading to us, I'd be happy to take them. So thank you. Now, I know that you're going to think this is a fun marketing ploy that I read like this, but I am like Mrs. Magoo. So I can only read the book of instruments. So this is the introduction and it's called from Columbia to Columbia in 40 short years. I'll read most of it. Of all I learned in the course of reporting this book, one statistic made me gasp. It would take a child born into poverty in Columbia at least 300 years or 11 generations to earn the country's average income. There it stood dead last, a tiny Colombian flag on the bottom of a chart compiled in 2018, looking almost crushed under the weight of the 29 nations that came before it, including China, India, Brazil and South Africa. The message was clear. To be born destitute in Columbia is to be nearly condemned. The advancement so miniscule in the course of one person's lifetime that it could hardly be detected according to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, also also known as the OECD. I was born in Bogota Columbia's capital in 1970 and I won't read that part. An abandoned by my birth mother at a bus stop a day later, placed in an orphanage where I was barely fed. I weighed just five pounds, three and a half months old. I likely would have died had I not been adopted by a blue collar couple from New York. I'd love for the story to end there, but my father abandoned our family roughly five years later, taking every penny of our savings with him and leaving us deeply indebted. I was raised by a single mother with no college education, child support payments were few and medical care and unfathomable luxury in my youth. Despite these obstacles, I had a far better chance of success in life in America. I had a hard working and determined mom who fully expected me to live up to my academic ability, no matter our circumstances, but upward mobility would remain a challenge. It would take five generations for a child born into a low income family in the U.S. to earn the country's average income. The OECD found that many children born into poverty around the world are trapped on the lowest rung of the social ladder. They have quote less chance of moving up and improve their occupational status and earnings as compared to previous generations of their family, equally troubling their parents' income quote will be one of the main factors for the main factor in explaining their own earnings. Only one in 10 people born to low educated parents in the country's the OECD examined go on to college compared to two thirds of children with highly educated parents, likewise about a third of those born to manual workers will become manual workers themselves. The organization said that upward mobility tended to be better for people born between 1955 and 1975 the year before I came to be the cure education at least in part. The organization found that countries that devoted more money to quality education and that targeted those resources to disadvantaged groups had higher rates of what they called educational mobility. The same held true for health care, quote, there is nothing inevitable about socioeconomic advantage or disadvantage being passed from one generation to another or floors or ceilings remaining persistently sticky the report read policies can be designed to allow people to move up, especially for those at the lowest wrong. Those born to wealth or at least ability might be tempted to greet the OECD's findings with a shrug. We've long known that poor people stay poor and rich people stay rich. But the organization found that a lack of social mobility has a long lasting and widespread impact on entire nations. Not only can it hurt their overall economic growth, but it means that many talents are missed out on or remain underdeveloped for those at the lowest levels. And it must be said no one chooses the country to which they are born or whether that nation is embroiled in a civil war is plagued with persistent poverty or ravaged by crime like Columbia. Education catapulted me in just one generation from one of the lowest casts in the world to the middle class. I attended a solid public school on Long Island. It offered numerous college level courses, reasonable class sizes, qualified teachers and well maintained facilities and was more than prepared prepared for college. I won a nearly full ride to Medillat Northwestern University and 2016 was named a Spencer Education Fellow at Columbia Journalism School. I doubt anyone at the orphanage recognized my potential during my stay, given my condition. But that doesn't mean it wasn't there the whole time. The same I believe is true for the impoverished children who arrived to America as refugees, undocumented immigrants and unaccompanied minors. While they might arrive to the state's penniless or nearly so, they are not worthless. They have all the potential one might hope for. All they need is a chance. That's the introduction. Wow, Joe. It's really it's quite moving everything that you've been through. Can I just ask you right here? Have you been back to Columbia? No, I haven't been back to Columbia. I don't really feel like a strong connection to Columbia, mostly because I almost started there. And just because I feel a much stronger connection to how I grew up here, I feel like the ultimate Italian American. So I'm a ridiculously good cook. And I that's all I cook. And that's all I grew up eating. So I feel, you know, and obviously I know so much more about my family than I do about these strangers that I feel like I'm more interested in my family's history and connection to Italy than I am into my own birth into Columbia. So that might surprise some people, but I will say that I feel very endeared. Like it moves me tremendously to reach out to report on talk to children born in impoverished areas around the world. Like if I would feel more of a connection to a child popping up in Syria in the last 10 years than a person who grew up in Columbia, you know, it's I just I really feel a strong connection to children who are born. You know, we don't choose the countries. We don't choose the wars. We don't choose the drug conflict, the lack of health care, the, you know, I use the word cast to describe Columbia because it's so rigid for those at the poorest level, which would have definitely included me. There's just no way to get out of this. So I feel a lot of kinship with people who come from around the world and these just really dire situations. Yeah, you know, it's interesting you say that because I feel like that the tendency is maybe to not see children as as resilient as they are. Right. Right. And determined and wanting to make their lives better. You haven't met many young kids who really want to live a terrible life in poverty and have no food. You know, so so all of us want to go toward the light and make things better. And certainly I think those these kids are in that camp. Do you want to continue on into the first chapter a little bit? Why don't I do a little bit of that? And this chapter is called the longest goodbyes. And it starts like this. Khadija Issa spent the early morning hours of August 16th 2016 consumed with worry. By the time her lawyer pulled up to her family's modest department at 7am to retrieve her, she was wide awake just as she had been all night. The 18 year old Sudanese refugee who had moved to Lancaster, Pennsylvania in the fall of 2015 had no idea what the day would bring. Never before had she seen the inside of a courtroom, not in America and not in her home country. But there she was on that cloudless summer morning about to embark on a 90 minute journey to East and Pennsylvania to tell a federal judge why she was suing her local school district just 10 months after arriving in the States. The Sinui teen was too fidgety to eat, but dutiful as she was, she scrambled eight eggs for her mother and five younger siblings and set the meal aside in a chip ceramic bowl so that breakfast would be ready when they awoke a half an hour later. The task complete, she headed back upstairs to smooth her hair and dress the occasion. Eager to impress the court, she picked out her finest clothes, a pair of dark blue jeans faded at the thigh, a crisp white long sleeve shirt, a touch too big for her narrow frame and to the amusement of her attorneys, a spotless pair of gold colored high top sneakers. She tucked her pale blue head scarf behind both ears and headed for the door, trying to remember what her mother, Marianne, had been telling her all week. Just listen to the lawyer, she said. They'll know what to do. The day had just begun, but already had broken a dozen years of tradition. As the eldest daughter in a Sudanese family, Khadija was tasked with caring for her younger brothers and sisters and had spent every morning for the past 12 years waking them from sleep and corralling them for breakfast. As soon as she was able, she took to caring the smallest among them in a sling on her back. By the time the family arrived in Lancaster, only baby Hawa was young enough to be secured this way. Her legs straddling Khadija's slender waist as she swept the floor or watched dishes. From the front, it often looked as though the teen had sprung a two tiny feet from her sides. Though she enjoyed her place in the family hierarchy, a sideways glance from Khadija could stop a fight in an instant. She aspired to be more than a caretaker. She dreamt of becoming a teacher or a nurse and learned from the adult refugees and volunteers who visited her family during their initial months in the States that such a journey could begin in only one place, her local public high school. Khadija had no doubt that she would be admitted. All three of her school-aged siblings were accepted with ease. One by one, they filled out the required paperwork, winced through their immunization shots and tried their best to pull together the necessary school supplies. But Khadija wasn't given that chance. When she met with school officials inside the district's administrative offices in 2015, they told her through an interpreter she was too old to enroll and should instead look for work. But I don't want to get a job, she pleaded in Arabic, her voice a high pitched chirp. Why would I work if I don't get an education? Sure, a low wage job would allow her to more immediately bridge the gap between her mother's meager wages, the family's welfare benefits and their ever growing pile of bills. But Khadija knew the only way to truly lift her family from poverty was to complete high school and then college to qualify for a position that would bring home several times the incomes she would earn on a grimy factory floor. Even more than that, she wanted to finally take control of her life. Ever since she was a little girl, Khadija had lived on other people's terms, but there was nothing she could do. School officials refused to back down, hoping to wait her out as they had a hundred other refugees in recent years. One by one, they came from the most troubled hotspots around the globe, hoping for a fresh start in America. And one by one, they were told they had aged out of their high school education, a lie that would cost them their future. It's amazing, Joe. I mean, she's just so brave and to think that she's doing all of this at a time when the political climate in the country was definitely, would have chilled most people, I think. Never reminded young girl, young teenage girl. And, and I feel like the language barrier was actually a help here because she didn't completely understand what Trump was saying all day and his supporters were saying she, you know, that she was kind of insulated from that. But she, the thing I think that's so special about refugees and so many immigrants is like, you want to talk patriotic, have a conversation with one of these people. I mean, the faith that so many of us have lost in this country or had lost or had been deeply challenged in the Trump presidency is alive and well in the immigrant and refugee community. And I'm not saying folks didn't express, you know, terrible sorrow and pain and suspicion, whether they're Muslims, refugees, immigrants, you know, that's true. That all happened. But their, their faith remains and oftentimes their reality is still much better here than it would be at home. And so Khadijah is a person who looked at America and said, I know what America is. I know better than all of you. I know this really is a place where I can have an opportunity. You just elected a black person with African roots as your president a few years ago. That happened. And so Khadijah kind of held on to that America and she forced through, through the legal system America to live up to what it said it was going to do. And I think that she is just like my idol. I think she's just a remarkable kid. And I talked to her all the time. We just talked like two nights ago. That's great. That's great with her golden sneakers. Oh my God. She's a riot. Yes. So we have questions here. Let's take one from Alice. She wants to know, have the results of the court case had specific impact on the school district's policies for other children in the district and also have other advocates taken up this issue in other places. So I would say, you know, the district was forced to reexamine its policies. Why was the district making these kids wait months and months to enroll? That's in violation of federal, I'm sorry, state statutes, which say enrollment should be about five days max. So that was a big problem. So after this case went to court, they really did reexamine what they were doing. They still put some refugees in Phoenix after this whole thing happened, which was really upsetting and stunning to some advocates because the judge didn't mandate what they could do essentially. So it's, they still have to leeway to make some of these decisions. So I would say it's not completely over that there are still children being sent to these schools. So that, yeah, it's, you know, it's kind of a fragile victory, but it's, you know, the issue has been raised. People are much more aware of their rights. The immigrant advocates, you know, know this case was just lost. So you better, you know, really strongly consider admitting these, this kid to the, you know, what they would could say is the appropriate school. So what was the second part of that question? The second part is also have other advocates taken up this issue in other places. I think that, you know, you have the Southern Poverty Law Center down in Collier County, Florida, filed a similar law suit a few years ago that was a little bit less successful for immigrants in terms of the outcome. You had Utica in upstate New York, which is a huge refugee hub, have this similar issue like five, six years ago. So yeah, it is, it is on the radar different places. And I think we'll see this play out as well in the fall when we have all of these children coming across the border undocumented who are also vulnerable to this type of tactic. Well, let's take another question here. Interesting. This one's from Teresa. Have you experienced immigrant high school students being quote unquote checked out, sent to adult education for various reasons to reduce the number of students not graduating on time? That is my entire book. What you just said was the entire setup to this book. You're, yes, I have, you know, kids being kind of shunted into inferior programs that don't result in a diploma. For example, Lancaster said to some of the refugees go to the Literacy Center, learn English there, Literacy Center is fantastic. It is, I wrote to them, they were so passionate about helping people learn English. There's nothing wrong with the Literacy Center. The Literacy Center does not give you a high school diploma. You know, so it's just like so I see instances where people are kind of pushed out or like there's a new barrier or another thing you then have to do well, come back to the district and do this other stuff. It's like all these hoops, all of these different things that the traditional school population doesn't have to do. And that's what the problem is, you know, we're supposed to assess the kids quickly, put them in the appropriate grade, you know, and watch them flourish and give them the language supports they need to master the language. And I know this is hard for kids, but this is hard for schools rather, you know, a lot of the times is something we have to remember. When these kids come in bulk, when there's a lot of these children in one place, it's often to a district that is poor, you know, a district that because the kids, they're not landing in Great Neck Long Island, you know, a rich area. They can afford to live in Hempstead Long Island a much more affordable area. So that, you know, so a number of these kids will arrive to the same kind of area and kind of a concentrated poverty. So I get it. You know, these districts are being asked to do a lot with little, but that doesn't mean we can send any group of children home and say, we pick you to not educate. You know, we can't do that with any group of children. It's amazing. Question from Jodi. Please give us updates on the students now. How are their families and have their situations improved in the new political climate? I would say that I definitely want you to read the book and I give an update on everybody in the back, like literally where are they now for all the attorneys who fought the case on both sides for the kids, all of whom are participating, where are they now? So I can give you an update on all of them. I think the families have done tremendously well. Could you use family which came here in such a fragile state? They received a lot of help from the community. They bonded with local refugees. They, you know, they have a strong, Lancaster is a beautiful, beautiful city, beautiful city. It's gorgeous. And great food, great, I mean, it's a little mini Brooklyn. It's a lovely place. So I would say they've done very well. They, one of the key things that they should be doing as new refugees is moving from a kind of, kind of crummy apartment to a better one. And they did that. A couple of years ago, they moved to a much nicer place. It was a bit, it's actually a big thread in the book about Miriam. In addition to worrying about Khadija schooling is also constantly looking for a better apartment because they lived in a really rough area of Lancaster. The kids had seen some crime that was very scary. One of the Khadija's brother had a, what he believed was a real gun pulled on him. And like in an incident, Khadija had someone pull a knife on her. I mean, it was a tough neighborhood. And so Miriam, who had six children and it was a single mother, wanted to get to a place where the kids could be safe. So that's like a big thread is whether or not she ever finds that apartment. So, so I would say they're doing a lot, a lot better. And Miriam speaks really solid English. She is, I would say, close to fluent. That's Khadija's mother, you know, somebody who isn't going to school, you know, but she worked in the hospitality industry and picked it up there. Interestingly, Khadija, after leaving high school, for a little bit, worked at a, like a retirement home. And she worked with residents who are very old and hard of hearing. And so they were constantly forcing her to speak up and enunciate, which improved her English pretty dramatically. Tell me, Joe, how did you get to know Khadija, Mohamed, these kids so well, you don't speak their, their language to a very remote sort of dialects, right? How did that all go down? So, yeah, I met the kids for the first time on the first day of the week long pretrial hearing. So that thing that they did in court, that week long thing that the judge decided, I sat in on every single day of that. And I introduced myself to lawyers on both sides and to all the kids. And I asked Khadija, I was like, would you mind if I come visit you? Now, mind you, Khadija spoke no English at the time. So I asked kind of through an interpreter and she said, yeah, okay, you can come visit. And so I visited her once or twice a week, typically twice a week for a year, driving from New York City to Lancaster three hours each way. And I just said, first just played with her little brothers and sisters or actually little sisters who were picking up English like this. You know, little kids pick up English right away when they left Khadija in the dust, which is another thread of the story like Khadija was this powerful person in the family, like the second in command after her mother and yet because of this educational disparity of the younger kids are like, you're speaking English. We, you know, it really, that language really kind of changes the balance of power in the family. So I was able to speak with the little kids and a family of six with a hardworking mom, they were so eager for someone to hang out with them. So I would, you know, talk with them. They'd take my reporter's notebook and draw pictures in it. They would speak into my microphone, silly songs. I mean, I have so much artwork for these kids. And so I just visited and just made myself a presence there. And Khadija could see like I genuinely cared about the outcome for this family. I adore Khadija. When you spend that much time with somebody, there's no, you know, she's not a distant subject to me. She's a really special kid from a really remarkable family and whom I got to know very, very well. Less so, I mean, Muhammad's family is great and amazing, but I spent a bit less time with them. I spent most of my time with Khadija. And I think in a prior conversation we had talked about, you also got to know the lawyer for the district extremely well. And I imagine that, doing the reporting that you do, you really embedded yourself. You know, interesting. Sharon O'Donnell is a real powerhouse of an attorney. And she did extraordinarily well in court, up against like a dozen attorneys from the opposing side from multiple firms. I mean, she was a one woman show. And she actually just, she wrote to me recently saying that she thought she was fairly treated in the book and, you know, which was really heartening to me. Another attorney did the same thing saying he loved the book. So it was like, in journalism, you either want to please both parties or have them both hate you. It's like, you wouldn't want one to say, oh, I did great. The other would be like, I was, you know, horribly represented. So I was really heartened that I had two opposing sides feeling like they were dealt with with dignity. So yeah, I spent a lot of time with all of them. That's key. I think we have time for one more question here. This one's from Robert. How do we in this country put education in a place where each school district has the resources to accomplish what is necessary to educate all children? I mean, to me, I'm not an education expert. I think that question should be posed to our teachers. The nation's teachers know exactly how to answer that question. Not the principal is necessarily the superintendent or the Congresspeople. The teachers, our frontline teachers know exactly what they need. They are very smart and we should be posing that question to them. As an abdistant observer and a public school graduate from Seychem School District on Long Island, I would say things that benefited me. My teachers taught subjects in which they had earned a degree. So in other words, I didn't have a history teacher teaching math or a computer teacher teaching gym. Everybody taught the subject they were supposed to. I had reasonable class sizes, 28 kids in a class, the facilities. My school district is fairly old now. So it's a bit older, but and those buildings are still there. They're getting older, aren't we all, but they're well maintained. You don't have, you know, poisonous drinking water. You don't have a roof falling. You know, they're older places, but they're well maintained. I would say, you know, reasonable class sizes, teachers teaching what they're supposed to and well maintained facilities. Believe me, the district I went to was on austerity, let go of hundreds of teachers in my last years there. I mean, this is not a rich part of Long Island at all. So it wasn't like an iPad for every kid at all, at all. But it was a devoted staff with a manageable number of kids in the classroom, updated, you know, pretty updated materials this is going back to the 80s and 90s. But it was good and it wasn't a rich district on Long Island at all, actually. So and I was prepared to North for Northwestern my sibling went directly to an Ivy League school from there. So, you know, we we did pretty well out of that school district. Well, I think that the power of a good teacher is, is epic. And on that note, I just want to say thank you so much for this amazing reporting and for all that you've done to give voice to these kids. Thank you. I appreciate you reading the book and asking me such great questions. And I really hope people give Khadija a chance because I'm telling you she will change you. She's remarkable. Thank you for sharing this powerful conversation. Joe Napolitano, Meg Willhouse is great to have you here for these and many other programs for all ages. Please visit BPL.org. Thank you to our partners at GBH Forum Network. Thank you, Joe Napolitano. Thank you, Meg Willhouse. And thank you all for joining us tonight. Be well. Good night. Thank you.