 Let me formally and officially welcome you. My name is Christian Dorsey. I'm EPI's Director of External and Government Affairs. And we are really privileged to host this conversation and very fortunate to host this conversation during these times. The genesis and sort of the prompt for this event has nothing to do with current events, but really came with the publishing of Cheryl Cashion's book, which for a plug is available for sale outside of the room, which hopefully you'll take advantage of after the event is over. But her very thoughtful and incisive book, which was intended to provoke thinking about the subject of affirmative action, did just that with EPI Research Associate Richard Rothstein, who engaged Professor Cashion in a debate about the subject of the book. And even though that was a different circumstance that prompted our having this event at this time, certainly we cannot ignore that this event takes place within a time of great conversation about race in our country. And even though nominally, affirmative action is very different than the conversations that are being had about race throughout the country, substantially they are linked. And I think you'll find through our discussion today that it will not only provide a window into discussing affirmative action per se, but also the dynamic of race relations, power relations, and how our community moves forward on talking about subjects of difference and identity. We have a number of resources available to you in the packets that were left at your table, sorry, at your chair. We have some resources from each of our presenters that are appearing here today. You'll see a piece from the Poverty Research Action Council, which has an exploration of Professor Cashion's book. You'll also see the American Prospect, and it's their July-August edition, which includes a back and forth between Professor Cashion and Richard Rothstein on the subject of the book. We also have a piece on diversity in higher education that was written by Professor Leah Epperson. And then we also have a piece from the New York Times, which profiled how colleges are doing in attaining socioeconomic diversity, and it features a very prominent shout-out to Vassar University and its president, Catherine Bon Hill. And I believe we also have in those packets little blank cards, which are going to be useful when we get to the question and answer portion of the program. Instead of doing questions and answers by passing around a microphone, we ask that you write your questions down on paper so that we can deal with them more efficiently. Now, we do have a number of people who are watching and participating in this event via a live webcast. Welcome to those of you as well. You all can get engaged in this conversation by doing one of two things. You can send questions through an email address. It is events at epi.org, and that is appearing on your screen. And for those of you watching online or even in the room who wants to start or join a conversation on Twitter, you can do so using the hashtag race or place. With that, let me get into the people that you came to hear from. I'm going to introduce all of our speakers with brief comments on their biographical backgrounds for extensive looks into their bios. We've included a packet. We've included some bios in your packet which show the incredible breadth of experience and scholarship that our speakers are bringing to the table this morning. We're going to have first, we're going to hear from Cheryl Cashin, who is a professor at the Georgetown University Law Center. And she teaches administrative constitutional law and race and American law among many other subjects. She writes frequently about race relations and government and inequality in America. And as I mentioned, her book, Place Not Race, a New Vision for Opportunity in America is the prompt for our conversation today. She is widely published, not only in book form, but also in academic journals and has provided commentaries for several periodicals, including the LA Times, Washington Post, and Education Week. Cheryl will be followed by Richard Rothstein. Richard is a research associate at the Economic Policy Institute. He's also a senior fellow of the Chief Justice Earl Warren Center for Law and Social Policy at the University of California Berkeley. And he is also a contributing editor to the American Prospect. Richard is developing a program examining how residential segregation is a key determinant of educational opportunity and authored a recent study, the making of Ferguson public policies at the root of its troubles. And we've included an executive summary of that piece in your packet. Richard has had a long career as a scholar in the subject of education. He is the author of several books, including Grading Education, Getting Accountability Right. And he's also written class in schools using social, economic, and educational reform to close the black-white achievement gap. We will then hear from in some order that I'm not quite sure yet, but it'll either be Professor Leah Epperson from the American University College of Law. Professor Epperson is also the associate dean for faculty and academic affairs. And she is a nationally recognized expert in the area of civil rights, constitutional law, and education policy. Her academic interest centers on educational equity and how public schools, colleges, and universities can create equal opportunity. And prior to becoming a law professor, she was also the head of the Education Law and Policy Group at the NAACP Legal Defense Fund. And we'll hear from Catherine Bonhill, who a few years ago was named the 10th president of Vassar University. She's also, very dear to our heart, is a noted economist whose work focuses on higher education, affordability, and access. And she has done extensive work on researching economic development and reform in Africa. But importantly for this conversation under Dr. Hill's leadership, Vassar has reinstated need-blind admissions and replaced loans with grants for the financial aid packages for low-income families. And Vassar has been widely recognized and widely praised for its realizing economic diversity among its students. When we get to the question and answer portion, that will be moderated by EPI's own Valerie Ralston Wilson. Valerie is the director of our program on race, ethnicity, and the economy. And she is a nationally recognized expert for her reports and policy analyses on the economic conditions of America's people of color. Prior to joining EPI, Valerie was an economist and vice president of research at the Washington Bureau of the National Urban League. So that is our roster of speakers. And with that, I'm going to turn the lectern over to Cheryl Cash. Thank you so much, Christian. I really appreciate it. Thank you all for coming out on this gray morning. I really want to thank Richard Rothstein, who savaged me in the American Prospect, but I think we've actually become quite good friends. And we actually are very similar in our perspectives on the issue of segregation. I want to thank you, Kathy, for coming and my dear friend, Leah, and my new friend, Valerie, and all of you folks here. So let me begin with a caveat. Nothing I say in this book or this talk is based on the Constitution. I am not an advocate of colorblind constitutionalism. I do believe that the 14th Amendment allows the state to be race conscious. My arguments are really, they're public policy arguments, and they're really a pragmatic response to where we are with affirmative action and some ironies about it. You may have heard that last week the organization that recruited, it was a couple weeks ago, the organization that recruited Abigail Fisher to sue the University of Texas, has succeeded in finding their Asian plaintiffs to sue Harvard, divide and conquer, and UNC Chapel Hill. And the Supreme Court has a standard that makes it harder to meet, to uphold the use of race. And then we also have the shooty decision where the court has said, even if you can survive a lawsuit, if you consider race, it's constitutional. But if a majority of the people in the state want to vote to ban it, they can. And as I understand it, there are at least six states where mobilization is going on. And think about that. The cynical, cheap, easy politics of putting a ballot initiative on the ballot in 2016 to ban race. So you're going to see more of that. Meanwhile, increasingly I'm of the view that race-based affirmative action doesn't really help the vast majority of students of color who suffer the disadvantages of racial segregation. And that's what takes me to my argument. I want to talk to you about opportunity in a phenomenon I called opportunity hoarding. And I'd like to begin with my personal story. I graduated from high school in Huntsville, Alabama in 1980. I graduated from a strong, well-integrated public high school at a time when the South, in particular, was making good on the promise of Brown v. Board. From 1968 forward to 1980, with each passing year, each year we got increases in school desegregation. We went from 0% of black children going to integrated schools to nearly 43%. And also the achievement gap was closing. And in that year, 1980, my activist parents were broke. But the neighborhood school that was available to me was actually pretty good. And I was the coden valedictorian, and I was able to be accepted to Princeton, my dream school. And then I attended Vanderbilt instead, because I got a full ride. But today, a valedictorian from my very same high school, which they're considering that it's about to be shut down, actually, the valedictorian in that high school probably wouldn't get any attention from the Vanderbilt's of the world or the Vassars, because that school has gone from being integrated and well resourced to overwhelmingly black and poor, as has the neighborhood surrounding the school. And what has happened, there is not dissimilar to what's happened in a lot of places. Many of you know, since 1980, public school have rapidly re-segregated, largely because the Supreme Court has told federal courts, it's time to get out of the business of policing school desegregation. And the real underlying problem is segregated neighborhoods. So segregation is a fact of American life. In fact, only 42% of all Americans today live in a middle class neighborhood. And that's down from 65% in 1970. And what has happened increasingly is the affluent and the highly educated are separated from everyone else. And that often determines who has access to high quality elementary and secondary education. Now, I'm going to put this up here, this chart. The darker for the people who are on the web watching this, the dark crimson is counties, jurist counties that have 40% or more of its population are college graduates. But in their 3,000 counties, roughly 3,000 counties in the United States, only 17 out of those 3,000 have a population where more than half are college graduates. And as Kathy knows, very selective schools could fill their freshman classes with students only from those 17 counties. College graduates used to be much more evenly distributed, but segregation between them and high school graduates has tripled since 1940. Highly educated people are drawn to metro centers where other people like themselves live. And even within the metro areas, they gravitate to neighborhoods of their own kind. And this is a phenomenon that transcends race. College graduates living in America's most highly educated metro areas, think Washington, DC, are more residentially isolated than African-Americans. And this concentration of human capital in some places and not others has serious consequences for children. I'm reminded of a quote from a law dean of a prestigious law school, not mine. In a meeting, this person said, those that are afforded high quality, selective K through 12, public or private education in their elite colleges and become leaders. And everybody else gets to watch it on television. And that's what's happening in our country because of this phenomenon called opportunity hoarding. And this is a phrase that comes from sociologist Charles Tilly. And he defines opportunity hoarding as in-group sanction practices that have the effect of excluding out-groups. I'll say that again, in-group sanction practices that have the effect of excluding out-groups. And the exclusion does not have to be intentional. My book talks about opportunity hoarding in K through 12, but their practice and attack also practices that have the effect of excluding from selective higher education. Douglas Massey argues, he overlaid this concept with geography. And he argued that where social boundaries conform to geographic ones, and that's what you're seeing on that map, where social boundaries conform to geographic ones, the processes of social stratification that come naturally to human beings become much more efficient and effective. And in lay terms, and all of you who pay attention to K through 12 education know this, place locks in advantages and disadvantages that are reinforced over time. And when you have geographic concentration of highly educated, affluent people in direct horizontal competition with people in more impoverished settings for finite public resources, you get savage inequality in the allocation of resources. Nobody says out loud, let's have a public policy which overinvests in schools where already advantaged kids live and disinvest elsewhere. But that is exactly what happens when you have a concentration of motivated parents who know how to advocate for what they want. And I'll overlay this. Now, I don't think I can zoom this in. So I'll just tell you what you're seeing. And I'm not picking on Connecticut. I'm just using this map because it was available to me. A Fair Housing Center worked with the Kirwan Institute to produce a map. This is a map of educational opportunity. And they have five colors. The darkest greens are very high opportunity places. And the palest colors are low opportunity places. And by opportunity, we're talking about they used public data, test scores, teacher certifications, schools that measured what percentage of the teachers were actually certified to teach what they were teaching per pupil spending, class size, those kinds of things to map the level of opportunity. And then they overlaid it with race. And one little green dot on there is 500 non-white people. So you can see. There it is. So not surprisingly, this dot is going crazy. Not surprisingly, black and Latino kids, we all know this, are heavily concentrated in very low opportunity settings. But you can find. And then there's also, God bless West Hartford, a rare, very high opportunity place that actually has public policies that promote inclusion. So it's fairly integrated. But that's atypical. But then you can also find these places. Very pale, low opportunity, not that many places around. Not that many non-white people around. The reason I prefer a place to class or race in thinking about who needs and deserves affirmative action is I think it captures the complexity of where we are in terms of the opportunities that are available to kids on the ground with education. The civil rights movement of the 1960s created the possibility of a black middle class or even an upper middle class. And by the way, economic segregation is rising fastest with blacks and Latinos. Black one percenters move here, or Maplewood, or West Orange, right? Black one percenters get to opportunity. But what the civil rights movement did not do was eliminate neighborhoods of concentrated black poverty where people with fewer options live. And this is the unfinished business of the civil rights movement. And I argue that what has been missing from affirmative action policies is an acknowledgement of the role of segregation in trailing access to educational opportunity. The children who live in integrated, well-resourced neighborhoods of whatever color and do not suffer the legacy of American apartheid will get into a very good college, even an elite one, if they choose to do the work, if they choose to work very hard and take the most challenging classes available to them. They are in the game. And I would refer you to an article that was in the upshot. I think it was last week, which should make parents relax. It said, hey, I'm gonna put it on the wall, shouldn't my husband say, relax, right? 80% of accomplished students get into a very selective school, right? But college-bound students from medium and low opportunity environs, particularly African Americans, disproportionately attend segregated schools, and they have to be superhuman. They have to be superhuman to overcome the structural disadvantages of place. And among those disadvantages are under-resourced schools with less experienced teachers and counselors, fewer high-achieving peers that raise expectations and share knowledge about the admissions process. And yes, predatory policing, all right? It's the valedictorian of Ferguson who really needs and deserves the kind of leg up in admissions that's currently assigned to place. And my larger argument with this book is I think selective colleges have an ethical obligation not to pretend that the level, the playing field is level, and to do things differently to find and support the high-achieving students from low and medium opportunity settings that are there, that can do the work. Now, let me, I was told I only had 20 minutes, so let me, I don't know how much time, how much time do I have left? Five minutes, okay, I'll be quick. So, what I'm arguing from, turning to the reforms, the specific reforms I recommend, I'm arguing for something much more radical, I think, than holding on to what's left of race-based affirmative action. I'm arguing that we should take the lessons of decades of affirmative action, the research that shows that affirmative action candidates typically with lower test scores and grades tend to be the students that most closely meet the professed missions of universities. And what we should do is scrub the admissions process of practices that really amount to exclusion and aren't truly tied to merit and get better at screening for those qualities that predict success in meeting university mission. And I love Union University Reading mission statements, and I went and pulled Vassar, since we have Kathy here, and it's actually one of the more interesting and creative ones I've read. The mission of Vassar College is to make accessible a liberal education that inspires each individual to lead a purposeful life. That's its first sentence, and I won't go on, right? But almost all universities talk about, in their mission statements, cultivating individuals who are gonna give back to the world, who are gonna be leaders, and what do leadership qualities have to do with an SAT score? They don't, and they're actually not very predictive. So, to summarize, I recommend that the admissions process be scrubbed of exclusionary practices and that individual students be judged based on the resources that they had available to them and what they achieved in light of those. Did they take the most challenging courses available to them and how they did? And then in that process, I recommend that special consideration be given to high achieving students who've had to overcome living in a neighborhood or attending a school where more than 20% of their peers are poor. I also recommend special consideration being given to low family wealth. And both of those proposals accurately reflect the legacy of segregation. I also argue that standardized tests should be optional or not used at all, that financial aid should return to being based solely on need, that legacy preferences should be scrapped, and that institutions that are serious about diversity should partner with organizations like the Posse Foundation and QuestBridge, which are astute at finding disadvantaged achievers who can succeed in selective higher education. And I'll say, and as I conclude, paying attention to place, I think, does screen for merit as it relates to mission, but also screens for equalities that are necessary to succeed. If you think about what an A student from a low opportunity setting has to do to succeed, you're screening for incredible resilience and grit that's not conveyed by an SAT score, skin color, or legacy. And my final point, and then also, they're thinking about the leadership and giving back. If you want somebody to go back to West Alabama to be a leader, it makes sense to give special consideration to somebody from West Alabama, particularly if they're interested in being a doctor. Now, the last point I wanna leave you with, which relates to what's been going on in the streets this week, is progressives who care. I assume everybody in here is probably in that category. Progressives who care about any issue of that's remotely progressive, that has to do with some form of justice. You need to be, we need to be overt at seeking racial reconciliation between the people who are living out here in low opportunity and the people here, right? We need theories that will bring about collective working together to make public policies better. You know, someone this morning talked about, on NPR I was talking about a collective consciousness, right? And I prefer strategies like play space, things like this, that have the possibility of connecting the dots. And my chief theorist for it, when you think about social movements and moving forward is Martin Luther King. And he talks about mutuality and justice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. And the final chapter in my book, which is entitled Reconciliation, holds up examples of cross racial alliances that have moved a policy direction to a more progressive way, more progressive direction that expands opportunity to everyone. Thank you. Thank you, Cheryl. I just wanted to turn that off again. Oh yeah, would you turn off the slide please? Affirmative action began in this country 50 years ago as a remedy. It was a remedy for century and more of centuries of slavery, segregation, exploitation of African Americans. Lyndon Johnson introduced affirmative action in this country and the speech here in Washington, in which he said, I'd not roughly speak, he said that if you take somebody who's been hobbled by chains and put him at the starting line of a race with people who have not been so hobbled, you can't say you're being truly fair. The person who is hobbled by chains is not prepared to compete in that race and therefore we need to take affirmative action, special programs in order to overcome the chain hobbling that's taken place. That is why I just described the centuries of slavery, segregation, and exploitation of African Americans. Race-based affirmative action, therefore, as Lyndon Johnson introduced, and as it was pursued for some years after that, is a matter of justice. It's a matter of remedying the past sins of American society and government. Now unless you think that this country has already remedied the centuries of slavery, segregation, and exploitation of African Americans, the justification that Lyndon Johnson proposed 50 years ago was as strong today as ever. Now the advocates of colorblind affirmative action policies that is not specifically targeting African Americans but reaching out to all students in the case of university admissions who are disadvantaged, as Cheryl Cashin says, by where they live or by low family wealth. They generally give four rationales and Cheryl in her book emphasizes all four of them. And these are, first, using race-based affirmative action, anger's whites, it interferes with what she just referred to as racial reconciliation, and therefore, it should be avoided because it prevents the civil rights advocates from making coalitions with white advocates of equality. Secondly, she says even though she personally does not have a colorblind constitutional theory, she says the Supreme Court won't buy race-based affirmative action and therefore, we are angering whites for no purpose because the Supreme Court won't let us do it anyway. Third, she argues that you can accomplish just as much for African Americans with a colorblind policy because, as she argued a few minutes ago, they live heavily in the kinds of neighborhoods that she would target with these kinds of colorblind policies. And finally, the fourth argument is that, as a matter of morality and justice, all students are equally entitled to these kinds of preferences if they're similarly disadvantaged, that somebody who's grown up in a low opportunity community is entitled to special preferences and affirmative action reaching out to them as an African American. Now, I'm gonna try to address all four of those, though I'm gonna focus mostly on the last one. That is that all disadvantaged students are entitled to affirmative action. And I think this argument confuses two very, very important issues in our society today. And we need to think about them quite separately. The first issue is that we have enormous and unacceptable social inequality, economic inequality in this country. Intergenerational mobility is lower than in other industrialized countries. It's stagnant, it's not improving. Some people argue that it's declined, but even if it is not declined, it's still at a very low level compared to other industrial countries. And that's true of irrespective of race. And therefore, colleges and universities have an obligation, a social policy obligation to try to contribute to efforts to increase upward mobility, intergenerational upward mobility in this society. Now, I wanna emphasize that it's true, I agree. Colleges and universities can contribute to increasing intergenerational upward mobility in this society, but we tend to exaggerate the role that colleges and universities can play. I think probably because most social policy analysts or academics or in universities or highly educated themselves, they exaggerate the role that education can play in the broad mix of social policies that we need to increase intergenerational mobility. The most important reforms to increase intergenerational mobility are not educational, but they're economic. For example, if we want to enhance the share of students from disadvantaged families who go to college and who go to the most competitive colleges, it'll be far more useful to do things like increase the minimum wage, reform labor markets to increase incentives for employers not to schedule irregular and part-time shifts, to strengthen laws governing the union organization of low wage workers, address the mortgage foreclosure epidemic, and increase the earned income tax credit. All of those will enable parents to take better care of their children and will enhance the ability of those children to thrive in school and be competitive to college. Reaching colleges when colleges and universities reach out to those children, they can play a role as well. But it's one of a number of tools in the upward mobility toolbox and we should not overemphasize the role that colleges and universities can play. I've written a great deal about this with regard to elementary and secondary education where there too, the most important and prominent policy discussions in this country, actors though, the higher expectations in schools and better curriculum and better trained teachers can create a classless society, get everybody college and career ready without dealing with any of the other issues that I just mentioned. A good example of this and applies just as well to affirmative action policies and to the policies of colleges and universities is the attitude of the U.S. Department of Education under this administration. Arnie Duncan said that education is the civil rights issue of our generation, the only sure path after poverty and the only way to achieve an equal and just society. That attitude of course as we've now had over a dozen years of that kind of policy, it's entirely failed and it will also fail at the college and university level if we're doing nothing on the economic and social front to try to get children better prepared to succeed in life and simply trying to increase upward mobility with college and university admissions programs. Now as I say, these programs to reach out to disadvantaged children who live in low opportunity neighborhoods who have families with low wealth, these are a matter of equity, it's a good social policy and we should pursue them. And you will hear later on from the president of a college that is pursuing it and it's admirable and should be commended. But the pursuit of equity is quite a different matter from the pursuit of justice. The pursuit of justice is an entirely separate issue, entirely distinct and should not be confused to the first and that is the need to remedy centuries of, as I said, slavery, segregation and exploitation. A governmentally imposed caste system, not class system but caste system on African Americans which has not been addressed and if we never, as has been said already and I'm sure everybody is aware, we're now having this conversation long after it was planned but since it was planned, we're all reminded of the fact that we have not addressed the remedies, the centuries of exploitation. Now African Americans are in these low opportunity places, they have low wealth for entirely different reasons and other families are in those situations. Some families are in these situations because they recently immigrated, some families are in these situations because they have stuck in low wage jobs, some families are in these situations because they've not taken advantage of or been able to take advantage of educational opportunities and some families because they live and de-industrialized the rural areas. These are all important social policy problems that should be addressed and as I say, college admissions offices can attempt to address them but African Americans are disproportionately lower class for an entirely different set of reasons and as Christian mentioned earlier, I documented these recently in a report called The Making of Ferguson, describing why Ferguson is a low opportunity area and it's not because families there have recently immigrated or happened to be stuck in low wage jobs or didn't take care of educational opportunities, it's because public policy, federal, state and local policies conspired over a century to place African Americans in low opportunity neighborhoods, racially explicit public policy and I described a number of these with respect to Ferguson and St. Louis but we can describe them with respect to any city or place in this country and let me give you an example. One of the things that Cheryl talks about is families having low wealth and their children are especially in need of actions by college admissions officers to seek them out, they may not think of going to college, they may not have the savings to go to college, they are much less likely even then families of similar incomes to send their children to college and especially to competitive colleges. Well, why do families have low wealth? As I said, some families have low wealth because they recently immigrated to this country and haven't had generations to accumulate wealth, some families have low wealth because they haven't been able to save because they're stuck in low wage jobs, African Americans have low wealth because our government conspired to deprive them of wealth. One of the policies that I described in my Ferguson report that was true throughout the country is that for the entire New Deal and post-war period during the great suburbanization of this country, the suburbanization was guided and directed by the Federal Housing Administration, the federal government with an explicit condition that that suburbanization not be made available to African Americans, explicit. The federal government financed the suburbanization, large merchant builders to build suburbs in the rings around every city in the country, St. Louis is no different from any other city and they required, the government required that those builders not make homes available to African Americans and the federal government even provided those builders with model deed language that they could place in the deeds of those subdivisions to ensure that no family could resell a home to African Americans. Now, probably the most famous example of this is Levittown, New York, Levittown and this was duplicated all over the country. Levittown, Daily City in California, the subject of the Malvina rental song about tiki-taki houses on the hillside throughout the country. These subdivisions were built by the Federal Housing Administration with construction loans guaranteed by the Federal Housing Administration with the explicit condition that no homes be sold to African Americans. Now, when my uncle moved into Levittown in the late 1940s, a returning war veteran, lower middle class family, he worked in a grocery store, those homes in Levittown at that time sold for $7,000. That was roughly two times, two and a half times national median income. In other words, putting it in today's terms, those homes in Levittown sold for about $125,000 each and lower middle class families, working class families, like members of my own family, were able to buy into Levittown if they were white and then gain from 50 years of equity appreciation that was denied to African Americans. Today, homes in Levittown sell for $400,000, seven times national median income. Telling African Americans, as Lyndon Johnson said, that okay, we've now changed the rules, you can now buy into Levittown is meaningless. African Americans could have afforded to buy into Levittown. There's working class and lower middle class African Americans could have afforded to buy into Levittown in the 1940s. They can't afford to do so today. And that has not been remedied, simply passing a law saying we have a fair housing act that you can now buy into Levittown and you can now have several hundred thousand dollars in equity appreciation that white families gained from being able to buy into Levittown in the 40s and 50s is not an effective remedy to that situation. So we need a special effort, a constitutionally required effort. Cheryl says she doesn't favor a colorblind constitutional policy and I accept, I certainly understand that that's not her view. She does not favor the Roberts Court's constitutional policy, but she favors policies that act as though we have no constitutional obligation to pay special attention to the needs of African Americans. So I say these two policies are distinct. One is the need to enhance equity, to enhance upward mobility for all disadvantaged families in this country so that we are not an outlier among industrialized nations and having the lowest rates of intergenerational mobility of any industrialized nation. That's one. Every industrialized nation should be attempting to become more equal and we should do so as well and college admissions officers have a role to play, although not the only role to play in this policy. But then there's a second issue which is race-based affirmative action which is not primarily for the purpose of enhancing equity, but it's for justice. It does enhance equity as well, but it's constitutionally required. Now, what about the argument that Cheryl and others make as well, I may think it's constitutionally required, but John Roberts doesn't agree and neither does Anthony Kennedy, so we're beating our heads against the wall in doing this. And I think there are two things that are important to emphasize in that regard. First, it's very short-sighted to think about the current court in terms of what policies we should be advocating. It is certainly true that colleges and universities in the present day are required to mask their policies as colorblind. I don't deny that. I think that the case that Cheryl mentioned where they're going to challenge Harvard's use of race and use of affirmative action by race, they have a good chance of succeeding with the current court. But when Thurgood Marshall began his drive to desegregate public schools, he started in 1933. He wasn't trying to appeal to the court of 1933. He had a long strategy, a long-term strategy to challenge racial segregation in elementary and secondary schools. He started with law schools. He then went on to graduate schools. He then went on to colleges. And over a 20-year period, built the foundation for a new policy. The court has changed its view so many times back and forth on the issues of race-based affirmative action and the use of race in the meaning of the 14th Amendment that it's quite foolish and short-sighted to think that the present views of the court are going to be the permanent views of the court. But there's one thing I will guarantee. If policy advocates don't advocate the use of race in affirmative action and a race-conscious interpretation of the 14th Amendment is guaranteed that the future court won't, on its own, do so in the absence of public opinion to support it. So I think it's very important while we acknowledge that we have to pretend to be colorblind in the present legal climate for this year's policies. Promoting this as an absolute value, as a good thing in itself, undermines the possibility of a future court taking a different position. Now finally, I'll just say one word. So the argument is that we can accomplish just as much for African-Americans with race-based policies, with colorblind policies we can with race-based policies. I happen to think that's not true. I'm not gonna go into it now. I argued in the American Prospect article that in fact the African-Americans who are most in need of affirmative action are very hard to identify with place-based policies, even with policies that seek out family wealth. And that unless you use race, you're going to get a distorted African-American population as the University of Texas found when they had a place-based, they still have a place-based policy. They recruited a lot of low-income African-Americans, but not lower middle-class African-Americans who are most in need of affirmative action, who were competitive for the university, but were not being sought out in order to increase the share of African-Americans in the Texas entering class. So in conclusion, I just wanna say that there's no doubt we need to pretend to be colorblind in the current legal climate, but it's also very important to realize that we have a separate challenge from the challenge of enhancing equity, and that is the challenge of increasing justice. We have a constitutional obligation to undo the Levittown syndrome of this society, to undo censories of slavery, segregation, and exploitation. And as recent events have, I think, demonstrated to everybody, we've made very, very little progress in undoing that unconstitutional placement of African-Americans in the caste system in this society. Good morning. I wasn't quite sure of our order. But thanks very much to the Economic Policy Institute for having me and for Cheryl and Richard for including me in their interesting and lively, I suppose what seems in print as a debate, but in listening to it, I mean, I just keep thinking that these are some variations on a theme and that there's a lot more points on which, I think, most of us here may see eye to eye than points in which we disagree. And so I wanna continue that discussion a little bit, probably because there's a lot of what Cheryl has written about and Richard's written about that I do agree with and have echoed in some of my work. And I think that the consistency in the agreement is that, I think there's no question among any of us about the difficulty that we have in a society today with something that Linda Darling Hammond once called a continuing comfort with the profound Achilles heel that is inequality in American education. And we see this throughout the spectrum of educational opportunities, both in K-12 education and in higher education opportunity. And you've heard both Cheryl and Richard speak very passionately about the importance of where we first see the disparities in the schisms that grow and grow until the point of looking at opportunity for higher education. And so I think when we look at the discussion of the types of policies that should be available, it really is important to look at it holistically from birth on. Both Cheryl and Richard have talked a lot about the ways in which policies like affirmative action have been helpful and remain necessary. So there's a little bit of a, that part does not seem to be a debate necessarily, that there's been a need for these kinds of policies. And it seems that both in their writings have agreed that as they currently exist, as affirmative action currently exists in terms of college admissions processes, it doesn't adequately address deeply entrenched racial and economic inequality in educational opportunity. One suggestion is for the type of reforms that Cheryl mentions that take account of deep seated and continued residential segregation and inequality in neighborhoods to address change. And Richard has argued really more for broad change coming through progressive economic policy that this education is just one piece of this. I think throughout my work, and certainly quite frankly coming to academia from a place where I was directing education, litigation and policy for the NAACP legal defense, but I do believe very strongly in the pursuit of a remedy that's about justice. And I do believe that there is a continued legacy that we see of slavery and Jim Crow. But I wanna talk about it in the context of looking at what the landscape is like in K-12 education. I wanna talk about it a little bit also in the context of what the changing demographics of the United States pretend for educational opportunity. And to speak perhaps a little bit more hopefully of the role of government. And this comes both as a constitutional law professor and scholar believing that there has to still be some good in there in our Supreme Court and in recent rulings. But also speaking about extra judicial forces that are part of our government. And what I think is really a continued resource and in many ways untapped resource in terms of the role that administrative advocacy can play in what we think of in terms of public policy in this area. So first, in looking at the context of today's racial disparity in education. Some of this has been touched upon already by Sheryl and Richard. But this is a momentous year because according to the National Center for Education Statistics 2014 marks the first year that white children comprise a minority of public school children in America. So this is the year where the tide has officially shifted. And it displays a tremendous racial and demographic change that's been taking place over the last several decades in the United States. But it means that kids who are in school today are going to grow up and live and work in a society that has no racial or ethnic majority. So this is a different America than we saw at the outset of some of these policies. And we hear this discussed quite frankly in a lot of the rhetoric around the importance of diversity in higher education. Because we've heard this time and again that students need to be prepared to compete effectively in a global marketplace. They need to be prepared to have a set of skills that are no longer a part of a moral good but it's really more of an economic necessity. And Sheryl mentioned that with respect to K-12 education we have had at the same time of this change in the demography of the United States and this rise in multicultural America a very troubling resegregation of American public schools so that they're more segregated today than at any point in the last 40 years. And this is due in large part to a series of Supreme Court opinions that somewhat chipped away at the ability to desegregate schools coupled with changes like white flight that were discussed by both of our presenters. And half of these schools are what we call hyper segregated. So not just kind of racially segregated but very racially segregated. 91 to 100% of the students being black and Latino and at the same time half of those students coming from places of extreme poverty as well. And we now have a huge body of research that's been culled over decades that talks about the negative consequences of this that the highest concentrations of black and brown students that are coupled with this high concentration to poverty and elementary and secondary schools are coupled with things like incredibly limited resources fewer experienced and credentialed teachers larger class sizes, fewer counselors so a whole host of other problems. And as Cheryl mentioned as well that have very deep and troubling effects with respect to issues of student discipline as well. And it's a domino effect. So this is what we see trickling up to those students who are then may or may not have an ability to go on to higher education. And in any given year half of black, Latino and Native American students won't graduate from high school. So this is the landscape. And it's true that after decades of litigation one may assume that we would be further along than we are today that we would see more successes. And we have in many ways seen a number of successes but we have also a continued legacy of racial discrimination that's really baked into the fabric and this is actually one of the things I say when I start teaching constitutional law it really is baked into the fabric of the American Constitution and it's something that for generations we have worked to rise above and to change in this country but it is something that is deep seated. And there is a real cost to this. So a part of what Richard and others have written about is what the deep cost of this kind of inequality is. And one of the more recent studies said that the continued achievement gap that we discuss when you look at the cost to our country of that achievement gap in K-12 education it imposes the economic equivalent of a permanent national recession. And I raise that to say that on the one hand this is it to me. This is the place where it is most important to look at how to address this kind of deep seated inequality and disparity. And also because there's so many social and educational benefits that come from starting as early as possible in addressing these kinds of disparities. In addressing this kind of continued isolation both racially and economically. And I think one of the questions that we have about this about on the one hand if we know all this great stuff about racial and economic integration in early ages increased critical thinking skills, higher graduation rates, better college attendance, greater civic participation for all students. Why do we still have these kinds of problems? Why do we still have these kinds of issues? And I think part of it is that we do need to understand in addition to looking at the plethora of opportunities that might be available to change policy at the higher education level it's also important to continue to focus on what we are doing as a nation and even what we were doing in terms of government policy at the K-12 level. Richard mentioned that the Secretary of Education Arnie Duncan has spoken often and eloquently about the importance of education as being the most critical civil rights issue of our time. Obama has talked about the need for the United States to lead the world in college graduation rates by 2020 which is not very far away and we are really far away from reaching that. We are nowhere near. And yet there are some pieces of hope I think when one looks at policy that can be widespread federal policy that could be administered from the executive branch. In talking about the role of a color conscious constitution and talking about the importance of the 14th amendment the directives come not only from the Supreme Court but also from what the executive branch does with those directives. So a few years ago the Department of Education and the Department of Justice finally released very important guidance about what the role should be of racial integration in elementary and secondary schools as well as in higher education. And these were a result of Supreme Court opinions. This is a common practice by the Department of Education as Judy Winston well knows. And so the guidance provided concrete and specific examples of what it meant to operate constitutionally and yet to care very deeply about addressing racial segregation in our elementary secondary schools and increasing diversity in higher education. It also recognized that a majority of Supreme Court justices actually did still see an important value in fostering racial inclusion at the K-12 level and the higher ed level. And we see this coming out in these particular pieces of guidance that came out a few years ago. In addition to the guidance that came out a few years ago more recently with the Supreme Court decision regarding the Michigan ballot initiative, Judy, the Department of Education issued additional guidance and it really underscored the role of the importance of looking at racial diversity to open up pathways of leadership in colleges and universities. And so I think we do have actually a set of guidelines from the Supreme Court as much as people may think that that is an area that may be narrowing over time. The jurisprudence that we have is actually still quite good in this area. And we also have a role that the federal political branches play in underscoring the importance of this constitutional directive about the persistence of the importance of race in the society, about the need to look at some point at race-conscious measures to address these things and even providing a bit of a roadmap as to how to do that. I think where the difficulty comes in and where you see the discussion between Sheryl and Richard focusing most precisely is on the reality that even though we won in many ways, I think, in the Supreme Court with respect to at least an acknowledgement of the continued importance of race, that we have this societal indecision about what to do with continued racial inequality. On the one hand, you have, I think, a broad consensus that racial inequality should be unacceptable in education. Nobody would say out loud that that's a great thing to have as a country. But we do have some pieces of our doctrine and some political responses that demonstrate a bit of discomfort when it comes to the allocation of benefits and burdens that may in any way be based on race. And so what we have had in the wake then is this attack on a certain set of policies. And that could be that the law doesn't necessarily wrestle with these issues in the most sophisticated way. So we get the state ballot initiatives that Sheryl is mentioning. We get some that have been very successful. We have had some that have actually been less successful across the country. And one could argue that this has to do with the language that is used, some of which is to capitalize on this societal indecision. It's to fracture instead of build community. And we have seen this kind of fracturing successful in many areas and in particular in response to trying to dismantle some race conscious policies at the level of state ballot initiatives. So when thinking about the solutions that are called for by Sheryl and Richard, I actually don't think that they're necessarily so far apart. The reality is that we are in a time that is difficult because we do have this societal indecision with respect to matters of race. The reality is also that we have a constitution that supports remedying a history of slavery and Jim Crow that I believe still very much stands for that. The reality is we also have a government in terms of the federal political branches in terms of the executive branch that has a very powerful role to play in underscoring this constitutional directive. And I think part of this is that we have to expand our political imagination beyond the reality of the moment. And there's a part of this moment that can seem very dark. But it does not mean that it's a time to abandon existing policies that have been helpful in terms of race conscious admissions policies at the higher ed level and in terms of what we have at the K-12 level. I would, I guess, just to wrap up here, suggest that one of the ways we can do this in terms of continuing to look at the racial and economic isolation that we so deeply feel, in particular, in elementary and secondary education is actually being a little bit more optimistic and hopeful about existing measures that can shape the scope and meaning of court directives and to shape the policy that is addressing existing disparities in terms of education. And there are a few of those that have been historically and continue to be fairly helpful. These are structures that seek to maximize research, communication, support, and incentive strategies. And it's really about regulation. It's about guidance. And it's about research. These are things like robust enforcement of laws that bar discrimination and inequality, existing compliance reviews that are actually very helpful at the elementary and secondary level to deal with persistent racial and economic disparities and a role that has been more successful in recent years under this administration. And that's an incredible role of data collection and dissemination of data. And the Department of Education's Office for Civil Rights has been more expansive in the data collection and dissemination than at any time in recent history. And it's material that is useful to buttress these constitutional directives about addressing racial and economic inequality. So I think that we gain a lot of insight from both of the policies that are discussed. And I think that we need not make a distinction between what is important on an individual level for justice, what's important on a collective consciousness level. But both of these are incredibly important. And it's important for us to also remember that if we expand our political imagination beyond the reality of the moment, I think it is sufficient to be more inclusive of these policies rather than dismissive of either one. Thank you. Well, thank you. I'm delighted to be here today. And now for something slightly different, but I think importantly related to the discussions today. I certainly believe that both socioeconomic diversity and racial diversity are of critical importance to American higher education. And as we've heard, concerns about legal challenges to affirmative action policies have increased discussions about using socioeconomic diversity policies to indirectly promote racial diversity. But I certainly believe that both types of diversity are important in and of themselves and we should not have to choose between them. Both race and income or class matter in America. But I also wanna argue that we are in fact not seeing significant commitments to or success with increasing socioeconomic diversity. And in fact, increasing socioeconomic diversity faces significant challenges in America. So thinking about it as a substitute for race-based affirmative action when in fact it's not working to me seems like an academic exercise at the moment and not a very good idea. So I'm gonna talk a little bit about what's going on with socioeconomic diversity and then talk about policies that might address it. Why do we care about socioeconomic diversity? I think it's, to me, it's self-evident and it's been talked a little bit about, but I do wanna just, I think it's worth articulating a little bit. There are significant benefits to a higher education degree. A BA increases your lifetime earnings by about 65% compared to only having a high school diploma and that gap in earnings between college and high school graduates has doubled since the 1980s. So it's now more important than it ever has been. And of course there are other benefits to higher education. A degree leads to a more interesting and satisfying jobs, more job security or ability to switch jobs because skills like critical reasoning, problem solving and good writing don't become obsolete like other training. Better health, increased voting, increased volunteering. Our country has long been committed to the idea that anyone who works hard can get ahead and that economic and social mobility are possibilities. These depend incredibly importantly on access to education, very importantly quality K through 12 education but access to higher education as well. For your degree significantly increases your chances of moving up from one income quintile to another one and we heard earlier how we're not doing very good at that in the United States. So much of the 20th century, the US actually did better than other countries in educating our population beyond high school. And we were partly able to do this because we were the first country to make available a high school education to everyone in the first part of the 20th century. But we're now facing some really significant challenges which is putting our commitment to improving socioeconomic access to higher education at risk. Our college attainment rates have stalled. Other countries are doing much better than we are overall in terms of higher education attainment. The OECD reports that other countries have increased their attainment rates for 25 to 34 year olds much more rapidly than we have. We used to be at the top of the list and now we kind of squeak into the top 10 being tied for 10th. So it's important also who goes to college and who doesn't. And in our society it depends on both income and race. This is problematic because it means that we're not investing in talented people and also because notions of basic fairness are important to a functioning society. If only some groups have access to a middle or an upper-class income it's gonna be very difficult to have the kind of society that we claim to be one committed to equal opportunity and social mobility and I think we're seeing that in current events over the last six months. Just some quick data, 44% of whites, age 25 to 64 have a higher education credential, only 28% of blacks, only 20% of Hispanics and 23% of Native Americans. And educational attainment also differs by family income. Over 80% of students in the top third of the income distribution go on to college compared to about 50% for those in the bottom third. So higher education confers benefits and increasing benefits over the last 30 to 40 years but access to those benefits depends on both income and race. Now at a time when I'm getting access to higher education has become increasingly important the costs have gone up rapidly, way above inflation. The reason is at least in part the same reason that the return to higher education has gone up. Skilled labor is being rewarded in our economy and higher education is one of the most skilled labor intensive sectors in the economy along with physicians and legal services. Prices, what full pay students are asked to pay in contrast to the cost which is what it costs to produce a year of education prices have also been going up by different amounts in different sectors. Importantly costs and prices don't necessarily have to move together in fact recently the most rapid price increases have been in the public sectors and have been driven by reductions in public support appropriations and not cost increases. Prices have also risen at the private non-profits but by less than at the publics. Finally net prices are really important too particularly when thinking about increasing socioeconomic diversity at colleges and universities. These are the prices that students pay after taking into account financial aid or scholarships. These have risen at different rates than either prices and costs. But the bottom line is that costs are up, prices are up and net prices are doing different things in different sectors but overall many families are facing rising prices and net prices in many cases as our society has shifted the responsibility for paying for higher education away from the public sector and towards individual families. Increasing socioeconomic diversity of college students is also being made more difficult by rising income inequality in the United States which is not unrelated to everything else I've talked about. The share of national income claimed by households in the top 20%, 5% and 1% of the income distribution have all increased between the 1970s and the start of this decade. And again this of course reflects in part the return to higher education and the different attainment rates by income level. But this is increasing the challenges that American higher education faces and it's gonna make it more difficult for higher education to play a role in contributing to equal opportunity and social mobility and moderating further increases in income inequality in the future and it's gonna complicate significantly moving higher education attainment rates in the direction of President Obama's goals for 2020. In fact I think those goals are not achievable which doesn't mean we can at least get the direction of change correct. Increasing income inequality directly contributes to increasing costs through the price of skilled labor. In addition real income growth that skewed towards higher income families creates challenges for higher education because the highest income families are willing and able to pay the full sticker price. And schools compete for these students supplying the services that they desire which pushes up costs further. Single rooms, great food, small classes, career counseling services, organic lawn care to name just a few. At the same time many schools have been and are committed to recruiting and educating a socioeconomically diverse student body but with lower family incomes lagging behind the top groups because of increased income inequality and actually falling in real terms in some cases greater need for financial aid results and this makes the commitment to financial aid, need-based financial aid more difficult now to sustain than it has ever been in the past. So what are the ways forward to get more people through higher education and to have the option of getting a BA available more broadly across income levels and race in America? Option one, allocate more public resources to higher education. This seems straightforward but at the moment it seems unlikely. With a slightly strengthening economy there's been some increase in state resources for higher education but with continuing state and federal budget issues and political gridlock significant changes in this seems unlikely to me. Realistically families are gonna be asked to bear more of the cost of higher education for their children rather than taxpayers. Since many of the benefits are private in fact some personal investment makes sense but then we need to worry about families who don't have the resources to make these investments even if they'd like to and here federal loan programs are very important. All the worry about loan burdens is in fact misleading and worrying. When someone decides to report on loan burdens instead of reporting actual data they tend to report the disaster stories which of course do exist but the data suggests that of those who earned a BA in 2011-12 60% had debt and the average debt was about $26,000 and this is more than justified by the increased earnings and stories about the terrible impact of debt are not gonna dissuade higher income families or students with educated parents from attending but may in fact keep exactly those families who should borrow to invest in their children's education from doing so and limiting loan programs in response to concerns about debt levels would similarly disadvantage this group. While it's unlikely that significant increases in public resources will be available existing support is significant and actually could be reallocated to improve outcomes and this seems like a slightly more likely outcome. Historically the public sector has transferred resources to higher education through a variety of channels, grants, subsidized loans, special tax treatment, appropriations, leaving decisions in many cases to the institutions of higher education on how to use these resources. With greater unhappiness on the part of the public and policy makers with outcomes more focused targeting of this public support is an option and this is a much preferable option to cutting back on public support. Other policies that would be helpful would include any that directly addressed increased income inequality in our society and anything that targeted changing the choices of low income students make about whether they're gonna go to college and which colleges they're gonna go to. So wrapping up, increasing socioeconomic diversity in American higher education would be a good thing for our society but we have not accomplished it and there are in fact increasing challenges who are doing so so we shouldn't count on it anytime soon for accomplishing some of our social objectives. Thank you. Or back and forth discussion on these important issues that have already been raised by each of our panelists. I have a few questions from the audience and I hope to try to compile these in some order and get to as many as possible but what I would like to do in the meantime to kick off the discussion is to try to synthesize or bring together everything that has been discussed. So I've been listening for some specific themes that seem to arise during this and at the start Cheryl presented this case where in considering place overrace in terms of how we move forward with affirmative action it's really balancing the challenge of defending affirmative action in our current political environment and addressing the impact of socioeconomic inequality or segregation. So there are those two challenges. How do we deal with the political issues facing affirmative action and using a race-based policy and then how do we incorporate that into how racial inequality has changed given the increasing economic segregation? I think overlaid or really intersected with that is the whole issue that Richard raised in terms of justice versus equity. How do we then marry those two? So as an opening question for the panel I want to ask should we be talking about each of these things in terms of a single tool used to address them? So is there really a choice to be made on whether or not we continue with the or continue to push forward, defend a race-based affirmative action policy versus having specific policies in place apart from or even integrated within affirmative action policy that begin to address some of these socioeconomic inequities. So is that necessarily a choice that we have to be made? Do we need a single tool for those? Are we really talking about, as to coin Leah's phrase are we really talking about expanding our political imagination? Well I would never suggest that place-based affirmative action and the other reforms and please don't forget about the other reforms which I think are even more radical than the place-based. I would never suggest that any of the strategies out there for increasing diversity in selective colleges is a panacea or the only thing we should be doing. Of course the most important thing is improving the quality of the pipeline but you know if you ask me what I think about what would be better and fairer and more impactful in terms of creating diversity on campus that's what my book responds to. Well I think it is important to keep the two distinct. As I said earlier I think that increasing socioeconomic diversity on campuses reaching out to children from low opportunity neighborhoods or otherwise socioeconomically disadvantaged is a good social policy for colleges and universities to follow. Any college or university that chooses to follow such a policy I think is admirable. It's not required to do so. Race-based affirmative action is a constitutional requirement and Chief Justice Roberts is wrong when he says it's not and someday he will be corrected if we educate the American public about why it's a necessity. So by arguing that colorblind policies should replace race-based policies we are miseducating the American public in its obligation to prepare a future Supreme Court as well as future policymakers to readdress the importance of remedying our policy. So it's our racial policies, our caste system. So I think it's important to keep them distinct for a political reason. Quite aside from whether colorblind policies succeed in increasing the share of African-Americans universities as I said I don't think they are very successful in doing so but quite aside from that we need to educate the American public refresh the American public's memory about why the grandchildren and great-grandchildren of Levittowners now have the ability to afford higher education at the most elite levels and the grandchildren and great-grandchildren of African-American returning World War II veterans who were not permitted to buy into Levittown do not have that opportunity. So I think we have to use every lever we've got and I like the idea of equity versus justice. On socioeconomic issues though I would argue that while not constitutionally necessary we receive huge subsidies from federal and state governments to a large part to target notions of equal opportunity and social mobility and yet schools are often using those subsidies for other purposes. So I do think that public policy could be improved in this area so that they're actually incentives to use the large transfers in the way that I think public policy makers intended. And I guess, Valerie, you already mentioned that I do think we should expand our thinking beyond the moment in which we find ourselves. I think the moment in which we find ourselves does require an understanding of the current political climate not so that we abandon a continued fight for what is just and for the importance of remedies to longstanding and deep-seated racial inequities. But I think it is also important to contextualize it in a way that will resonate and that will be responsive to where we find ourselves. And so to take the point with respect to a constitutional requirement under the Equal Protection Clause to address these lingering effects of slavery in Jim Crow I absolutely agree. From a litigation perspective, for better or worse the Supreme Court has focused on an issue of diversity in higher education as opposed to the very important and very real need to remedy history of slavery in Jim Crow. And I don't actually think it means that it's been abandoned. That's why I highlighted, for example, the guidance that's been issued by the Department of Education and the Department of Justice because I do think it's something that is acknowledging the continued effects of a history of racial discrimination. But it is an example of finding ourselves in a moment where, for better or worse, the politics of language kind of require that we understand that the discussion may be a little different today. I think I agree with Richard though that we have to also continue to prepare ourselves for a moment in the future when we are in a space where people hear the language of justice and remedy a little bit more clearly. And just to follow up with you on that, we do have a question from someone who wants to know what are some of the specific race-conscious policies the Obama administration is using to achieve racial justice in education? Well, it's an interesting question I would say right now. I think there could be more that are used. But there are a couple of ways of looking at it. I think one of the pieces I mentioned earlier was that the, in my mind, the Department of Education actually serves an incredibly critical role in their ability to actually gather information about much of what we've been discussing this morning in terms of inequities in the pipeline. And one example of that would be the recent, the recent data that was released and guidance around it with respect to school discipline in our country. And it was information that was based on research that the Department of Education's Office for Civil Rights has done gathering data from every single public school in the country, every type of public school, traditional, non-traditional, and coming at the end of that and saying, you know what, we actually have a problem with school discipline. And it's not any kind of a problem, it's a race problem. We have a race problem, it's a problem in terms of a disproportionately negative effect on black and brown school children. And it's the kind of thing that has tremendous weight when it comes from our government saying, we did the research, we looked at every single school, and there's no other explanation for what's happening other than a racial explanation. And we have to devise policies that take account of this and address it. So I think that's one example of how the Department of Education actually can be more focused when it comes to issues of racial inequality and public education. There are also traditional policies that the government has had available that have been very successful, would be more successful if administrations continued to focus on and fund them in ways that are incredibly helpful. And those would be things like our oldest, most established and well-funded school choice program in America, the magnet school program. And the example that Cheryl pointed to in West Hartford, Connecticut, is an example of a very successful school choice program. This is a result of a longstanding case in Connecticut, Chef versus O'Neill. But it's one that actually maximized things like the magnet school assistance program and other programs to foster racial and economic integration between inner city, largely minority and more impoverished schools and wider, wealthier suburban schools. So there are examples of things like that as well. I think a third example might be the role of the Department of Education in being able to provide information to school districts around the country about programs that have been effective. Very often we have these 15,000 K-12 school districts around the country that operate in isolation and may be wanting to think creatively about how to address some of these issues that all of us have discussed this morning. And yet they don't necessarily know how, they don't have the tools, they don't have the expertise. It's the role of our government, it's the role of the Department of Education to provide that kind of technical assistance to show what has been successful. And that is something that they have done in certain instances as well. And these are both programs that might address eliminating or decreasing racial isolation as well as very deeply entrenched socioeconomic isolation that's discussed very eloquently by what many people call the Godfather of the school choice movement who I see over there, hi Rick. But in looking at these issues and to the extent that that type of information, those kinds of studies, like the study about my home district where my daughter goes to school, Montgomery County, Maryland, those public schools and what they've done to foster highly successful schools that look at and are committed to integration at a racial and socioeconomic level. These are the kinds of programs that our federal government can highlight and provide to districts around the country so that they can be replicated on a broader level. All right, so we have a few questions here related to what may be some of the potential responses, implications or outcomes of focusing more on a place-based strategy, either as it relates to geographically, one zip code, you know, where they live, but also in terms of the class inequality issue. So I'm gonna try to put these together and there are three questions or three potential outcomes that have at least been raised by these questions. One being if we decide now that we're going to focus on place, that becomes the proxy for race. Will that not then become the new target? So in other words, you know, is the issue not so much about what we're targeting as it is opposition to the desired outcome of greater opportunity, greater equality. The other question that was raised that I think is interesting. If we go to a place-based strategy, is there any potential that that may then have the impact of desegregating some neighborhoods to the extent that white families may choose to move to a school where they feel that they're a student, we have a higher percentage of beings and a top 10% like the Texas plan. A third option or question that has been raised is should we not seize this opportunity of currently having a more conservative Supreme Court that wants to pull back from race to perhaps present more radical affirmative action policies that are class-based and thereby, you know, having perhaps the intended effect on addressing racial diversity. So one being, does place then become the new target if race is substituted with place? The second being, could there be potential positive impacts on neighborhood desegregation? And then, is there an opportunity to move more towards the left in terms of how affirmative action is implemented on a class basis? Let me try this really quickly. In terms of place being a target, and I'll use the example of the Texas 10% plan, absolutely the people from affluent districts, they hate that program. And they've tried repeatedly to get it repealed. But you have a coalition of strange bedfellows, rural white Republicans, particularly from West Texas whose students were never getting into UT, Latinos and black representatives in the state legislature have held together and insulated that program from repeal. They let UT have one amendment to it. And these are legislatures who don't agree on other things together, but that's the kind of transformative politics I'm talking about. And the 10% plan, it's not the only thing, UT should have de-emphasized test scores and thought about other strategies as well. But that's the kind of transformative politics we need to get more investment in K through 12 education. And I had, I was on a panel when an arch-opponent, Roger Clegg, a race-based affirmative action, said, I don't have a problem with considering where a person comes from, you know. So it's much more politically palpable, much more politically valuable. And I'll say, if we have the same kind of segregation patterns that you saw on that screen 100 years from now, the legal and ethical and moral and political case for giving special consideration to people from under-resourced places will still be there. And most people get that. It has moral clarity to it. In the same way that video had moral clarity when the poor man is being suffocated, you know, that's what I'm talking about, this collective consciousness. The second point, you know, actually, I think it's a good thing that a place-based policy might encourage a little bit more spreading around of motivated students. That's where people get big dreams from their peers, you know, and you might call it gaming the system, but it's not nearly as bad as the way the system is rigged today against high achieving kids of all colors who are outside the most advantaged networks. What was the third question? I forgot the third question. The third question may be more appropriate for Cathy to respond to, and it was about policies focused on economic diversity and the potential impact that they could actually have on increased racial diversity. Yeah, well, I think for me, the major constraint is that institutions have to decide to allocate resources to need-based financial aid, and there are very few incentives to actually do that. So I don't think it's just the question of, you know, are you using SATs or are you using how many AP classes you took? Most schools really would like to be doing more, but at the moment, every time, I'm gonna use the selective privates because that's the data, I know best, but every time you take a very low-income kid, a pale kid, you have to come up with $60,000 that you are not gonna get from that full-pay kid, and if you actually do significant progress on socioeconomic diversity, it has significant impacts on the resources available for you for other programs. So we can ask schools to do that on their own, but it's very hard to do it. I would like to see policymakers create incentives for us to do that. We know where these students are. They're out there. In a way, it's the low-hanging fruit. It's the kids who have gotten through the crappy K through 12 schools, but they're there, and many of our schools are turning them down because of the impacts on their budgets. Yeah, see, this is, if I could just very quickly interject here, this is part of the reason which brought me to this point. I think more pressure needs to be put on institutions. I see it in my own school. It's something very cynical happening around race. You can get your phenotypic diversity by admitting Nigerians who went to elite boarding schools in Britain who can pay full pay with the least cost to your budget. And so, I think universities do need more pressure to be considering low-income kids from different settings. So, do we have? Rappa? Okay, all right. So that's the signal to Rappa, but I do wanna throw this thought out there. I may not get a chance to respond to it, but I think it's worth throwing out there. You know, a lot of our discussion has been focused on higher education. We've talked some about how K through 12 impacts the pipeline to higher education. But I think one of the points that we didn't get to in this discussion, but deserves attention is the fact that we still seem to be focused on a very selective group of institutions and how these policies are implemented. Low-income African-American students do attend college, many of whom attend HBCUs. And so, when we're talking about public investment in higher education, I think that that's another part of the discussion that needs to be had. These students are going to school, they're a group of schools that serve them almost exclusively. And so that we need to expand our imaginations or political imaginations in that aspect and look more broadly at the higher education system where inequalities exist within the system itself beyond just admissions to elite institutions. So with that being said, we're going to wrap up. I want to thank you all for coming out to participate and hear this very important discussion. I don't know how long our panelists will be around, but perhaps you may be able to grab one or two if you just have a burning question that didn't get raised. But again, thank you and enjoy the rest of your Friday.