 LPI conducts and communicates independent high quality research to improve education policy and practice. We'd like to welcome you to bridging the divide school integration designs. Today we'll hear from expert policy makers, researchers and practitioners about different integration designs that create high quality diverse and democratic systems of public schools with the goal of advancing access to educational opportunity. You all have printed agendas. On the flash drives you'll find panelists bios and LPI reports including two new reports. The federal role in school integration, Brown's promise and present challenges by Linda Darling-Hammond and Janelle George. As well as sharing the wealth, how regional finance and desegregation plans can enhance educational equity by John Britton, Larkin Willis and Peter Cookson. We ask that you silence your cell phones as the program will be recorded and the hashtag for today's event is diversity equity access. It is now my pleasure to introduce Dr. Linda Darling-Hammond, the president and CEO of the Learning Policy Institute. Wow, what a crowd and before 9 o'clock I'm really impressed, I'm really impressed. Really I'm going to kick us off by with great pleasure and privilege to introduce Congressman Bobby Scott whose life just became much busier again in recent months. Congressman Scott is the chair of the House of Representatives Committee on Education and Labor. He is serving his 14th term representing the citizens of Virginia's third congressional district. Prior to serving in Congress, he was in the Virginia House of Delicates and in the Senate of Virginia. In 2015 he was one of the four primary negotiators of the Every Student Succeeds Act and his intellectual stamp is on many, many parts of this bill which has really in many parts of the country created a sort of a new framework for approaching the state responsibility in education and embedded in the act which is a surprise to many people are many things that I call equity nuggets. There are all kinds of pieces and I'm looking at John King who's going to be up here in a few minutes who was responsible with his predecessor Arne Duncan for many of these as well. The equity nuggets include ways that we ask districts to look at diversity and integration in assignments to look at the kind of money that is being allocated to different schools in different districts across states. There are a number of ways by which the act begins to really make real the idea that we could enable every student to succeed by allocating equitably resources to their education. He's a lead sponsor of the Strength and Diversity Act of 2018 which would provide federal funds to support state and local efforts to improve diversity and eliminate socioeconomic and racial isolation in public schools. He is active in many, many education arenas leading the way in which folks are approaching educational opportunity including the National Council for Educating Black Children for which he sort of serves as the intellectual and spiritual leader. I could go on but we want to hear from Congressman Scott and he is on a very tight timeframe so Bobby Scott welcome. Thank you so much. Thank you Linda for your very kind introduction and thank you for all of your work over the years on making sure that every student gets a quality education I want to thank the Learning Policy Institute for hosting this conversation and also for the release of your report. I do feel a little awkward here today because of the situation I'm in it's kind of like the guy who survived the Johnstown flood many years ago and he was a young child and he liked to tell the story about how bad the flood was year after year after year it always tell the story and he's got older and older there were fewer and fewer people that could actually validate the facts and took full advantage of it the flood got bigger and bigger and bigger he finally died an old man and got to the pearly gates and said St. Peter I want to tell the story about this flood and St. Peter said yeah we were watching you tell the story over the years I tell you what we'll get everybody together and you could tell the story once and that's it and so he got everybody together and the old man got to the podium and just before he started speaking St. Peter said that when you tell the story about how big the flood was remember that Noah is in the audience. So here I am introduced by Linda and John King is sitting in the front row and John Britain is in the next row back and the next person I met was Sue in the state of New Jersey on integration and here I am trying to tell my story about school integration so I'll do the best I can but you understand the parameters I'm working under I would have I want to thank thank everybody for coming and then also this report is going to be extremely timely as we fashion legislation going forward and look forward to making sure that we can get as many parts of that report in the actual legislation as possible. Let me begin by just a kind of a statement of principle so guide the committee on education and labor as in the 116th Congress equitable education serves as a compelling community interest and it is the responsibility of government to provide universal high quality education for all students and that's what we're going to be trying to trying to do and if you agree with that statement you also have to agree it is responsibility of government to remedy the inequalities that persist today because of the legacy of discrimination and housing education economic and criminal justice policies and put simply our government contributed to the racial discrimination and so our government local state and federal all must be part of the solution. We know all too well that although many of the overtly discriminatory policies may no longer be on the books pursuing educational equity requires us to confront the consequences of centuries of structural inequality that permeate our institutions research and evidence clearly shows that racial and socioeconomic integration can help close achievement gaps and increase access to quality education. In the 1970s and 80s as our schools grew more diverse the K through 12 racial achievement gaps closed more than the 1990s when the schools began resegregating. It's past time for Congress to examine integration not only as a moral imperative but also as an evidence-based strategy that improves teaching learning and school climate. Unfortunately everybody here is aware of the government accountability office the GAO study released about two years ago which shows that too many of our students in America are still too many schools in America are still segregated by race and class and that segregation is actually getting worse by the year. Six over 60 years ago the Supreme Court struck down lawful school segregation and the Brown v. Board of Education case. They said in that case that education is perhaps the most important function of state and local government went on to say that in these days it is doubtful that any child may reasonably be expected to succeed in life if denied the opportunity of an education such an opportunity where the state has undertaken to provide it is a right which must be made available to all unequal terms and so the court concluded that in the field of public education the doctrine of separate but equal has no place separate educational facilities are inherently unequal. Now my home state of Virginia was one of the states plus the District of Columbia were parties to that landmark case in fact Virginia's involvement in Brown v. Board of Education stood out because the original effort was led by student Barbara Johns. She was only 16 years of age and emerged as the emerged to challenge the notion that African Americans should continue to receive separate and unequal education under the law. She let a walk out of her high school and all black high school designed 180 students serving more than 450 and helped trigger a monumental step towards school desegregation. Her story is also includes the Virginia strategy of massive resistance to the Brown v. Board of Education. Virginia apparently only noticed the part of the decision that said where the state has undertaken to provide it. When ordered to integrate they simply closed the schools and didn't provide any education at all. That lasted for several years in fact in Prince Edward County Virginia from 1950 59 to 64 the schools were closed denying that almost a generation of students their education. During that time of course white students were able to get an education because they had a voucher program to fund white segregated academies and so that those students could get an education while the black students were left out. But as we go forward and recommitting ourselves to fulfilling the vision set forth in Brown we must focus on initiatives that truly integrate our schools and ensure that all students have access to equitable education. It means reading the federal law of provisions that impede local efforts to integrate public schools provisions that remind us of an ugly past. So the federal government must provide support to local and regional leaders who want to do this work their legislative goals captured in the strength and diversity act. We've introduced it several times the strength and diversity act would provide public school districts with the tools needed to develop voluntary community driven strategies for promoting racial and socioeconomically diverse schools. The bill authorizes funding for to support local efforts to integrate public public schools and it supports commit communities that are committed to studying the scope of their challenge and tackling these challenges with innovative evidence-based approaches to address racial isolation in schools. The strength and diversity act seeks to empower but not force school districts to voluntarily craft approaches to school integration that work best for their communities. It's also a small investment in the much larger fight to remedy decades of first purposeful action including actions by the federal government that intentionally segregated our communities and our schools to deny people of color equal opportunity. Simply put, since the federal government had a role in creating the problem, federal government has an obligation to help solve the problem and remitting segregation in public schools will not be easy. The Supreme Court has not been helpful. In fact, Supreme Court invalidated at least two plans, one in Kentucky, one in Washington state that were voluntary plans and so technical assistance is important so that schools that want to do this can avoid constitutional problems. House Democrats are particularly dedicated to advancing the strength and diversity act in light of the Trump administration's pattern of blocking school integration efforts. In fact, one of the first actions of the Secretary of Education was to eliminate the opening doors, expanding opportunities grant program proposed by the Obama administration. This was a voluntary grant program for school districts to create locally driven strategies that increase school diversity, prove student achievement in the lowest performing schools. Unfortunately, the grant program was not the only effort of school diversity that has been eliminated in recent years. Just last month, the administration also acted to not only act to impede integration, but this time they rescinded the Obama era guidance that provided recommendations to school districts on how to pursue legal and voluntary integration efforts. While non-bidening, the guidance helps school districts take responsibility for steps towards full integration, such as adjusting school citing decisions and admissions to a competitive K through 12 schools and programs. The administration is also dismantling guidance involving discipline, especially school suspensions. We know that the racial disparities and the guidance showed how you can reduce the disparities without jeopardizing school safety, and that's another one that's in the process of biting the dust. The effort of those actions to undermine the Supreme Court's holding that school districts have a compelling interest in seeking diversity and avoiding racial isolation is the effect of those actions. School districts have neither the federal support nor the guidance to take steps towards this important objective, and that's now unfortunately the reality. The refusal to uphold evidence-based constitutional guidance in our school diversity and seek opportunities like the opening doors program or setbacks that not only allow our system to become more entrenched in racial isolation, but what's worse, the discontinuance of these initiatives has sent a clear signal to states and in local districts that the federal government doesn't support the hard work of racial integration. As chair of the House Committee on Education and Labor, we're going to try to change that direction. We're committed to supporting the Strength and Diversity Act and elevating other solutions to combat educational inequity. Now, continue to push for greater investment in education, greater integration of our schools, and the more thoughtful government support and oversight to promote equity. And I vowed to fight to remove long-standing vestiges of discrimination like prohibition of fusing federal funds for integration from the General Education Provision Act. We know that many of you have joined in the efforts over the years, successful last year, in removing a similar prohibition from the fiscal year 19 Labor HHS Appropriations Bill. That provision prohibited the use of federal funds for the purpose of transportation designed to reduce school segregation. That provision was actually in legislation in the past by the Congress every year up until last year. And thanks for your efforts. We finally removed that vestige of long-term opposition to school integration. Our success in that effort is a sign that the momentum has changed and that you have my word that will continue to advocate the removal of such policies. One thing we are doing is introducing the Equity and Inclusion Enforcement Act, which would empower parents in communities to address racial disparities in public education, in part by restoring a private right of action to file claims under Title VI of the Civil Rights Act, when federally supported programs have disproportionate impact on communities of color. And so I look forward to working with you as we improve our educational system and improve and ensure that all of our children, regardless of background, have diverse, safe, healthy, and high-quality classrooms in which to learn and reach their full potential. Thank you and I look forward to continuing the conversation. Thank you for giving us a seat of hope and planting that as you head off to do the important work that the House of Representatives is now deeply engaged in and we appreciate that very much. Thank you. And I am now also deeply honored to introduce Senator Chris Murphy, who is from the great state of Connecticut. Senator Murphy is the member of the Senate Health Education Labor and Pensions Committee where he's consistently focused on advancing policies that address educational inequity. He is the lead sponsor of the Diversity, Strength and Diversity Act on the Senate side, which is wonderful to see it moving on both sides. He has worked hard to ensure that the Every Student Succeeds Act preserves its commitment to students of rights. He's been a leader in the Senate on issues such as school discipline issues and meeting the social, emotional, and academic needs of students. Another key aspect of an equity agenda, and he is in every important fight in the Senate right up their front and center, not only in education, but especially in education to be sure that children are protected, that they are kept safe, that they are encouraged to grow and learn in ways that will produce a better America in the long run. Senator Chris Murphy, thank you so much. Thank you very much, Linda. It's really wonderful to be here with you all just for a few minutes to help you kick off what I hope is going to be a really fantastic day. Great to be here with John and so many of friends who have taught me an enormous amount about this space during my time on the Health Education and Labor Committee in the United States Senate. And I'm really looking forward to the product of your work here today. Very glad to be able to follow my friend Bobby Scott on stage. I want to particularly, I know he's already moved on, but to the extent of his team is still here. Thank him for a really important hearing that one of his subcommittees conducted this week on a topic that is also very near and dear to me. That is the use of seclusion and restraints on children in schools, in particular disabled children, in particular students of color. And my hope is that legislation that he and I have been working on together for years in order to put some guardrails around the use and the overuse of these abusive practices on students is going to be able to move through that committee, shine some light on this issue and give us a platform by which to try to make the case to move it in the Senate. So thank you to Representative Scott and his team for moving that forward as well. So I am just so eager to hear what guidance you give us as we move forward on this conversation in the United States Senate. I'm so proud to have picked up a piece of legislation that originally came from Secretary King and the Obama Administration. This is the Strength in Diversity Act, which provides $120 million to fund voluntary local efforts to increase socioeconomic and racial diversity in schools. I come from a state that is one of the most segregated in the nation, the state of Connecticut. Well, at one point being on the forefront of the movements to diversify schools, you remember the chef versus O'Neill hearing, I hear John Britton may be testifying later today. We were so proud that we had a Supreme Court that recognized economic segregation as in many ways equally impermissible as racial segregation. And we put ourselves on a path to try to remedy that problem in our state. That pathway has been blocked. Our progress has been stalled. And today we are moving in the wrong direction in our state. More and more students of color are going to school in majority non white schools. Our state is not making the progress that we had hoped. I know that Ed Trust just came out with this incredibly important report on the difference in funding that goes to majority white schools and majority non white schools. We have the same problem in Connecticut. In my old congressional district that is now represented by Teacher of the Year, Johanna Hayes. Dan Berry is a majority non white district. And they spend somewhere around $5,000 a year on students in that district. Cornwall just up the street is a majority white district and they spend about $35,000 per student in that district. And the same story could be told of communities that are right next to each other like Bridgeport and Westport. The impression in Connecticut is that we spend a lot more money on the non white school districts. That's not the reality as the Ed Trust report shows for the entire for the entire country. And so we have more and more evidence about why it is so important to attack this question of diversity in schools. And the experience in Connecticut, of course, is also the experience nationally in terms of the direction that this issue is heading. Since 1988, the share of intensely segregated non white schools that are these are schools with only 10 or less percentage of the population being white students has more than tripled increasing from 6% of schools in 1988 to 19% of schools today in Chicago in New York, New York just down the street from Connecticut, more than 95% of African American and lesion students are attending majority poverty schools, of which most schools are majority minority schools. And so it this begs for a financial commitment. It begs for real leadership at the federal level. I was so proud to have played a small role in the passage of the new elementary and secondary Education Act. And my my narrow window of interest on that piece of legislation was the civil rights title, of which there was none when the bill came out of the United States Senate, thanks to Secretary King, the Obama administration and a handful of us who demanded that it be included in the final product. We did in fact end up passing a piece of legislation and thanks to Bobby Scott, a piece of legislation that did include real requirements for schools to stand up for students of color for disabled students for English language learners. But to me, it represented the fact that the federal government is involved in education because of civil rights. There's not a lot of other reasons for the federal government to lay a heavy hand into local education, if not for the issue of civil rights. That's how the federal government gets originally to the issue of overseeing federal education. And so we have that title in the elementary and secondary Education Act, but we need to do so much more. And the Strength in Diversity Act does that by setting up this pool of federal resources that states who want to do the right thing can draw upon a state like Connecticut, who may be cash strapped to try to do the things that they want to do in order to fulfill the Chef mandate, now could access that federal pool of dollars. Connecticut has had a program called the Open Choice Program. It worked wonders, it has largely stalled, but the data is the data. The students of color who are in the Open Choice Program, students from Hartford Bridgeport who are going to school in places like Simsbury or Fairfield are doing better than the students who are not participating in that program. And so in Connecticut, if we had more resources to invest in these kinds of programs, we know what the results would be. I appreciate the support that you're going to lend to this piece of legislation today, but I also appreciate the fact that you're going to challenge us to look at this issue from a holistic basis. This year we are celebrating 50 years of the Fair Housing Act and it's an act that is not working as intended because today black families are still getting steered into certain neighborhoods and steered away from other neighborhoods when they choose to buy a house in my state of Connecticut. In fact, there's a really interesting op-ed in the Washington Post from about a year ago of an education writer here in D.C. who moved to Connecticut and was aghast to find how few integrated neighborhoods were available to him moving to my state and how when he did go look for homes in the majority white neighborhoods, he and his husband were the only black family at the open houses on Saturday and Sunday. That is not by accident. That is on purpose and it challenges us to think about the issue of racial and socioeconomic segregation, not just through the lens of investing in school diversity programs, but by challenging us to breathe new life back into many of the other protections that should exist for families that want the opportunity to live in truly integrated places. The Fair Housing Act is one of those opportunities. I have so much to learn about this, but I'm so glad that I have so many amazing partners here. You've got an amazing, amazing lineup of speakers today, and so I will do them justice and get out of the way. Thank you very much, everybody. Have a great day. What a start to our day. I want to thank everyone who is here. Certainly thank Chairman Scott and Senator Murphy, both for their remarks this morning and for their deep and ongoing commitment to advancing equal educational opportunities for all students. We've entitled today's gathering, Bridging the Divide, School Integration Designs. It is urgent that we bridge the divide, not only among us as citizens of the United States, but that divide between the established research on the benefits of diverse learning environments that enable all students to learn and thrive and the deeply segregated landscape of our nation's public schools today and the policies that have been guiding them. As I was reflecting on this event today last evening, I realized that exactly one year ago today, we met in this very room to launch a conversation on the 50th anniversary of the Kerner Commission report. So there's something symbolic about that. That report was the result of a commission appointed by President Lyndon Johnson to address the more than 70 cities that experienced civil unrest in 1967 and 68. That commission warned that we were moving toward two societies, one white and one black, separate and unequal. And while that alert did lead to significant civil rights progress during the subsequent decade, we have rapidly reverted to a separate and unequal reality that is plaguing us today. And I'm going to see if our technology works. This is one of the briefs that was issued on that occasion, education and the path to a nation indivisible, which is part of a volume of reports that were put together by Alan Curtis as a remembrance of the 50 years since and a stock taking in many areas of our lives. This issue is very much in the press right now. This month's Phi Delta cap and magazine is about segregation in America's schools. And I think I saw Josh Starr, the head of Phi Delta cap is somewhere in the room. So he can talk more to you about many, many angles that that illuminates Education Week and National Public Radio and others this week carried the story that we heard about with respect to the $23 billion divide between the money spent on predominantly white schools and predominantly non-white schools. Our timing of these events seems prescient, but I think this outpouring of concern, which has been largely silent for decades, if you think about it, may be a response in part to the divisive rhetoric that's been emanating from the White House, which is rending our nation apart. And these effects of the divide are becoming much more clear to Americans across the country. While we know that integrated schools are not a panacea for the divisiveness we now experience, we also know that we can produce significant benefits. For example, from extensive research over many years, including an amicus brief that was filed in the Parents Involved case in Seattle that Senator Murphy and Congressman Scott referenced. Five hundred and fifty social scientists signed on to that brief. Many research reviews have documented that attending integrated schools contributes to promoting tolerance, developing cross-cultural understanding, reducing bias and prejudice, increasing the likelihood that students will live in integrated neighborhoods as adults and hold jobs in integrated workplaces later in life, improves academic achievement and critical thinking skills, improves educational attainment, and promotes civic participation in a diverse global economy. In fact, one recent study by economist Rucker Johnson, looking at the benefits of integrated environments for the educational achievement and attainment of African-American students, found huge gains in achievement and graduation rates for each year that students attended an integrated school with no detrimental effects on the achievement or attainment of white students, but simply a strong set of outcomes in closing an opportunity and achievement gap. We also know that maintaining productive integrated schools in which all students get access to quality curriculum and where discrimination is not replicated within the school itself does not happen by magic. This is a steady work in and of itself. We detail the current state of school segregation and strategies that have been used to reverse it in our report release today, which is available on your flash drives, the federal role, and school integration, Brown's promise and present challenges. In that report, we note that the typical black student is now in a school where almost two out of every three classmates are low income, nearly double the level in schools of the typical white or Asian student. Another study found that in Chicago and New York City more than 95% of African-American and Latino, Latino students attending majority poverty schools, most of which are also majority minority. The 2016 general government accountability office GAO report that was referenced earlier called such schools hyper segregated, describes how they are impacted by educational inequities like resource disparities, inexperienced and unqualified educators, high teacher turnover, and fewer educational resources. Meanwhile, another national study of districts and charters pursuing socio-economic diversity found that a large proportion of white students attended overwhelmingly racially isolated schools, more than a third attended schools that are 90 to 100% white. And as we just heard from Senator Murphy, these schools have much greater resources. The Ed Bild study that was reported the Washington Post, which documented that $23 billion gap, also details how that is a result not only of local property tax differentials, but in inadequate responses from states to closing the gap. All of these inequalities have grown much worse over the last several decades. Schools are more segregated by race and class today they were than they were in the late 1980s, when nearly twice as many black students were in integrated schools as is true today. There's been a tendency to believe in these intervening years that there's nothing we can do about this, that it's a naturally occurring byproduct of families housing choices. However, there are in fact many things that have been done that increase segregation, including housing policy, but also education policy and many things that can be done to reduce segregation and its ill effects. And we'll talk about them today. One thing that we this is a slide a chart from one of our studies, which just shows the degree of segregation in districts that were under court order desegregation plans and how rapidly segregation decreased under those plans and when the plans were lifted how rapidly segregation returned again just to point out that policy can make a very marked and obvious difference. The federal government can play a significant role in advancing equal educational opportunity as we saw in the 60s and 70s. And more recently when the Obama administration offered guidance to districts on how to maintain legally defensible strategies for creating integrated schools even after the Supreme Court overturned desegregation strategies in Seattle and Louisville. This guidance that the Trump administration has recently rescinded along with many other civil rights rules is really what propelled us to write the report that's being released today. State and local governments can also play a significant role as we reveal in a second study sharing the wealth also on your flash drives where we look at the outcomes of the Hartford plan that Senator Murphy talked about. Boston's METCO plan the Omaha and Nebraska plan to both share regional wealth among inequitably funded districts and to promote integration in the school attendance all of which produced noteworthy outcomes and in several cases continued to do so. These multiple pathways to promote diversity which we'll hear about from today's speakers include open enrollment programs, magnet schools, inter and intra district choice programs, school and program citing decisions and many others. Although the guidance is rescinded a number of states and districts are still paving the way and exploring multiple pathways to promote diverse learning environments and we're going to learn about those and how we can support that ongoing work. And with that I'm going to introduce John King who will be come on up John and let me embarrass you while you're sitting up here. John is currently the president and CEO of the Ed Trust a national nonprofit organization that seeks to identify and close educational opportunity and achievement gaps. Immediately prior to that he was our secretary of education. He implemented Obama's stronger together initiative, $120 million proposal in the president's budget that incentivized schools to become more socioeconomically diverse. Prior to his role as secretary he was deputy secretary overseeing many of the policies and programs that have to do with closing the opportunity gap. And before that he was New York state education commissioner where we really began working together on strengthening teaching in New York state. King began his career as a high school social studies teacher in Puerto Rico and in Boston Massachusetts as a middle school principal he survived that. And these roles in hot seats in the government to continue to lead us in this area of achieving greater equity and closing the opportunity gap. So let's now welcome John King for a conversation about the federal role in school diversity. John when you took over as secretary one of the very first things that you did was put integration back on the table. And it had been off the table. I remember writing you a note about it. It had been off the table for really decades. What caused you to that? What were you trying to accomplish there and what were you able to do? Well first thank you for the opportunity to join all of you. It's good to be back here. We were here together a year ago for the Kerner commission conversation. You know it's really two things. One was personal experience. I will add the blessing to go to intentionally integrated schools in New York City during a period of my life when I lost both of my parents and school made all the difference. And I went to an elementary school and a middle school that were diverse by design. I wasn't called that at the time but that's how they were structured. If not for those programs and the teachers that I had there I don't think I'd be alive today. So deeply personally I believe in this work. But then as you pointed out the evidence is overwhelming. That when students have access to racially and socioeconomically diverse schools the outcomes are better. The academic outcomes are better. Social emotional outcomes are better. And ultimately I think our democracy is stronger. So both in the context of that initiative to kind of get people thinking and talking and regulating around integration and the Obama era guidance that has recently been rescinded. Tell us a little bit about what the federal role can be in this arena. Yeah well look you know I agree completely with Senator Murphy that at the end of the day the responsibility of the federal government in education is to be a civil rights agency. That's what US Education Department should be doing. That means a number of things. One is enforcing the law. Right. And as you showed in the in the graph around enforcing desegregation orders the federal government can play and did play certainly in the in the 70s up until the Reagan years a very important role in enforcing those court ordered desegregation decisions. The federal government can provide guidance. That's what we were trying to do with the school diversity guidance helping school districts navigate the very unfortunate series of Supreme Court decisions that have slowed our progress towards the division of Brown. The federal government can provide resources and incentivize changes in behavior. That's that's what we hope for from the hundred twenty million dollars stronger together effort that now is the strength and diversity bill. There's also a moral leadership role for the department and that's one of the ones that makes me the most nervous about where we are today. And you heard about this from Congressman Scott. The current administration has only rolled back the diversity guidance they've rolled back protections against sexual assault in schools. They've rolled back guidance around trying to reduce discipline disparities. They have really tried to dismantle the work of the office for civil rights trying to reverse what is a kind of 50 60 year history of how we think about civil rights enforcement where when we investigate a case we look for patterns. And what they have essentially tried to direct investigators in the office for civil rights to do is to not focus on patterns of civil rights violations but to just treat each incident isolation flies in the face of good civil rights enforcement. And then you've got my successor today announcing a federal tax credit voucher scheme which in all likelihood is likely to exacerbate the very segregation that we're talking about today. And so that moral leadership role is so critical and now we have leadership that is pushing against the priorities that we're talking about today. So with the guidance rescinded and maybe I'll just take a minute to note that this was guidance after parents involved the Seattle case to outline for districts what is legally defensible strategies for integrating schools with that guidance gone. What would you advise districts and states that are really concerned about this to do. Yeah. Well one important fact is that rescinding the guidance and change with the law allows right and so everything we said in the guidance remains true. It may not be up on the Education Department website but it remains true and we can circulate it other way. That's exactly right. And so districts and states I would say have the responsibility to try to learn from the best practices around the country around school integration. You're going to describe some today and certainly have tried to in the LPI reports. Century Foundation has done a series of reports profiling strategies ranging from controlled choice plans to cross district plans to the creation of dual language schools or public Montessori schools or art schools that will attract students from different neighborhoods. So there are a variety of strategies that districts can employ all the things we described in the guidance around using race and thinking about citing decisions and articulation from grade to grade. All that remains true. What we lack though I have to say is the guidance about what you can do. What we need is more political will around this right. It's about folks stepping up and saying the current state is not good enough. And you know I'm encouraged by the places that are doing the right thing. But I don't think we have the urgency we should as a country frankly majority of our kids in the nation's public schools are kids of color and majority of the kids in the nation's public schools are eligible for a free reduced price lunch. But country our economy our democracy have no future if we fail to educate low income students and students of color. So we ought to have tremendous urgency. We ought to have people stepping up in big ways on this issue and saying how do we think about housing policy differently. How do we think about transportation policy differently. How do we think about education policy differently to give people access to opportunity. So yes people should still read the guidance and sell and still do the things we describe there. But we desperately need a movement around educational justice. Well said. Well said. So the every students exceeds act has all these little equity nuggets that I mentioned embedded in it which I think are not even always known to the state agencies that enforce the act. And we want to raise those up. One of them requires monitoring of how well districts are assigning students to both schools and classes in ways that are not segregated by race income or special education status. How might the this lever for integration be lifted up and used by states and districts and schools. Well there's a number of opportunities. One is greater transparency around these issues so that there is a better public understanding of the degrees of segregation. We know New York well. You know I think about their places in central Brooklyn where you can go a couple of blocks from a school that is almost entirely affluent white students to a school that is almost entirely low income students of color. That's not by accident. Right. That's by design. And those neighborhoods the schools are significantly more segregated than the housing. And so when people say oh well there's nothing we could do this is about choices people have made about housing. No. That's in fact not the case. That's intentional school assignment policies that create segregation. So just making sure that that is clear to the public then states have the opportunity both under federal law and state law to intervene in those situations. There's also the opportunity and assets worth noting around school improvement. Given what we know about the academic gains that come from integrated schools states could and New York is doing this in their asset plan could think about school integration as a school improvement strategy and use school improvement resources to support diversity strategies whether that's socioeconomic or racial integration strategies. I hope some will we certainly at a trust are trying to help advocates understand that that is an important lever that is available. The other piece is that states could step up in a more aggressive way to rethink how school assignment is done not only within districts but frankly across districts. You know I live in Montgomery County Maryland. Montgomery County Maryland has in many decades long history of intentional school diversity as well as intentional construction of mixed income housing. I contrast Montgomery County with Long Island New York or Westchester County New York. Then these are places that are profoundly segregated where you go a mile and you go from a district that is all low income students of color to a district that is all affluent white students. It doesn't have to be that way. Those districts could be organized differently. So there really isn't a leadership opportunity I think embedded in ESSA and embedded in this moment. Yeah that's a really good example when we we've lived in Montgomery County before they just as they were beginning to do desegregation activities magnet schools were being created and so on. Those have gotten more useful. There's still the challenge within those schools and we found it in Westchester County when we moved to New Rochelle of the segregation within schools that is put in place by tracking systems. What is your advice on that. Well again this this is a place where leadership is required. A couple observations. One is we know that schools often set up structures especially around tracking that deny opportunity systematically to certain groups of students. I think about many districts where the only way you get into the gifted and talented program is if you show up on Saturday for the special test that only some people know about. Right. That that's designed to lock some folks out of opportunity or places where you only get into the AP class. If yes you have good grades and yes you do your homework. And oh by the way the teacher has to write your recommendation and all the issues of implicit bias may appear in that recommendation process. So we know that there are those systems we have to dismantle those systems. We also know that teachers of color are more likely to refer students of color for advanced coursework. They are less likely to use exclusionary discipline with students of color. As I mentioned earlier a majority of our kids in nation's public schools are kids of color 18 percent of our teachers are teachers of color. We've done work at Ed Trust showing particularly in New York State for example tens of thousands of students of color who go to schools where they will never see a teacher or principal of color. And so tackling the issue of teacher diversity I think is also part of how we create inclusive climate. I think about the work that rides is doing at Harvard Ed School which is about saying we've got to not only have schools that are integrated at the doorway but they have to be integrated in the hallway and we have to be thoughtful about how we create healthy integrated racially and socioeconomically diverse communities. You're actually calling to mind an amazing teacher who worked in Pellum New York Evelyn Jenkins Gunn I'm going to call her name. She's a national board certified teacher African American who a single handedly eliminated the tracking system in that school because the thought was that the students of color could only handle the basic curriculum not the region's curriculum. She said I will take all the students I will get them through the region's curriculum. We will do that in an integrated way and it was a small school but you know the efforts of someone committed to demonstrating that students can benefit from access to knowledge and great teachers can help develop the strategies and pedagogies for that to happen makes it clear that a part of this process is in fact both that commitment and developing that teaching skill that's needed to do that job. So in the context of the work that you've been doing you know since New York you've been all across the country. Are there particular practices that you've seen that you would want to hold up that you know people should be aware of. Yeah. Yeah. Well you know I'll start I'll start with home because my kids go to Montgomery County Schools and we're very happy with their experience and I will note that intentionality about housing policy is an important part of this conversation and thinking about how you dismantle things like exclusionary zoning or source source of the payments for rent there are places where they won't allow you to use the housing voucher and so that locks certain people out of certain neighborhoods we ought to change those things. So housing policy interconnected with education policy. I think about the work that Louisville Kentucky Jefferson County is doing a commitment to maintain diversity. You know the story of Kentucky so fascinating because there are some folks who like to talk about local control unless they want to control what people are doing to do something different. So you have a state legislature that actually tried to override local control in Louisville Kentucky to undo school integration in Louisville. But the community and parents organized to resist that because they wanted to protect school integration in Louisville. I think that's a really important story. You know Cambridge Massachusetts has this long history around controlled choice. I think it's a very promising approach. They use a socioeconomic integration strategy. I know you'll hear from Mohammed later from San Antonio. I think what San Antonio is doing is brilliant around looking at the category of students who are free and reduced price lunch eligible and saying that actually within that category there's quite a bit of range from the family that is just you know just below the threshold and getting reduced price lunch to the family that is in dire dire desperate poverty making less than $10,000 a year. And what they found in San Antonio is that their schools yes that many of their schools were 90 percent of free reduced price lunch but still within their schools the schools some of the schools had the deepest concentrated poverty. And so they are rethinking their school assignment policies to try to create better socioeconomic integration. The last point I make is parents want great opportunities for their kids and if you pull parents including white younger parents they want diverse schools for their kids. And so you know you think about the work century foundation as some profiling schools do a language in D.C. there's so much demand for dual language schools people are worried that they need to set aside seats for English learners to make sure that the schools actually stay dual language. Right. Or you have an art school in D.C. that's fantastic where people actually who live in the suburbs lie and say they live in the city so they can come to the art school. Right. We should have more art schools. Right. To me the answer isn't you know how do we stamp that out. The answer is that's that's that's encouraging. Let's create more opportunities for people to cross district lines to get access to those opportunities. So if we if we're intentional about designing schools that attract a diverse parent population I think we really can make tremendous progress. And I think you're putting your finger on something really really important which is that we have tended whenever we identify something that is successful to ration it. And when we ration that whether it's advanced placement courses gifted and talented programs dual immersion schools we then see the power dynamics that cause it to be rationed to those who have the most cloud when we need to take an approach that says if something's working we need to figure out how to expand it. We need to figure out how to make it more available to more families whether it's at the school level or the program level. Many of the curricula that are used in track systems gifted and talented programs or advanced courses or were never intended to be rationed to only a small subset of students. They were intended for everyone. And so we need to really shift the thinking and the training for teachers and leaders to make it possible for that to happen. We've looked at countries around the world and those that have gained the most you know the PISA measures and so on among the things they've done in addition to investing in teaching is detracking and making a curriculum a thinking curriculum available to all kids. So I think that point about finding what's working expanding it is just really really critical. I want to give you an opportunity to say whatever it is that I didn't ask you about as I'm getting the little high sign about us closing this part of the program. I guess the thing I would I would challenge all of us to do and you know a lot of friends and audience right and we are all often together at these events and we've got to create a movement we got to find ways to persuade the people who don't come to these events to agree with us if we're going to change our reality. And I worry a little bit about a sort of self congratulatory progressivism that sets in where we're you know we sort of come away from an event and we say oh we went to that school integration event and aren't we good people because we're for that right. But the task is to expand those opportunities for kids and to do that we've got to we've got to grow the movement. I think about civil rights organizations and communities that are often very stretched at this moment they're trying to resist abusive behavior by ice at the border they're trying to resist violence by police officer against young men. They're pulled in a million directions and if we want those civil rights organizations local level to engage in this issue we have to help give them capacity and organizing opportunities. I think about parents who if they knew what kinds of opportunities were available in the next town over and maybe there'd be a lot more demand but oftentimes folks don't because they don't see those great things that are happening in those communities. So how do we help organize parents and mobilize them. How do we help the business community understand the very clear return on investment case around diverse schools. So the challenge our gift to all of us us included right is that we have to be out as organizers trying to grow this movement so that we can make progress and ultimately fulfill the promise of Brown. Thank you. Let's thank John King. I'm now going to welcome our first panel to the stage. What we've learned and what do we have yet to learn. I'd like to introduce Janelle George our senior policy advisor and co-lead of LPI's equitable resources and access team who will be moderating the high the panel and Janelle will introduce the panelists. Well, good morning. Thank you all so much for joining us and welcome to our first panel. What have we learned. What do we have yet to learn. And I want to start with a quote from scholar W.D. Du Bois. And his 1935 essay does the Negro needs separate schools. He concluded and I quote theoretically the Negro needs neither segregated schools nor mixed schools. What he needs is education with a capital E. What he must remember is that there is no magic either in mixed schools or segregated schools. And as our speakers have noted integrated schools are not a panacea but there is rich research demonstrating the benefits of integrated education. And we also know that there are effective programs that promote integrated schools such as magnet schools which will hear about on this first panel as well as inter district programs which will hear about on the second panel. And our goal with this first panel is really to look at the key goals of integration effort access to education with the capital E and equitable learning opportunities for students of color. And what we want to do is examine what are the lessons that we've learned from these efforts. And again we recognize that integration is not an end into itself. And we also recognize as a prior panelist have also noted that there are a lot of intersecting policies that impact integration like discriminatory housing policies like poverty. There are so many different issues that actually fuel segregation. And this also means that there are families who live in neighborhoods where integrated schools are actually not an option for them. And then we also have to recognize that some families choose racially isolated schools as well. So that we have a lot of things to discuss here on our first panel but let me start with giving a brief introduction of our panelists. So to my immediate left is Donna Bivens who is an education justice coordinator with the Boston busing desegregation project in the Union of Minority Neighborhoods. And she'll talk about the work that she's done regarding desegregation in Boston and also why integration efforts are really critical and important. To her left is Professor Gary Orfield who is a distinguished research professor of education, law, political science and urban planning. And he is also the co-director of the Civil Rights Project at UCLA. And he'll underscore why integration is essential for educational equity. And to his left is Nicole Dooley who is policy counsel for the NAACP legal defense and educational fund. And she'll transition us into talking more about specific strategies. And she'll talk about magnet schools in particular. And to her left is Professor Amy Stewart Wells. She is a professor of sociology and education at Teachers College at Columbia University. She is a current president of the American Educational Research Association. And she'll talk about the difference between 20th century approaches to integration and 21st century approaches. And she may also touch on the reimagining Education Summer Institute at Teachers College as well. So let's start with Donna. So you have been working on desegregation efforts in Boston schools for quite some time. First of all, actually, we had an interesting conversation about the distinction between integration and desegregation. And sometimes we use these words interchangeably. So can you talk a little bit about that distinction between integration and desegregation? And then tell us a little bit more about the process and the strategy for the efforts in Boston. Thank you, Jeanelle. What we did was start a process that really connects with what the previous speaker was saying about building a movement. We tried to get people involved in trying to get people involved in organizing in the schools to look at in Boston, to look at the history. So people said, you know, and we took a learning approach. So we really wanted to understand why is it important to look at this history? And the word we got back was definitely, but it has to be grounded in what's going on today. And so a lot of the conflict that was going on was because of things people didn't know about the history. First of all, people who've been through the history, people who are academic, who had the longer history. And so we found that people had to have a sense of how we got to where we are in order to build that movement. And so every place we looked, whether it was talking to students or to people in the academy, wherever we went, there's something that somebody didn't know. And so to do that movement building is really about building a learning process. And one of the things that we learned in doing that was that people didn't want to hear, some people are focused on busing, some people are focused on desegregation, and some people are focusing on integration. So the frame what we came for is that the larger effort was about quality education for everyone. That was the goal. And it went back to the 1700s in Boston. The strategy at that time was around desegregation. First with Brown and then with Boston, it was more going to be Hennigan, which is very different. So that was the strategy. And busing, which was the hot topic, was just one of many strategies that were laid out to bring the integration, to bring about the desegregation. And so a lot of the confusion and conflict came from mixing those things up. And people saying, no, we can't say busing, we have to say desegregation. And actually Judge Garrity, who did the order, said that this wasn't an integration project. This was a desegregation project. He clearly made that distinction. Interesting. So integration is really the goal desegregation is how you get there. Well, I think it's closest to the voice quote. Quality education for all. And that involves integration because we're all together trying to do this. But that was the goal. The strategy was desegregation and integration as they came together. And I think the quote just sums up so much of what we learned in that process of trying to get people to talk to each other and to learn. Everybody had something to learn. Even just with what we did here today, there's so many things percolating for me. Because I think our project had the chance to listen to so many different voices and read so many different things just on a grassroots level. It's already people trying to learn together. That's great. That's great. And so Professor Orfield, we've just heard about from our prior speakers why integration is important. In your research, you've said that segregated schools can be viewed as institutions of concentrated disadvantage. And that policies that attempt to resolve the achievement gap or opportunity gap would probably fail if the segregation issue were not addressed. Can you elaborate a little bit more on that? Yes. I think it's really important for us to understand that segregation is a fundamental mechanism of American society. It is a perfect mechanism for perpetuating inequality between generations. The basic reality of American society is that African-Americans, Latinos, and Native Americans have systematically unequal sets of opportunities and lives of wealth and possibilities. And that schools are supposed to be the way we make up for that since we have the weakest social policies of any modern democracy. The schools, though, that we give, we give the best schools to the most privileged kids and the worst schools to the most disadvantaged kids. Segregation is almost never segregation just by race. It's almost always what we call double or triple segregation. The average Black or Latino student is in a school that is a school of concentrated, persistent poverty. In an isolated neighborhood, it is a school where the parents have less average educational background. It's a school where there's more unstable enrollment. There's more people with housing problems. There's more children with developmental disabilities. There's more children with uncreated chronic health problems. There are less qualified and less stable faculty. There is a peer group of fellow students who are much less prepared on average. And there's a curriculum that's more limited, either formally more limited or just more limited in reality. If you think about what we know about what accounts for school outcomes, the most important things are the family background of the kids who come to the school, the quality and experience of the teachers, the nature of the peer group, the fellow students. We've known these things for more than a half century. It's been consistently shown. These things are all part of segregation. Their segregation just had one dimension. It would be simple. And it would be silly for people to pursue it so intensely because it would just be sitting next to somebody of a different color. But what you're really talking about is a fundamentally different opportunity system, a fundamentally system where schools are connected to college, a system where schools have a reputation that can draw and hold excellent faculty, a system where schools get more support from communities because the community has more to give and many other dimensions. So this is a very powerful mechanism. If you think about the civil rights revolution, it was an attack on this mechanism. That was what it was about. It was not about trivial things. It was about going after basic structure of American society. Since then, in all of our conservative administrations, there's been basically efforts to restore segregation by changing the courts, by taking away a sport system, by consistently attacking the idea, by saying it's just an excuse for inequality, and then by trying in things like no child left behind to punish the segregated schools for being unequal rather than dealing with the fundamental mechanism that makes them unequal and perpetuates the inequality of the students' lives. That's a really interesting point that this is not just about having students of color sit next to white students. Absolutely not. It is so much more multi-dimensional. If you study the opinion of African-American families about this issue, it has never been about being next to whites. It has been to get into better schools. That's right. People recognize segregation is such an obvious reality that the astonishing thing is that mostly we think it's normal and we think there's nothing that can be done about it. Thank you. And Nicole, so we heard earlier, particularly from Senator Murphy who mentioned the chef versus O'Neill litigation, that LDF had a pretty prominent role in. So we heard a little bit about magnet programs. And they have been implemented as another approach, desegregation approach. Can you talk a little bit about magnets and why they're particularly promising as a desegregation strategy? Definitely. Thank you. So magnets started in the early 1970s and they were explicitly designed to bring about voluntary desegregation while also fostering innovative school models. It was a way for schools to choose to allow their students to go to schools outside of their own schools without having blessing or other perhaps less popular ways of integration. Today, there are about 3,400 magnet schools across the country and in more than 600 school districts. In about 34 states, enrolling 2.6 million students. So magnets can be based upon particular themes or courses or subject areas or career interests. They are supported by the federal government since 1976. The U.S. Department of Education has provided grants to local education agencies to establish and operate magnet schools for the purpose of desegregating. The law says magnet schools are a significant part of the nation's effort to achieve voluntary desegregation in our nation's schools. So that program, the magnet school assistance program, is currently funded at $92 million annually. So one really good example of this is in Connecticut. And send a number of you kind of spoil my thunder a little bit. But in 1989, students and their families filed a check versus O'Neill arguing that schools or students in Hartford public schools were receiving an education that was lesser than the education being received by students in neighboring suburban school districts. So as part of the remedy, the Connecticut Supreme Court required the state to provide integrated and substantially equal educational opportunities to all students regardless of race. Part of this resulted in the establishment of magnet schools to provide high quality education where students of different races and of different socioeconomic backgrounds can learn together across district lines. They also implemented the open choice program, which Senator Murphy mentioned, where students from Hartford could go to school in the suburbs and students from the suburbs could go to school in Hartford. Today, the state has created over 40 inter-district magnet schools in Hartford and the suburbs and about 20,000 students attend the open choice or magnet schools. And studies have shown that the magnet and open choice program students outperform Hartford students attending traditional public schools. And more than 45% of Hartford's black students and Latinx students attend schools in reduced isolation settings. Interesting. And also interesting how, given the content of the curriculum in magnet, so whether it's a theme-based or other very rich content, which again shows that the goal is definitely desegregation, but also access to the richer educational opportunity. Yeah, providing quality educational services at the same time as providing an integrated setting for students. Great. Thank you. So Amy, you have written that we need to question our assumptions about how race, ethnicity, and culture shape the way we define good students or good schools or good communities. And so how does this perspective inform a 21st century approach to school integration? Well, I think that I've been watching as a researcher, but also as a policy analyst, is just how the discourse around desegregation or integration has changed. And so we look back to the 20th century after Brown. There was a lot of focus on implementing, focus on student assignment, focus on segregation measures, and then the outcomes of desegregation, many of which were very positive as we've been talking about today. But they weren't all positive. Now what we're seeing as we're moving into the 21st century, we're seeing the 20th century policies being dismantled. And we start to really question that history and think about how we want to move forward. And important themes that are emerging is, one, the historical work on desegregated black schools, the work of Vanessa Siddle Walker, which shows a lot of strengths and assets within those schools and the teaching practices being used within those schools and how we could think about bringing some of that forward in terms of creating 21st century citizens, because there's a lot of powerful pedagogy that was happening in many of those spaces. The other thing is the research that showed some of the social and emotional harms that were inflicted on students of color within desegregated schools. And I think we need to be very honest and open about that. And we need to recognize the harm that was done and really think about why that happened and the extent to which desegregation was more of an assimilationist project and not a meaningful integration project. The other thing is some work that we've been doing on Long Island and in New York City and others are doing, too, is focusing on the processes by which desegregation occurs. So in other words, the way in which school reputations are developed and the way in which schools are defined as good and bad, which then allows particularly white, affluent parents to make choices other than desegregated or racially diverse schools. And some of the work we've seen, we've been watching the changing demographics of the suburbs, the changing demographics of the cities and gentrifying areas and wondering why there aren't more stable and strong diverse schools in those spaces. And we found that actually the research shows that the most affluent, well educated white parents are a more likely to say they want integrated schools and be more less likely to choose those schools. And a lot of that, yeah. So I've been interviewing a lot of those parents because I think we ought to really face that contradiction. And a lot of it has to do with just how we start to racialize schools for school reputation. OK. So we're thinking about good schools as as predominantly white schools, higher status schools, at least a lot of parents do when they're making choices. And then their networks reinforce that, right? Their social networks. So our research on Long Island showed that when you control a lot of variables on school quality and neighborhood quality, you found that you found that the percentage of black students in the school could change property values by as much as $50,000 in terms of housing choices. And that's controlling protest scores and outcomes. So clearly race matters in how we understand good and bad schools. And so the work that we've been trying to do is both building on that historical perspective of how do we frame desegregation in the 20th century and how might we want to reframe it in the 21st century, as well as trying to change minds around reputation and its relationship to race and redefining what good schools are. So we've been doing that in two ways at Teachers College. One through a summer professional development institute, which is for teachers and principals. We had 500 people there last summer. It's just growing and growing. We've had people from Finland come, which is amazing, because supposedly we're supposed to think that Finland has the most amazing schools. And now they want to know what we're doing around racial literacy, culturally relevant pedagogy, developing ethnic studies curriculums that give teachers some content to think about culturally relevant and culturally sustaining practices. We're talking about culturally sustaining leadership practices within schools, and we're giving teachers and principals professional development credits to come and learn this in the summer from some amazing educators from all over the country. So we've also developed an advanced online certificate program for educators who want to earn an advanced certificate in teaching and learning in racially diverse schools. The other project we're doing is called the Public Good, which relates to this Reimagining Education Summer Institute, and that is doing research on schools that are changing demographically to try to find ways to support and sustain diversity. A lot of the work is focused on the white parents and recognizing white privilege and how that frames their way of understanding whether they want to change a school or fix a school, and also seeing the assets, and particularly in the gentrifying areas where you have schools that have been black and Latino historically, and have many powerful forms of expressing community and care within those schools, or they have certain curricular programs that are very strong and that they're very proud of. And so, without writing off those schools and the assets within those schools and those communities helping white parents understand that you're joining a community, and you can be a part of that community, and you can bring resources to that community for sure, but you're not trying to fix something that other people have cared about for many years. So that's the work of the Public Good Project. So we're trying to support and sustain diversity at a much deeper level, working with professional development, with teachers in those schools, as well as really engaging parents and thinking of strategic communication. How are we defining good schools? How are we thinking about good schools within the school choice process? Wow, that's great, that's great. There's a lot there, and it is interesting how we racialize school reputations. And you also raise a very salient point that we can't ignore the impact of school desegregation and the children who were directly involved in that. I remember going to a lecture by Minnie Jean Brown, who was one of the Little Rock Nine who integrated Central High School in Little Rock, Arkansas, and she said, the trauma of Central lives in my body. And it was just so telling that impact, all these years later that that had on them. So thank you, and thanks to all of our panelists. And so why don't we open it up now for questions and answers? I see a question, right? Thank you, I'm Gary Stein. I'm a retired justice of the New Jersey Supreme Court, and I'm chair of the nonprofit filed suit last May against the state of New Jersey, which has among the most segregated schools in the country. And with the collective wisdom in this room, it's extraordinary to have a chance to talk to all of you about our problem, but I want to sound an alarm, which is that the collective wisdom doesn't quite offer a remediation model for us in New Jersey. We've been in settlement negotiations with the states in September, but I can't tell you how difficult it is being aware of the virtue of magnet schools and having talked to the METCO program about inter-district choice and knowing the options. I can't tell you how hard it is to actually implement a remediation program in the context of a statewide lawsuit. For example, we confront squarely the question because we have 250,000 black and Latino children in New Jersey that attend schools that are more than 90% non-white. We squarely confront the question that's gonna take 15, 20 years to desegregate and what happens to the inner city schools and to the children left behind during the desegregation process. How do we make sure that in the process of desegregating we're not doing harm to children? What do we do with the fact that we have 85 charter schools in New Jersey, most of which are segregated by race? Some are doing well, some are not doing well, but they have to desegregate because the New Jersey Supreme Court has held that de facto public school segregation in New Jersey violates the state constitution. So we have the ideal legal situation to desegregate. And yet the implementation and the remediation is a struggle, we're working very hard on it. We have a diverse board of trustees with vast experience in the field, but I can only tell you that the Learning Policy Institute, the Education Trust, people who have worked in this field so diligently and so successfully for decades need to be aware that on the ground, the remediation issue is complicated. And it's hard to get consensus among the people that agree with us, much less consensus with the state officials who for the first time, history of the state education department are being called to account and told that they have to desegregate the public schools and their question is how? So I invite any of the panel members to give me their perspective. Professor Orfield has been a wonderful resource to whom I'm so deeply grateful. I've spoken to Professor Wells about choice, but this is hard and I would just sound the alarm for the whole industry that spoke so well on this subject that the remediation issue on the ground ain't easy. Thank you, thank you. I've been involved in dozens of these cases over 40 years, so I've watched what's happened in cities and I've watched what's happened with these things. People who think there's ever gonna be consensus are wrong. It's a complicated issue and we're talking now not about systemic remedies, but by trying to change different sorts of choice patterns, which are complex. And we're also talking about a situation where there's lots of vested interests and there's no way everybody's gonna be happy, especially at the beginning. So you have to make some hard decisions. Now the people in central cities believes that if you don't desegregate, they'll be better off sometimes. We've had that experience in many places. The reality is that the places that never desegregated, Chicago, for example, except for some magnet schools, Detroit, which is the classic case, they didn't flourish, they continued to decay and become more disadvantaged. It's not that there's a really good alternative by just letting things go. Now people have to have the courage to take some steps. The great thing about desegregation is that it's very hard to start it, but it's very well accepted when it's done well. Everybody likes it. You ask black parents, white parents, Asian parents, all groups, Latino parents, they like it. And particularly if there's a good educational advantage that comes with it, it's quite clear. So the real trick about doing these things is getting going, getting started, getting some examples, living examples on the ground and addressing the serious issues that Amy and others here have talked about as seriously as you can and recognizing that nothing will always be accepted and popular with everyone. There has to be some courage and some leadership. But we've been doing now for the last 50 years as the dominant method of federal policy, for example, has been to try to make separate schools equal. That's what the Elementary, Secondary Education Act, Title I was about, we spent hundreds of billions of dollars now trying to do that. And what we're trying to do when we do that is trying to replace some of the things that already exist in middle-class schools that work fine as a pathway to college, but where we don't let students of color get in because we have no mechanisms to make them accessible from the segregated neighborhood patterns that we have and the city boundary lines. So we have to think about having courage to get something going and admitting that it's not gonna be magical. Everybody's not gonna be perfectly happy. You can include subsidies for central cities. You certainly can disproportionately locate magnet schools in them, but you can't ever make everyone happy. And every time that I've seen a place where they tried to work until the risk consensus, they never got anything done. And what happened was that the enemies began to pick at it and to mobilize against it over time. The important thing is to get something that makes sense going and to make it better and to have examples on the ground of schools where people from every background want to get in and where they all benefit. Great. And Donna, from your experience, you wanna comment on that and then Amy as well? Yeah, I think it's a very complex question because a lot of our work in Boston looking at our history was looking at what happened to the people that went through that process. And we started with those people. So they had issues around criminal justice. They had issues around mass incarceration. I used to say they had issues around addiction. They were the people for whom it didn't work. And people really criticized us for starting with that group. But our work as an organization was with that group. And so I think that when you're looking at the systemic reality and the complexity of the systemic reality that we're dealing with, you really have to do two things. You have to have places where you're learning together, where you acknowledge that nobody knows everything and we all have something to learn. And I think that's what our project had the luxury in some ways of doing, just hearing people say what their reality is. But then you have to get grounded in what's your work to do. And our work again was, we started with criminal record reform. And that was our constituency. And so we had to take what we learned and figure out how to use that for that constituency. So now we're more focused on things like really looking at poverty, whereas our organization in minority neighborhoods had been more focused on racism. And I don't say race, I say racism. Because I think we get a little confused when we start, we keep saying, let's talk about race. And we know that it's a construct. So let's talk about racism, which is really hard in Boston, I would add. And then let's think about how we're thinking about poverty because we're really trying to think about, okay, we started out doing this, what's poverty have to do with it? And it's not that people live in poverty. Poverty is a condition. People have poverty. And more and more people are having poverty, in different areas of their life, because as people pointed out, of the way the country's going in terms of holding on to our founding understandings of who belonged. So you really have to find ways to listen to everyone and to find out what your work is to do. Thank you, Amy. I would just add, the key thing is to start to look at the state accountability system and start to broaden definitions of good and bad schools to include racially diverse schools and some sorts of incentives for schools that meet that accountability mark. And then at the school and the district level, you really need to be working on professional development, engaging parents and strategic communication around the goodness of diverse schools and diverse learning environments. So those are the three areas we've been working on and we've seen, we have started to see some success. The professional development part is really important because teachers have to really understand culturally relevant practices and think about how those connect to their content areas, start to help students develop more ethnic studies kind of curriculum that can be woven into that curriculum. It starts to broaden our understanding of smart students in good schools in a way that's very powerful and palpable and very important to the next generation of children that we're educating. One of the interesting things is that there's a lot of people in the education world who want to address this issue and there's no resources given to them. When we had the federal desegregation assistance program, which was the largest federal program canceled in education by President Reagan, there were hundreds of districts who voluntarily wanted money to make desegregation better. It was a very popular program and there was evidence that it was creating benefits, substantial benefits, and it was eliminated. We haven't had any significant federal money for desegregation now since 1981. We have a little grant programs occasionally and there's a lot to response to them, but we don't do that. We don't put that money out there. There would be a response. Right, and that's part of this divide that we're talking about bridging, right? How do you get the resources, the information, the evidence-based strategies to the people who are being directly impacted, who really do have the will to advance desegregation? Other questions? Hello, Itai, working in education, live here in DC. My question is, what if it's more segregation? What if it is more intentional than the way we talk about it? What if we deliberately create choice systems that separate kids and deliberately create discipline systems that separate kids and deliberately create accountability systems that say that a white school is good and a black school is bad? And I read Orfield's paper about our city, about DC. You're there to use the term apartheid schools, but you brought numbers behind it. And even though you brought numbers and facts, some local leaders said we disagree without bringing different numbers to dispute it. And so my question is, should we talk about policy drivers of segregation or should we rather work on measuring it, characterizing it, revealing the intentions behind it? Are we still in the step of acknowledging that it exists rather than thinking of how it happens? Great question. It's a really question easily answered, both. We have to do both. All of you. Here in DC, all of my children started school in a previously 100% African American and 100% poor school on Capitol Hill. I now have grandchildren in that school. It was integrated by organizing the neighborhood. And it's been an asset to the community ever since. We're gonna be releasing a report in a couple of weeks on the possibilities that are created by gentrification in New York City. There's a lot of change going on in our big cities now that create new opportunities. There's a lot of change going on in our suburbs, some of which are resegregating, some of which are diversifying, that offer us opportunities and incentives for educators to address these issues if we give them a framework and some resources. But there's no simple magic bullet. Does anyone else wanna speak to you? Yeah, I agree that there's no magic bullet. In fact, quite the opposite. You know, bridging, as we learn more about this history, about where we were, we really start looking more at thinking systemically and what does that mean? And one of the things that came up for me, even with the title, is that bridging the, bridging the- What's the divide? The divide is not a thing you do once in a crawl. It's a pattern. And as we look at patterns, instead of thinking that we're gonna take care of this, we can move together to get closer to something that we want to happen. Because the system that is intentional about this is very powerful and has a lot of power right now. But if you step back, we're all in it. And so how do we address the patterns that we're seeing and not fool ourselves into thinking that anybody's gonna actually solve this anytime soon? I was looking at, there's a new film about Howard Thurman. And I don't know, Howard Thurman was a theologian mystic and there's a beautiful film that was on PBS about him. And one thing that someone said at the screening of it was that Howard Thurman had said to him, that this is somebody who brought nonviolent resistance to the United States. But he said, all social patterns are temporary and brief, go deep. And I think that's what we're having to do. And a lot of times we think we get pulled in a million directions. How do we go deep? I just wanna add with that comment about the accountability system and the choice system. I mean, there are definitely moments when you think this is the new Jim Crow of education, right? And these policies that the districts and the schools need to respond to are driving them away from doing this good work. And that is definitely true. But I also think there are enough people on the ground and educators who are really interested in pushing back and redefining. And we've seen some movement. Massachusetts is now piloting a new accountability system that would include more of what parents actually say they care about in education, which includes intergroup relations and diversity and intercultural understanding. So I think we have to highlight these places that where the good works happening and then use some strategic communications to say we are redefining what good schools are for our children in the 21st century. And segregation is not on that list, so yeah. Great. Good morning, I'm Stefan Turnup-Seed. I work in the education industry and I also live in Alabama. So that'll give you kind of an interesting backdrop. The question, I agree with everything you've said about how shining a light, finding where the good work is done. I work with school systems all around who are asking the question. The challenge I have personally, and I think we have and many of us who work in this field, is where do we go find that stuff? We come to these things and we listen to the work that you guys have done and we take copious notes and we go out and try to find it. Well, when you go to the state that's doing the good work, it's really hard to find it. It's really hard to find who's in charge of that. And so is there some mechanism that exists out there where we could say point to a school district and say, look, go here, here's a list of exemplars that are doing good work in this area. We know you wanna do it, let us help you. Great question. Why don't we start with Donna? Yeah, I think that's a really important thing. And it's, again, with the wealth gap and the controlling the reality of what we're seeing gap, who sees what from what perspective in the room. I just think of the room as a system. So the person standing right there is there seeing something very different from the person sitting up here, right? And so I think it's not sort of a question as maybe of what next? It's like, first of all, having some time to really delve into that question and to figure out together, what could we do? How are we seeing this, what could we do? And then to take it to our different places. So even some of our ways of doing this work, I'm sure there are others, but even just having a speaker, speakers are the other ways that we can share information for lives. And I mean, there's some wonderful things happening in that area. But as you said, sometimes we don't know where it is. Sometimes the people doing it don't have a lot of resources. You know, I was listening to Jitu Brown in Chicago the other day. And they're brilliant in looking at the system, you know? But you know, it's again, it's a pattern. How do we, what are we trying to do? What sense do we make? What are we seeing? What sense do we make of it? And what can we do to go the next step? That's all we can do, I think. Amy, did you want to end the call? Yes, I think that's a really good question. And we are working on disseminating some of the work from the Summer Institute. So now that we have a advanced certificate program, we have the participants are doing culminating projects around things they're implementing in their schools. There are a lot of examples in our Summer Institute of good teaching practice within racially diverse schools, good leadership strategies. So I would encourage you to come to New York in the middle of July. It's a lot of fun. And we are also, we have hired a new social media person who will be working on disseminating some of those best practices. The other thing I'm working on for AERA is a film that actually highlights this important work going on in Massachusetts and in California around ethnic studies and what that means to students so that we can see really solid examples, places doing a different approaches to discipline and how all that connects to really help us dismantle segregation because we're rethinking what education is, we're reimagining the whole enterprise in a way in which segregation does not make sense because we've created a system in which segregation legitimizes and reproduces the exact mechanisms we're using within education, so. There's, one of the things that we really need to do in state departments of education should do this is communicate and exchange good examples. They have, some of them used to do that and they've stopped. That's really valuable professional work that could be done easily with one or two people in each state department that would just say if you really want to take your board to some place so it's going on nearby, here's where you go. That would be a very good thing for people who are creative to start doing. You can go to those wonderful regional magnets in Connecticut, you'd be very happy. In Alabama, you used to have all these magnet schools that were integrated and now they're all testing students and excluding students on the basis of a test. Compare the past to the present of your own schools. That would be a good lesson for the state, it seems to me. And Nicole. I was just gonna recommend putting you back to LPI because they've also done a bunch of research on schools and districts that are looking more deeply and broadly at the competencies of really high quality. That students a need as they get through high quality K-12 teaching and learning. Could I just add another problem here, sticky issue, whatever is that there's so much information, you know? And sometimes you almost have information overload to understand how big this is, like even today. You know, I'm checking off things, oh yeah, there's that, there's that, there's that. There's someplace you hold it in your head but or and in your heart, hopefully. But how do you narrow down what's yours to do and what can move it for you? And how do we help each other to do that? Cause I know there's just so much you can learn. And the only thing I would add is also who the information is going to. I know that LDF works with the Dignity in Schools campaign, which includes parents and teachers. Teachers are phenomenal advocates for a lot of these policies as well but ensuring that that information gets in their hands but also in the hands of parents who can't come to a nine to 12 forum during the day because they're working and supporting their family. But being able to disseminate the research and share it is another really, really important component. I think we have time for one more question. Of course I was standing, do I get the mic because I was standing close to the mic? Lee Tidal, the director of the at Harvard grad school of education, reimagining integration, diverse and equitable schools project. And I wanted to connect a couple of dots. I wanted to just embrace the way Donna was talking about the importance of the difference between desegregation and integration. And one of the things that we have found real helpful in the schools that we've approached and the districts that we work with is how to actually name that. And we talk about the ABCDs, the notion that we want high academics for all kids, for all kids, a sense of belongingness. So you don't have to check your culture at the door. C is commitment to understanding and dismantling racism because if we don't do that the schools are just recapitulating the past. And D is appreciation of diversity. And we find that very quick description is helpful in identifying and helping people identify what their sense of purpose is. And I also wanted to build on something that Gary said because Gary talked about how when you do this well people want it. And we don't do it well that much. And one of the things that we find helpful to think about and I invite everyone here particularly who come to a policy conference to think about the connections between three things. Policy, practices, and perceptions. And if we've done as we, I think many of us would agree we've done desegregation pretty poorly as a country in the last 60 years. So the perception is pretty negative of desegregated schools. And that leads and kind of develops a negative loop for policy, right? Because policy makers listen to the perceptions of their constituents, at least that's the way it's supposed to work. And what we've been focusing on is how do you focus on practices? Like how do we get schools to do it well and how do we find the schools that are doing it well and amplify those voices to give those examples? And we're trying to create a positive loop where more people will be able to identify that. And last is just in response to the last question, we've also been trying to organize resources and please send them our way on our website that are organized around the ABCD. So you can click on our website, click on A, academics, B belonging and get case examples and articles that are written about. That's some of them written by the people here. So thank you for pulling this together and thank you for bringing that voice forward. Thank you so much. Any concluding comments, thoughts from our panelists as we wrap up? I'd just like to respond to one thing. We didn't do desegregation badly. It was a big advantage. We didn't do it well enough. If you compare it to segregation, it was much better than segregation. If you compare it to what we could have done, it wasn't nearly enough. But we knew what needed to be done back in the 1970s. It was cut off politically. The resources were cut away. It's not, there was a lot of really good research done about how to make desegregated schools integrated. And then we just defunded and denied it and we began to have governments that systematically attacked it like the Reagan administration, the Bush administration and so forth. We need to recognize that we actually made big improvements during the civil rights era. We didn't go far enough and it was cut short. It needs to be started again. It needs to be started again in the context of a poor race society rather than a biracial concept. Those of us in California know that very well. It also, it's not that complicated. It's really complicated to get it started, but we know how to do it much better. We just need to put the resources and policy behind it. That's great. Any other concluding topics? I would just like to say we also really need to listen to the educators this time. I feel like when we did desegregation in the 20th century, we kind of acted like, oh, that will just happen if we move kids around. And educators who have been working on this at the classroom level in terms of developing curriculum and strategies, they are the wisest people on how we do this. And that's why I do invite you all to TC in July because you'll hear from a lot of great ones all over the country who are doing it and have a lot of great ideas in our networking with each other. So. Thank you. Thank you, Nicole. Yeah, I was just going to add, and you mentioned this a little bit earlier and Secretary King mentioned it. I think in addition to having, like putting in place policies for most desegregation and integration, we have to keep in mind through every step of the process, the implicit biases, and they work themselves even into the solutions. Because a lot of the prior solutions may have been kind of with the word, like there was a hole in the bottom of the boat, that kind of a concept where, it was good in theory, but implicit biases within the system kind of dragged it down. So we want to make sure that we're moving forward. We don't have that problem happen again. And Donna. Yeah, I just like to add to what Amy says that we need to listen to a lot of people and realize that wisdom and about what we're experiencing rests in a lot of different places with students, with parents, with educators, with people in the academy, with activists, you know, we really have to listen to each other. Thank you. And please join me in thanking our first panel. Thank you. Thank you so much. Thank you so much for that. Thank you. Thank you so much. Thank you. So it's my pleasure as we introduce our second panel, I would like to introduce the moderator, Peter Cookson Jr. I have the pleasure of working with him as a co-lead on LPI's Equitable Resources and Access Team. He is a professor of sociology at Georgetown University. He also co-leads the National Poverty Study, which is a joint research project at Stanford, John Hopkins, and the American Institutes of Research, where he founded the Equity Project. He is the author of 16 books. I don't know when he finds time to do all this, but numerous articles and reports on educational equity, including the new report that's available on your flash drive sharing the wealth, how regional finance and desegregation plans can enhance educational equity co-authored by John Britten, who's also on the panel here, and Larkin Willis. So at this time, let's welcome our second panel. Well, thank you, Janelle, and thanks to the first panel, which was fantastic. It's a great segue to what we're gonna be talking about in a few minutes, and also to this fantastic film and all those young people who are putting their lives and souls and hearts on the line to do what we're just talking about every day. So what a great way to talk about it. You know, this whole meeting is called Bridging the Divide, School Integration Designs. And so in this panel, what we're gonna look at are some school integration designs that have been tested, some of them need to open up possibilities and opportunities to build a public school system that is both diverse, excellent, and also democratic, because that's also a big part of this. We want schools that are based in the idea of democracy, particularly at this time. So we're gonna have a great conversation as a wonderful panelist. I'm working only plenty of time for Q&A at the end of this. So also I know as part of this mentioned before, but we do have a hashtag called diversity, equity, and access if you wanna do something with that. Well, I know most of these folks pretty well. They're a pretty fantastic group. I'm gonna introduce them a little bit. It's in your program, so you'll be able to read more about them. Sitting right here is Dean John Britton, who is the acting dean of the University of District Columbia, David A. Clark School of Law and an accomplished civil rights attorney. That's an understatement. John has been the civil rights movement for his many young years. He'll address why regional integration plans, John was the author, first author of the book that Larkin and myself is sharing the wealth that we have, are important, particularly given some of the challenges that we've highlighted. But I think also we should give John a chance to talk a little bit more widely to a little bit because of his extensive background and his continuing commitment to his issues. Sitting next to John is Rick Calver, also a friend of mine, who's director of K-12 Equity and senior fellow at the Century Foundation. Probably a lot of you know Rick's work. Rick is internationally recognized for his contributions to many things, but relevant to this discussion today, the implementation of socioeconomic integration and its relationship to racial integration. Rick has quite a bit of experience looking at various plans and so he's going to give us some examples today which I think will be really useful for us. Sitting next to Rick is Mohamed Choudhury, Chief Innovation Officer. Many of you probably also know Mohamed's work, Chief Innovation Officer for the San Antonio Independent School District. Mohamed will address his groundbreaking work in San Antonio with control choice and the next steps we need to be taken to make integration work for all students. I should say that the last time he was here, he gave a really inspired speech. I'm hoping that you'll be able to do that again. But also, we did have a conversation about what happens after the school bell rings and I think we've been talking about that as well. There's both between school segregation but there's also within school segregation and we need to address both those issues. And sitting next to Mohamed is the Honorable Judith Johnson. She is New York State Education Department Board of Regents and she also has an incredibly distinguished career in education, particularly in New York and Westchester County and has been on the forefront of this struggle for her whole career. She's gonna bring us all home by focusing on the centrality of equity in creating school systems that serve all students and she asked if she could do some podium so look at her notes and that would be fantastic. So we're all set. Let's start with John. Thank you very much. Good morning everyone. Good morning. Because segregation is more prevalent across districts than within districts, the most effective approaches for school diversity and equity are across the district boundary lines. Roe blocks will be inevitable as we've heard from Senator Murphy this morning. So for these efforts to succeed, policymakers must make an authentic commitment to implementing inter-district school desegregation plans. They must be persistent and practice ongoing problem solving. The key to promoting the educational advantages of school integration is the remedy, not the liability that caused extreme racial isolation of school children by race, ethnicity, and family income. The report released today, Sharing Wealth by LPI, examines three inter-district desegregation plans and how they've been designed, financed, and implemented. It assesses the evidence of their success as measured by student achievement data and other meaningful academic and social outcomes. Drawing on the evidence from three inter-district desegregation plans in Boston, Massachusetts, Hartford, Connecticut, and Omaha, Nebraska, we identified several potential strategies for legislators and policymakers who are committed to the principle of justice that are at the heart of the Brown decision. The landmark Chef versus O'Neill desegregation integration case decided by the Connecticut Supreme Court in 1996, as Senator Murphy mentioned this morning, was the first case to hold that the district boundary line between urban and suburban schools was the cause of the unconstitutional racial isolation in the schools. In addition, the court and shelf case found that de facto segregation was unconstitutional, thus avoiding the virtually impossible standard of proving intent. The court ordered the state to cure desegregation. Nicole Dooley from the Legal Defense Fund in the first panel described the multitude of voluntary remedies such as inter-district school choice, transfers, magnet schools both within inter-district and intra-district and inter-district and more. And that is the setup for this conversation today on the wealth between low-performance schools, high-performance schools, with high concentrations of poverty and low achievement and blending it across district lines with more advantage schools. Thank you so much. That's a great way to start the conversation. We'll come back to that because we'll look back to it. Rick, tell us a little bit about what you've been doing in terms of both socioeconomic integration as well as some of the rich elements for us. Yeah, well, that's too, and it's great to be with all of you here and thank you, Peter and Linda and Janelle for, and everyone at LPI for hosting this great conversation. So I think socioeconomic integration that is bringing kids of different economic groups together is kind of one of the rare growth spots for school integration. When I started studying this issue back in 1996, there were two school districts in the whole country that looked at conscious efforts to bring children of different classes together, across Wisconsin and McKinney, Texas. They educated about 30,000 students. And today there are more than 100 school districts and charter schools that are seeking socioeconomic integration in part for legal reasons and in part for educational reasons. So many of you have heard of the parents involved decision. It's been referenced here. It was a terrible decision by the US Supreme Court in 2007 which suggested that voluntary racial integration programs in Louisville and Seattle were unconstitutional. They were struck down and many people worried that that would be the end of school integration. In fact, we've seen a lot of good-hearted people committed to school diversity. We want racial integration, not give up and instead shifted the basis of integration programs with an emphasis on socioeconomic status. And Janelle's report points out there are still ways you can use race not at the individual level so much but at the geographic level and that's important to do. But many of these districts now are really focusing on socioeconomic status. That's important in part because a well-designed socioeconomic integration program will produce racial diversity as well given the unfortunate overlap between race and class in American society. And so we've seen in a number of districts where they've adopted socioeconomic integration programs, they've gotten a substantial amount of racial integration as well. And that's incredibly important for all the reasons that Amy Stewart Wells and others have pointed out. In essence, diversity makes us smarter and so having that racial integration that flows from socioeconomic integration is important for students of all backgrounds. It benefits everyone. But the socioeconomic integration movement is not just a clever way of kind of getting around the Supreme Court decision and parents involved. There's also an educational rationale for it independently of the racial impact. We know that there were racial school integration programs that did not result in socioeconomic integration. So in places like Louisville, there was one school, the Roosevelt Perry Elementary School, that was 50% African-American, 50% white, and it was 100% poor. And the school was one that really struggled because the evidence has suggested for years that concentrations of poverty are bad for kids. And so for that basic educational reason, it's important as well to integrate socioeconomically. There are a growing number of districts that are pursuing this policy. I've worked with John and our friend Michael Alves in Charlotte, North Carolina, in Pasadena, and some other places to promote socioeconomic diversity. You'll hear from Muhammad about his amazing work in San Antonio and before that in Dallas. And in New York State, Judith and I were talking about this earlier, there is an effort now in New York City to integrate my part of a school diversity advisory group. And we can come back to that. That would be fascinating, that would be fantastic. Yeah, I think that's gonna be a really, we'll go a little round there. Thank you, that's fantastic. Muhammad, you've done so much in both Dallas as well as San Antonio. And you've been a leader in this field. What are the next things that we need to think about in order to make this really real in terms of bridging the divide, in San Antonio, but also, maybe reflect a little bit more general. Yeah, so I think, you know, once you get all the colors and numbers in the building, it does not stop there. In fact, you could make things worse if you get that wrong. And you have to design guardrails and conditions to be able to hold feet, hold fire to the feet of the people who are running these schools, and the people who are designing systems to preserve these kinds of schools. I've been fortunate to be entrusted to not only oversee our Diverse by Design Initiative, but also design it, but also supervise the principles. So it's kind of like a perfect set of conditions. So I'll follow my sword if need be, as I told our superintendent. So our schools that are Diverse by Design in San Antonio, we have wonderfully grown out, we'll have about 8,000 kids attending them in a 50,000 student district, in a city that has 17 school districts that they could completely redo it and achieve a type of integration at scale, but they won't, because people are scared, and racist, both of us. It's probably what it is. With all of that, so let's just talk about what happens in the building, because I could go off in different places, but the thing I would say is there's several things. My Diverse by Design schools, they're their own professional learning network. We have a program that we have designed and put resources from Teaching Tolerance and other places in the work that Amy is doing in New York to look at what it looks like to create integrated relationships at the parent level. So then that ripples into integrated play dates. How they construct their PTAs matters, so they hold seats. They make sure the most active, loudest social capital parent whose child is gifted is not the one running things, and they push back. And when they say the bad ones, when they say the bad ones and to get out, they say no, there's no such thing as bad ones. And so if you wanna be here, that's what that means. Also these schools do not academically screen. And in my enrollment process, I also on top of my block methodology, which tries to define socioeconomic capital at the close level, we also look at at risk factors, which unfortunately in this country, because of decades of segregation by design government sponsored tracks with race and class. So I also achieve racial integration through the block methodology, but also through giving my students who are attending segregated struggling schools the highest weight. Those kids have the best shot. So oftentimes a family tells me, how do you get in? How do you gain the system? Attend a struggling segregated school, and I will give you the highest weight, do it. If you do that, you can come to the school. But you know what, if you do that, you'll probably turn around that school too with your power. So it's a lot of that. It's a lot of pulling them together. It's a lot of courage. I also have performance agreements with these schools. I am an educator by heart. I believe in autonomy. So they have performance contracts. We do it in LA, they have pilot schools in Dallas. We call them transformation schools in Dallas. We've embraced the in district charter governance model. So in the performance contract, there is a closing of the gap domain that looks at the subgroup performance and that matters as well. So I'll just stop there, yeah. We'll come back to all this, that's fantastic. Thank you. Judith, you and I have had a couple of conversations about the role of equity in all of this. And you have such a broad experience, not just as a regent, but as a superintendent and teacher and so forth. Why don't you kind of take us home a little bit around this issue of equity and what this really means in this context. Thank you very much. I actually asked Peter was he sure that he wanted me to sit on this panel. That's true. First of all, the Board of Regents is the official policy making board for education for the state of New York. Its history goes back to the late 1800s. Alexander Hamilton was the first president of the New York State Board of Regents. 1800s, the first African-American to sit on that board was Dr. Kenneth Clark in the 1960s. Took us some while to get the black voice to the table. Throughout that time, however, New York has had a history, and I don't know if Gary's still in the room, of having more segregated schools than any other state in the union. And that's hard for me to share with you because we are the most diverse state. I would think California's probably as diverse at this point. It may be Texas, so I would put the three of us in that category. And we have great potential in terms of our universities and our colleges. So why do we have a performance achievement gap issue that is, and this is, I will go to my notes. I think I'm gonna shorten this so that we can engage in the conversation. The districts in New York State perpetuate segregated schools, and it's based on where you live, your zip code, your family income, the ability or the absence of discretionary income to continuously educate your children, the education of your parents, and the opportunities to learn in the schools. And I'm talking about my home state of New York. So in 2017, the chancellor decided to form an equity task group to look at the issues of equity in New York State. And here's where I'm gonna shorten this. We were looking at the issues of equity not to desegregate our schools. I'll talk a little bit about what that looks like, but because the huge achievement gap between children of poverty and children who did not come out of poverty was so vast and 49% of the children in New York State at this point, 49% of our poor children, if you use a standardized test as a measure, are not reading at a level of proficiency. In New York State, that spends the second most dollars on children in any other state in the union with one exception, New Jersey. So there's a concern if in eight or nine years we don't turn around this achievement gap, we don't have a robust workforce for the state of New York. And it's a little difficult for people to project down the road and recognize that the absence of a robust workforce means a reduction in revenue from taxes, which means a reduction in the state budget. And we really do need to get that story home as quickly as possible. I'm gonna give you one other issue and then I'm gonna stop. I can see Peter looking at me. Mom, you're looking at me. So what happened with this formation of this equity task force, which is a work group of the Board of Regents? We decided to look at several areas, culturally responsive, sustaining school environments, the achievement gap, the pathways to high school graduation. Depending on what school and what district you're in, there are multiple pathways or few pathways. We collect some data that tells us that children of color who attend largely white schools graduated 90% level, children of color attending segregated schools, racially and economically segregated schools, 73% of them graduate. That's huge when you translate that into numbers. More importantly, translate that into human life and the contributions that we're never gonna get from these young people because we failed to educate them to high standards. So what did the Board of Regents get stuck on? And that's where I wanna share with you because I'm interested in your observations. So if you're gonna have a work group that looks at equity, then we ought to be a definition of equity, which you think. So let me give you the definition and the challenge and the two words that stand out. Must or should. Must or should. Equity means the learning needs of every student are supported and met in an environment where all students are valued, respected and see themselves as experiencing academic success without regard to differences in age, gender, socioeconomic status, religion, race, ethnicity, sexual orientation, disability, native language, national origin, or citizenship status. It's the next sentence. We believe that every child should have equitable access to learning opportunities. They can be no educational excellence without educational equity. The debate at this point at the Board of Regents is must versus should. And we cannot move forward until that decision has been made and I will tell you that it is both legal and contentious. I know that John's sitting on this panel. So John, this is what I've been told that if we make it a must, we'll be subject to lawsuits. Well, here's the concern I have. Lawsuits seem to be the only way we get justice. I know of no moral will that has translated into positive human behavior. So I'm ready for the lawsuits at the Board of Regents. I made sure I had personal insurance. But we're covered, we really are. I think, I think that we now have to worry about must versus should. There is not an appetite for integrating our schools in this country at this time. That is the problem. Well, if I may answer your question, Mr. Judith. I think it's a kind of dichotomy. As I said earlier, there is the requirement to find liability. That's what a lawsuit does. However, history has shown the courts are reluctant to create a remedy, at least in the last 20 to 25 years. And so they refer the case back to the state to formulate a remedy. Well, that's like giving the fox the control over guarding the hens. And it creates long standing, long running entanglement between the plaintiffs who are seeking equal educational opportunities and the state, which is in charge of education. So I hypothesize that today, the most successful remedies are double voluntary. They're voluntary that the state or the local education authority is willing to devise a remedy to promote school diversity and integration and families volunteer to participate in these remedies. That seems to be the most successful method and we need the carrots and the other incentives to induce school authorities to do that. The inner district remedy, that's between districts, as featured in this new report on shared wealth is one of the successful devices in the examples where we have documented it. Nevertheless, they are voluntary. The courts have largely, as Gary Orfield has traced in all of his studies, abandoned school integration except to find liability under certain circumstances but to largely punt on the remedy. So we have to be more creative, we have to be more interactive and we have to promote voluntary methods. Let me respond to that. I would think that what we need to do on the equity issue is ensure that all students are in schools that are adequately funded to give them access to the same educational programs. That if, now I will just tell you, as we, as this work unfolded, we've had panels speaking to the board. And one of the panels, Matt Gonzalez from Apple Seed, which is an outstanding organization for teaching young children to be social advocates, brought five students, high school seniors to meet with the Board of Regents in the summer. And they were powerful but there was one young man who brought everything to a halt. He said, I am preparing to go to a state university in September. I have never been in a classroom with a white student. He has gone through 12 years of New York City education. He has never been in that classroom. And he said, I'm not exactly sure how I'm going to handle that. And he said, I'm not sure I'm prepared to compete with them. So I am suggesting the funding is the root. That what we need to do is, if you can have five opportunities for an AP physics class, because there are five sections and it fits your schedule, in a high wealth school district, then we ought to have five AP classes to pick from in a low wealth district. Do you get the gist of what I'm trying to say? If you visit some schools, I want to talk about some outstanding schools that are competing, that are confounding this, that are doing a good job. If you visit a school where the Makerspace Technology Unit consumes three quarters of a floor, giving kids the opportunity to be innovative and creative with technology. And it's a high wealth school district down the road from where Bill and Hillary live. Then why isn't that Makerspace funded 10 miles down the road in a school district that's largely enrolled by poor kids? Those are really powerful points and that was really a powerful story. I'd like to bring Rick and Muhammad into the conversation a little bit too. Let's go to this, you know, Rick is also an attorney, you may or may not know. So we don't want to get in all the legal pieces of it. I went to law school and did not take the bar exam. All right. It really is a lawyer, you see what I'm saying? But seriously, Rick, I think you have really framed this really well, you know, the should versus must and then talking about the future. Can you talk a little bit about how you see the future and then Muhammad, you know, beyond, well I'm saying beyond San Antonio, but using what you know about San Antonio. Because I think it would be interesting to have this conversation being pulled together a little bit to look to what can we do? What are some of the processes and procedures and policies and maybe legal devices that we might be able to have that could actually make a difference and we have four people who really know understand this problem. So Rick, why don't you also jump into this? Yeah, let me say a couple of things. One is I think Judith, you're absolutely right. The resources are incredibly important and we know from that ed-built study that the resources are inequitably distributed between African-American and other people of color and whites in our system. Having said that, the Plessey approach, let's pour equal resources into segregated schools has been tried and tried and tried and it is, first of all, we never do end up getting equal resources when the schools are separate. And secondly, there are disadvantages imposed by segregation apart from the per pupil spending. There was an interesting study that the Century Foundation published back in 2010 by Heather Schwartz from the Rand Corporation and there was kind of a perfect experiment, if you will, what will really help low-income students? Montgomery County had two strategies. One was to pour extra resources, $2,000 extra per pupil into the higher poverty schools in Montgomery County and that had some benefits. They found that money matters and that there were some positive results from that. On the other hand, student, because as Secretary King mentioned, Montgomery County has a second strategy of inclusionary zoning in the housing policy, you ended up with a number of low-income families who had the chance to go to economically and racially integrated schools. And it was a social scientist's dream in the sense that basically these students were randomly assigned to public housing units either in the part of the county where they spend more per pupil or the part of the county where they spend less per pupil but they're economically and racially integrated. And it turned out that in the first couple of years it didn't matter that much. Over time, the students who went to the economically integrated schools far outperformed the low-income students who went to higher poverty schools. So these are all students in public housing, all disadvantaged students, primarily African-American students, those who went to integrated schools got a much better education. So that's why, even though it's much more politically difficult to promote socioeconomic and racial integration, that's why I still cling to that idea because we know that the Brown had it right, separate is inherently individual. That's such an interesting data point about the integration of the schools and diversity of the schools and just being sort of left-brained even if you look at achievement, so to speak, the difference it can make. That's a huge data point. Muhammad, what do you want to take as a student? It's become a tagline of minds and the journalists in the city have picked up on it. So while we continue to figure out how to do high-poverty segregated schools well, we need to stop recreating them, right? It is damn hard to do this well. I can tell you as a teacher in Los Angeles, in South LA and Northeast LA, and I was a damn good teacher and I was also a damn good social worker too at the same time because that's what I needed to be to be able to close the gap for those kids. In Dallas, we have our Accelerating Campus Excellence Initiative, turning around Southern Dallas schools, students living in abject poverty and outperforming Highland Park, the little donut with million dollar homes inside the district. It is damn hard. Extended school day, master teachers, where test scores is part of the equation to remind my union friends because I need to find the best teacher and that matters, and also wrap around services with limited property wealth that we generate compared to Highland Park because of racist policies, a red line to this day. And then we need to stop recreating them. So it goes back to me, you have to do both the power structures of this country lie with a single race and has from colonization through Jim Crow, through redlining to today, they cannot be comfortable with their power. They have to share it, they have to give it up, and so you have to go to school with brown children as well. So you have to be able to disrupt the lines and figure out how to do high property segregated schools well, right? But I feel sorry for the kids, the young boys at Charlottesville who marched. They have lived in a disadvantaged life and have not seen what America's gonna look like and become. So separate but equal is not gonna work if we want America to survive. I'll just stop there. The challenge is getting America to understand this. The New York state, the way the school districts are constructed, they're geographic lines. We would need to have legislation passed so that we no longer collected school property taxes by where you live, but we collected them at the state level and distributed them evenly. This is really inequity. Is it the financial equity piece of this is huge? Do you want to do it? The only thing I wanna add is the problem is, you know, racist, self-proclaimed progressives, liberals, and everyone else wants segregation too. That's the problem too, right? Like we, it's not a red or blue thing. My self-proclaimed progressive friends like it too. And so that's a problem, right? But I'd love to see teachers and unions marching in collective bargaining that integration is part of the deal. I'd like to see that. I'd like to see the Venn diagram of all my friends who are marching in LA. I was a union chapter chair in my school, so. So I supported their march, but I'd love to see the Venn diagram between supporting UTLA's march and repealing Prop 13. I'd like to see that as well. But I would love to see collective bargaining that says integration is part of the equation. Then you'll see the legislators in California Venn, which has the perfect sea of blue, by the way, and it's segregated. Yes, you must always point out, though, we're gathered here today to remote the educational and social values of school diversity and integration. Nevertheless, the majority schools are still segregated and low performing, and we can't leave them out. So we're like two wings on a bird of a plane flying in unison, trying to improve education. It's not necessarily either or, but we try and move people more towards the integration side of the needle. All right. It's getting to people. All right. Let's try to say one thing. I see that we've taken over, so I'll jump in, too. Muhammad, your point about the teacher collective bargaining is brilliant. I think that's a wonderful idea, to build it into the contract. A lot of teacher unions are now bargaining for the collective good, the common good. I hope Randy takes it out right now. And, you know... Randy Weingart. Yeah. Remember, I was mentioning La Crosse, Wisconsin, the small community in the middle of, I don't want to say the middle of nowhere, but the middle of Wisconsin, that it was the teachers who pushed for integration. They went to the principals who went to the superintendent, who went to the school board, and the teacher said, we can't do our jobs right when there are concentrations of poverty in certain schools that are overwhelming to us as educators, and these other schools have, you know, our seas of wealth. So there's real potential there. They can, I think we ought to work on that together. Okay, Rick. I want to use my gavel here, all right? All right. This has been fantastic. And now we're going to open it up for Q&A. And please, we've got some mics around the room. This is a pretty dynamic and fired up group of folks to be able to have here. So let's have some questions from the audience. Hi, Valerie Bram, I'm working with intentionally diverse schools in Los Angeles and appreciate all these comments and the piece about the union really is triggering for me, being in Los Angeles, with everything that's been going on, Los Angeles is at a real pivot point right now where they're looking at pushing down a path of unified enrollment, possible district restructuring, that's all been sidelined by fiscal cliffs and strikes and whatnot, but there's a lot of opportunity for leadership around this issue. And there's also a lot of silence in Los Angeles. I wish we were debating should or must. It's like the topic's not even on the table as far as I can tell. And so my question is like, what's the tipping point? How do we spark the dialogue about this in districts where they feel like we're broke, we got to fix that first, right? They think of achieving integrated schools as a luxury once you've dealt with the big stuff, but I know San Antonio doesn't have a easy fiscal profile either. I know San Antonio, you know, New York hasn't had any of this easy and they've still tackled it. So I'm trying to understand like, how do you get there as a system where this becomes important enough to people that they understand the interconnection between why we face a fiscal cliff due to declining enrollment and the need to integrate schools, for example. Anybody wanna grab that? My thing is you just gotta keep going, can't stop. If you believe in it and you believe at its core, it is gonna help us move the needle on a lot of things in our country. And I believe that to the core, to the day I die, then I'm gonna keep doing it. Even if that means I created, I started with one in Dallas. I started with one school in Dallas. And then when they went to go, and then now there's seven of them. And when they went to go undo it because the real estate agents were mad that they weren't zoned to the million dollar housing in East Dallas, those parents had to help, no, do not touch our schools. So I was like mission accomplished, so I'm good there, so I can leave now. And so, yes, do we have to pick between, do we have a lot of bottom 5% of schools in San Antonio, in a highly segregated environment? Yes, we do, and we have to figure that out. And we have to figure out how to get the best teachers in there, the best curriculum, and equalize as much as possible. But we also know that we have to disrupt the lines as well because disrupting the lines will also benefit these kids as well. And so, you can't just get comfortable. So it can start with one. It can totally start with one. You should get Alex Caputo Pearl in a room and ask him how he feels about that if the West LA parents will open up their lines and borders to the kids. Because that area can achieve perfectly balanced school that they wanted to. But you have West LA charters now that are low poverty and highly affluent too. Why are they affing out, right? So that's a problem as well too. So there's a lot. Can I say to this, one of the, one of the, you mentioned organizing teachers, we need to start in this country by recognizing the value of our teachers, the dignity that they bring to it. So they can feel empowered to take these things. They're fighting for their economic survival instead of fighting for kids because we don't value what they bring to the classroom and to our country as a democracy. So the first thing we need to do is start a campaign to talk about the importance of classroom teachers in the lives and sustaining our democracy. Yes, absolutely. If you go into a school that's high poverty, the teachers who don't get paid very much are buying food for the children and all sorts of stuff. If you want to jump in here a little bit. I think, and I agree with what Muhammad and Drewith has said. The other thing I'd suggest is, I guess it's piggybacking on your point, Muhammad. The problem can seem so overwhelming in a community like Los Angeles. That's what New York faced. I remember talking to Joe Klein about integration in New York. He said, integration in New York, there's no way we could do that given the demographics. But what our school diversity advisory committee in New York City is doing now is saying, okay, maybe we cannot integrate every New York City school tomorrow. But within New York City, there are 32 community school districts. In nine of them, the demographics are diverse enough to create the possibilities of economically and racially integrated schools. And some people on our committee said, well, that's only nine of 32 districts. We can't offer a partial solution. Those nine districts, community school districts, educate 300,000 students. I mean, that would be the fifth largest school district in the country if we made progress there. And the theory of change is that if you can create high-quality integrated schools in those nine districts, then it's possible that more people from all backgrounds will participate in the public schools and you could widen the circle. It's not inevitable that half of white people in New York City are gonna go to private school, which is the case today. So I think starting small as Mohammed has and then building out is the way to kind of address the naysayers who say, we can't fix it all and therefore we shouldn't make any progress at all. Good point. We have some other questions, other comments or questions. Hi, I'm Karen Dolan from the Institute for Policy Studies. Thank you so much for your presentations today and the whole morning's been really great. I'm wondering, we haven't talked a lot about it, but I'm wondering about your thoughts about not just school discipline, but the school, the prison pipeline and especially with regard to now this move to have more SROs in schools. And we haven't really talked about restorative justice this morning and the way in which black and brown, disabled, trans, we haven't talked very much about trans students either, are really targeted. So not only within segregated schools, but when schools are in integrated schools, if it's still those students that are gonna be targeted for expulsion, suspension, referral to the criminal justice system, because I'd love to hear your thoughts on that. I would like to start that one because just last month, the Board of Regents did pass a resolution unanimously passed the resolution rejecting the current Secretary of Education's decision to eliminate the guidance. We restored the guidance for New York and are investing in the training of classroom teachers because you can't just restore it and say it will be without giving teachers the knowledge and the skills they need. But we made a very deliberate effort that we've got to cut short this school to prison pipeline and one of the ways to do that is to help students acquire the knowledge and skills they need to successfully work through all of the challenges that they face and the traumas that they face. And let's be realistic, a lot of this behavior comes from frustration and the absence of support, but we can help them work through that in ways that don't have them ending up before a judge and having them send off to a jail. So that was an intentional decision at the state level to reject what DeVos has set out and to make it a policy that all school districts must. Yeah. John, did you wanna jump in? I just wanna second that, that in this era of the Trump administration with Ms. DeVos or Mr. Carson, we must look to our states and our local for more remedies and creativity to promote equality in education in particular. I think the question having to do with in school, sort of segregation along all kinds of lines is a powerful one we're talking about the future that really needs to be more developed. There are folks who have written about it, but if we don't deal with it within school, we may not get to where we wanna go in terms of the diversity and the effects of diversity. We've got a few more minutes for Q and A. We have some questions and thoughts. Hi, thank you. My name is Robin Ensum with the National Urban League. My question is for Mohammed and you may have touched on this. I'm curious to know what conditions existed in San Antonio to make possible what you accomplished. So what were the conditions and what was it that moved the will for this to happen? A bold superintendent first, that was important. I have a very unified board as they say, but in Dallas I had a swing board, also a bold superintendent. It was nine members, five, four on most nights. And in San Antonio it's been seven, zero for many votes. So that's important, that matters. They have to want it. If they don't want it, I probably would have been fired the first week or at the time, I mean I would have been, as soon as I said the word segregation. When I saw Pedro Martinez who grew up in Chicago and was CFO under Arnie Duncan who knew this well and when I interviewed I asked them, are we gonna do choice well? Are we gonna do choice equitably? Or are we gonna let the free market decide? Look at the magnets, they're all over the place right now. I wanna unify enrollment, I wanna do control choice. I want you to live in abject poverty attending a struggling school and if you wanna choice out, you have the best shot in getting into a new seat that is integrated if you want it. And so they all said yes. So that was very important as well. It's an urban city with affluence all around it every day, it's gentrifying. Hopefully San Antonio, the mantra in San Antonio it's always been slow to develop Austin Happen, Houston Happen Dallas, so hopefully they can get that right. The mayor campaigned on an inclusive San Antonio. So I quickly crashed the housing task force as well because they gotta get that right as well. So those matter, right? We have a policy task force who oversee our attendance zones. We have an enrollment office under a person who's obsessive about integration. And so that helps as well. And then we offer choice as well. So with all of those conditions, we were able to do it. So we offer open enrollment opportunities, right? Even before charters, magnets have existed. But now we're also talking about magnets segregating and we segregating, right? I mean, think about that. And then we have attendance zones, of course, the hardest one to do. There's 17 different school districts. There's people talking about it and there's a lot of energy. I don't have the nonprofit power and waves and student activists like New York does or LA. I really don't in San Antonio, but there are a lot of people who want it, right? And I'll just give one other piece. When I launched the brand new school, I learned in Dallas three conditions have to be true. One, you needed an attractive instructional model and location. You needed things that tapping to deeper learning. The peer effect doesn't work if you don't have like a deeper learning model, everything from Montessori dual language, project-based learning, et cetera. Obviously no selective admissions and no tracking and you've got to preserve that into policy. Location matter, as much as my progressive families want to believe that they believe in equal opportunity, they won't make the jump at that Montessori school in a segregated neighborhood with higher crime rates. But when I put it in the center of the city where it's gentrifying and the organic coffee shops are propping up, they'll make the jump. If anything, they'll fight me for wanting more seats. They won't have it, they can get up to 50%, but on most days I give more seats to the economically disadvantaged students so my schools are six-ting above. The second piece is transportation to the greatest extent possible. Choice without transportation is not choice for our families. So push the city to give free transportation to high school students. Develop a hub system, figure it out as much as you can. And the third one is you've got to control for it, you've got to design for it. If you want to do a 50-50 dual language school with emerging bilingual students being half of the school, then they get the seats, control choice. You have to design for it and I believe they provided federal guidance, one of the ones that has not been revoked. It's still published on the site. I hope I just didn't ruin that. But that matters. Texas doesn't have anything against it or anything for it. So recently the charter office told me, well I don't know if you can do this. I said I can do this and I actually have a purple backing to do this, believe it or not. That's been very interesting as someone coming from California, Los Angeles. And the commissioner of the Texas State of Education was my former board member in Dallas. So I use that card as much as I can to as well push for this work. So a lot of different conditions, right? But you can approach in many different ways. Mohamed mentioned the New York City students and Amy's part of the School Diversity Advisory Group with me and I know both of us have been incredibly impressed by the student activism in New York City. We had a chancellor under Mayor de Blasio, Carmen Perrinha who was not committed to school integration. She talked about creating pen pals between different communities. That was her version of integration. We now have a chancellor, Richard Carranza, who is deeply committed to integration is talking about segregation, naming it. And Mohamed and I were talking about this before. And what enables that transformation within two chancellors? Well, one has to do with whether the person is a leader and feels it. But also having that strong student support, activism from the community makes an enormous difference. You know, I think we've pretty much run out of time. I want to thank the panel and give them a big round of applause. Thank you all. Thank you Peter. All right. Gonna have a good or next event. That'd be great. Thank you. It was a pleasure seeing you, sir. Good seeing you. Good seeing you. I was in Houston trying to get the same thing started. You're doing now, and I was the dean of the School of Law that you're doing now. Is this the way a lot of work to do? I had a first African-American superintendent and he can do this for a little while. Okay. Hello, everybody. This is on. Great. I have the very, very, very deep pleasure to introduce to you our next speaker. There's just, I'm foaming around a little bit here. There are a few people as young as our next speaker who has made a huge impact on the policy and intellectual life of America, really, as Professor Kahil Jibran Mohamed. Want to introduce him. He's one of America's leading public intellectuals on civil rights and the African-American experience. He is a professor of history, race, and public policy at the Harvard Kennedy School and he is a Suzanne Young Murray professor at Radcliffe. His scholarship examines the broad intersections of race, democracy, inequality, and criminal justice in modern U.S. urban history. His book, The Commendation of Blackness, Race, Crime, and the Making of the Urban Modern America, won the 2011 John Hope Franklin Best Book Award. He has previously served as a director of the Schaumburg Center for Research in Black Culture in the nation's leading library and archive of global black history and was an associate professor at Indiana University. In 2017, he won the Distinguished Service Medal from Columbia University's Teachers College. Professor Mohamed. Good afternoon or close to good afternoon everyone. I want to thank Linda Darling Hammond, Learning Policy Institute, Janelle George, all the people who helped make today possible and for inviting me into the room. Until Mohamed spoke, I thought I might be the only troublemaker but I now know I'm in good company and so I'm grateful for this. So I'm gonna work for my laptop in part because I have taken the assignment here of closing remarks to try to digest some of what I've heard today and I'm gonna be faithful to that but I also have a few things to share of my own. So again, I wanna thank everyone for the contribution to today's event. I've learned a lot. So I wanna set the context of who I am and my work because this is important. I'm not probably the most common kind of interlocutor or contributor to such conversations and I think for me it's hopeful that one historians in the big age sense of things are becoming part of these conversations but also I heard so many amazing comments about the intersections of many sectors of our society that impinge and shape educational outcomes and to me that is also an incredibly fruitful and generative direction for the kinds of outcomes that we wanna see happening. So what happens elsewhere in our society matters and I pay close attention to that. It's also true that I do teach education students in a class that I teach at Harvard. Actually all my classes education students show up from the Harvard Graduate School of Education for the most part. They're usually about a fifth of the students and frankly as someone who mostly has been training people to become historians and now training people to think about racism and inequality and policy making I'm learning a lot from them as well. So what you hear from me is also a consequence of the lessons that I've learned from the students many of whom are practitioners. They've been in various educational doing various forms of educational work for a long time. One of the things that they've taught me is that they were educated in segregated schools. These are adults, 20 somethings, 30, 40 somethings and they are 90% white. They also didn't question their right to the quality and exceptional educations that they received as students who now getting graduate degrees in a policy school are at Harvard University. They were also educated that America is an exceptional nation and mostly gets it right. And so their sense of the deficits that exist in our society are the deficits of the students that they are taught to save. And so they also have to come to terms with the fact that they've been taught to be white saviors. That part of their obligation as well-educated people is to get back in this way, to fix broken people. They also don't know much about race or racism. They walk in the door thinking they do to some degree also curious about what they don't know and walking out more or less pissed. That we failed them. That we failed them as educators, as a society, as people who profess to be the greatest nation in the world and its caretakers have failed them in understanding the precise history of this country and not the one that fuels our civic myths. And for my black students, many of them still report getting to Harvard in spite of teachers and guidance counselors in public schools who track them or want to track them into community schools or lesser schools and they have their sites settled. This is just a little bit of what I've learned from those students but I think all of it helps us collectively today face squarely the facts before us. One of the history lessons that I teach my students, this is my contribution in a sense, is I tell them a lot more about the story of Kenneth and Mamie Clark. For whom we are here today in part based on the theme of this conference. And yet I worry that in the abstraction of who they were and what they did, we lose a little bit more of what they learned. And so part of my job as a historian is to keep the knowledge that we've gained in circulation to help redistribute it in ways that we may not make the same mistakes as those who've come before us make. I'll share with you a few highlights from that work. And so you know about nimbyism, not my backyardism but Clark in many ways coined what we might call not all my child ism, nomsieism. He didn't write this of course, but I think it's one way of thinking about some of the common things we've heard today. In the work that I think is most telling of how we have lost some of the central messages of Kenneth and Mamie Clark's body of work comes from Dark Ghetto published in 1965. We talk about brown, we've dissected brown and certainly many commentators over the last 40 and 50 years have looked and assessed brown. But Clark left us himself a message after looking at the dismal results of what brown had produced by 1965 as well as anticipating much of the struggles against busing and the desegregation that was to come. He had already anticipated a lot of the challenges that we saw in the 1970s, some of which were overcome, some of which have now been erased. He says in Dark Ghetto that the middle and upper class parents who defend their decision for private schools with the plea, quote, I won't sacrifice my child, gives perhaps less weight to their child's resilience than the evidence would support and certainly less weight to the importance of democratically based education than the times demand. But such arguments have little weight when parents fear for their child's future. And I think when he notes the democratically based education, he reminds us that in 1965 what was most important was not the simple need for literacy or numeracy, but that what goes on in our classrooms ensures that our democratic institutions will survive. That's a message that never left for the most part that generation of thinkers and most certainly did not impact much of the conversation about what was going on. It translated into integration and we've heard so many versions of that today. So let's think about that democratically based education in broader terms as the broader context of my remarks. I think it's also important to note that Clark was very clear for black children, schools hurt them, that their IQ scores by the standards of testing at that time went down the longer they went in school. And Clark called this, he said that the justification for these things were poor children can't learn, like their middle class peers. He said that people defended this that culturally deprived children come from incurious homes. This was the attack on black families. And he said of course that people said these children have psychological problems. He said all of these amounted to what he described as an alibi for educational neglect. Now I call this the problem of damage imagery. Because we've taken the evidence of the disadvantage as Professor Orfield described earlier, not as an invitation to rewire our society but as a way of doubling down on the notion that we've gotta fix those kids. But Clark was very clear there was nothing ever wrong with those kids. He made it painfully clear because the problem was that the assumption that something was wrong with them, the notion of damage to them would be the key ingredient to ensuring that they would have poor schooling experiences. I'll just use his words specifically. Children who are treated as if they are uneducable almost invariably become uneducable. Children are quote not fooled by the various euphemisms educators used to disguise educational snobbery. He also noted they react negatively and hostily and aggressively to the educational process. They hate teachers, they hate school, they hate anything that seems to impose upon them this denigration because they are not being respected as human beings, because they are sacrificed in a machinery of efficiency and expendability because their dignity and potential as human beings are being obscured and ignored in terms of educationally relevant factors, their manners, their speech, their dress or parent's disinterest. So I challenge my students and I challenge all of you to think about how relevant it was before we got to desegregation court orders that someone who had dedicated he and his partner their lives to pointing out these problems. So let me reframe this. John King said earlier that we lack not guidance or wisdom, but political will and folks stepping up that we need an educational justice movement and I wanna endorse that 100%. But I also wanna say we haven't been honest about the complicity of both the Obama administration as well as various other education reformers who have not been committed to that work. So we have to match our talk with our actual action and there's a huge gap between those two things. I also wanna insist something that we didn't hear today is that segregation damages white people. I heard someone earlier refer to schools of mostly whites as racially isolated. If segregation is a problem it works in both directions. We're used to a long list of citing evidence of the damage that black people have experienced but we don't study nor talk enough about how segregation harms white people. It makes them feel privileged, it encourages their blind spots, it limits their moral imagination, it miseducates and poorly educates them. And this may sound divisive but it seems to me how else can we face squarely the facts that face us in this moment? Before Trump we had the largest penal system the world had ever known. Before Trump the overwhelming evidence of re-segregation was already presented before us. Trump is a symptom, not a cause. And part of what the Southern Poverty Law Center has been teaching us and I'm grateful for Amy Stuart Wells using the work and everything she described about the importance of racial and historical literacy. They tell us that if we were to learn something about Brown, oh my gosh, we've done a terrible job. When the Southern Poverty Law Center looked at every state in the country to determine how much civil rights history they were teaching, they found that 35 states by any stretch of the imagination were doing a very poor job, 16 of which required no teaching of civil rights history. Then when they did a sample of 12,000 high school students to determine whether or not they could answer the question, what was Brown versus Board of Education and why is it important? Only 2% could answer those questions correctly. So if we believed in the promise of Brown collectively then of course we would teach that to Brown. But the truth is that we didn't, we know that to be the case but here is where the opportunity lies. If we can focus on something that we might call civics education of a 21st century kind then we can begin to rebuild citizens who value these things because we've been doing just the opposite. It's also important for me to note that diversity, I have serious concerns with the way in which diversity functions in our language and the way that we try to communicate our values. Diversity for the most part as far as I can tell is a mask for reinforcing white privilege. It helps people, white people for the most part still in decision-making positions decide who they like to be around. But that's not democratically based education. All the evidence that diversity makes us smarter is not going to change things if white people don't believe it and don't act on it other than the cosmetic diversity that comes with living in Bed-Stuy or various newly gentrified parts of the United States. White affluent parents who like diversity are still counting how many black bodies are in the classroom with their kids to determine how good the classroom is. Part of this is because they have never had to listen very hard to understand the stakes of what it means to give up some of that privilege. And if you don't believe the degree to which that racism is real or the anti-blackness of even liberal and moderate parents, one doesn't have to stretch very hard to hear conversations about meritocracy, about excellence, or to even hear, again, the reinforcing cycles or feedback of the damage of black children. If a child coming from a broken home has these problems, why should I subject my child to that, even if I believe that the right kinds of black and brown children should be in this school? So we have to address that squarely. It's also true that the language of the achievement gap has been weaponized against us. As much as it has become a source and a useful source for pointing out the failures that exist systemically, it also essentially reinforces the myth of black inferiority. It's still very much with us in tracking, to one degree, and Trump's notion of low IQs, which he is so freely disseminated in his political rhetoric, but his free use of low IQ rhetoric comes squarely out of the ongoing conversations about the skills gap that exists amongst black people. When I talk to some of my economics colleagues at Harvard, they don't think racism is really a problem. The problem is skills. If the problem is skills and the problem is squarely back on those who lack the skills, racism is completely abstracted or historical or not existent. So let's think about what it means to change the standards of achievement gap. First of all, we have to acknowledge that whiteness cannot be the uniform basis for how we measure how other people are doing. This is exactly what Credo does at Stanford University when it tries to measure what traditional public schools white students are doing versus the charter schools. Well, it completely says, no matter what white kids are doing in school, they're the norm and we have to figure out how everyone else is doing. That's a form of white supremacy baked into the very standards of evidence that we use to move the needle. Let me just remind you, all of you know this. 2017 NAP scores fourth grade math, only 51% of all white students achieve proficiency. In reading, only 47% of all white students achieve proficiency. Now we often compare in our fluent school districts, 85, 90% achievement levels versus barely proficient for black and brown children, but we never talk nationally about the fact that barely half of all white children in America in the aggregate are proficient in reading and math. So why would we assume then that what's going on with white people is a standard by which we should close the achievement gap? That doesn't even deal with the baked in racism that exists amongst white children who are reinforcing retrenching and reproducing the very notions of white supremacy that are animating our politics in this country today. This is not just an old people problem, this is also a young people problem. The consequences of 50 years of desegregation, segregation and resegregation also means that black teachers have been purged from our nation's classrooms, something that we haven't talked about. Why would we expect black teachers to be purged from our nation's classroom? Because if the assumption is that black people on average have lower IQs or are not as smart or come from broken homes, why would I as a white parent want my students to be subject to white teachers? The irony of this of course is that the more that we've invested in white teachers through TFA and other programs that basically encourage white saviors like the kind of students that I teach to go into the classroom to save black kids is the more that we in the end reinforce the very forms of implicit bias that social psychologists now as Mazarene Banaji, one of the creators of the IAT test at Harvard told me, we have 5,000 audit study tests, we need no more tests to know that white people have anti-black racism as well as black people. And so we're not having a conversation about implicit bias among teachers like we are about police officers. So that's another area that would, as far as I'm concerned, shift the burden away from the damage of black and brown children to the damage that a poor or miseducated white teaching force brings into the classroom. Some of the work that Amy Stewart Wells is doing also. Okay, so how did we get here? We got here through a civil rights revolution as Gary Orfield described it. There was an attack on this structure. I'm almost done. Since then there has been a deliberate, consistent effort to attack the civil rights movement as Professor Orfield said, but I wanna remind you that the relationship of that attack on the civil rights movement is also a relationship that runs through everything else. So let's connect the dots. Let's connect the dots between Milton Friedman's, the University of Chicago economist, who essentially has established 40 years of economic policy where morality has no place in the marketplace, also was one of the earlier advocates for school vouchers and choice. Which of course, when he went into the Reagan administration, then adopted as a plan that by any stretch of the imagination was an effort to kill public education. Because if the government was the problem, and public education was one of the biggest expenditures and footprint of the government, the goal was to get rid of public education. Let's make no mistake about it. Now, of course, black conservatives joined into this. I won't go into the details, but I want to remind you that the discourses that that kind of conservative attack on the civil rights movement took place in that moment has affected all of us. It isn't just in the minds of conservatives. So when we start conversations about broken black families, we have accepted the terms of the conservative revolution about why it is that there is a quote unquote achievement gap in the first place. We are still not talking about the damage that it does to our society. So I will close with saying that when the former New Jersey justice described the problem that New Jersey faces, my wife is an elected school board member in an integrated community of South Orange and Maplewood. I live with the challenges that she faces that affect that community every single day as our kitchen table conversation. I lament the fact that we didn't give him a good answer directly. And I think that part of the answer, both in terms of what Muhammad talked about in terms of collective bargaining agreements is a step in that direction. I think that I heard legislations to stop using property taxes from Judith Johnson is a wonderful step in that direction. I think a lot of the design plans that are working, I would argue at the margins, which is not to say that they're not meaningful and they shouldn't pile us towards something better, is productive, but I will say to the justice and to all the rest of us, if we don't reframe this not as a civil rights issue, which is how Senator Murphy, as well as Congressman Scott did, I think we have to reframe this as a democracy problem. This is about a country that is teetering on the brink of destroying itself and Trump did not get elected on the basis of an argument of a big tent. He got elected on the very same exclusionary policies that the Republican Party has been advancing with far softer and more gentler language for almost 50 years. He got in office from a majority white electorate, a majority white electorate, a majority white electorate on the basis of various prescriptive forms of racism, more of it, an insistence and a retreat against the notion that diversity is a good idea, against the notion that together we are stronger. Now we can play the game of simply arguing politically that that's not our values and therefore we all believe the same thing, but we don't. We've lost those arguments. We've been losing those arguments. So the way to correct that is to be intentional, to be explicit about the fact that we had this problem, we have this problem and we're gonna fix this problem which is not fixing the achievement gap. We should expect more of white people, of their children, of their attitudes, of their beliefs and in the process, my guess, my guess is if we can center black humanity better in all of this work, we will be a better nation for it because if we remember the legacy of black contributions to American democracy, if we remember what the slaves accomplished, we'd know that the 14th Amendment, the basis of all our equal protections, the basis for every claim of civil rights, it did not come from on high. It did not come from a kind of thoughtful moment of moderates and liberals getting together. It came from the fact that black people forced the nation to reconcile its beliefs and ideals with the reality and everyone, everyone, everyone has benefited from that. So if we believe in that, then we cannot tell black children that simply being literate and numerically smart is good enough. We have to tell them that you are part of a story alongside white allies who helped to make America truly great in the first place and if we wanna keep it that way, that story can no longer be optional. Thank you. I don't know quite what we can do to end it on that. That was fantastic. It was also just a very deep learning experience. So thank you very much. Patrick Shields, who's the Executive Director of Learning Policy Institute with more than 25 years doing large social science research, just gonna wrap it up. Yeah, yeah, we can't do much. In fact, if I could cede my five minutes back to Professor Muhammad, I would like to hear some more from you. Thank you very much. We were concerned when we put together this program that we looked at the data and Linda showed that chart before of resegregation and Gary talked about what's happening. We have the New Jersey case about the difficulty of implementing things. And we thought it might be a little bit of a downer. But I really have been invigorated today, not only by the concrete examples of controlled choice and inter-district choice, but also the thoughtful remarks that Professor Muhammad just made about sort of trying to rethink basically how we take this on as a matter of the values of a democracy in our society, and not just a matter of our schools and who sits next to who in the classroom. So with that, I'd like to thank you all for coming to remind you that these reports are on our website, LearningPolicyInstitute.org that you can find easily. And thank you, and we'll be continuing in this series of events.