 Hello, and thank you for joining us today for the Civil Rights Road to Deeper Learning. At this time, I'd like to introduce our moderator for the session, LPI President Linda Darling-Hammond. Thank you so much. I am pleased to be joined by all of you for this webinar on the Civil Rights Road to Deeper Learning. I'm Linda Darling-Hammond, the president of the Learning Policy Institute, and I'm joined by an amazing group of speakers whom you see on the screen, including Kia Darling-Hammond, Cheryl and Iphil, Gory Letts and Billings, and Kent McGuire. I will properly introduce each of them as we proceed. We're going to take up the issue of how we make access to deeper learning, a reality for all children, and why we need not only school reinvention, but also civil rights engagement to accomplish this. We are releasing a brief by the Learning Policy Institute and a book from Teachers College Press that outline these issues, and I'm going to take just a couple of minutes to frame up the issues, and then we're going to launch into a discussion when you can go to the next slide. Everyone knows that this is a critical time in the history of the world, as well as in the context of our educational systems. Around the world, we are facing a public health crisis that is ongoing, an economic crisis, a climate crisis, a civil rights crisis. All of these manifest in ways that reflect the inequalities in our educational systems that have been longstanding. Next slide. But you know, such moments of great historical import often lead to generational social changes. They give us the opportunity to really rethink, disrupt and redesign the schools and other social institutions that we experience. So how do we use this time to support systemic change? At LPI, we have been working on an agenda for restarting and reinventing school since the beginning of the COVID pandemic. You can find this resource there. And the reason we need to reinvent is because the schools we have were not designed for the demands that we have for them today. They were invented in the early 1900s when mass education, compulsory education, was beginning to occur when one room rural schoolhouses were being replaced by urban school systems that were designed, modeled after the factory model that Henry Ford had just created, the assembly line technology, which was not designed to support relationships. People were put on a conveyor belt through a set of different prescribed experiences. They were not designed for a whole child approach or for the 21st century skills or deeper learning that we need today. The norm was transmission teaching, memorize a bunch of facts and spit them back. Personalized supports were lacking. And the system was not only not designed for equitable opportunity, but was explicitly designed for inequality, both in the way it was funded and in the way that schools were designed with tracking systems informed by the eugenicists of that time who felt that students of different backgrounds would not be able to achieve inequitable ways and should be placed on different conveyor belts to achieve their different life stations at the end of school. And we're struggling with these designs even today. But what's happened, of course, is that the demand for skills has been changing for some time. There's a growing demand for complex skills, higher order thinking. The jobs that required routine, manual and cognitive skills have been declining. They're being outsourced and digitized. And the dilemma that schools have is that those skills that are the easiest to digitize, automate and outsource are the same ones that are the easiest to teach and test. So there's been an ongoing effort to redesign schools to deal with the realities of the current age. The other issue is that knowledge is expanding. But there's a set of researchers that you see, Berkeley, who've been looking at the expansion of knowledge in the world. They found that between 1999 and 2003, there was more new knowledge created in the world than in the entire history of the world preceding. And we see that now, knowledge is climbing at an exponential rate. Technology knowledge is doubling every 11 months. And our students are going to need to be able to work with knowledge that hasn't been discovered yet, using technologies that haven't been invented yet, solving major problems in the world that we have not been able to solve. And so what does this mean for school? Well, right up the street for me is Google. And if you go or to go to Google when they first began, they would collect all of the traditional information about you, your test scores and your grade point average and your courses and your transcript. But when they looked in giant studies at which of those things predicted success at Google, they discovered that none of those were predictors of success at Google. Instead, what they found was that what they call learning ability is what would actually predict that success. The kind of skills that allow you to transfer and apply knowledge to take new information, to make sense of it, to work with others, to design something, to test it out, to revise the work, to continue to grow and learn in the course of the work and to be able to self-manage and improve. So this is a very different mission for schools that is what requires deeper learning. Next slide. So what would our schools look like if they were based on what we know about learning? Of course, there's a major change from each child in their seat filling out the worksheets with information that they're handed to a collaborative environment in which students are inquiring and problem solving and supported by their educators to do that. And I'm going to show a little video clip where a student in such a school describes what deeper learning means to him. I was born in Suva, which is the capital of Fiji, and life was different in almost every single way. My father felt that if I received the college education here, I would be more successful. So that was one of the significant reasons we left Fiji. I started eighth grade here, and I struggled academically at first. Coming here to impact was really the key thing that helped me change, because I was given a chance to start over. My name is Raheel Maharaj, and I go to Impact Academy of Arts and Technology in Hayward, which is a small project-based learning school. We focus on a couple of really important leadership skills, like collaborate productively, critical thinking, communicate powerfully, and complete projects effectively. So along with making sure that students are keeping up with the content, they're also getting these life skills that they'll need to be successful in college and in the workplace. An assignment that I had for my AP government class was the paper on federalism. This paper focused on the Constitution and analyzing the Constitution to determine whether the state or the federal government should be in charge of a specific issue. All the students were given the choice to pick any issue, and I picked immigration. States recently have been passing laws, and the federal government has been deeming them unconstitutional. My family immigrated here, so it kind of pertained to me as well. And it really evoked something in me to research and see what the actual solution to that issue would be. After researching all the current affairs about immigration, I began looking for laws that would give powers to Congress or give powers to the states. Immigration is not specifically mentioned in the Constitution, so you have to analyze more generalized law and apply it. I came to the conclusion that the federal government should be in charge, because not only is the Congress responsible for national security, the rights should be consistent throughout every state, because we do as a nation believe in equality. I think deeper learning is when a student learns something beyond the content that we're supposed to, when they're able to apply their experiences or apply the knowledge that they receive from other classes into what they're doing. Learning something through deeper learning really means internalizing the information. So this kind of learning, of course, is beginning to be encouraged in more schools across the country, but we also have to deal with the historical legacy of inequality that we want. Could you take that down and backtrack for a second? Which is built on poverty and segregation, which we experience in this country and that have been exacerbated over recent years. The allocation of school resources, then, in unequal ways across communities, the way in which that then creates an inequitable distribution of well-qualified educators. We're seeing that with the two disadvantages that are occurring once again. That supports an unequal access to curriculum, especially the thinking curriculum, the deeper learning curriculum that has been traditionally reserved to the most affluent students. And then we often see dysfunctional schools at the end of that process. Now, if you could put up the next. The distribution of teachers and the preparation of teachers really has to do then also with the pedagogy that students experience, whether it is focused on higher level skills, whether teachers have the tools to support learning, to teach heterogeneous classes, to understand students' social-emotional needs. And finally, next slide, the ways in which implicit bias can then complicate further the treatment of students in schools, the assumptions that may be made about how students are capable, whether families care about their children, the kinds of disciplinary treatment that may occur, and the activation of stereotype threat, which is when students are stigmatized based on their identity in many ways, race, income, sexual orientation, disability status, which undermines their performance. So these things all need to be resolved, which requires both attention to the inequalities that continue to need attention, and the transformation of schools that will allow us to support students as we hope they will be supported. I'm going to transition now to a little description of the grief in the book that we're talking about, which is gonna be presented by my co-author, Kia Darling Hammond, who is the author also of The Bridge to Thriving Framework. She's worked in youth development, taught in and led schools, conducted research, and advised policymakers about how to enact a whole-child approach that enables thriving, especially for young people who have been most marginalized. She serves on the Congressional Black Mental Health Brain Trust and the Congressional Black Caucus Suicide Prevention Task Force, and her work focuses on human development and transformative justice. Kia, take it away. Thank you for that beautiful introduction. I'm really excited to present our work that we did together, which builds, of course, on all that you've just heard from Dr. Linda Darling Hammond. I'm going to share my screen and talk very briefly about what we come to discuss in the book, and then we'll have a discussion with the guests here today. So hopefully everyone can see what I have going on here. I'm gonna turn off a couple of things and proceed. So by way of introduction, access to education and specifically schooling in the United States has long been marked by segregation and discrimination, by a struggle between a small elite seeking power over resources, production, wealth, and labor, and the larger population fighting for self-actualization, self-determination, and true democracy. The first bricks on the civil rights road to deeper learning were laid through activism and resistance, later buoyed by legal action through legislation and the courts. And freedom fighters engaged in liberation education focused on critical thinking, positive identity development, literacy, and collectivism, all ingredients required for resilience and change. And I'll just give a brief shout out to Goldie Muhammad and her cultivating genius framework there because it's related, it is the same. And that was all true then and it remains true now. Today's students are growing up amid multiple interlocking crises related to climate, human and civil rights, and the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. Economically, extreme wealth disparities are still growing and the work world continues to shift toward prioritizing technical skill where college degrees are required and the majority of compensation now goes. And it's just critical that today's young people be prepared to participate and lead meaningfully in this complex world. A knowledgeable, thoughtful, caring public is essential for a stable democratic society and a great deal of change work remains on the horizon. So as described by the Hewlett Foundation, deeper learning can speak to that with these six competencies, including mastering core academic content, thinking critically and solving complex problems, communicating effectively, developing academic mindsets, learning how to learn and being self-directed and working collaboratively and in particular, those complex problems and the need for effective communication and collective collaboration are key. Yet such learning is, our access to such learning is challenged by longstanding inequities in our schools and society and equity requires that young people live in safe and healthy environments so they can participate in school fully, that those schools be well resourced, welcoming and supportive and that the learning be facilitated by well-supported, competent and caring educators with the knowledge and skill required to provide culturally relevant, empowering deeper learning experiences. And so you can see our engagement very much with the pyramid you just saw here in terms of what's needed. Clearing the path to such opportunity for marginalized young people requires civil rights litigation, enforcement and advocacy. And in our book and the related brief, we offer examples of successful efforts to describe and describe the civil conditions and actions essential to paving a way forward, to safety, to support, to opportunity and a future full of possibility. More specifically and detailed at the level of the safe and healthy communities, we touch on these points presented here at the foundation of the Civil Rights Road is this safe and healthy community, both beyond and within schools, children's developmental needs have to be supported if they're gonna have access to academic success. It's also in these spaces that we see critical civil rights engagement around such issues as technology equity, economic opportunity, pollution and fair housing. Shamefully, the United States has the highest child poverty rate in the industrialized world and being deprived of necessary resources puts children and their families at disproportionate risk for exposure to environmental toxins. This is tied to redlining, the practice of designating black communities unworthy of investment, thus limiting sales, devaluing homes and amplifying mortgage failure. So neighborhood conditions declined and environmental hazards were exacerbated. And now almost a century later, black Americans are 75% more likely to live in close proximity to oil and gas facilities resulting in higher rates of cancer and asthma with black children twice as likely to develop asthma as their peers. The Earth Justice Coalition has a report that says for more than five years, there's been a water crisis in Flint, Michigan. Meanwhile, in Whitehall, Alabama, residents live with raw sewage because basic sanitation is not affordable. The fifth district of St. James Parish in Louisiana is known as Cancer Alley. All of these cases are in predominantly black areas and we need only look to Mississippi now to see how these infrastructural issues persist. A 2004 study of exposure to air toxicity and estimated respiratory and cancer risk among LA Unified School District students found that controlling for other factors affecting achievement schools close to toxic facilities exhibited a 16 to 20% gap in academic performance. And researchers estimated that cleaning the air alone would yield a performance boost of over 10%. In the book, we highlight lead poisoning in Flint where the shift in water supply to save money exposed thousands of children and families to high levels of lead for an extended period of time. And it's important to point out that there is no safe level of lead exposure and it can cause a host of neuropsychological and physical problems, including issues that can be passed epigenetically across generations. But we go on to note that Flint is not the only nor even the worst case of contemporary lead contamination in the US as millions of homes and schools, especially in low income communities continue to be exposed in multiple ways, paint, soil and water. All of these issues, disinvestment, segregation, poisonous environments and the intense stress of trying to survive it all place a considerable strain on people, their relationships and their bodies, which can lead to toxic stress and dysregulate the entire body, especially the neuroendocrine system. This can lead to higher rates of infection and a variety of health risks, including challenges in brain development, learning and behavior and that trauma and exhaustion and anxiety deflect attention from educational tasks, impeding concentration and the learning process. So the civil rights work ahead revolves around eliminating child poverty, rebuilding the larger social safety net and achieving the environmental justice that we require at federal and state levels. The next step on the path to deeper learning is resourcing our school systems. Much as we fall short with regard to child poverty, we also have among the most inequitable allocations of funding to schools of any country. And that underinvestment and segregation have gone hand in hand. An enormous amount of litigation has been levied to tackle these issues because education is a state responsibility, outlined in each state constitution, litigation to address inequalities has occurred in virtually every state at some time over the past 50 years, although with varying results. And even as a number of courts ruled that state school finance schemes were unconstitutional in the 70s and 80s, progress stalled during the Reagan administration when federal data collection and reporting were discontinued along with funding for state data collection. However, those systems have been rebuilt and so we now have resources like the civil rights data collection and litigation has persisted. Fundamentally, the investments make a difference. A large-scale national study found that districts that substantially increase spending in response to court-ordered school finance reforms saw significant increases among students from low-income families in high school graduation followed by higher wages and lower poverty rates as adults. Massachusetts is a great example. It climbed to number one when it made sizable and meaningful investments, including weighting school funding for underserved marginalized students, changing the standards and assessments, engaging in extension teacher training and preschool and New Jersey more recently, which serves more than 50% students of color, undertook similar reforms after 30 years of litigation and now runs neck and neck with Massachusetts as one of the highest-achieving states in the nation. However, only nine states have, quote, progressive funding systems that allocate at least 10% more per pupil to high-poverty districts. Others offer little support and at least 20 states spend less on high-poverty than low-poverty districts, so there's plenty of work still to do. In our book, we detail these and other case histories, including Brown versus the Board of Education, noting that while Brown did enable some black students to attend better resourced white schools, it also destabilized black schools and the many black educators who worked in them. And so there's this complexity to the way that these things roll out. Black students often encounter discrimination, exclusionary discipline and segregation through tracking in integrated schools. And so as we move through this challenging and imperfect condition and we continue to battle re-segregation and bias, we also have to design for a truly equitable future. And a key dimension of that work is improving the school-based conditions that students encounter no matter where they learn. So that's the next step, supportive and inclusive schools. From the community to the classroom, children's developmental contexts matter a lot. Without safety, whether it's physical or emotional, belonging, connectedness, support and other key dimensions of positive climate, students are more likely to avoid school, suffer diminished cognitive capacity and struggle with confidence in the classroom. In our book, we highlight a number of models, including the Comer School Development Program. Educators enacting similar developmentally sound whole child experiences work to attach children to the school community, to ensure that they feel a sense of belonging and teach them how to be a contributing member of that community, while eschewing punitive and exclusionary discipline. And that's key. But unfortunately, exclusion through segregation, suspensions and expulsions is still too prevalent in schools. The zero tolerance policies enacted in recent decades levied severe punishments for even the most minor offenses, including misbehavior like tardiness, talking, texting or sleeping in class or subjective behaviors like willful defiance or quote disrespect without strategies for helping students connect to and thrive in school and without attention to the bias that adults may be enacting. National civil rights or CRDC data for the 2017-2018 year show that US K-12 students missed 11.2 million school days due to out of school suspensions, but the rates were more than twice as high for black students and disproportionately, similarly disproportionately high for native students and students with disabilities, not because they misbehaved more or behaved worse, but because of bias. Further, black students, including those with identified disabilities were disproportionately represented among those referred to law enforcement or arrested at school. So the thing to know is that school suspension and other exclusionary practices do not produce behavioral or academic benefits. In fact, they decrease academic achievement and test scores. They undermine school climate. They reduce the sense of belonging and engagement that keeps kids coming to and trying hard in school. They increase school dropout rates and increase risks of future incarceration, but schools can and do operate differently. Restorative practices when implemented in compassionate, developmentally-sounding, equitable ways are powerful as our school wraparound supports like nutritious food, healthcare, enrichment, and social support. All of these augment deeper learning opportunities designed to motivate and engage children and they can mitigate the effects of poverty and toxic stress. Civil rights enforcement and associated investments in educational programs make a significant difference in securing positive and inclusive school environments. Federal civil rights law requires that schools receiving federal funds not discriminate. And the U.S. Department of Education's Office for Civil Rights has pursued actions and districts with disproportionate exclusion. Legislatively, bills can and have shifted toward restricting suspension and expulsion and encouraging restorative practices. Places that have pursued this course like California show less exclusion, higher graduation rates, and safer schools in which students learn more. So the next step then is to make sure that what students are learning is being provided by teachers who are well-prepared and supported. And the importance of teachers can't be overstated. As the primary arbiters of student daily school-based experiences, they, along with principles, hold tremendous power to construct the learning environment and define what learning is. So on the road to deeper learning, there must be teachers who are trained to deliver innovative curriculum using inclusive, dynamic pedagogy, and who believe that all children can and deserve to learn. This requires a high level of sophisticated skill. This is typically the product of teacher preparation rooted in knowledge about child development and learning. As they occur in cultural contexts, it's supportive of skills for developing identity-safe, affirming classrooms in which all students claim membership. It's focused on designing authentic, engaging curriculum and assessments and attentive to children's interests and passions. And that kind of preparation offers extended clinical experiences in schools and classrooms where these practices already operate. It's tightly connected to relevant coursework and it's often unavailable to too many candidates. So... I'm gonna encourage you to synthesize quickly so that we can move to the panel. Thank you so much for that heads up. The lack of financial support for preparation makes teacher training less accessible to teachers of color. While we're seeing evidence that actually being taught by teachers of color has a seriously positive impact on students of color. And so equitable access to teachers and equitable access to teacher training are both really important parts of the civil rights road forward. In the book, we outline a Marshall plan for teaching, describing federal and state policy, supporting teacher recruitment, preparation, compensation and ongoing development to build an infrastructure that enables the kind of teaching and the kind of learning that we want to see. John Mehta says, deeper learning has a race problem. Students in more affluent skills and top tracks are given the kind of problem solving education that befits the future managerial class where students in lower tracks and higher poverty schools are given the kind of rule following tasks that mirror much of factory and other working classwork. To the degree that race mirrors class, these inequalities in access to deeper learning are short changing black and Latino Latinas students. Here in this final step of our civil rights road to deeper learning, we discuss inequalities in access and how access can be secured. In addition to schools separated by de jure and de facto segregation, tracking systems developed in the early 90s separated students within schools. Those were justified by eugenicists thinking that hearken back to the 1920s. And that approach persists to this day and creates significant equity issues. Further, the high stakes test based accountability system introduced by No Child Left Behind has reinforced both tracking and its focus on low level skills for those in the bottom tracks. So what should change? Access to deeper learning curriculum should and can begin in preschool when children are developing their initial brain architecture and are inquisitive and exploring and communicative and playful. This can have really high positive impacts both across schooling and throughout the lifespan. Elementary and secondary schools can build on this with authentic instruction and assessment, personalized support for learning and support for educator learning through reflection, collaboration, leadership and professional development. Fundamentally success lies in creating untracked settings where students receive the message that all can succeed and undertake mastery learning experiences, grapple with meaningful questions, conduct inquiry together, present and vet their answers and continue to revise and learn and more deeply understand the concepts. This benefits all students regardless of prior level of achievement. And we offer many examples of schools that provide these conditions in our book. This road that we're on is still a long road to travel and success will depend on high quality education being acknowledged as a right for all. And that actually leads us directly into the next portion of our program, the discussion with these experts. I'm so pleased to turn this over to them. Thank you so much to talk about. And we've got a wonderful panel. Kent McGuire who is the Education Program Director at the Hewlett Foundation. He leads the investments of teaching and learning and open educational strategies. Kent was Assistant Secretary for the Office of Educational Research and Improvement in the Clinton administration in addition to other philanthropic roles prior to that and Dean of Temple University School of Education. He has a wise voice and a consistent leader in the ongoing struggle for both civil rights and deeper learning. Sheryl and Ifil served as the seventh President and Director Council of the NAACP Legal Defense and Education Fund and currently advises the organization in her role as President Emeritus. Ifil began her legal career as a fellow at the American Civil Liberties Union before moving to LDF where she's led innumerable actions to gain educational opportunity for underserved students to secure voting rights and many other elements of the civil rights road. She has served on the faculty of the University of Maryland School of Law and her book on the courthouse lawn confronting the legacy of lynching in the 21st century reflects her lifelong engagement in and analysis of issues of race and American public life. Gloria Ladsen-Billings is the Kellner Family Distinguished Professor of Urban Education Emeritus at the University of Wisconsin, Madison and she is past President of the National Academy of Education of the American Educational Research Association. She has examined the pedagogical practices of teachers who are successful with African American students. Many of you will remember the groundbreaking Dream Keepers book that she put out years ago and then her subsequent work on culturally relevant pedagogies and the applications now of critical race theory to education and her work has won numerous scholarly awards. Kent, I wanna ask you to start us off. The juxtaposition of deeper learning with the civil rights agenda that is so essential to achieve it was initially your idea and you provided the impetus along with Eliza Byard to whom we are very grateful to get this work done. Could you help frame this issue for us? What did you see as a problem and what is at stake as we tackle it? Well, Linda, thank you. Good to be in such good company this afternoon. You know, I think I just would like to start with an observation, one that I think will sort of lightly go over some of the terrain that both you and Gia have already, you know, covered. But the observation is this, that, you know, there was a period in this country, I think when we were actually closing gaps between white kids and kids of color. Now, that period was largely coincident, I think, with a war on poverty. And what I think of as the meat of the civil rights era, you know, I'm talking about the 60s and 70s and maybe a little bit into the 80s, I don't know. But several things were true then. One, there were conscious efforts to integrate our schools, not just busing, but magnets and various kinds of options and incentives because we knew then that integrated schools were generally better resourced. There were better and more abundant programs living in better facilities with more highly trained and prepared teachers, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. Two, there was an effort in that period of time to attend to the structural inequities in our school finance systems. I actually grew up and entered the field at that time. I remember leveraging Linda, your work and our wise's work to lay out the legal architecture and argument for the state responsibility for taking this who's used up. Three, there was a tension to improving teacher preparation, not just certification and licensure, but ultimately professional standards. Thinking here about the ascent at the time of the National Board for Professional Teaching Standards so that there was a narrative about what evolving from a novice to someone who was accomplished that had gotten fleshed out and eventually better data on how students were actually experiencing school, be it the state and district NAIC, which allowed us to make more accurate comparisons from one jurisdiction or another, or PISA and TIMS that just allowed us to do the same internationally all the way to the Civil Rights Data Collection. And so as federal policy pivoted from attempting to create this level playing field, what I'll argue was accountability as the improvement strategy. I think we began to give these learning gains back. And at the time, I remember we were in a moment of regime change and Catherine LeMond had just been appointed to the US Commission on Civil Rights, she's back in a leadership position. Thank goodness, in the department today. But at the time, we had a conversation about all that was at stake. And that's when Eliza came to me and said, it would really be important to track what has happened, historically document what is actually happening now and bring back into view the kinds of policy moves that had been working to reduce racial disparities in learning. And that's sort of why I went to Hewlett anyway to chip away at these correlates between race, income and learning. And so I said, well, how can I help? This project grew out of that ask. And that I will argue is why we are here today. My sense is that we need both a clear sense of what we know and what we can do and the civil rights engagement to act on that knowledge. So I was really happy to see Kia in the book, attention to the various many different strategies of engagement to try to connect the dots between the things we know and the strategies for making those things happen. Linda, that's my answer for why we're here. Oh, that's great, thank you. Cheryl, I want to turn to you for many years, you've led the NAACP legal defense fund as it tackled a wide range of inequalities in school funding segregation conditions for learning. What would you identify as the most important areas of progress we've seen and the most important civil rights issues that are still facing us today? Well, thank you so much and congratulations to you, Linda and Kia on this very, very important book. And I frankly got off track because I was just mesmerized listening to Kent walk us through this process. I went to school K through 12 in that period that Kent was referring to, it basically began, the beginning of the end was 1980 with the election of Ronald Reagan. But for the 70s, that correlation and you were instrumental in providing the data on this, Linda, the correlation of integration, the highest period of integration and the highest period of robust federal funding. And so when people say, we don't know what to do, we actually do know what to do because we did it. We just decided to stop doing it. And I raise it because everything that Kent said and everything we're talking about exists within a broader infrastructure, political infrastructure in this country that it's important to identify. And that political infrastructure is a withdrawal from investments in public life. And I'm writing a book now about kind of how we arrived at this democratic crisis moment. And part of it is this withdrawal from the commitment to public life which is very much connected to Brown versus Board of Education and education. The idea that supporting public life, public parks, public universities, public schools, public libraries that were just a regular part of American life only became controversial initially when Brown and his progeny made clear that those investments would have to be provided on an equal basis for black people and white people and Latino people and Asian American people and so forth. It was the articulation of the equality principle in Brown that of course was articulated in the 14th Amendment in 1868 but that had lain dormant for most of the first part of the 20th century. It was the Supreme Court's articulation of that that made whole swaths of the white population decide that we don't wanna invest in public life. We don't wanna invest in public life if we have to share it on an equal basis. This is powerful and important because we're fooling ourselves if we think that we can get to where we need to get to in the ways that can't describe without reckoning with this broader political infrastructure that surrounds so much of this. And so that's one of the things I'm writing about. So that's a tough thing to tackle. However, because you asked about areas of progress, we do happen to be in a unique moment in which we are being compelled to address some of our public failures, whether it's our public election system or public infrastructure is one of those examples which happens to be very much related to the issue that Kia was emphasizing about safe and healthy communities and about the schools themselves. When I heard during the course of the campaign and then immediately after the election that President Biden intended to make a big infrastructure push, I was very, very keen as were many others as you know, Linda, to make sure that there was an understanding that school infrastructure had to be a huge part of this. LDF, the Legal Defense Fund has been in litigation in Baltimore in a long standing case that we had to revive to simply address the need for equitable funding and operations. We have schools in Baltimore still to this day, it just happened a month ago, schools that close at 11 a.m. in the hot weather because they don't have air conditioning and they send the children home. So we have all these instructional days that are lost every year, my kids went to school in Baltimore, I had to come pick them up at 11. That was many, many years ago and it's still happening. We have schools where children are wearing coats because the heating doesn't work. We still have lead pipes running rampant throughout schools in Baltimore. So we have an infrastructure problem that's related to schools. We have an infrastructure problem that's related to education and teachers. In a place, again, I'll use the example of Baltimore where I'm sitting where you don't have a robust public transportation system that runs east-west through the black community in the city so that teachers have an easy opportunity to be able to get to schools across town that students have an opportunity to take advantage of those magnet programs that Kent was talking about. But fortunately we're in a moment where the secretary of education, the secretary of transportation, the secretary of housing all understand this connection. And infrastructure dollars are opportunistic dollars. They wait for a federal moment when you have an administration that's willing to put that money up and we have one now. And so we have a unique opportunity in the coming years because that money has already been allocated as this building begins to go forth to make sure that the conversation about education is integrated into it. The school should be the center of the community. And that means that the green dollars should affect the school building. That means that the green space should affect the area around the school that there should be ease of transportation that will allow people to get around the city and to these various schools. So I think we're in a moment where there are opportunities to up those investments in ways that maybe we haven't thought about in the past but that are powerful and compellingly important. And then lastly, I'll just say, I think we're seeing a progress around some of the school discipline work in terms of diversion programs and restorative justice. Many schools and teachers really reaching out for the resources to be able to do that. There was just consensus around a diversion program in Baltimore. This is very, very important to deal particularly with the racial disparities in school suspension and to address the criminalization of what the great playwright and performer Anna Devere Smith would say is the mischief of you, mischief when it's white children but criminal and misdemeanors when it's black children. So I'll stop there. Well, just on that point of the progress that's been made, we're about to issue a report that shows that the greater access to restorative practices students have, the higher achievement, the lower the gap, the reduced discipline, cases and better mental health. So all of these things that as we see them taking hold do make a difference and the American Rescue Plan Act did cut child poverty in half for a year. For a year. So we know what to do as you said but we gotta keep doing it. Gloria, I wanna turn to you. You've, I often quote you for the comment you once made that we're in a country that aggressively neglects its young and that has been the case. Sometimes you and I both were in the courthouse in Clarendon County for the recurrence of the school finance lawsuit in South Carolina that had been brought 50 years earlier under Brown to, you know, protest the disparities. But in part, some of those disparities dealt with the teacher, the disparities in access to qualified teachers and your work has been so important in articulating what it is that teachers need to know and be able to do to teach all children well. Talk to us a little bit about the implications for children of teachers who are well-prepared versus those who are not and how we make progress on that agenda for access to deeper learning. Well, thank you, Linda and Kia for this invitation and thank you for your wonderful book. And thank you for putting me on a panel with these brilliant colleagues. I can kind of skate now because they've actually done all the work. But I do wanna just say that, you know one of the things that I think happens in our thinking and I'm saying all of us end up doing this is we still keep looking at black and brown children as a problem. And I'm really hoping we can begin to see them often as the barometer. The things that happen in black and brown communities they're not gonna just stay there. They are the bellwether of what is coming down the road if we don't improve. So I remember 1970s the Moynihan report and it was this sort of, you know gloom and doom about the black family and the fact that 25% of these families were headed by females. Well, today, 25% of all American families are headed by single females. We were telling folks something then about if you don't have the economic and the community support, Sherlyn referenced this sort of disengagement with the public that is rampant. So I think that that's fundamental thing we have to look at is what are black and brown communities telling us about what's down the road? The secondly, I also wanna point out that we've made two promises in this nation regarding school and we've never fulfilled those two. The first one is around school desegregation. That's a promise, codified in our civil rights and our Supreme Court decision through Brown. The second one is about equitable funding. And I think if we don't do those two things almost everything that we try to do is tinkering because those are fundamental to the way in which schools operate. So given your question about underprepared and unprepared teachers, I actually did a little bit of research beforehand and found that there's a recent survey that suggests that 72% of newly graduated aspiring teachers say that they feel unprepared to work in an urban classroom. So we're not even talking about people who don't have preparation. These are people who have gone through preparation and they feel like they don't know what to do. That's to get into an urban classroom. Some 62% said that they feel unprepared to teach what they term culturally diverse students. So if we've got these large numbers of people who actually go through our programs and they feel like they can't do the work, can you imagine those people who we are in some ways just pulling off the street saying, well, were you a veteran? Do you have a degree in biology? We're doing these sort of stop gaps almost like mass units on a combat field. We know this is not the right way to go about educating all of our children. So to the extent that the teacher is that key and pivotal feature, what I call the point of service. I often talk with other folks in other professions and I say, when you think about being in the hospital as well equipped as your doctor is, you're not going to really see your doctor. Your doctor's coming maybe once a day if your issue was acute to just check and see how you did over through the night. But your point of service as the nurse will constantly be there. And so that level of care is what determines what your health is like. Similarly for the school classroom, it's the teacher. That person that is standing in front of your children that calls you and engages you is critical and yet we are seeing, we are in a period right now where there is a vilification and a demonization of the teacher unheard of. I want to even say in US history, in human history, all civilizations revere teachers. And yet we are telling these people that the work they do is not important, that the work they do is quote, indoctrination and that it is harming children. So I think we're in a very tough situation or in the profession. And I think once again, the group that suffers most from what we are doing tend to be the kids who are the most vulnerable, in this case, black and brown, kids of color, particularly those who are poor. Thank you. You know, both Kent and Sherylen have some ideas and work on this question of what teachers need to be able to know and be able to do. Kent, you were dean of a school of education working on this agenda for deeper learning in urban settings, Sherylen. You fought for this kind of teaching in place after place. And you have to have a sister who is a fabulous teacher of deeper learning whom I've seen in action. So I want to give you an opportunity to speak to this question as well. It's one that came up from many of our participants. And by the way, I'm on and off Zoom because of the video because my internet is unstable. So Kent, do you want to start on this? I guess I can do that. I actually made it to Atlanta for a meeting I have tomorrow. And I'm hanging out in an organization I used to run. And the one thing I gave them was a strong signal. So I'm here. I'm a recovering dean, still to say that. And the first thing I would say on the preparation front is in so far as urban preparation is concerned is you'd have to want to. And I'm not sure all institutions are warmed up to their focus on urban settings. Two, it helped if you had a faculty and a team that's intellectually curious about it because the interest in understanding what's going on and the desire to learn more about it, get to know the people who have the most at stake, I think finds its way quickly into the experience that candidates would have. I know I worked hard to increase that level of curiosity in engagement, nor can this happen without deep relations with schools and strategic connections to district. Or at least I'll say it's a whole lot of art, I think, to get this done well or get it done right, absent that. Because, of course, what we want, we do want really good theory. But we also want that stitched together with high quality experiences out in the field. And then there's the matter, Linda, of what we might want our teachers to know and be able to do. How students learn and develop within various social contexts. How we pursue our curricular goals with the social, and I would argue, democratic purposes of education in mind. Or the various ways in which teaching might be structured in light of what we want kids to be able to do, as engaged learners with agency and purpose. And ultimately, caring and committed people, living respectfully with others. So these are some of the things that I think it takes. I was going to speak to the matter of cultural and linguistic competence, but I realized I'm staring at Gloria. So I dare not go. Don't need to go more fully into that. But the last thing I'd say is that, to a point she made toward the end, we really do need to find a narrative in this country that's about supporting teachers, particularly those willing to take up an honest and accurate history of the nation. Help our students work with the facts and be able to sort out facts from fiction. And use what they know to really understand the world in which they live and give people the sense that it's their oyster and theirs to change and improve. I gave Barbara another link to a little op-ed. I wrote to simply try to get people to talk in terms of what we should be teaching, as opposed to arguing so much about what we shouldn't. Yeah. Sheryl, and we have one minute. I want to give you the last word if you'd like to take it. I'll take it. I'll take it. I'll take it to say once again to build on both Ken and Gloria and to just return to my earlier point. We are in actually an emergency, I think, and crisis around our democracy at large, but certainly around education. And that is because education is so critical to a functioning healthy democracy. We have been telling teachers what we think of them for many years. We have been telling them by the way we pay teachers. We have been telling teachers what we think of them by demanding that they stifle their own intellectual curiosity and their own growth and teach to the test. So we've been doing this for some time. I believe that the protests in 2018 and I think 2019 of teachers in places like Kentucky and Oklahoma and West Virginia were a turning point. There was a decision, I think, and an understanding that this was a potential mighty force for change. And so there has been an attack on teachers. Teachers are human beings, too. They are like everyone else. We see all this stuff about quiet quitting and people kind of rediscovering the balance they want in their lives because of COVID. Teachers are subject to that as well, and we shouldn't expect something differently of them than we expect of others. And so we should be talking about how we can support teachers given this reality. Then we have the fact that we threw teachers into Zoom teaching, into distance teaching without preparation, and that we are now back in the classroom and teachers are facing students, many of whom are in deep emotional and mental crisis. So this is an emergency. And that emergency now has been layered by the concerted politicization and attacks, even dangerous attacks on teaching and on teachers. And so once again, if we want to talk about teacher preparation, but leave aside the broader political context, we simply won't be able to do it. Yes, my sister, Dr. Olivia Lynch is an extraordinary educator. And one of the things she always taught me was that teachers have the right to learn, that teachers are not robots who stand in front of the class and hand out worksheets as you were suggesting, Linda, but they have the right to learn. And we're so far from that now because we don't even want teachers to be able to have the latitude, discretion and expansive ability to make decisions about the kinds of texts that they want to use in the classroom and the kinds of things they want to expose students to. And instead what we're creating is an atmosphere in which teachers are compelled in many jurisdictions to look over their shoulder and to worry about whether a student is going home and telling their parents that they're reading something inappropriate. I mean, these are the earmarks of authoritarian regimes. And unfortunately, the battleground is being fought on our education system. My daughter is a special education teacher and is deeply aware and deeply engaged with the needs of educators and children in this relationship, that the unique relationship of teacher and student. And that relationship is being a broken apart by this kind of political force that is attempting to come between the student and the teacher, that is attempting to come between the teacher and the administration, that is attempting to come between the teacher and that teacher's own instincts and knowledge about the way in which they wish to teach and collaborate. And so I think it's time for us to really lean in and understand that the battle that's being fought is part of this larger dynamic and will require us to speak very clearly and forthrightly about this danger that we're facing. Wow. We could go for another hour and our participants are sending notes saying that many of us would like us to do that, but we're not going to. We're going to have to close this out. We'll resume this conversation in future webinars. There's so much to talk about. There's also an enormous amount of progress going on from all of the hard working and committed both parents and educators and civil rights activists in the field to get us to the place where deeper learning is the reality for all of our children. So we thank everyone who came. We thank you for these brilliant comments and we look forward to continuing the conversation.