 My name is Dr. Connor Williams. I'm a senior researcher here in New America's education policy program. This is New America's third event in our series on systemic racial injustice in the United States. We're calling the series Moment to Movement. And the hashtag, if you're posting to social media on that, about this is just that. It's Moment to Movement, except a two, the numeral two, rather than TO to save you a character. So while you have your phones on your minds, also please mute them. We'd like no interruptions for this event. So today's event features a discussion of how systemic racism in the United States permeates the education system. This is an area of intense interest for those of us working here on New America's education team and really throughout New America, which is why I want to call out the work specifically of my colleagues, Shayna Cook and Kirsten Holtz, who really made this event happen. As a former first grade teacher whose students were uniformly all of them, students of color, children of color, people of color, this is an issue that I care about deeply, but I have only very brief introductory remarks for you. Because many years ago, when I was a freshman at Bowdoin College, which by the way, most of you, if any of you even have heard of it, you'll know it as the alma mater of Doree McKesson as well, one of the leading protestors, one of the leading curators and advocates who was in Ferguson, he's now in Baltimore and he's been in New York and many other places as well. But when I was at Bowdoin College, I joined the school's African-American society because I thought it was a simple decision. I knew myself to be a lover of diversity, a hater of racism, a progressive who cared about issues related to race. But I soon discovered that that sort of earnest enthusiasm had serious limitations, right? That my own racial privilege made it extremely difficult for me to understand how to be the right kind of ally for my classmates. Thinking I understood did not mean actually understanding their experiences with racism educational or otherwise. So because of that chastening experience, I'm far from knowing the answer to how to be the right ally so far. I've learned that privileged white men who want to support the cause of racial injustice rather than the United States should always do more listening than speaking. So I'm eager to introduce our conversation partners here today and we have limited time so excuse me if I'm very brief. You have each speaker's bio in your event materials and you should be able to look that up if you'd like. On today's panel we have Howard University Professor Dr. Bahia Muhammad, DC Trust Executive Director Ed Davies, New York City Educator and Author Jose Vilsen and the Advancement Projects Thomas Mariadisen. Nicole Hannah Jones from the New York Times will be our moderator but before we launch into the panel I'd like to introduce Howard University's Jamisha Morgan to give some introductory remarks. Jamisha is a graduating senior, tomorrow graduating senior at Howard University and she's been an on-campus leader as well as an advocate for criminal justice and for prisoner reform in the United States. Please join me in welcoming Jamisha to the podium. Thank you all. I'm definitely, definitely excited to graduate from Howard University tomorrow. I am a graduating senior receiving a Bachelor of Science in Psychology as well as a Bachelor of Arts in Administration of Justice from Howard University. I will be pursuing my Juris Doctorate at the University of Southern California in August so thank you all again for having me and I'll actually be introducing each speaker individually. So we have again Dr. Bahia Muhammad who is the Assistant Professor of Criminology at Howard University. Dr. Bahia Muhammad received her BS in Administration of Justice from Rutgers University, New Brunswick Campus with a minor in Psychology and a Criminology Certificate. Dr. Muhammad became a Ronald E. McNar Scholar and Minority Academic Career Program undergraduate research fellow. She also spent a semester as a research intern at the University of Natal located in South Africa where she interviewed natives on their attitudes towards justice, towards the criminal justice system. Dr. Muhammad went on to receive her MS in Criminal Justice from John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York City. As a graduate she presented research findings at numerous professional conferences such as those held by the Academy of Criminal Justice Science, American Society of Criminology, Sisters of the Academy and the American Correction Association. Dr. Muhammad received her PhD from Rutgers University School of Criminal Justice where she specialized in families and communities affected by mass incarceration. Her particular area of expertise rests in the lived experiences of children of incarcerated parents. Dr. Muhammad has spent the last decades of her criminal justice career conducting ethnographic work about children ages 7 to 18 living in urban communities throughout New Jersey who have experienced the loss of one or both of their parents to the prison system. Introducing Dr. Bahia Muhammad. An honor and a privilege to be here with you guys today. This is definitely a major conversation that is happening all around the nation. I come to you from doing a presentation for the New Jersey Education Association where we were looking at the human rights of children of incarcerated parents and how can we make the school systems a better place to end the school to prison pipeline. And so a lot of the things that that discussion revolved around are some of the things I will share with you today. A lot of the parents who are residing in these low income areas feel that there is no hope in terms of the things that they can provide for their particular children. And so out of that workshop we came up with some things that individuals can do within their own communities to be able to help children as they navigate through the school systems. One of these things are definitely connected and affected to this idea of fear. A lot of the teachers are discussed in small focus groups that they had a fear of the students that they were to report in each day and teach. And these are non minority teachers who are discussing and disclosing in private focus groups that they are fearful of the students because of the lack of coherence to school regulations and through policies. And it really affects the day to day inside of the classroom. So one of the things that we've been trying to manage is this idea of fear. How do you continue to go in and be an esteemed teacher and help individuals in order to pass through a system that you're afraid of? Some of the things that we discussed and that we've been implementing most recently in a school district in New York is to have panels of students and teachers where we create safe spaces for individuals to have this conversation. When we talk to young individuals who are in these particular school systems they have no idea that their teachers are fearful of them. They're not looking at the other individual or the person on the short end of the stick. So they're not looking at the individual that they threw the chalk at. They're not looking at the individual that they blew spit balls to. And so one of the things that we started to create was this idea to have students and teachers have an open conversation about the realities of what they're experiencing. We found that immediately following these sessions that it allowed the students to see their teachers as human beings and vice versa. It allowed the teachers to also come into class with a better attitude toward trying to achieve the goal of success. Another thing that we've identified in some of these working groups are that a lot of the research that's out there on populations that we're talking about specifically affected by the school-to-prison pipeline. There are negative things that are dictated in the research. Mine specifically focuses on children of incarcerated parents. And we know all of the negative aspects that children are faced when they have an incarcerated parent. And right now they're saying that these individuals have a greater likelihood of spending time in prison just because they were born to these criminogenic parents. And so my research, far from the tree, is identifying some of the success stories. Some of those children who have managed to navigate through the system. Some of them are graduating from Princeton. Some of my sample are coming directly from my university at Howard University, as well as Harvard. And they talk about these relationships that go against what the data says. But for me, I think the biggest takeaway that we need to grapple with and start to really look at, honestly, is this idea that the research is governing a lot of what we think. And it governs the rhetoric, the language that we have in order to talk about it. So if we start from a negative place and we don't have any of the positive, we'll never be able to kind of walk down the middle. Okay, I think I am supposed to get started on, you know, right? Okay, so we don't have a lot of time. We have a lot of questions. And I want to make sure that the audience also has a chance to answer questions. So I'm going to moderate. You see me give a little signal? Wrap it up. I'm not being rude. I was trying to do my job. So we're going to start off the concept of school-to-prison pipeline, sometimes called the schoolhouse, the jailhouse pipeline. Thanks to the work of a lot of advocates and researchers, has really entered the national lexicon. But I wonder if we might start with a definition for people in the audience. And anyone or a couple of you can take this up. But what exactly are we talking about when we say the school-to-prison pipeline? And when did this become a noted phenomenon? Ed, would you like to share? Well, actually, I would turn it to Thomas, because this is probably more of your area of mind. Sure. So I work for a place called the Advancement Project. And I'm a staff attorney in our schoolhouse-to-jailhouse-track program. So we've been working on school-to-prison pipeline issues for almost since we've been around, for which it's about 15 years. And so our understanding of what the school-to-prison pipeline is is that it's a combination of things, right? It's a combination of both policies and practices that really are structured towards, in a very racially biased way, taking kids, deprioritizing education for students of color and criminalizing the behavior of students of color in such a way as to lead them down the pathway towards system involvement, criminal justice involvement, incarceration. And that's a very brief one. I can go a little more in-depth, but if you wanted to. I think that's good. So when did this become noted kind of as a growing phenomenon? Sorry. Go ahead. Go ahead. Actually, the way you phrased the question is actually interesting to me because it seems like what became a noted phenomenon is really what I would just call a fad. Because if you ask too many young people and generations of young people who've been affected by this, they'll tell you throughout history, this has been the way things have been. And it's only now that we're actually turning an eye to it and sort of commoditize it as something sexy, something that we can talk about in public discourse, even though it's something that's been affecting people of color for a while. I imagine part of that has to do with two things. One, we have Columbine happens, right? And so I know a lot of people kind of trace the involvement of policing in schools and zero tolerance to this moment when we have started to have school shootings. But also collection of data, which we didn't have before either, so while we knew it was happening, we couldn't quantify it. So I wonder if you guys could talk about kind of the role that Columbine and school shootings did play in starting to see at least an increase in law enforcement in schools and the impact of that. I was just going to say, I don't think that's been that change, that the phenomenon hasn't really changed for urban settings or in places where there are black youth. So I grew up in the public school system and there was always a story about some student getting shot up for their pair of J's, their Jordans or whatever have you. And of course, police had to come in and as, you know, I guess Columbine for us made it, I guess, national because it was a different set of students. So for me, when I looked at it, I said, okay, well, now it's going to become a national story because the students look different. Whereas with the public schools that I frequented or I passed by, there was always a situation. There was always police hovering around and there were always police precinct being commissioned right to our public schools. And especially the ones that I guess people would call failing if you will. Yeah, and I think, I mean, Columbine definitely triggered, you know, a tremendous amount of funding from the federal and state level towards, you know, implementing cops in schools. You know, I think at some point, the federal government was giving about 180 million for cops in schools every year, metal detectors. And I guess the sad, tragic, infuriating irony is that, you know, to this day, Columbine doesn't have metal detectors, but, you know, we've seen the rapid militarization of, you know, these schools in all of our urban areas where there are concentrations of students of color. And I think to add to that, you know, I think even though the discourse around school to prison pipeline has like improved in the sense that like we're talking about it, we have a panel right now about it. It's in the discourse, it's in the language. There are things that have continued to ramp up the militarization of schools. So Newtown, you know, the Newtown shooting also injected some more federal and state funding into securitizing schools. And then, you know, something as crazy as this 1033 program, which we found about during Ferguson where military surplus equipment was going to not just the school police, to police departments, but to, you know, Los Angeles LA Unified School District didn't just get, you know, some guns. They got 61 rifles, grenade launchers and a, you know, mine-proof vehicle, you know. And they returned the grenade launchers because that was like really bad, but they kept the mine-proof vehicle. So I didn't know Cherry Bombs could like, you know, were that serious, but, you know. So we've seen that this is like an ongoing issue that has yet to be rectified and that, you know, the funding at the state and federal level is continuing to keep us in this militarized position. So I think, I mean, I think irony is a great word because when we look at, particularly with funding and we know how funding works with law enforcement, you have to show that you have a problem and that's how you get more funding. And so you have law enforcement that writes grants saying we have these concerns, we have these security concerns and that's how money is supported in schools, is that the policies and the funding were designed to deal with crimes committed largely by white males. But of course, the irony then is that the implementation has disproportionately impacted black males and also brown youth as well. So we know that black students are suspended and expelled at three times the rate of white students. I wonder, Ed, if you can talk about kind of the relationship between the rise of zero tolerance and kind of this, I think disproportionate discipline has always been a problem in black schools, but there's definitely been a ratcheting up and more police presence in schools. I don't think it's not a coincidence that has led to more arrests in schools. So can you talk a little bit about the correlation between those two? Yeah, well the correlation certainly exists in terms of the changes in policies where in efforts as we went to this high stakes testing and ways of needing to control classrooms to maximize test results, we need to weed out the bad seeds. And so a lot of zero tolerance policies were implemented as we began to ramp up with police presence in schools and that widened the pipeline, the school to prison pipeline so that more young people went through it faster. And the issue is we are trying to address through juvenile justice education issues and the problems that exist in how we educate our kids, how we view our kids and the dehumanization of young people so that it's easier to just pluck them out and put them on a path that leads to nowhere for them versus doing the hard work in terms of how we better educate kids. And so it's like we're taking a sledgehammer to a problem that requires a feather. So it's starting very young. I think one of the most starting statistics probably for most of us that came out of the Office of Civil Rights data was about preschoolers, right? So one, what was shocking to me was that we were actually suspending and expelling three and four year olds, which I think most of us probably didn't even know that was happening. But then two, that half of those preschool students who are suspended and expelled for at least one day are black. So that criminalization of our youth are starting really with toddlers and young children. So I wonder if Jose and Dr. Muhammad, if you can speak about kind of your reaction to those stats, learning these large numbers of very young children who are already being suspended and expelled and kind of what that, how that kind of gets a ball rolling for them down the line when already at that age they're being put out of school. Mr. Sure. I'm particularly interested in your perspective as a teacher in the classroom. There's two elements I always talk about when I come into these panels. One is that there's this big idea about this teach like a champion thing, which I'm sure some of you have heard about. There's this idea that if you just get kids to do exactly what you say at exactly the right time, then you will get them to learn very, very well via test score. The issue with that is people have exacerbated it to the point where every little move you make or not make becomes an issue of criminality. So you can get suspended for having the wrong dress code for having the wrong reaction to a teacher for the slightest infractions. And we're seeing this and of course people always say, oh, well it looks like it's happening in Mississippi. It's happening in Arkansas. And I'm like, no, it's happening in New York City. It's happening in all the places we call liberal because people want to focus on the idea that you can get black kids to behave very, very well as long as they, well, in some cases they even pee on themselves to try to stay in school. And yet that's permissible insofar as they follow the regulations to a T. And there's a second element too when we talk about, for instance, hiring teachers of color. This is the idea that if you just hire enough then you'll fix a lot of the problems. Yet and still, what a lot of people see when they see a teacher of color, a principal of color, whoever may have you, a small side effect which you need to talk about more often is this idea that when you put a teacher of color, specifically a male teacher of color, they're not there as an educator but as an overseer. And that's the other part too that we need to grapple with. How do we get the people who are activating from the community to not be overseers but to be activated within community and be part of engaging better people, not just better kids, not just better students, whatever, better people to build them, I mold them in a 360 sort of model all the way through. And that's something that I always consider, I think about when I hear about preschoolers getting arrested even. Like I've seen that before and I'm just like, I'm horrified. You just strip the joy out of this child because you wanted better test scores or you just wanted to make sure that you had a zero-tile policy and you wanted to have an example. Yet and still, the examples end up being children of color, specifically girls. It's a higher rate now than boys. It's like a faster rate with bad girls rising and we need to have that conversation more often than not. For me, that statistic wasn't really that surprising. If you look at it from a criminological perspective, the super predator myth, when you teach juvenile delinquency is one of the first things you start with. It was a criminal justice professor who basically dictated and argued through writing and it was well publicized that the next generation of youth are going to be more bloody, more nasty, not care about anybody than any of the individuals we incarcerated. And so it guarded a whole lot of fear in so many different individuals. In that same year, you had the No Child Left Behind Act that was passed. And so at that same time, you also throw into the pool prison privatization and you started to see from research data that a lot of the healthcare that was being provided to correctional institutions were for younger individuals. And so it only makes sense to start incarcerating individuals at a younger age because to outsource, to get healthcare, they need to be younger. Health industries are not giving services to prisons in order to care for the inmates who are incarcerated unless they're 13, unless they're 12 or unless they're 10. And you started to see a lot of the rules and regulations and laws that govern society going to that direction as well. Also, a lot of the prison beds are built in advance. And so if the fourth grade reading levels for children are low, they are building prison beds or deciding the number of beds they're building. And so it only makes sense strategically that they have a pipeline. You go in from pre-K, a lot of parents nowadays want that time off. So they're giving their children away to these school districts and kind of turning a blind eye. And then they navigate them right into the prison system. It's a million dollar industry. And of course, it takes a lot of thought and regulation. And you have to look at so many different components in order to really see how much of a beast it is. They're really two sides to this. There's the disproportionate discipline that's needed out within school districts, suspensions, expulsions, which we know then leads to students who can at least afford to miss school, missing school, and kind of the snowball effect. But then there's also kind of the aggressive involvement of law enforcement in schools. So I wonder if you guys can talk about some of the things that students are actually being arrested for these days. And not things that one would think, maybe like physical violence, but there's a laundry list of things that students are being charged with, sometimes even with felonies. And I wonder if you guys can talk about some of those things that we wouldn't expect. Yeah, so I mean, I have a few examples. Unfortunately, of all of them, most of them are in Florida. So, you know, Advancement Project works a lot in Florida, but also I think in terms of some of the examples that I was talking about before that they have all, a lot of the public examples have been girls of color, black girls who have been arrested, and they've been some sort of sensational cases. So, you know, in 2005, there was the case of Jayisha Scott. And she was, you know, she went into school, into her kindergarten class, she was five years old, and she was just having a bad day. And so she tore some papers from the bulletin board. She climbed on a table. She allegedly hit an assistant principal during the tantrum, but you know, keep in mind this is a five year old young girl. And instead of using common sense, the school called the police and not just one, but three police officers came and arrested and cuffed her. And, you know, this sort of made national headlines and it was a big, you know, scandal. Then there's the case of Kiera Wilmot, who is in Polk County, Florida. Two years ago, she was a high school student. She was 16 years old. She was conducting a science experiment that caused a small explosion and the kind of stuff that you would see on like leave it to beaver, you know, like they do an experiment, the experiment goes wrong, the volcano explodes, and it emitted some smoke. And no one was hurt, no property damage. She was, had good grades and perfect behavior. She was expelled. She was forced to complete her degree through the expulsion program. And she was arrested for possession of a weapon and discharging a destructive device. So these are just like a couple examples. I mean, there have been, you know, recent cases in just in the last couple of months of other incidents of police brutality against students. So we're not only talking about students who are getting arrested, we're talking about incidents of brutality against students. And these are, this is obviously only the tip of the iceberg for what we think is actually going on. And part of this problem is really it's twofold. One, it's like the fact that we do have like a police presence in schools and that police officers are, you know, trained to deal with crime, not to deal with, you know, adolescent or in this case, you know, toddler behavior, you know, two-year-old, three-year-old, five-year-old behavior and, you know, kindergarten behavior. And I think the other aspect of it is that we've seen an overreliance now from teachers on going to school resource officers or to police when they're, you know, not able to manage the classroom. And so I think there's become, as I think Ed was saying before, this blurred line between classroom management and like adolescent behavior and criminal behavior to the point where it's not just the presence of police officers, it's not just the arrests, but it's also the school codes themselves contain, you know, statutory language that sounds in criminal justice law. It says, you know, there are assault and battery categories, you know. And so fighting is no longer fighting anymore. Tantrums are no longer tantrums anymore. It's now become probable cause for arrest. Do you wanna add to that? Yeah, I was gonna add to that. Everything you said is exactly right. And I think part of my concern is that if we put too much focus on the policies that need to change, whether they're suspension policies, expulsion policies, the policies that regulate how police or school resource officers act in school, this cycle will just continue because, again, what we're really dealing with is how adults interact with young people and that's where it starts. It starts with the human interactions between two people and we all, you know, we learn that I'm a parent of four and I remember my mom telling me that, you know, parenting doesn't come with a handbook and it doesn't and you learn on the fly about how to raise a kid, how to change a diaper at three o'clock in the morning feedings, but lo and behold, we do have handbooks that teach adults how to better engage and interact with young people through a positive youth development approach and those are the type of things that are needed, whether they're teachers, whether they're school resource officers or others in making decisions about how we deal with young people and that's where we're woefully under-resourced, woefully not focusing and missing the mark in terms of how are we educating young people and as he said, it's not just about the classroom education, it's also about the human development of that young person and that's what really needs to happen to mitigate a lot of these issues and it's focusing on having better interactions and tied to that, if we're looking at the school, the prison pipeline, and it's this long continuum, one of the things that we have to address is where does it really start? In some places, we can start with the police, we can start with expulsion policies, but we can also start with the fact that we have an overrepresentation of students who are designated as special ed who are expelled or suspended and part of that is the misdiagnosis of them needing an IEP or individual education plan, it's been a long day, I'm sorry, but the need for that because we categorize discipline issues as a special ed case and so we don't treat those young people as folks who are just on the developmental continuum may need a little extra support or may need not only a caring adult but a capable adult in their life, someone who's capable of helping them manage and deal with those natural growing pains that all of us go through rather than just sticking them in special ed and then that opens the door, that's a fast lane, that's like the toll-free highway into the school-to-prison pipeline. So let's talk about the role of race, right? Because what we do know is that these most egregious cases, five-year-olds being shackled, which we just read about last week, they're not typically happening to white children. Not that it never happens, but it's not typical. So January of last year, the Office of Civil Rights at the Department of Education issued a dear colleague letter to school districts across the nation laying out these statistics of the disproportionate discipline of black and Latino students and warning them that the research suggests the substantial racial disparities are not explained just by black and brown kids are behaving worse than other students. And then just last month, researchers at Stanford found that teachers were more likely to believe that black students who were misbehaving needed more severe discipline than white students with similar behaviors. So you kind of have the sociological research that is backing up what the data is showing us. So let's talk about the role of race and the role that race is playing and our inability to kind of deal with that. That's so much a discipline is whether I view your behavior as normal or whether I view your behavior as dangerous. I think it's interesting, as I was reading and preparing for this panel discussion, I thought a lot about how we utilize this idea that going to prison is the rights of passage. And so you have so many individuals, regardless of color, who are dictating and using this kind of rhetoric in order to describe what the experience of incarceration is. And of course, that does not match with prisonization and what really happens there. But you have some individuals who really think that prison is the place for young black, violent, animalistic individuals to go in order to become parents. That's really what rights of passage is, if you look at it from an African-American perspective or minority perspective. And so individuals are really throwing away the key and saying, the research shows that there's a greater likelihood that they're gonna end up there anyway. So why not get the police to come into the school, shackle them and just take them away and make everybody's life easy? So I think it really, really starts with this idea of rhetoric and language. We don't have that language. And in the black communities, the families are not talking about it. Children are being suspended, they're being shackled down, but these discussions are not happening at the kitchen table. Sometimes there's no kitchen table. And so we fall back on the language of other individuals, which are the individuals who are shackling these families and communities. And we all kind of wrap it up to say, it's the rights of passage and it's not. It is not. Because I think that's a very good point. And when you consider, this is cultural and historical irony for African-Americans and tied to our lineage as Africans, where the culture for most African communities was for the young men to go off at a certain age, usually around 12 or 13, as a right of passage to learn to become a man. And many people talk today that that's disappeared, that no longer happens. I posit that it happens and it happens in our school-to-prison pipeline. That that's where majority of our African-American males are going to learn to become a man, whatever that is. And usually not a good lesson or a positive lesson. And so it just speaks to, and we've had the article that it came out, I think last week about 1.5 million men missing. And it's not just about what's missing is what the impact is. And when those young men do re-emerge, those who aren't dead, it's re-emerging in a way that is undermining our society and the things that we want for our society, but not necessarily through, totally through their fault. It's the construct that we've created and we in passing on and bastardizing this legacy of what a right of passage is for an African-American male in this country. Yeah, I'd like to go to you because I think when you talked about the irony that Columbine does not have metal detectors, right? And who we're seeing as, again, what behavior we're judging as criminal and what behavior we're not, depending on what that child looks like. Yeah, and I think as everybody's speaking, I'm sort of thinking about a sort of critical race theory analysis of this, like a structural determinism and how that plays into what's going on. Yeah, well, just in terms of like, on one hand, I think the way that we interact with students is very important, right? Like the behavior is the fact that we're criminalizing all these things, implicit bias. These are important aspects, undeniably, but there is also a little bit of this, if you step back just far enough, you can see that the system is working actually, right? Like that it's not just, and I think the way in which that becomes crystal clear is I was actually just in, in Boca Raton, Florida, a couple days ago at a prison divestment conference, right? And we were doing an action in front of, with some community organizers in front of GeoGroup, which is the second largest private prison operator in the country, or if not the world, and billions of dollars flowing into GeoGroup. And the profit-making model is off of black bodies and black suffering, right? Like we're not talking about just the prison beds that are assessed and counted based on test scores that are happening at the lower level, but we're also talking about the infrastructure that for companies like Taser, which is not only providing law enforcement with the Taser equipment, but also with the cameras, right? Like there's a, the School to Prison pipeline that describes a profit-making industry mechanism that is, that's very, that's really vast. And so, I think when we're thinking about strategies on how to counteract this and to change that, I think we have to really vision, and I think we have to be very aggressive in thinking about alternatives, right? And thinking about what real reform and transformation means, and that's why I think for, at least for advancement, like the key, the way in which we've seen the greatest advancement and progress on this issue has really been when community organizing is at the center of it. So if you look at Denver Public Schools and Paderasee Hovenes, which has done a lot of work around changing the code of conduct, changing the intergovernmental agreement with police. If you look at PowerU in Miami, which has done a lot of work around putting restorative justice into schools, all of those are based on community organizing. And as Jose was saying, like what's one of the things that's primary to that is the storytelling that's allowed. Community organizing allows for us to move beyond the data and to allow the community actually to tell their stories. And I think that's where we get better crafting of policy, better crafting of alternatives and solutions. I wonder if you might talk about this as a classroom teacher, because a large part of the disconnect is when a kid who looks like you acts up, throws blocks at you, which is one of the things that a child has been arrested for, which is throwing blocks. If you see that child as like your own child or other children you know, then you just say, oh, he's just acting up. But if you see them as fitting a larger pattern of misbehavior, then you say that child is being aggressive and dangerous. And I wonder if you can talk about kind of not just from your own experience, but seeing how other teachers who are not black or brown are interacting with students and how race plays a role? Let me start off by saying that prison is not justice. I think that's something else that seems to be underbending a lot of what we're talking about. A lot of my students have known family members who have gone to prison for whatever different reason. And I think these are the things that I think are kind of undergirding what's happening here is that prison is a possibility for a lot of our kids. And it's a viable possibility because they've seen their own family members do so. So when people always say, oh, well, you can have a mentor that's a lawyer, that's a doctor, well, some of our kids see prison as a viable pathway. So that's number one. Number two, I'm fairly proud to say that in my own classroom, I rarely, if ever, find a way to get my students into the dean's office. I generally handle it myself. And the reason I do it is because I rather just build a relationship with my student. And if they find themselves needing a time out, I mean, by all means, but I think there's something to be said for me looking at my student as one of my own, as somebody who I've gone through that struggle with versus saying those kids, those animals, look at the way that they're behaving. How dare they? And that seems to be permeate with a lot of, frankly, a lot of my colleagues, a lot of the discussions that I see Sabrina Stevens in the back, a lot of the discussions we have on Twitter around education, for instance, is about pushing our own white colleagues and frankly, our non-white colleagues to reconsider the way that they talk about discipline within schools. We can't always say, oh, look, those children, their parents never come and look at all this, look at all that. And it's always a pathological issue with the way that we look at black kids versus saying, well, you know what, those are our kids and we need to find a way to embrace them in this community. And these are the things that we need to keep cycling back around to because unfortunately, we don't get enough stories coming out of the classroom saying, hey, listen, those kids are our kids too. With the population right now of our teaching core, if I'm not mistaken, is around 83% white. It's about 17% of color. There's about 3% male teachers of color, the rest women of color. And then you mix that with the fact that, and I think this was the last study I was done by a couple of researchers out of Harvard that suggested that black women have the best relationship out of any sort of race and gender mix out of any sort of teacher that we have. Yet and still, the worst relationship happens to be black men with black boys. And again, that's that pathological issue that we keep discussing. It's not just happening with our white teachers. And of course, I always push the cultural competence issue with our teachers, but it's also happening within our communities as well and how we look at kids as apart from us because we've already graduated, we've already passed that. And that's something we can't have anymore. So Tom, you already touched on this a little bit, but the school to prison pipeline is often framed as a problem plaguing black boys. But we know the black girls are more likely to face suspension or expulsion than any other race or ethnic group of girls. And also the only group that is more likely to face expulsion and suspension than black girls are black boys. So they're also more likely to be suspended or expelled than boys of other races. And in recent studies show that dark skin black girls face actually higher rates and worse discipline than light skin black girls. So I wonder if we can talk about the challenges of addressing an issue when implicit bias is running so deep. So outside of just racial discrimination, we also are having colorism discrimination where darker children are being punished more harshly than lighter ones. Well, as a dark skin young man. No, it is very interesting how even culturally within African American community, shades of blackness has always been a contentious issue at times. So in the sea that play out, I think it goes a lot to what Jose was saying. It really comes down to how we view, view our young people, view our students in school that if we can make a decision based on just a hue of someone's skin, even within an ethnicity, it just tells us how far removed we are from actually seeing young people, youth as being humans versus the demons that like culturally we've assigned to everything black in this world. And historically, you know, black has always been seen. I mean, even the terms that come out of Latin for things that are black have always been associated with negative things. And so that's a lot to overcome that's been built into our historical psyche around light as bright and dark is just something very terrible that we have to contain, corral and push away. And when you apply that to young women and you see that it also just sort of goes against our construct of what we view women, our social construct of women as docile creatures or, you know, individuals. And then we see the raging black woman, especially if she's darker skin, and then that even makes it more of an issue for us that we have to do something about. And that's why I think, in part, why those rates are going up for black women. But when we're dealing with a bias that is so ingrained in our culture, which is not just race, but colorism, how then is it possible to address something so deeply seated, not just among white teachers or non-black teachers, but among black educators as well? It seems like that is a very difficult thing to overcome. Change of the human condition. I mean, that's the long work. I mean, that's what it takes. It takes changing our personal orientation to the world and to those in the world. It takes changing our personal orientation, our personal will to do things differently based on seeing things differently. And that's what, going back to what I said earlier about policies and the impact. One, yes, it takes a lot of political will to change a policy, but it takes a lot of personal will to enact a policy in the way that's fair and just across the board. And what we're dealing with on a day-to-day basis, it's not the policy that is necessary to leading the school career prison pipeline. It's the people who are enforcing those policies and their interpretation of actions and their interpretation of the policies. And so the work really has to start with how do we change people's minds? How do we change their hearts around their own personal orientation and how they view the students who are in front of them? Anyone else want to just? I think in terms of that discussion that you need to, it has to start with self-love. You have to have those conversations and we shy away from those, you know, soft on-crime type of things because that's not the culture that we live in. But ultimately, you have to learn to love yourself because I've spoken with students who feel, light-skinned students who feel that they don't wanna be that black girl that got pushed down. And they feel that that happened because of her skin color. They don't connect that to policy. So because we're not having these conversations within our communities, we could never get to the bottom of it, but also there's a lot of hurt and frustration that's embedded in those. And so I think it'll start by having these same type of conversations in schools, in communities at the bottom of housing projects where they have family success centers. And for us to really learn what that language sounds like. What does it feel like? What are those stories? There's so much power in that. And when you're able to identify your own story, it's empowering. I think it ties directly into post-traumatic slave syndrome which really looks at this idea of how minority communities are also contributing to this idea of the years of enslavement. And back then, you know, if you're light-skinned and you're inside of the slave master's house, you're considered to be better than. And so you're starting to see a lot of those different things play themselves out in policies, but because we're not talking, we're still looking on an individual level. And I think, which is with Dad, one small thing to that, I think that when Dr. Hahn's talking about, like, you know, the storytelling, I actually think that we also need to fight to make spaces for young girls to tell these stories in their schools. You know, like, because it's important not only for young girls to feel like they have a safe space to do that, but also that their educators and that other folks understand their stories and get to understand and appreciate what those struggles are in order for them to understand how their actions are impacting young girls, especially young black girls. I mean, it seems like there's an internal conversation that black folks have to have amongst themselves, but there's also the external conversation because all of the self-love in the world is not gonna stop a teacher from seeing a dark-skinned child as being more violent, more prone to discipline problems. So I wonder, when we're looking at that, how do we have those conversations as soon as we start to talk about race, as soon as we start to talk about why discipline falls more harshly on some students than others, then individual teachers, right, then get defensive as all of us would. I'm not racist, I don't see my students differently than anyone else. If they acted right, I wouldn't do anything. How do we then, and these are some of the conversations, obviously, that you guys try to have all the time. And as I see you having the conversations on Twitter seems like it's a tough road to hold to get teachers to recognize this bias, which isn't about saying I hate certain students, but that we live in a country that was bred out of a racial caste system, and then that leaks into the classroom. So how do you change that? It's gotta be a multifaceted approach. I often find myself saying, okay, at some point I've gotta call you racist, right, because you totally said that, and I can't believe you did that. That's my strategy. Yeah, that tends to be like that last boom though. Right before I'm like, okay, I'm just gonna throw away Twitter, I'm done. But I always start with questions, with a set of questions, and usually they go from the very large macro, so it doesn't feel as personal. So let's talk about institutional racism. Let's talk about the disparities in funding for our kids. Let's talk about the inequitable policies and the way that we look at school to prison. And these are conversations I've had not just with individual teachers, but with education leaders even. And I'm not gonna go too far. I don't know how affiliated y'all are. But I will say that when I have these conversations with folks, it's always like, wow, I really didn't think of that. Yes, that's called privilege. Now, if we can have that conversation more thoroughly, then it becomes all right. Now, look at this personally. How did you react to this student? And why did you react the way that you did? And then we could start building from there. And maybe it's so funny too, a lot of our schools have people right within the building who every child of color runs to. Yet we never tap into that because we're so afraid to find out that in fact, we may have this implicit or explicit bias about ourselves. So oftentimes the kids say, oh, you know, I'm gonna run to you whenever I have a problem. Like don't run to me, just deal with the person. But you know, you kind of get it. You gotta, how do you know that I get it? All right, because of the color of my skin. Okay, so we can talk about that. But then it's also like, all right, I'm not just gonna have this conversation with you. I need to have the conversation with my fellow colleagues and I gotta haul them around. And we gotta have the conversation about why it is that this child gravitates more towards me than less towards you and build from there. These are things that I constantly, I'm still struggling with as one of the teachers of color who gets it, but at the same time, how do we have that in across America in all types of schools and have conversations that will be safe so everyone can feel safe to struggle and deal with the biases that they inherently have and yet keep moving in a way that not just helps themselves internally, but then with their own kids. These are conversations we need to keep pushing as well. We need to, I need that. Oh, I was gonna mention that one of the strategies that I've done at the university is that I teach my criminal justice classes in a prison. Half of the individuals are incarcerated and the other half are university students. When I took my students to live at a prison for seven days, it was in West Virginia where 69% of the population were white. The rest of the population, 2% African American. And so I was bringing Howard University students there. There were discussions on school to prison pipeline sort of things and the white officers in the room felt uneasy by the conversation. And so we put them into the circle. We actually had another circle and it was amazing how some of the officers mentioned that all they could hear was police brutality. They didn't hear anything else that we were talking about in terms of treating arrested individuals during a parent's arrest in a just way because they were carrying things that were hurtful for them that they had gone through. And as students, they were looking at Baltimore. They were looking at Ferguson and so they were speaking from that angle and it allowed us to kind of have that conversation and have that aha moment. And really, everybody kind of wants to be heard and maybe share this information but we also have that fear of wow, I wonder if I'm going to be seen in this kind of way. And so we really do shy away from safe spaces. We shy away from changing the narrative. But these are things that definitely have a major and immediate effect. It's just like in the classroom when you give that information, the students may not receive it immediately but later on down the line, it's already stuck in their brains. But because we are not talking, we can only go off of the language of the land. So I just have one more question and then I'm going to open it up to the audience. It'll leave you guys about a half hour or so. So my last question has to do with kind of where do we go from here? And I know that I'm an investigative reporter and so I never write hopeful things. And people always want, whenever I get to talk, they always want to hear what can be done because who wants to sit and talk about an issue that's so entrenched we can't do anything about it. So I know in last year when the Office of Civil Rights issued that dear colleague letter, one of the things that they said was that these racial disparities in student discipline may actually violate Title VI of the Civil Rights Act that just having a disparity is not automatically a violation but you have to be able to justify why this disparity is happening. And so I'm wondering, one, are we seeing any more aggressive efforts at the federal, state, or local level that are coming from government? And then how is that working or not working with grassroots efforts from organizers and activists to kind of transform this system? And any of you who want to speak on that? Well, I know it. I'm told you should never ask compound questions. So let's start with the first one. Are we seeing anything coming from government that gives us hope? And then we'll go to the next one, which is grassroots. Well, if you look at the president's My Brother's Keeper initiative and what in the report that came out of that task force in addressing disproportionate suspensions and expulsions in guidelines for doing that are one of the recommendations in that, that I think there are 72 MBK challenged communities across the country, which are cities or municipalities who've signed on to develop action plans based on those recommendations. So that's one driver that has gotten the conversation, continued the conversation around how do we address the school to prison pipeline that's coming out from the federal government that hopefully will be supported at the local level by philanthropic and local government agencies. Anyone else? And I know at our university, the president just signed on to an initiative that is creating a school to university pipeline, which counters the school to prison pipeline where they're going to be going into the community schools, Banneker North, which is right across the street from us and allowing students to get college credits and be able to pipeline directly into Howard University as opposed to going to a community college. And so they're going into those schools and pulling those kids out and bringing them into the university. With my classes, I also bring the Howard University students into Banneker so that they can see university students and have conversations, but also inviting them to the campus as well. Yeah, and I think actually we're seeing a little bit of a cross, like sort of cross pollination between what the organizing is doing and what's happening at the federal and state level. So actually in the recent interim report on 21st century policing, the president's task force around this, one of the recommendations was implementing restorative justice models, right? And so we've seen in different jurisdictions, New York is one, some degree in Baltimore and now in Florida and Denver that jurisdictions are now not only have organizers done an amazing job of making restorative justice like a viable option, but administrators are starting to even approach advancement and other organizations and community organizers and say, hey, maybe we should think about other ways of doing this. Like this isn't working, we see that our disparities are really high and we've got to figure out some strategies. And so they're actually opening the door to some community organizations to come in and work with them directly. And I think that that's, I still think that the overall picture around racial disparity is something we should be honest about and we shouldn't sugarcoat even with restorative justice and better training because the system is what the system is. But I do think that there is some promise, particularly in these restorative justice initiatives. And also because restorative justice really does flatten the power dynamic a lot and it really does empower students in the classroom setting and teachers to sort of treat each other as like on a much more horizontal, kind of almost collegial level. So I was going to mention the set of activists that are students that are popping up all over the country. I think as my friend, she and Barrett would say, there's a severe case of adultism that happens whenever we have these panels in that. We tend to look at ourselves as the agents of change instead of trying to say, well, do the students have a voice in this? And if they do, then let's hear it. So that's one. And that's happening in places like Newark, Philadelphia, LA. I mean, Oakland, good, it's gracious. I mean, really good, powerful stuff. And they're not just talking about anti-testing or chemical or whatever. They're also talking about the experiences and the lack of fun and engagement they're having at school. And they're pushing their adults to do better as well. Number two, I'm seeing in my own district, Carmen Ferenia has tried to restrict the disciplinary policies to try to bring suspensions down by recoding a lot of what's happening in our discipline policies and trying to disarm a lot of folk from just suspending kids over and over and over again. I try to keep them within school and that hopefully will make a seed change. I think those are the two big things I'm looking at right now. Okay, so we're gonna open it up and we'll need you to ask the question into the microphone. So anyone have any questions for the panel? I was wondering in your experience and in your research, if school uniform policies have affected the school to prison pipeline at all? Well, it's certainly given them another reason to write someone up for an infraction, whether they actually have the uniform on and shirts not tucked in, don't have a belt. Him line is up too high or you're not wearing the complete uniform in the way it's supposed to be. So it's just additive, one of the other things that you can check as a reason to suspend or discipline a child. And of course, all the schools, specifically charter schools that are making kids pay whenever they don't have a certain uniform, make them pay 50 bucks every time they don't got a belt on, please. Well, probably not in the way you might have called. That in 1990, old school hip hop artist by the name of Kudgy Rap had a song come out and it was called Rikers Island. And the part of the hook was you won't be smiling when on Rikers Island. So I bring that up because the man in the middle had spoken about this new age, rights of passage being going to prison. At some point in time, going to prison had been popularized amongst the youth. So when my brother heard the song, he said, yeah, I'm going to Rikers Island. And then three months later when he ended up in Rikers and then eight months after that got out because his charges was dropped, he was practicing his prison poses in the mirror. And then he had me come next to him so he can have us both do a pose. He was like, yeah, Rook brothers caught 40 kilos of cocaine, 20 million dollars. There has been this glamorization of going to prison within our urban youth. And while we're working on it from the outside of the pipeline, trying to effect policy change, trying to make sure that the educators know that they need to have a cultural, multicultural approach with dealing with our children. What can we do on the inside of the pipeline so that our youth don't become complicit in our own new age enslavement? I think exposure. I mean, you have to expose these children to things outside of the urban ghettos that they're used to. They need to go to libraries. They need to go to museums. You have to start really early with them because they get bored with us. Like we are older, but you have to understand that there's a technology age and that means it's fast. That's like a microwave fast. So you have to be creative on your toes, not overworked, ready to really engage these critical minds. Take them outside of the realm. A lot of the young individuals who I've worked with, they've never been out of Newark. So I bring them to New York. They've never been out of East Armit. So we bring them into Irvington, neighboring cities and different areas. Teach them about their history. Teach them about nutrition. I mean, you have to get them excited about the good things. And a lot of the times we think, oh, just mentoring. You know, that's all you need. One hour of mentoring with someone who's doing a good job, which is great. Mentoring is working, the research is there, but the breed of children who are coming out now are just different and they're really fast. I'm glad you brought up that point about using that rap as an example of what you're talking about. Because when we're dealing with the culture, the hip-hop culture that has become very pervasive, that glamorizes these things, every time that we try and deal with it, it's like bringing a knife to a gunfight. The pervasive nature of the entertainment industry, it's what we have co-opted or what they've co-opted is they're selling to our young black people that this is their culture when all it is is commerce. It is something that they've packaged in order to sell records and sell other things, and we have not done enough to inoculate them against, this isn't a representation of you, this is someone's glamorizing something so that you can buy their record, video, whatever it is. And that's a part of the struggle is how do we combat that with all the things that you were talking about that they need to do. But again, it's so pervasive, it's so endemic, it's with social media, it's like every time that we try and catch up to it, it's already moved to a different platform. And so part of the fight is how do we get in front of it, and how do we work with our young people from the inside internally within themselves to have enough self-esteem and be strong enough to resist that temptation of buying into what's being sold to them, which isn't a representation of who we are historically or ever have been. So I know I'm the moderator, but I just have to speak up for the hip hop generation. I think hip hop makes a great scapegoat for a lot of societal inequities. And I think if you look at, I don't know that black youth are aspiring to go to prison. I think that's ridiculous. I think we pathologize our youth just like everyone else. What I will say is if you look at the statistics, they're actually being pretty smart about what the statistics are predicting for them. When one of three black men have, the odds are that one of three black men will be incarcerated at some point, you can go into many of these school districts, and that's higher than their odds of graduating from high school, and it's certainly higher than their odds of going to college. So I think that what we really need to understand is our youth are reflecting what society is giving to them. It's not hip hop. Sorry. I know I'm the moderator and I'm a journalist, but it's not hip hop. I'll second that motion. Yeah, I agree. I definitely agree with that. Positive youth development. But I think the reality is that most of us recognize that there's a horrific lack of positive youth development in our schools. We work closely with DC public schools, and I think any- Can you stand up so we could do- Sure, I'm sorry. I was noting that a number of you use the concept of positive youth development, but I think all of us, any of us who have engaged in many of the schools around the country, recognize a woeful lack of positive youth development utilized by administrators, teachers, parents, and other students, and watch, in fact, the negative approach many adults have to engaging with young people and the demoralizing behavior that they have to encounter on a regular basis. We in our organization use a lot of current positive youth development practices, but when we try to teach them to people who work with our program in places where we control the environment, we get a lot of pushback because it runs counter to what a lot of people, where a lot of people operate from their gut. We call it tough love. They call it going old school on people, but what it really is is demoralizing young people in a way that leaves them so torn down that by the time they get into a place where they even engaging with adults, they don't have a lot to rely on. Let's think about just having kids walk into a school system, standing in a long line to go through a metal detector, the manner in which security guards often engage with our young people, and then they get into the building after going through this process every single day, and then they get into the hallway where they have an administrator screaming at them or yelling at them for some one person or two person's behavior. So my question is, how do we change that conversation? How do we get adults to understand that maybe we have to move from what we think is the old school way of doing things to a more positive way of engaging with young people, which we just don't see a lot of in a lot of our school system settings. For those who don't know the jargon, what are examples of positive development? What are you talking about? Engaging young people and problem solving. The way you greet someone when they appear to have broken a rule. So I'll give you an example. A student shows up late for school. And so traditionally, they'd be dealt with harshly. Why are you late? You know you're late. You get detention, you have this. Versus in a positive youth development model, you may ask, first of all, welcome the student to school. Thank them for making the effort to come. And then dialoguing with them to find out what may have made them late. In many instances, we'll find that students are caring for younger siblings or an elder, or doing something that required them to problem solve before getting to school. And so they've already overcome a number of hurdles just to get there. And yet the first adult or one of the earlier adults they encounter, you know, greets them negatively. Positive youth development would say, let's have a conversation. So, you know, I discovered that you're late because you're caring for your grandmother who's sick. Or you had to get two of your siblings to do two different daycare centers. So what can we do together to help you get to school on time while respecting the fact that you're doing something that's very responsible. And I'm respecting that. That's a positive youth development model. Are there other questions? Yeah, I want to say good evening ladies and gentlemen to the panel up here. And also to Sister Mohammed, if I'm pronouncing correctly, she the one invited me to come here. My name is Denver Hawkins Bay and I just want to briefly, I kind of like what the gentleman was saying there. I don't know his name with the gray suit on, you know, purple tie, you know. And what he was saying make a lot of sense. And basically a lot of stuff for everybody on the panel. But the thing is, is that, you know, we are living in a microwave society and meaning that, you know, instrument gratification, you know, people are very impatient now. Nobody has the time to wait for this and that. If you notice a lot of people running to the subway or the bus or whatever, you know, it's like the house on fire, you know. And kind of, excuse me if I say I'm broke up in what I'm saying, you know. And as far as the prison system concern, you know, until you actually experienced and been there and seen the type of set that's going on in there, you really don't know. You're going by what you read or what you hear. You know, you have a lot of games in the system there. You know, they're young, you know, and I would never use the word thug like the president used or the male or the Baltimore used, you know, which I think is a really an appropriate word, you know, which is really another word for the N word, you know, and the thing is, is that it's really no programs in the system, you know, and it's just being warehouse, you know, because, and I just want to say this here, you know, and it's a big business, you know. You have at least 10 colleges or more that have stock in these prison systems, you know. Okay, excuse me, thank you. And then we have one up front after that. Hi there, I had two questions. I wanted Dr. Muhammad to elaborate a little bit on what you were saying about healthcare in the prison system. I wanted to understand a bit more about that. And then for any of the panelists, if you had thoughts about the convergence of state violence and privatization, right, that we're warehousing kids in schools that are more and more like prisons and that have on ramp for selected kids to prison. And I wonder if that's part of the same impetus to make money off schools that we're seeing being driven by these surplus people that we don't have places for in the economy and in the labor market once they become adults. Are we just pushing it back by a few years and starting to commodify them in schools? In terms of the healthcare, that's speaking directly to the bids that go into private prisons. So there's a bidding rate for everything that goes on the commissary down to the care for the individuals who are incarcerated. And from some research that comes out of Princeton University, they have identified that the majority of bids that are being accepted and that provide the lowest rate on the dollar for individuals who are incarcerated are for younger individuals. So the younger you come into the system, the more likely it is that you would be able to get healthcare services and a prison cannot run without those healthcare services. And so that is feeding the school to prison pipeline. If you get them younger, they're worth a lot more dollars. It's just like healthcare. If you work at a job where people are 60 and older, it's a lot more money in order to fund that population and it's a lot cheaper health-wise if you're younger. Good evening. My name is Jamal Abdulalim. I'm a freelance journalist here in DC. The first time I heard this idea that prison beds that were based on test scores, I thought that that would be an interesting story to write. It would be interesting to see the committee or whatever governmental agency it is that actually does this. And I spent some time looking into it. It appears to be a myth. And so I've abandoned it. And anytime I hear it repeated, it kind of annoys me because it's a very serious allegation to say that there's a governmental agency somewhere sitting up planning how many prison beds that would be based on third grade reading scores. I almost let it slide, but when I heard two panelists say basically the same thing. So I'm willing to be educated. If you have a citation for it, please feel free to share it. Don't give it up. I just took my students into the Maryland Department of Corrections and the way that you find that information out is inside of the prison. So in Maryland they outsource and create all of the prisons around the nation. They do the research on the inside that identifies how big the prison's gonna be. They're building a new one now in Maryland and they use the statistics from the school district in order to build it. And so of course it's going to come out as being a myth because nobody wants you to be able to put your finger on it so that you don't think about it. But I would say that you need to, if you are in contact with me, I could put you in contact with that particular facility, there's no researcher that's gonna write about it. There's no researcher that's gonna be able to get into a prison and get the warden of that facility to say, yes, I'm gonna allow you to interview these people to say that this is what we're doing. It's also about money for them. So you have to go about it from the back door and a lot of the prisons are being built and infrastructureed by a CAD system. CAD systems are now being taught inside the prisons to incarcerated individuals. So that means that those jobs are no longer on the outside. Those are jobs that are only on the inside of prison. So you won't be able to talk to someone on the outside to say, how did you develop the blueprint for this prison? But those blueprints are being developed from the prisoners first and then they're being outsourced through private organizations. So that information is just not public because it's not a public revenue. So there is a story there and there are ways to get at it. Hi, I'm Ken Fielding, I'm a journalist as well and the former director for sibling human rights for United Methodist Church. It's not a myth. You alluded to Florida. I know of a case in Florida where the Wacken Hut, the president of Wacken Hut CEO which is a prison builder actually meets with the state superintendent of schools to identify, I guess, a class of black youth that are not achieving at the third grade level to decide how many beds and where Wacken Hut, which is a prison builder, can build its prisons. So that's on record. So it's not a myth at all. I would say I also tried to track down that statistic and similar stories in every, I could not and I'm a pretty good investigative reporter and I could not track it down either. Yeah, but it's been recorded where there's been actual meetings between Wacken Hut and school superintendents and I'm aware of them. Okay, well, send me some documents because I would love to write the story but I've never been able to prove it either. Hi, I'm gonna stand kind of short. So I do a lot of looking into early childhood research and preschool spaces and so when we were talking about preschool suspensions and expulsions, like one of the things you run into when you're researching is the notion of challenging behaviors and how a lot of what's written on school to prison pipeline or preschool to prison pipeline focuses on what to do if a child has a challenging behavior and a lot of the research starts at that point rather than asking how one defines a challenging behavior or who's doing the identification of if a behavior is challenging and all those things. So I wonder from the panel if there's any way to affect the process of how we research and talk about these from a scholarly level so that the people who work in policy in other different spaces can effectively talk about it. A part of it is understanding, starting with child development, if you're dealing with younger youth in that age range and also youth development. It's having a basic understanding of the developmental nature in the correlated activities, actions and behaviors that young people have. And so when you understand that then it's easier not to codify certain behaviors as challenging but understand that young people at a certain age do have a hard time in times expressing themselves if they're in a stressful situation or something doesn't agree with them. I mean, for those who've had kids, we deal with that at home all the time. It's no different than what happens in the classroom. And when we're talking about youth development principles, one of the founding elements of it is giving young people voice and agency in their own development. As soon as, and which is why it's hard for people in authority to adopt a youth development framework because they feel that I'm the authority and it starts with me and ends with me but young people having some power in their own agency over what happens to them whether it's in a classroom setting or not is a part of the dynamic that we have to address. And so part of it again is understanding in making sure that adults who work with young people whether across any sector have the tools necessary to identify and assess what behavior is and then act appropriately and not go buy some blueprint that someone gives them that says if a child does this, that's bad and therefore you can do this to them and put them into the pipeline. So that's where I would start. We probably have time for one more question. Quick comment. So you mentioned the Dear Colleague Letter from the Department of Ed and Department of Justice. I just wanted to raise also that HHS and the Department of Ed released a policy statement in December on expulsion and suspension in early learning settings. So it includes the pre-K, childcare, everything. And it includes a series of recommendations for states and programs. It talks about inappropriate behavioral expectations. It talks about a lot of the issues that have been described here. Some of the, we actually had to explicitly put in there that programs should not use language drawn from the criminal justice system because we heard of cases where pre-schoolers were being put on probation, where they were using three strikes and you're out language. So anyway, I would refer folks to that. It's on HHS and Ed's websites. Hi, my name is Jennifer Lee-Operhoory. I'm a journalist, but my question is more out of interest than reporting. When I was in school in Jersey City and undergrad, a lot of my friends were education majors and at some point everyone goes through the student-teacher phase and a resounding thing that I heard was please don't send me to Snyder because a lot of people were afraid to go into this school for the same reasons that Dr. Muhammad brought up about just kind of being afraid of students of different backgrounds than what they were raised within. So I was wondering, we talked about interventions with teachers who are currently in these systems, but is there anything going on on the student-teacher level so that we might be able to kind of counteract the paranoia before these people are actively exposed to children? There's a lot of discussion around the idea of cultural competence starting from teacher ed schools all the way up and those of us who are actively working with folks to develop those sorts of conversations. Here's something I think about when I hear you say that. Oftentimes we don't prepare teachers for the places they are going and that's the main basis for having cultural competence to begin with. We're not preparing teachers to just teach. We're preparing teachers to teach students and we're not just preparing them to teach students but preparing them to teach the students that they are going to be teaching. And so it has to be hyper-local in a way that makes sure that the teachers understand the skills necessary to walk into a building and develop that sort of compassion along racial and gender lines because that's a big conversation. I think a lot of that, a lot of the things that we were talking about now will dissipate once you start having those conversations in a more thorough level. Secondly, we need to develop mechanisms within our school systems to have the conversations because the biggest professor's development that happens isn't at the teacher prep level. It's happening right at the school. So if you're a teacher that's been in the school now for let's say four or five years, then you've already passed the master's phase where you get your master's, you get your certification. Now you've got a due process to whatever have you. And yet and still, teachers need to keep learning because that's the way we build but we're not learning how to deal with culture. We're learning how to raise test scores and how to gain, well, I know this DC, how to gain the system to get more bonus money. So I know how that works. And unfortunately, that's just not the way, we don't build better teachers by trying to focus on a very narrow sense of how they teach. So our teacher evaluation systems are not built towards getting kids to become better people. They're built around teaching them how to be better test takers. So that's something that we need to keep having a conversation about how do we measure achievement, not just on an academic level but on a personal level. And I think one of that piece we were talking about is really gonna help us have the conversations in schools about race and gender in class because we wanna make better people. Okay, it's now six o'clock. I didn't know if anyone in America wants to make closing remarks, but if not, then thank you all for coming and taking part in this important conversation. And thank you to all the panelists.