 Good evening, everybody, and thanks so much for coming here to the New America Foundation. My name is Kevin Carey. I direct the education policy program here, and we're lucky enough to be joined today by Jamel Bowie, staff writer at Slate Magazine. That's correct. And, of course, Dana Goldstein, New York Times bestselling author. Dana Goldstein. Am I the first one who gets to introduce you? That way. Very good. It won't get old, I don't imagine. The author of The Teacher Wars, which is a tremendous work of education history. Dana wrote The Teacher Wars on the Bernard Schwartz Fellowship here at the New America Foundation, so we could not be more pleased to have her here today to talk about the many, many things in her book. So we're going to start with the conversation, and then we will have time for questions from the audience probably around six o'clock. And also, please help yourself to the bar and back and the refreshments outside. So Dana, your book begins much closer to the beginning of the United States of America than the end, and in the first chapter there's a character named Catherine Beecher, who was in the middle of a lot of interesting things related to Harriet Beecher Stowe, friend of Horace Mann, the founder of the American Common Schools Movement. I found myself as a reader wanting to like Catherine Beecher quite a bit. She was very smart, very independent. She was, in her own way, a very important contributor to the idea of public education, as we know it in America today. And she was also very interested in advancing the cause of women, particularly in giving them access to opportunities to teach. But in reading your book at the same time, I kind of feel like I shouldn't be such a Catherine Beecher fan. I think you seem to be making the argument that in some of the bargains that were made with local officials around how we fund education in the way that we chose to create institutions to train teachers, and sort of more broadly in our notion of the intersection between femininity and the teaching profession, that American education is still sort of haunted by Catherine Beecher's spirit. Is that... Talk to us about that. That is so accurate. I think you read my intention exactly correctly. Because I started out myself wanting to like her, and I struggled with her as a person. So she grows up, she's the daughter of Lyman Beecher, who is a famous Calvinist, Iron Brimstone celebrity preacher. And she is the sister of Harriet Beecher Stowe, the author of Uncle Tom's Cabin. And she's engaged to a very interesting young man who dies in a shipwreck in Drowns. And she's about 21. She realizes that she's never going to marry herself. And she's a very intelligent, intellectual woman, and she wants to do something useful with her life. And she settles on education and teaching in particular as the thing that she will do that is useful. And she makes a sort of very compelling plea for the role of the teacher in establishing this new American Republic, which of course in the 1820s and 1830s is very much still an experiment. And I think it's hard for us today to get our minds around what it was like to be a young American in the 1820s and 1830s, but this idea of going West was an imperative. And she wanted women to be part of that project. And she defined the teaching role as how they would do it. How they would go West and open these one room school houses. Yet at the same time, in her efforts to make this vision appealing to policymakers, who of course did not want to raise taxes to fund public education, she makes the argument that one of the reasons why women should teach is that they can be paid half as much. It's not the most compelling argument to her personally. She personally wants to do it because it's interesting and because she wants to play a role in public life. But she's pragmatic and so she makes this pragmatic argument to budget cutting. And I call it in the book the argument for cheapness, which is constantly a part of our education debate. We are attracted to certain ideas because they're perceived as being inexpensive. So she is a very tough figure and you look at her, she also opposes women's suffrage. So teaching for her is a traditionally feminine job. It is mothering outside the home. She sees the school as an extension of the home in that it's where women lead children. So just as the mother leads children in the home, the teacher leads children in the school. And normal schools are established to train these mother teachers, is the phrase that I use in the book, and they are in many places open only to women. So if the state of Massachusetts creates a normal school and only accepts women into it as a trainee teacher, they then end up with a public school system that is only staffed by teachers who they can pay 50% as much. So in this way, teaching goes from 90% female in 1800 to what we have today 76% female today. And interestingly, this overwhelming three-quarters female nature of American teaching is so surprisingly consistent over time with a sort of a few blips after the Great Depression during the Great Depression. And we know in our own lifetimes, many of you see are not me, but during the Vietnam War. You use a phrase throughout the book, and it seems like you chose it as kind of an intellectual thread that goes throughout your history, which takes us all the way up to the present day. You use the phrase moral panic, and I felt like to some extent an alternate sub-pad could have been the history of moral panics and why they screwed things up for American teachers. So what does that mean and what has it meant to teaching? I didn't set out to write about moral panic. It was a concept that sociologists have written about that I was familiar with from before I started this book, but I did start out thinking that teaching is a very politicized profession. The most controversial profession in American public life were constantly debating at tenure unions, charter schools, so we're constantly fighting on these topics. But one of the surprises in the historical research was that this panic that teaching is a failed profession does go back to the early 19th century, and that kind of triggered my memory of having read about moral panics in other contexts, like welfare, queens or craft babies, which were the sort of moral panics of the 80s. But with teaching, even if you go back to Catherine Beecher making the argument that women should be teachers in the 1830s, she creates this panic about male teachers. She describes them as drunk, as lash-wielding, almost child abusers. And in describing male teachers in this way, she says, let's send the men into the factories and bring the women into the schools. I mean, you have to remember, think about Lowell. At the time it was women in the factories, oftentimes, so she's kind of arguing for this flip that we still have today into the 20th century, the conception that the manufacturing economy is for men. Teaching is almost a companion, almost a working class job for women. So that's the first moral panic. And then, of course, we see the red scares in which so many left-wing teachers, tens of thousands across the country, lose their jobs. That's one of the biggest moral panics in the book. And I talk about many others. But I think today we have this image of the ineffective, older, 10-year teacher. I make the argument in the book that through the panic we have about this figure today, we see these echoes of these historical panics. You mentioned the red scares. Another major subject of your book is the relationship between teaching and organized labor. And you tell the story of how in New York City there was, through the post-World War I period and all the way up into the 1960s, but maybe reaching its peak sort of around World War II and afterwards, a group of New York City's teachers who were explicitly associated with communism. And how that led to their sort of the separation of their relationship first with the AFL and then they went to the CIO and then eventually away from the CIO. And then eventually in the 1960s, the teachers union was pushed aside by the organization that became the United Federation of Teachers, which was more male, more related to blue collar unionism. And you, I think, actually did a nice job of anchoring that discussion with the earlier tensions and choices that were made in Chicago in terms of the relation between teacher unions as organizations and organized labor. And I was noteworthy, I think, at the end of that chapter there was you kind of evoke a sense of loss, that you felt like something was lost. And so can you tell us a little more about why that is and is it still lost, the thing that you think? So the teachers union, which is active in New York City from about 1935 to the early 1960s, was informally tied to the Communist Party. Not all of the active people in this union were Communist Party members, but they were certainly sympathetic to the Communist agenda. They were very tied to thinkers like WB Du Bois and other folks at the time who were kind of skirting around this community of Communist intellectuals. The term historians have used to describe the teachers union of the time is that it was social movement unionism. They actually opposed the right of teachers to strike. They did not have the right to collectively bargain. So what were they all about? On one hand they did familiar, they did familiar union things like go to the state legislature and ask for more pay for teachers. But a lot of what they did was ally with low income parents and communities to do things like make sure school bathrooms are clean, to make sure that racist textbooks were taken out of the schools. And they really looked to parents to kind of help them set the agenda. And in some ways had a more fruitful relationship than we saw teachers unions having with parents in low income neighborhoods after collective bargaining. Interestingly when Al Schenker and the United Federation of Teachers rise up and they go on strike. The teacher union teachers, these communists, they break the picket lines. I mean, it's just fascinating. And then later on in Ocean Hill Brownsville in the late 60s and early 70s, the children of these communists break the picket lines. So you see this multi generation flow of far left teachers who are skeptical of the sort of establishment union movement. These folks, a lot of them had truly radical politics. Like I've thumbed through their newspapers and you would see these kind of glowing, ridiculous depictions of life in the Soviet Union. So certainly we don't want to romanticize this period. But I think that this was a more, it was an extremely intellectually coherent sort of movement driven neighborhood driven. Attuned to poverty type of unionism at the time. And to me it was a really interesting, as an interesting model potentially. You quote at the end of that chapter one of the, I think three men who was part of the founding of the UFT is saying, teaching high school is like working on an assembly line. Which is the sort of thing that I think is, like nobody would ever say that in public now. I was telling people now. So, I mean, was that idea just kind of worked out or do people just know not to say that? Yeah, so that's George Altamare. He was one of the co-founders of the UFT alongside Al Shanker. I want to give him a little credit because the work rules that teachers had in the 50s were like assembly work rules. And you saw that the teachers were not allowed to have lunch on their own or with other adults that they had to supervise all aspects of the functions of the school that had nothing to do with academics, things that we have support staff to do today in schools. And if they were going to take a sick day that had to have a note from a doctor, they were paid $66 per week, which at the same, at the time in New York City was the same as a car washer. So you can see why he would have said that at the time. Interestingly, he also said it again, 20, 30, 40 years later. So, but he was also an excellent social studies teacher. So you kind of have to balance that. Why would a guy like that say something like that? I talk about how these founders of the modern union movement, going back to the early 60s, they were the sons of blue collar workers. So they grew up in households that were infused with this type of language and mostly in New York City, Jewish and Italian Catholic households. And so, alongside Al Shanker, their parents were furriers and unionized seamstresses and things like that. So that sort of language came very naturally. Jamele, your thoughts and reactions to the book? Earlier you had mentioned W. E. B. Du Bois and one of the interesting things I thought, and the book was the extent to which teaching sort of formed the backbone for kind of black intellectual life beginning really in the immediate post emancipation period and continuing really the next century. So I would love it if you could just talk a bit more about that. Yeah, so in chapter three of the book I talk about the black teachers who came from the north into the south to educate the children and grandchildren of slaves and during the Civil War and right afterward. And Du Bois uses this phrase, the preacher and the teacher. He sees the preacher and the teacher as the epitome of black hopes and dreams in these decades after the Civil War in terms of using education to uplift the race, which is the term that is used. And Du Bois himself, during one of his summers at Fisk University, he gets himself certified as a teacher which takes about two seconds at the time. And he goes out into rural Tennessee and he's teaching in a one-room school house, it's in the rural black belt. It's inside a confederate colonel's, what was his corn repository. So this is like a windowless, stank, horrible place to have a school. And yet he's doing this, what we would consider today, high expectations, no excuses, type of education with the kids. And he later writes about this, beautifully for the Atlantic, which becomes a big part of the souls of black folk. I also talk about Anna Julia Cooper, who was a teacher and then a principal here at the M Street High School in Washington, DC. It was also called the Dunbar School, had several name changes. But this school here in DC epitomizes Du Bois's hopes for the town's attempt. This idea that 10% of black Americans were destined to go to college and have professional careers. Interestingly, in terms of the concept of the moral panic, which Kevin brought these expectations of high intellectualism for black children ignited a moral panic. And you see Anna Julia Cooper, this path breaking Washington feminist black educator driven from her job during Teddy Roosevelt's administration. For her very strong belief that M Street High School should not be a vocational school, but this should be a school that prepares kids for Oberlin and Brown and Harvard and she successfully is doing that and is driven from her job. In fact, they concoct a fake sex scandal saying that she had an affair with her foster son. So this is the sort of fascinating politicization of education that we see throughout history and black teachers who had these high expectations. Interestingly, their ideas are very much the basis of today's education reform movement, but at the time they were attacked and vilified for having these beliefs. What's so interesting about the vilification and just that particular historical moment is that you have the panic over Teddy Roosevelt inviting Booker T. Washington to the White House. You have the newspapers all throughout the Northeast, concerns about educating blacks because I forget this is like a newspaper from Mississippi, but he's writing about the Northeast and he says, listen, if we educate them, they'll become even more criminal, which is hilarious to think. You know, given a lot of rich stereotypes today, it's like the reverse. And so yeah, just that your focus on that was really great to give in what was going on in the broader American culture and it often seems like, particularly with African-American teachers and black communities, that what is happening in their classrooms and their schools is in some way shape or form reflection of sort of broader racial narratives happening at the time. I think that's right and I want to talk about the issue of school discipline because the racial disparity in school discipline over the past year has become more and more of a news story, in part because the Obama administration was very wise to disseminate some of the data that they have collected showing these disparities. One of the surprises to me in the research was the extent to which debates over how to discipline children are not only eternal, but have always had this racialized cast. So in 1897, when the very first Teachers Union is founded in Chicago, one of the rights that the female 97% white teachers are asking for is the right to talk to kids from the classroom. Now at the time this had more of an ethnic than a racial cast, they were specifically asking for this for immigrant kids. A lot of these kids had been working in factories and then they made truancy law stricter so they brought these factory kids into the classroom and guess what? They had no idea how to sit still and be part of a learning environment and the teachers were saying, I have a 60-person class, very typical at the time. I've got to be able to throw the bad kids out or I can't teach. So this motivated in many ways the founding of Teachers' Unions and in 1967, big teacher strike in New York City, again the two-thirds white teaching force is asking for the right to toss kids from the classroom and at this time it begins to take on a very racialized cast because the kids that are getting tossed out are black and Puerto Rican at the time and this becomes a big part of the black power community controlled debate with folks saying like, take a look at what's happening. We can't say anymore that this is not about race. There's a neat moment where Anna Cooper, who was primarily featured as a person existing in the 19th century and early 20th century, shows up in 1954 at age 100 to say of the Brown v. Board decision, I don't like it. I'm worried about desegregation and its effect on education and you have I think some really interesting thoughts and discussions about the effect of desegregation on black teachers, some of which was I think like much of which was the result of racist policies of all kinds but perhaps not all of it. And I'll add to that, like even today if you talk to quite a few older African-Americans you'll hear similar concerns that, you know, we're glad the schools are equal now but we're not sure how this desegregation has worked out for us. I wonder if there's something about just getting older that makes you have that opinion because certainly in the 1950s the young intellectuals at the time, liberals of both races were very, very excited about integration and so my guess is that a lot of the older folks, white or black or any other identity today who now question it may have supported it in the past. Anagilia Cooper is just one of the interesting black educators who was skeptical of Brown v. Board in the early 1950s. I think there were two strains of thought that went into that. One was the idea that we now have some sociological research backing which is that black children will be exposed to lower expectations by white educators and Anagilia Cooper is someone who kind of predicts this and she has the wisdom to know this is a problem because recall that earlier in her own life she was attacked for having high expectations and wanting to send these children to Ivy League school so she has an informed and in some sense prescient concern about that. The second concern is really about jobs. Jobs for black educators will black educators lose their jobs and yes that did happen. Tens of thousands of black teachers in the south were fired or laid off or pushed out of school systems as there were some merger between black and white school boards and black and white these black and white systems came together as there were jobs that were accessed up and it was almost always black jobs that were lost so these these concerns were certainly legitimate ones. That's actually something that comes up I've noticed when you talk to southern politicians about tenure and the importance of tenure it's one of the things that I've heard more than once people say look like those women because they were mostly women didn't have tenure and they just got fired en masse by you know white administrators and there was no one to protect them. Actually a lot of the southern states did have tenure previous to Brown v. Board and then when Brown v. Board came onto the horizon and the years just before they changed their tenure laws and why were they doing this they were specifically doing this so they could fire black teachers in the events that integration happened and they foresaw this and were quite deliberate about this. A little more about I'd be interested in your thoughts a little more and you've written in your own sort of broader writing about women's issues quite a bit in addition to education. You talk in the book about this sort of complicated relationship between the teaching profession and the women's movement you talk about how Elizabeth Cady Stanton kind of talked down to teachers she had sort of a from her position as a woman of privilege within that social context. But then there's this wonderful scene where Susan B Anthony sort of stands up and talks to male educators about why their low social standing as a result of their association with women who were seen as not good for anything except for teaching so what does that say. But at the end of the book you do say we need more men in teaching and so your thoughts and this is kind of a broad question about the relationship between the teaching profession and feminism. One of the cleavages and feminist thought of the 19th century and I have noticed this today even in everyday conversations with smart women is whether the feminist in question respected or looked down upon teaching. And I chose this cleavage in chapter two looking at Susan B Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton. So Susan B Anthony was herself a teacher for about 10 years in her 20s and early 30s and she loved the job until she became so stuck because women were not allowed to ascend to be principals and she saw a 19 year old boy promoted above her as the principal of the school where she was working when she was about 29 and she this basically she couldn't continue doing it after this she was so frustrated and it was it was one of the big motivators for her to become a feminist activist so when she thought about women teachers and about how to improve education she talked about equalizing pay between men and women to make the job more respected getting women into co-ecologists to train for this career as opposed to in these crappy normal schools that took people from the sixth and the seventh grade as an alternative to high school and turn them into teachers. So she saw the system which was based as we discussed earlier on the idea that we needed to pay teachers very little and she saw that as the crux of why teaching was not a respected job and she thought for women and for students you had to address all these economic structural issues. Now she was the daughter of a mill owner whose business went bust and she had an experience of class downward mobility so she was very attuned to economic issues and in addition she had a disgust for marriage her entire life from her teen years she never wanted to get married so she had to be economically and financially independent so you can see how her personal experience shaped how she thought about education and teaching. Elizabeth Cady Stannon the daughter of a judge the wife of an attorney seven children who were home schooled by a governess she saw public school teaching as this crap work and she went around the country telling parents mothers and fathers do not let your daughters become teachers push for your daughters to become doctors push for them to become suffrage activists push for them to become attorneys anything but teaching. What I saw in Stannon was that she had bought into this rhetoric that the previous generation Catherine Beecher and Horace Mann had built they had sent this message that teaching was mothering it was just like being a mother women were biologically predisposed to do it you didn't necessarily need a very high level of training to do this job and so Elizabeth Cady Stannon really felt this so often we talk about second wave feminism of the 60s and 70s as the sports that decimated the teaching profession by taking ambitious women out of the classroom I trace in the book the trend line back much much earlier over a hundred years earlier to the 19th century because you see ambitious women even if they're attracted to teaching you see them infected by these ideas that it's not a respectable job so much earlier. So one of the questions I always get is did second wave feminism ruin teaching is it so you know because women now can become journalists doctors lawyers is that you know why we have this crisis in education and what I say is if you look at the numbers there doesn't seem to be a big drop-off in teacher quality pre and post feminism it looks like about 10 percent of teachers both before and after were graduates of selective colleges with high GPAs high SAT scores and all those other at least countable um measures of eliteness. At the same time I did a lot of oral histories for the book there's no question that you talk to women who entered the profession in the late 50s early 60s right before the opening up of all these other opportunities to women they have a level of ambition some of them that makes you question if they would have done something else. Joan Wofford is someone who I write about in chapter six she was one of the founders of the idea that became the National Teacher Corps which was president johnson's great society program this is someone who I have no doubt would have been a supreme court clerk or something like that and in fact she only taught for a few years and when more opportunities opened up she was sort of climbing all sorts of ladders later in her life so the relationship between feminism and teaching is a complex one the teachers union movement is a feminist movement it was 97 female there's a lot of very fertile and wonderful back and forth but there's also a current of feminist thinking that has denigrated teaching because if it's the only job women are supposed to do well then it must be crappy we have to fight for more. One of the things that I find interesting a little I guess funny is maybe the word I'd use is the extent to which ideas like teach for America and sort of teacher cores we're going to go out to disadvantaged schools we're going to send our most capable people and they're going to improve them exist pretty much for the entirety of the history of teaching and in every case it's sort of lots of energy a realization that in fact no that's not going to happen and then the cycle restarts itself and so you know what what do you see happening with our current cycle do you think there's more we have more context about what's going on what's happened before and that's maybe we can chart a different path or are we going to you know 10 years from now 15 years from now embark upon another one of these things with another you know sort of fancy name educators for the future or something that's good. So the missionary teacher figure has been it is one of the most constant trends that I trace in this book going back to the early 19th century it's the idea that the most elite people can be recruited to teach but you can only expect them to do it for a short period of time. I've written recently quite a bit about Teach for America they have begun to truly question some of their own thinking on this encouraging recruits to consider three four five years in the classroom as opposed to just two launching a pilot program to give folks a full year of pre-service training as opposed to just the five weeks which is standard for them. I think we have new research now showing the impact of teacher turnover on student achievement it appears to show and I talk about this in chapter nine and ten of the book it appears to show that even when teacher quality in a school remains constant so there's no drop-off in quality the churn and burn cycle impacts kids negatively even if your own teacher is veteran so it's interesting it's like when a lot of adults are turning over in a school that the effects kind of seep through classroom walls and find the kids and it's not surprising because the adult energy in the building has been focused on recruitment training and hiring and less on instruction improving what's going on in the classroom and this impacts children so you know in my writing about Teach for America I've suggested perhaps that because they are such a central organization in the reform movement the fact that maybe they are thinking more deeply about their model and experimenting with new ways to train their teachers better and to ask their teachers to stay longer will this have an overall effect on our policy conversation in terms of acknowledging that retention is as big a part of the conversation as recruitment. We haven't been there in the past decade but are we headed toward a place like that I don't know a lot of people have asked me like why don't policymakers learn from history it's been one of the most it's been one of the most common questions I've been getting on this book tour and I don't like I don't know that's like above my pay grade I think I think we have an a historic political conversation in the United States I think we live in an anti-intellectual country and you even sometimes I even heard some of the critiques I heard the book it's like well so much of its space in the past I was like well it is a history like if you don't but I do take it all this there's reporting in here from six months ago I mean I was knocking down my publisher's door to get in some of the stuff that has happened more recently for example with Teach for America that I just mentioned but if we don't care to learn the lessons from the past we will repeat the same mistakes over and over again and and am I hopeful and optimistic I think we're in a hopeful moment right the second because there's a sense that the very strong push on standardized testing absent a stronger instructional vision there's a sense that that has jumped the shark a bit and that we need to no matter how we feel about testing folks are saying like let's think more about the instructional component and where to classroom observations fit into all of this and New America has led the way on some of this questioning and I think that while we're in this moment now maybe something else will come up and I hope that it will be teachers learning from each other teacher to teacher which is where I am the book in terms of what I think is a very very very powerful and I've seen it be powerful in my reporting but some of these American impulses this obsession with youth and enthusiasm this is way beyond the education debate I mean these are things in our culture that are so deep-seated that I would not be surprised if they come up again and again it seems like some of these things are reactions to some of the things that come up again and again are somewhat logical enough I would in some cases indefensible in some cases maybe not just some of the basic sort of structural realities of a very large geographically dispersed nation with no contemplation of education in our federal constitution at all so we started there and then we made some early decisions around the role of women and training and we've never changed any of those things and so that kind of leads us to certain places where people say well if we can't fix those things because what are we going to do maybe we can do this maybe we can do this there's also the interesting thing that you kind of traced through there about how measurement is always we have this sort of like I did not realize the extent to which the Horace Mann's enthusiasm for phrenology was not something that I think I had heard about it but it was really kind of front and center that somebody who is you know really like lionized in the popular history of American education for you know starting something an idea that there are a few people in history who start an idea that was new at the time and 170 years later almost everyone believes in and that's this idea of public education and yet he thought that it was we should do that after we measured the bumps in the back of people's heads and you know then it was like you testing and you could measure the bumps and then with education you can sort of help you know sort the kids well right that was that was explicitly the idea right and then we just you know we we traded in the bumps for a IQ test which would do the same thing essentially just by looking inside the skull but with but frankly with no more you know ultimate science behind them yeah so along with the missionary teacher ideal that the sort of proto-teach for americas that Jamila asked the testing pushes the other ones that I would have mentioned is the two most constant themes in american education history from phrenology to IQ to achievement testing I want to be careful you know today's achievement testing has so much more validity than either of those two things that that are just discussed and phrenology and IQ were used to classify children achievement testing today we're using mostly to classify schools and teachers so this is this is a big a big change and a positive one we're no longer so obsessed with tracking and classifying kids as we are with drawing conclusions about the schools and holding the schools accountable which I mean overall has been a positive change although there certainly excesses to this which I discussed in chapter nine of the book okay yes the system the big big system in the first part of this book and the second part of the grasp of this book I have to state in both those places that education is not in the u.s constitution it is a responsibility left to states and local governments and only 13 percent of the funding comes from washington and so what this means is that even though we have a national reform conversation which ideas for educational improvement are introduced by politicians and for philanthropists whether it's arnie duncan or bill gates or they have all the same ideas they could say both them together um these ideas are introduced at the national level and are supposed to trickle down but actually is incredibly localized quirky weird system where everything is different from everything else compared you know depending on geography so again this is why and like I am a lifelong liberal who tends to think like national government good you know that that's my bias so i was surprised when i came out with the conclusion of the book bottom up not top down and i bottom up change not top down change and i think the reason why i came there is just from a pragmatic realization that we're not going to have a national curriculum in the united states you know we went kevin and i went to finland together and yes they have a lot of flexibility at the school level but they also have like a research back national curriculum that is you know handed to the schools to to experiment with in many ways but you know the current core is not that it just isn't that it's it doesn't have the same level of coherence um that we see in other nations that we compare ourselves to so this this idea of top down reform we actually lack the political structures to do it in many ways and and that's why looking at schools as systems the school itself is the system and the teachers collaborating with one another within the school you know that's very important there was in your chapter that's focused on the rise of the new york city present-day unionism and the ocean hill brownsville crisis event there's this sort of fascinating postscript almost where you say oh and also there was this huge teacher strike in newark that that is not doesn't move nearly large in our collective memory but was actually much more violent and much more prolonged and it made me want to like read a whole article just about that um well tell me about some of the things that you came upon in writing the book that you wish you had time to write more about yeah well you can read a whole book about the new york teachers strike it's by steve golin it's called hope on the line hopes on the line i believe it is fabulous if you have time to read about new york in the 1970s which of course was coming out of these horrible race turmoil riots and violence in the streets all of this leads directly into the teacher strike at the moment when black power is confronting the teachers union movement in a much more violent way than it did in the brooklyn strike which is so much more famous um so yeah that's i actually had originally meant to write more about it and what i heard was like everybody wants to hear about new york city so unfortunately that was one thing that was one thing like that um other things that were on the cutting room floor i am really interested in the history of integration desegregation i this is a book about teachers and teaching and debates over teaching and not every broad education debate so for example the boston busting wars they are not in this book i referenced them briefly in the sense that mayor john lindsay in new york city was so scared that something like that would happen in new york that he did not try really tried to desegregate the schools so you know one of the things i've been saying in new york city at my you know events up there is like new york city hello you have the most segregated schools in the nation we never integrated these schools and lifelong new yorkers are saying i never knew that so it's interesting that history doesn't get talked about um as much as it should and and i always welcome the opportunity to discuss that and then the third thing is something that someone here was asking me about right before the event which is this idea of a new or revitalized vocational education something that's very interesting to me not old style vocab where you track people and all the poor kids are going to mechanic class and they don't get the opportunity to go to college but based on the research we have showing that high school dropouts often say i thought there was no connection to work and what i was doing and i never saw how this would increase my earning potential giving kids the opportunity to go into professional internships and externships and to learn in the workplace and this there's a wonderful book called schooling in the workplace by a woman named Nancy Hoffman that i'd recommend on that and i talk very briefly in the epilogue about the linked learning model um that's based out in california i think that one is very promising um i mean since you you want to talk more about integration might as well uh i mean one of the things that is striking about um and i mean this gets to sort of the problem of scale in the united states in education is that um you know most black kids are attending schools that are mostly black and most latino kids are attending schools in mostly minority and that there are these that there's a tremendous amount of segregation in the american education system that i think kind of just goes completely unmentioned um and it's it seems to be something that we have to actually address um if we're talking about sort of systemic education education reform yeah i agree completely and it's one of the you know one of the 10 recommendations i make for opening up this debate like let's burst this debate open let's you know not just talk about value added measurement teachers all this other stuff which is so important and um integrated schools is one of them you know i think that the the most politically fruitful way to discuss this day is a choice-based model so it is good that the obama administration had passed a regulation in the past year that allows charter schools to weigh their lotteries to achieve socioeconomic diversity originally the no excuses charter school movement was very interested in this concept of 999 90 percent failing test scores 90 percent low-income 90 percent children of color well in chapter eight i discussed the research on integration and we know that there's very positive academic achievement effects for poor children when they get to attend schools that are not overwhelmed by poverty but where they are also with middle class and affluent kids and guess what there are not negative effects on the middle class and affluent kids who might even learn something about people other than themselves and also have a positive experience i was best so i speak from personal experience on this one um you know you look at montgomery county and interesting research that the sentry foundation has done where it was through public housing lotteries that they achieved school integration so it's not just as you get education policy that we have to look at but also housing policy so through the mix of charter schools magnet schools and with urban planning thought we can't we can achieve this and it is not the old 70s debates about busing and it is not fair to sort of tar the conversation about desegregation or integration with old idea and there's a great book out right now from rick colinberg and you may have seen an op-ed in your times that's talking about the smarter charter and he's very interested in the idea of charters as a desegregation tool and there's an interesting movement within the charter schools movement to do this whether you're talking about community roots in brooklyn the large mont schools and la the charles drew school in atlanta so you see these hopeful spots across the country and i think that i think that that is very positive and very important and we often talk about teacher effectiveness policy as what took the place of a failed debate about racial integration actually we did not implement racial integration and where we did implement it we saw 3.5.8 percentage point gains for kids guess what those are the same small but significant percent gains that we're seeing from the accountability policies that are most successful so why not the two together it's always a conversation of well this failed we didn't even really try it but let's just say that failed tossed it out go to the next thing a very little coherence at the policy level so you know these ideas can be fruitful in tandem not set up in competition with one another there is i mean some some quite a bit of tension between some of the more promising ideas that are by their nature top down i mean desegregation feels pretty top down to me in many ways we was imposed by the i mean from the legal level is imposed by the supreme courts it requires us you know often to look across traditional communities and legal boundaries which have organized themselves for a lot of reasons some of which you know very much pernicious policy reasons in a in a segregated fashion i mean that does seem different than just coming from the ground up i mean like i was i was struck by the quote in your ocean hill brownsville chapter which you know again i think is very very nuanced and fair i mean in a way that i think i mean it was clear to me you took like a lot of pains to really understand exactly what was going on and at the end of it and and you know like i don't think that the conventional thought has treated the community all that well in that discussion i don't think that it's really 50 50 in terms of who thinks who was right and who was wrong and and you acknowledge that it seemed that the whole crisis and this is almost i think unavoidable seemed to have a very bad economic effect on the students and you know parsing sort of the nature of the education with helicopters and you know the level of animus that kind of came in there i think would be almost impossible but there's this quote from the principal where he says well yeah you know everyone else had failed and so we felt like at least we could fail on our own i mean it's poignant but at the same time everyone wants more than failure and so i mean is it the common core which a lot of people have a enthusiasm for including educators is you know it's pretty top-down in many ways i mean top-down from philanthropy arguably more than any place and so so i mean given that our system has fallen short in many ways and has been primarily decentralized i mean can we what how likely is it that sort of just relying on the grassroots to grow will work i think has to be a combination of up and down i actually like the common core of i've written about the standards quite a bit and i've read them and i i think that they are good standards um the trouble with them is in the implementation the lack of resources to skills filled for teachers and that's where i think the teacher to teacher learning and sharing of best practices is going to be really important one of the currencies in the system that doesn't get talked about enough is time because the way the teachers work day is structured uh there's not enough time for adults to work with other adults on something like getting something like the common core right and that's something you hear from teachers a lot and i think it's an important point to make and of course time is money anytime you have adults with other adults they're not in front of kids and someone else has got to be with the kids so that's that's just something to think about um the things that are supposed to be so affordable when they're done right become more expensive so the idea that um it's not about the money which you hear a lot about in school reform i try to you know convocate question that a little bit because we want reforms to be done correctly and not just fast and cheap um so yes i think i think when you talk about something like a charter school that through its attractive curriculum and effective disciplinary practices is going to be attractive to parents from across racial and socio-economic lines that is integration on a choice model so it's really different from the sort of top down um bussing based integration that we saw in the 60s and 70s so i i think realistically and of course i think this is a good thing intellectually we're going to continue to have ideas for school reform that are top down ideas um the implement the implementation though must come from an acknowledgement of what the system looks like on the ground and there needs to be flexibility in the implementation and there needs to be you know training and sharing of practices on the ground that is encouraged and not quashed i mean that's one of the things that i look at in chapter 10 of the book you see teachers organizing around the common core at Crenshaw High School in Los Angeles common core based curriculum but it's very based on sort of community service and community activism as its organizing theme and of parents and kids and all sorts of people are excited about this at Crenshaw High School and the superintendent of Los Angeles doesn't like it because it's not his vision of what common core school reform looks like and the next thing you know it the vast majority of the teachers who've been active in this effort have been recessed they're getting moved around to other schools and the experiment is over so currently what you see in our current system is that when teachers organize and empower themselves to try a new idea to often they're stomped on not empowered um i want to give Jamil one more chance to ask any last questions you have and then we'll go to uh questions from the audience i hope we just go to questions from the audience okay yeah that's right do we have a microphone or are we just uh yes so we have a microphone um i will call on you and then um wait for the microphone to come uh sir in the front i'll be up in the front please my name is Dave Price and i'm just someone who spent 33 years yeah is it no yeah i mean i'm a teacher voice as someone who spent 33 years is still spending time in education i want to thank you i want to thank you for your book i completed it uh one of the schools that i work at had to be done more um but i want to say about hypothetical you have your 10 recommendations in that but tonight you're riding on your cell phone rings and it's Barack Obama and it says i've read your book but i can't do 10 things oh god i hate that question and and and i'm just and i've looked at your book give them a tour of where i mean it's so massive you don't know of course and this will help our audience on the web too this is oh i know right uh so my question is uh what would be your top two or three recommendations in some kind and i know it's a difficult question i understand that and but or just pick you know something that you think bang for your buck whatever however you want to organize it what would you do first because it has to be a first thing first i think my overall my overall large idea which informs a lot of the 10 things in the back of the book is that classroom level instruction matters so the teacher actions and behaviors and in the class are the are the stuff of education so with every idea we have we have to make sure that we're improving those interactions between student and teacher um i did a piece for the wall street journal on on four research driven teacher behaviors that seem to work to improve student achievement i would like politicians to read that because when you realize that drilling kids on multiple choice test leads to depress student achievement that having conceptual deeper intellectual questions at the heart of the lesson is what leads to the higher test scores that we all say we want you know then you start to ask the question about is the way that we're implementing the common core going to lead to these outcomes is it going to lead to the conceptual lessons we know only a third of the classrooms now are conceptually driven and not fact driven you know right or wrong so that's my over i'm i'm going to leave it there because it's a tough question but it's the stuff of education is the interaction between the student and the teacher just real quick you give up your book for your writing and come with me as i talk to superintendents and around the country you won't make as much money but we'll have fun i'm not i'm not making that much money but i wouldn't make any um yes in the back my name is steve voidsakievich and i do teacher prep policy for the aft my question is about your emphasis on bottom-up reform i think your common core examples are very striking i'm curious how you see all the pieces moving at once in the sense that for policy makers to say teachers need the time and support to implement these reforms it seemed you have to have a certain respect for the professionalism of teachers in the job of teaching but how do you build that respect by giving teachers the time to work on it but to you know the time and support so it's like you have to have the attitude in order to get the funding but you have to have the funding in order to let the teachers do the work how do you move that whole picture at once so you're providing policy solutions and changing attitudes that's tough but one of the things i tried to do in the chapter 10 of my book is to show great teachers that work in the classroom and to to depict a little bit what that actually looks like because once we realize that of the 3.4 million teachers we already have working i mean this should be obvious but many of them are very good at what they do and we can look to them to show examples of what great teaching looks like then i think what i write in the book is that we want our policy debate to be motivated less by fear of the worst teachers than by the inspiration we draw from the best so when you know when i see president obama standing up in the state of the union saying let's stop making excuses for bad teachers oh yeah and by the way great teachers are great like let's just put some more specifics behind that second part of that which is you know what does great teaching look like so what i say as a journalist is when i'm talking to administrators or unions let me come see your best work because that should be the model i don't i i wish that in our national conversation we would look more at the work of the best teachers i mean i'm a journalist so some of these big policy level questions i struggle with but it's you make a very important point it's it's hard to make change without the respect there sir my name is randy scarborough i taught at a small high school in southern california for 31 years recently a federal judge went after tenure in my state and when the decision came down and arnie duncan made a comment you could almost hear the champagne corks popping in the background my question is when did we lose the democratic party rock obama has been cozying up with charter school people for 10 years arnie duncan is no friend of public education kori booker when did we more or less lose the democratic party at the at its top levels well the debate in the democratic party about teachers unions is like a hundred years old so jane adams the settlement house crusader in chicago wanted stricter teacher accountability measures and margaret hailey the founder of the teachers union movement opposed that and then president johnson created the national teacher corps over the objections of the nea so even our you know war on poverty president had some beef with the teachers union um i think that the the the black power critique of union teachers infiltrated the left including the mainstream of the democratic party i mean when you see um a generation of generation x democrats kori booker rock obama um they a lot of them they have personal ties to organizations like teach for america and the kip charter school networks they actually personally know folks that were involved in the leadership of those organizations and so they are sympathetic and excited by it and though the ideology of those organizations was crafted to suit the reagan years the idea of small government the idea of philanthropically not federally supported change models so i think now we see as generation x or the the younger baby boomers like president obama as they ascend politically there's this debate in the democratic party but there's nothing new about debates in the democratic party about teachers and unions and to what extent being a pro public education democrat means being a pro union democrat i mean i think of course the folks you mentioned would dispute your characterization and say that they are pro public schools they just have a critique of the union position right i would i would add to that that you know guys like rock obama and kori booker and and folks um in the democratic party in this mold are coming or are they're urban democrats first first and foremost i don't mean that as a euphemism for african-american i mean that they are centered in cities um and that's going to just inform how they approach education policy i'm sure that if the national democratic leadership came from north carolina in southern virginia in south carolina they might have a very different view of teacher unionization in teachers unions and sort of teacher organization just because those are there's a different context for teaching and for its intersection with politics you make a uh an interesting observation or you quote someone making observation about the sort of symbiotic relationship between teachers unions once they became agents of collective bargaining and large administrative organizations because um that's a position of greater leverage for them so a lot of historians of labor have made the point and i'm just borrowing this that unionism is essentially conservative force what do we mean by that we know unions advocate for progressive policies they ally themselves to management because it union wants to sit down from an empowered management across the table that is empowered to agree to their demands in education what this means is that you know in the 60s and 70s the demands for community control of urban schools grew up teachers unions did not want that not because they hated parents but because you know in new york city there's one million kids in you know countless schools are they gonna sit down and debate a contract with every single principal that's not what they want they want to go to a school board they want to go to a mayor and they want to sit down at the city level and and debate a contract that is going to apply to all 80 000 of their members and so you know um historians of teachers unions have made this point that from the parent's perspective it has often seemed like there's no difference between the union and the administration of these urban systems that has pursued all these nefarious policies like refusing to desegregate the schools and and cutting funding because they see them all as part of one bureaucracy and you know reformers the past 10 20 years have called this the blob and i you know i think it's important that within the blob there's lots of different interests but there's some you know there's some accuracy to that characterization and my mom's a teacher and we have these conversations all the time about education and i was wondering do you know a lot about the teachers and the impact they have or the impact that these policies have but what about like the actual student like i just graduated from college and before that i was in high school and i found because of the standardized tests as you mentioned students constantly are now worried more about like oh how am i going to get an a how am i going to aces test not necessarily about like intellectual curiosity and like expanding this and um my high school english teacher who really like challenged me critically and like where a was like such a huge achievement from her and she and i have talked about this too so i'm wondering what all of your perspectives are in terms of the impact you see on that teachers have said they have seen students on the college level or even a high school level sorry i was like a really long winning question i mean the standardized touching push impacts kids in schools where they have interpreted this to mean we should spend a lot of time prepping for multiple choice tests and so i look you know in chapter nine of the book at a district in colorado where they decided to create tests and gym and art and music and then as a result kindergarteners and first graders were coming in and sitting down taking a multiple test test this is admittedly an extreme example but you'd be surprised the state of florida is now saying they're going to test in every subject every grade level so it's not as um it's not as surprising as you might think and you're right it does have an impact on students there is a proper use of testing in the classroom the proper use of testing is to diagnose what the students do and do not know so that the teacher can direct his or her instruction effectively toward the students and you would use diagnostic testing in the beginning of a unit and then again you test at the end and you see if you have successfully taught and the teacher is doing this to help the kids not because he or she is necessarily subject to a whole bunch of accountability measures i mean that's my take on a functional use of testing that is driven by the research i've done from this book on how testing impacts kids i think even bill gates told you this florida thing was crazy yeah so when i had the opportunity actually i had the opportunity to ask both arnie duncan and bill gates about what they saw of florida and they were both like oh we don't like that's what they're doing we don't like that um and that's what you see behind arnie duncan statement of a couple weeks ago that the standardized testing push is you know sucking the oxygen out of the room quote unquote you know i think there's this sense that we need to examine the excesses of accountability that we started out with too little accountability but have we pushed too much too fast and i think i think this gets a bit to what you were saying earlier about sort of the need for kind of a full spectrum approach to these things you would be teacher training accountability everything um some some to some degree the insane push for testing in some places reads like an attempt to avoid durable policy and go for a quick fix and so i think you know a reconfiguration towards more durable full spectrum policy in terms of improving schools and improving teachers will address some of these you know these extreme cases thank you um i feel like in the book and in your other writing you talk about um you know the fact that our public education system exists in a context of a somewhat weak you know social services in this country so i feel like the book in some places is grappling with this idea of um you know we don't want to teach treat teachers like like extraordinary angels like they're doing some sort of community service like it's a job like we should respect people who do it well but and i agree with that like i don't want it to be like oh my god you're a hero you know which but but i feel like some teachers are in the face of the fact that you know in schools that are 90% poverty they're being tasked to be a social worker and a teacher and uh you know and and and so i mean how can we both not have this sort of angel devil dichotomy and recognize the sort of double duty that maybe teachers in high poverty schools are doing yes um i mean one of my own early memories of my from my own education is my fourth grade teacher buying a winter coat for boy in my class and like to me she was a hero in that moment so i don't yes i want to acknowledge that teachers are stepping up to the plate in their non-academic responsibilities for their kids every single day um i talk about the research on teachers impact and poverty in the book so that we can demystify this um seven percent of the current achievement gap is driven by teacher quality gaps between schools seven percent the vast majority of it is coming from family socioeconomic factors and neighborhoods however the same research suggests that if the best teachers were systematically moved to the poorest kids more than half of these achievement gaps that are you know socioeconomically based could be closed so my question is then well how are we doing it systematically moving the best teachers to the neediest kids and the answer is not great we see that in the highest poverty schools there is a constant you know churn and burn which itself impacts achievement as i was discussing earlier we see that only about 25 percent of the teachers last year who in a federal experiment were offered 20 thousand dollars to go to a higher poverty school only 25 percent wanted to even apply to potentially get this bonus which is a giant bonus in the world of public education so that brings me you know to what jamal is just talking about and what i mentioned earlier of the broader let's broaden the conversation because you know a tool like integration so that there aren't so many a hundred percent high poverty schools will mean that teachers can do more effective work without having to be heroes for 25 kids in the class maybe they can be heroes for three kids maybe three kids need heroics and you know 22 of them need a really great instructional leader in front of the class and maybe that's a balance that's much more doable so so yes i i like what she said a lot it seems like heroism is something that almost by definition is a good that we greatly value but cannot reasonably expect from someone i mean that's what heroism means and so you can't build a system of expectations around what we can't expect from i mean i look at the book of what we can learn from systems abroad and i think it's important to put things in international context but in a way i just get frustrated with this debate it's like japan south korea finland well we have a you know 20 percent of the kids in poverty here so it's not going to look like these other countries not as long as we have these child poverty rates so that is like a very important kind of underlying conversation and yet at the same time i completely reject the idea that because of poverty we should not improve school and we can't talk about instruction and that's to me just too easy you know and i wouldn't have become an education journalist if i thought that we shouldn't talk about education until we're done with poverty you know that i wouldn't be doing this job if i felt that that was a legitimate argument um the gentleman in the back standing up so one of the things that you talked about um one of the variables was time and to me another variable is trust and so i'm curious to see how you would create more trust and part of my discussion or thinking of that is you talked about the power of teacher to teacher and sort of the personal learning communities and that requires a lot of trust and people willing to see each other and willing to talk to each other and willing to acknowledge that one you know there could be improvements so how would you create a system where you could have that trust and then a sub to that is do you think that some of the laws and unions right now where a teacher isn't allowed to observe another teacher prevent that type of trust um yeah so unions have unions unfortunately have often not been helpful in negotiations on adult adult time in the system and that i think is changing now um we've seen some changes in new york which is the system i'm most familiar with i live in new york but uh we've seen some changes even in the past year where there's going to be more collaborative time built into the day something that the the unions had previously opposed so yes um i i write a little bit in the book about the role of the principal and how crucial that is because when you ask people why does this high poverty school have teachers that are dying to work in it and this one nobody wants to work in it and they're five blocks away from each other and the demographics are really similar it's always the principal the principal is a hundred percent the time they answer to that question we don't often talk about the principal but the principal is often where good school reforms go to die um one of the interesting things in the history is um i traced this attempt to have better classroom observations and really look at what teachers are doing student to teacher in the classroom and it's often the principal who's either unwilling or unable to go into the classroom and in a detailed way look at what the teacher is doing either because they don't have the time they're drowning under the responsibilities of you know running every aspect of a school or they just don't have the skill in the training to do a good job so you know we've had a teacher accountability teacher effectiveness conversation you know we we need to you know principal accountability principal effectiveness that's also quite important and it builds trust um yes i have a teacher voice too i really don't i respect that very much it's a good theme got a microphone um i spent most of my adult life as a classroom teacher proudly um although it was very interesting how many times people in in i don't know cocktail parties or whatever once i said i was a teacher that was the end of the conversation um as if i didn't have anything else to say um but one of the things that's been really clear to me and i don't hear it talked about very much is there aren't just there isn't just one kind of great teacher and there isn't just one kind of great school and i wonder what you have to say about you could be a great teacher for a single kid or for this kind of kid or what have you and um and i think that's part of the anti-charter movement is a sort of a fear of diversity what do you think that's coming from that that sense that we could only have one model of good teacher or great teacher and one model of of great school yeah i agree with you um in the eblog of the book i talk about an idea introduced by the political scientist steven tell us and the sociologist john mayba they're at john pockins and harvard and they talk about communities of practice so the idea that we know that schools that have a certain pedagogical strategy that work for their particular student population are successful they could partner with a teacher's college that also adopts a similar set of tools and then we could have a more coherent system but there needs to be like 10 of those models there can't it can't be just no excuses for example no excuses has shown some success in part because it's a coherent way of looking at the work and the adults who work in those systems have signed on to do that type of work um and to a certain extent families are choosing that they want to be in a no excuse of school but is there a similar model that could you know come up around an art-centric curriculum or a project-based curriculum or yes yes yes yes so i i completely agree at something i write about a little bit i think the linked learning system in california which i mentioned earlier has had some success uh organizing itself as a community of practice and absolutely the the system is so diverse and so geographically spread out you know what i'm about to go to rural west virginia to to do some schools reporting later this week and i can guarantee you that what works in harlem might not work in rural west virginia but some of it might there might be some good sharing there but you know you have to be open to the idea um both that it that there are similar things that work for all kids but also differences what research have you done you talked about recruiting and retention what research have you done on why the best you know students out of college choose or don't choose or consider teaching why people leave as you think about the different levels of security versus upside versus length of career what are the drivers that make sense to you as a journalist yeah so there's actually a good polling of teachers who've left and laura who's here in the back has written about this uh she's a teacher who left but uh teachers say that they often leave because there's no opportunity for advancement and they don't just mean money but they mean opportunities to be recognized in the adult world for what they're doing and to have a changing set of responsibilities over time so that their role is not stagnant so career ladders that build teachers responsibilities and one thing i suggest in the book is they should be mentoring novices when they get good you know those sorts of things can be powerful uh teachers who leave also complain about the principles quite a lot which is one thing i mentioned earlier i think it's important to have you know administrators that are focused on empowering teachers you know a lot of teachers never receive any feedback positive or negative so no one has said to them like kevin you've been here two years how do you like it here are you thinking this day you know these kinds of things that any good boss in any career should be doing should you know be more standard practice um in school um why do people choose to teach or not choose to teach i mean i think that the vast majority of teachers are mission driven and quite a few of them say like i have imagined myself as a teacher since being a student but i do look um at some of the economic research showing that the gap between what a teacher can earn in the united states and what other college educated careers pay is bigger here than in other nations so for example in south korea an engineer and a teacher are at the same salary level here we know that they have a big differential between them and you can look at sort of the attorney teacher uh gap as another predictive one for teacher quality across the western world and actually it's interesting because we probably all know someone who might have thought about being a teacher or going to law school or in my case journalist or law school which is the perennial debate so glad i avoided that one um but yeah so we we have asked American teachers to close income inequality gaps and that is seen as one of their responsibilities but teachers are a victim of increasing inequality teachers earning power relative to other college educated workers has decreased since 1940 so in 1940 a teacher was about average or a little bit better than other similarly educated people depending on if you were a man or a woman now you are below so you are seeing your peers um be able to to afford more faster one of the things that's important to look at is to bring some of teachers raises and compensation forward into a little bit earlier in the career in north carolina takes 15 years to go from $30,000 entry level salary to $40,000 so like we're talking 37 years old 40 you have just achieved $40,000 and this sets public school teaching apart from other jobs that require a master's degree at the high school level i mean you can't you have to look at the structure of how it's paid jamal has written about this too oh actually next after her first um hi i'm stefanie deluca and i'm from the american chemical society um i actually have two questions does this work that's not the question um three questions so um they might be related i'm not sure um so the first question is um we have a lot of you know there's a lot of energy in this room and in the education world it seems in general about we have all these great ideas we're going to go do this you know we're going to have like teacher networking and they're going to have workforce you know um professional development opportunities and things like that we're going to make this country like the greatest education center ever but where do you suggest that the funding come from to carry that out or do you think it's a more reshuffling of the money that's already being put forth for education purposes my second question is um different um so i went to a rural school in alabama and my general sense was that the teachers and the educators there might have been like one or two who seem to care about the students most of the time they cared about friday's football game um i was wondering and then you know i go and observe my sister she's in high school now and it's very similar i don't know do you think it's because schools and rural communities are like the teachers and administrators there are the last to know about these ideas that are coming out or or they don't care do you see if it's a trend across rural versus say urban centers um or why do you think that the rural schools tend to be slower on the uptake than some of these other other places i think rural systems are slower on the uptake in any reform or change movement because of their geographic isolation i don't it's not because people don't care um sports sports are a thing that suck up a lot of energy and money in the american public school system that set us apart from our international peers amanda rippley who is also a follow-up new america has written about this quite persuasively and she has looked at how it unfortunately may be especially a problem in rural places so i think what you experienced um you know there's some evidence to back that and that takes me to your first question which is it's going to be more about reshuffling money than about more money and i mean you just have to look at our political good luck to see why that why that's the case sir uh hi i'm uh Wyatt nelson uh with the aft um so you mentioned we're talking earlier about the industrial education system uh it was sort of the factory setting education where you know the batch of students comes in and you fill them up with knowledge and then they leave after one year and so our economy has changed quite a bit since then so do you envision a new system of education that's not based on the industrial revolution and not based on the industrial economy for the 21st century based on your research i don't think we can prepare kids for specific jobs um the current system was based on the assumption that only about 10 percent of kids would go to college today we want college for all so we have we're putting a very high expectation conversation on a system that was not built for that i think it's much more important to teach kids critical thinking skills and high literacy and numeracy than to direct them toward anything because the economy changes sometimes much faster than we can predict and we don't always we aren't always good at predicting what the needs of the economy will be in terms of people's skills but we know that more education leads to better outcomes for people within the economy i'm just curious i'm curious what kevin and jamal would say about this i mean i would i would agree it seems it seems sort of hard practically to be able to to train kids for particular jobs um and it just seems foolhardy i mean if you you know if in the 90s you're like oh we should have every kid take a visual basic class and then five years later that's just utterly useless i mean it would have been useless at the time um but it would have been more useless later on uh you know it just doesn't seem like it would work you know i i know in my experience i had the the very good luck to have very good public public school teachers and simply learning how to think learning how to read learning how to look at text um it's been far more beneficial to my life uh than you know learning any particular skill although i do appreciate things i learned in homeac i think i mean the key is that people always have forward access to more educational opportunities um some of those opportunities happen in formal educational settings which is why we want to make sure that people have if not college for all at least all people with a reasonable chance to choose college if if that's where they want to go but you know a lot of what we learn we learn um on the job while working but only in some jobs and that that i think is sort of the um scary thing about the economy we're living in that we're really trying to wrestle with which is that some jobs and some careers offer vast opportunities for learning and personal advancement and some you're just stuck not learning anything and if you're not learning you're falling behind um so um i think you can direct people into certain sorts you can direct people in certain directions going to college is is itself a sort of type of career choice although it opens more careers in front of you um what you don't want is to kind of steer people down those blind alleys where it's very hard to kind of reverse and get back into the learning system so that doesn't that doesn't mean that there's not a role for workplace education in terms of getting to see what it's like to be an adult within the workplace who has goals and sets them and meets them and all these things i mean i i've seen that this and in and of itself can be powerful especially for kids who aren't being exposed to the workplace and ideas about that at home so i think that's a kind of a fine line um i think we have time for one more question we'll take it right here and then thank you very much for this mighty intellectual work i've heard it said teachers take great pains to make something much more simply received to someone else and that increases civilization so thank you for teaching us um i wonder parents being the primary educators i'm a teacher i've been a lifelong teacher as a sort of secondary educator that plays ideally second fiddle to an engaged family obviously we don't have the ideal in many instances but i see in the the united states a need to find professional um but not just professional personas that we can point to to teach the family about education but but about teaching about the profession of teaching about a teacher what is a teacher as one of the sort of choice worthy professional thing that they would hold us to the standard so they improve the schools by demanding that the teachers live up to it but also encourage it in their homes to their children so that we have more uh professional teachers in the next generation i'm curious in your treasure trove here who you find are truly the the great exemplars that we'd want to bring back out the sort of the the one or two that are really great for that and that would be particularly useful in our current milieu so you're asking me the one or two greatest teachers in american history or or the one or two you think models they could even be fictional i don't know what's been used before the one or two models that would would help rebirth this image i like real people more than pretend people so um i teach english i mentioned anna julia cooper the black feminist teacher who worked here in dc i would love everyone to know her story i think she's incredibly inspiring and and she was a career teacher from her teenage years until her late 70s um she is a wonderful example and if you're interested in her chapter three of the book is your jam um and you asked for two i didn't realize but maybe she's my favorite person in the whole book because nobody's asked me that for um i i guess i would refer people also to chapter five of the book which is kind of where kevin started the conversation you can read about these crazy radical communist teachers i'm not suggesting we adopt their politics but um to read about how they didn't have a black history curriculum so they wrote one themselves to read about how the bathrooms were dirty in the school so you know they just decided to fix it um and not just to go about themselves to do it but to partner with families and even ministers in the neighborhood and all this i mean it goes back to what you were asking about tanya about so many teachers are taking that extra stuff and we should acknowledge that um i find many of their stories which i tell in chapter five you know quite interesting and inspiring and these were also teachers who were very active in an intellectual community that gave them the strength um to do the work that they were doing and that i think is also very important to think about is that you know when adults are working they need to to have colleagues and peers um which is a theme you've noticed i've come back to again and again because teachers spend their time with kids but they are adults that have all the same needs as all other professional adults for collaboration um recognition from the adult world um and all of those things so this was a group of teachers that was active mid-century that form this for themselves and i find that quite fascinating so that's how i'd answer the question um thanks to all of you for coming join me and thank you very much