 Good evening, everybody. My name is Victor Obaseke. Welcome to the Future Forum. Thanks for being here. Well, and thanks for making it through the rain and the cold. I know we're not used to that as Texans and I know as Austinites, we're definitely not used to driving in it. I wanted to focus first on the organization itself. Of course, as we said in the video, it's an organization really focused on folks engaging and interacting on issues that are most important in our community and our society. And so we're really pleased to have you here and really pleased to have the panel here. But it's a membership organization, so I do want to encourage you to join as the video did. We'll be here at the reception afterward to talk more about how you can do that if you'd like to join and you're not a member at this time. Before I introduce our moderator, I did want to kind of lay the groundwork for the conversation by providing just a couple of data points. Very basic, not a long presentation that gives us all kind of level playing field for understanding the race and Texas public school system conversation that we're going to have tonight. So with that, let me jump into the slides here. So the state demographer was good enough to customize a presentation that was given in January for this particular event by telling us some things that, you know, if you're engaged in education, you probably already know, but we did want to again reiterate. This particular slide, for those of you who may not be able to see it clearly, kind of speaks to three trends as the rest of the slides do that I think are important to understand for this particular conversation. The first one is obvious and quite dramatic. And that is the Hispanic population growth is quite dramatic in terms of the projections. We see that it could be upwards of 8 million by 2050. And of course, we have just 28 million in the state now. The second and really important and really important factor to indicate in the terms of the trends is the non-Hispanic white population, which is actually projected to shrink and to shrink just not just in terms of percentage, but in terms of population itself after 2020, which is quite dramatic. And we'll see it and give me one second. I'm having some technical problems that's going in and out. A third is the, and it's called other here. Again, this is the state demographers data, it's great data, but I wouldn't refer to folks as other. That's mostly the Asian, Asian American population, non-Hispanic. And you see that it's a small base population number, but it grows quite dramatically over time. So these slides just really reinforce that in terms of the numbers. And you see the raw numbers of the youth, Hispanic youth, really dramatically increasing. And you see again that raw number of non-Hispanic white youth actually shrinking. The percentages indicate the same. And so with that kind of picture, broad picture of the Texas public school system as it relates to the racial makeup of the school age children, of course, at zero 18. And so some of those kids wouldn't be in the school system and a few may be older. We get a really strong sense of what the school district, the school population would look like over time. And just to put that into perspective quickly, the 2015 zero to 18 population, 18 or under, was 7.7 million, is the estimate from the state demographer. While in the 2015-2016 school year, 5.8 million youth were in our public school systems. So we're talking a very large chunk of this population being in the public schools. And so I think this is a really good proxy for understanding what is going to happen over time with our public schools. With that, I want to provide some information from the state demographer. If you want more, and I'm happy to provide these slides, but the state demographer is obviously the developer of these slides. There's the information. I'll be here afterward. I'm happy to send you the information as well. But let's touch base about that if you'd like to do that. And without further ado, I'd love to introduce our moderator, Julie Chang. Julie Chang is of course the state education reporter for the Austin American statesman. She also reports on social services at the statesman. She's been there since 2013, and prior to that, she was at the Beaumont Enterprise reporting there as well. A native of Houston, she attended Bel Air High School, and then got journalism and plan two honors degrees here at the University of Texas. Without further ado, Julie Chang. Well, thank you for having me today. To start off, I want to actually introduce our panelists here. To my left is Morgan Craven. She's an attorney leading Texas Appleseed School to Prison Pipeline Project. She received her BA from Sanford in her law degree from Harvard Law School. To her left is Gina Hinajosa. She's a member of the Texas House of Representatives. She was elected to office in 2016, representing here in Austin. She graduated from UT Austin, also with a plan two degree in government. She received her law degree from George Washington Law School in 1999. Prior to being elected to the House, she was the board president for Austin ISD. To her left is Gregory Michael Worthington. He's a doctoral student in the educational policy and planning program here at UT. He has a bachelor's of science and general mathematics from UTSA and a master's of education from UT Austin. Between earning those degrees, Greg taught high school math to underserved students in Edgewood and Northside ISDs in San Antonio. Finally, Rafael Bejar is the director of outreach for the Texas Public Policy Foundation. He's been there since January 2017. He's a third-year veteran in the local and the political field promoting democracy and accountable and responsible government on multiple levels of the state, on multiple levels of the government. He earned his master's in political management from George Washington University, where he also served as adjunct professor teaching coalition building. So very esteemed and well-experienced panelists we have here. So education indeed is a dynamic topic filled with lots of questions and answers that need to be addressed. But I guess just to start off, I do want to address the question of, I know, getting to a pretty hard-hitting topic here is charter schools. Charter schools, as most of you probably know, are publicly funded but privately operated schools. Primarily, their demographic makeup is that they are primarily brown and black students. And so I just wanted to get your y'all's thoughts on whether that makeup, you think, will continue if it's going to still be primarily brown and black students. And because funding is such a difficult issue and we're all strapped for cash, I mean, do you think that divisiveness you see in the public school arena between charter schools and school districts will continue? I'm happy to speak on that. And you need to, I'm the politician, I like to talk, so you need to rein me in when I go overboard. But this is an issue that really has emerged as a central issue lately in the School Finance Commission discussions because essentially we are underfunding our public schools. Everybody essentially, maybe not everybody on this panel, but most people essentially agree about that. And yet what we've created now is our parallel tracks of publicly funded schools. You have your district schools that take everybody and then you have your charter schools that do not. And in fact, I had a bill this last session, and Morgan helped, ABC helped us on that and testified in support of it that said that charter schools, since they take public money and are funded 100% by the state, they should be open to all kids and should not exclude kids because of disciplinary records, which we know disproportionately affects kids of color, mostly boys of color. And so that has been a problem. And I had pulled up some numbers just of a charter school, a charter school in the district that has a great reputation and that's Kip College Prep. When I was on the school board, we struggled with how to turn around means and Garcia Middle School. And we had constant struggles in this community with that. Kip is right in the same community. And I just pulled up numbers is because if you look at charter schools and how they compare with district schools, you're going to see in general that our public schools are outperforming. But it's important to even take a closer snapshot because these are the kids in the same community, right? You need to look at a community of kids and how different people are educating them. And what struck me is when you look at the numbers, means has 20% African-American, Garcia 28% African-American, Kip only 3%, means has 78% of its kids are at risk. And at risk category, at risk kids are kids basically whose lives are in crisis, right? Because of pregnancy, because of homelessness, there's like 13, 14 factors. So means 78% of their kids, Garcia 81%, Kip 68%. When you look at mobility, so in Austin, when I was on the school board, I don't know if it's changed, but we had the highest mobility rate of any urban district. That means families don't have housing stability because it's so expensive to live here, right? The mobility rate of means is 20, almost 25%. It's almost 20% of Garcia. If you look at Kip, it's 3.9%, which is staggering differences when you're looking at a population and the needs within a campus. And so we have this incredibly inefficient and inequitable system right now that we are inadequately funding. And I think we need time to take a pause on that kind of funding and charter school expansion and figure out these problems. Rafa, hearing these statistics about means as well as Kip in the same neighborhood and the discrepancy that you're hearing, I mean, is that true for all charter schools across the state? Yeah, I'm not sure if that's really applies to the totality of the charter school experience throughout the state. I will say this, just to start off in a more general tone, charter schools were given a license to operate. And I think that if you just take a look at the experiment of charter schools, it has been a resounding success if you take a look at the people that are quite honestly flocking to charter schools to take advantage of those opportunities. Quite honestly, if they weren't doing something right, people wouldn't take their kids out of a working public school and take them and put them into a charter school. Why do you think in particular kids are what you call flocking to charter schools? What are some of the reasons? What are some of the attractiveness of charter schools in your opinion? Well, I think that at least from what I've seen in my experience, again, I'm from San Antonio, and I'll speak from the experiences that we have in San Antonio. So in San Antonio, and this applies to different areas of the state as well, unfortunately, we have a history with some schools, not all schools, traditional public schools of waste, mismanagement, and corruption. In fact, we've had TEA come in and take over three contiguous ISDs, independent school districts, on the south side of San Antonio, and that's obviously primarily Hispanic part of town, economically disadvantaged. And a lot of the charter schools that have come in, they've come in, there's been obviously some talking, the way that Julie phrasing your question, is that there are a lot of primarily black and brown students. Well, if you take a look at the charter schools, a lot of the charter schools mission is specifically designed to service this community. And they go into these areas, and they draw from the folks that live there. And if it happens to be African American, or perhaps it's be Hispanic, that's where the bulk of their students, the bulk of the composition of their students are going to be. And I think that the reason why they are flocking to this opportunity is that parents see that they want something more for their student, for their child. And they want to make sure that their child has in their view, in their perception, a better education experience. And you touch upon parental choice, and that brings up another controversial issue among certain folks at the Capitol, which is this idea of private school choice, school choice, or voucher system, it comes in different types of names. I mean, do you think that private school choice, the idea of having public money fund in some way private school tuition for families is going to continue to be an issue that's talked about, and will it eventually pass here in Texas? Well, I personally hope so. And I will say from my vantage point is that why would we want to condemn our children to attend a low-performing or failing school just because they're in a particular zip code? I mean, to me, that's unconscionable. And as a parent, I would do everything either to try to change that public school setting or find an alternative. So, and I think that that is why you see a lot of support gearing up not only for the charter schools, but also for school choice. Anyone who want to respond? Yeah, I would like to. So, we definitely do have a history of inequity in our public schools across the nation, in Texas, and definitely in San Antonio. I'm also from San Antonio. And as I mentioned earlier, I taught there. I taught high school mathematics in Edgewood and Northside at Memorial and John Jay High Schools. And I think it's important to take a look at the big picture of what's been happening with racial inequity over the years. And I think a lot of it, when we look at the history of it, a lot of it stems back to the business community, which is exactly where the school choice idea came from. By the way, school choice is not just vouchers. It's also charter schools. It's the idea of injecting competition between public schools. And you make them compete for students. Really, you're competing for funding via students, which I find a bit troubling when you attach dollars to a child's back and say, if you want your funding, come get it. But, so education reforms have long stemmed from the business community. The invention of public schools came from the business community. The need to meet the changing economy and the changing labor market and our production and what that looked like. And so at the beginning of the 18th century, beginning of the 20th century, there was this progressive, this administrative progressive reform where we took schools and we structured them like businesses. Public schools were definitely already a thing. But there were new needs. We had industrial revolution going on. We needed workers. And so they created these schools that were structured like businesses with business style management. That's the term administrative, right? This is where we got the idea of principles and other folks from. And they took kids and they sorted them by perceived abilities to learn and by faulty assessments, faulty tests. And there's quite a bit of a correlation between what's happening now and then. And so when we took these kids, we funneled them into trade programs and we funneled them into vocational schools. And the business community was very much at play here, not just in policy, but even funding and establishing wealthy philanthropists, if that sounds familiar, from the business community were establishing schools and funding them and convincing a lot legislators to create these schools through policies. And they justified this, of course, with their assessments. And at some point in the 60s and 70s, we had a lot of revolution, uprising of some sort, lots of protests, civil rights movement came in and lots of people were fighting for educational rights during this time. You had Edward B. Kirby was born out of this. It was originally San Antonio V. Rodriguez at the U.S. Supreme Court in 1973. So there's a lot happening in terms of education there with school segregation. And so in the 80s on, all of a sudden the business community came up with this idea of privatization. And all of a sudden we want to deregulate schools. They want, originally they wanted to regulate schools through this to control and centralize that power. That was the administrative progressive movement. Now they want to decentralize that, but they want to get rid of that power and they want to deregulate schools through law. And they also want to deprofessionalize educators, which was professionalizing educators was the business community's idea in the first place, all because of labor demands. And so, but again, we're converting schools into businesses and we're making them compete for their funding. And I think if we're going to move forward with looking at issues of racial equity and how to solve this problem, that's kind of a really vague statement. I think we need to kind of give up on giving the business community all this power they have in policymaking and ideas and idea creation for what education and reform should look like. These solutions need to be born within the communities that are suffering and they're not included. We don't talk to students. We don't talk to their parents and we don't talk to the teachers that work with them. These are the people who are constantly left out. If you look at Forbes had a list of top 100 innovators in education, almost the entire list was people in business. Talking about, I mean, a lot of these issues, and you guys have mentioned this too, is this idea of underfunding public schools in general. And I mean, the legislature right now is through the public finance commission, the public school finance commission is exploring ways to solve the big question mark that is school finance. I mean, what is it that we need to be doing? What are the big three issues that we need to be addressing in order to fix this funding problem? Representative Penninghamson? Well, and that's the multi-billion dollar question that no one's been able to figure out. I'll tell you what some of the problems are. It's easier to find the problems than it is to come up with a solution. So I'm originally from Brownsville, Texas, went to public schools where it's a title one school district. Everybody is on freedom, religious lunch. I grew up in that. And I went to school in that. And so Brownsville is one of those Chapter 42 districts that's a recipient of the Robin Hood or recapture money that a district like Austin, which is a Chapter 41 district, sends. I think that conceptually- And what's the purpose of- Right. So that everybody, all kids get a good equitable education, regardless of their community's ability to pay for it through property wealth. And I think that's a noble aim. And I think that is something we should say stay true to, despite the fact that Austin is the biggest payer into, in my disc, the district I represent into recapture of any other school district in the state of Texas by far, by hundreds of millions. However, the current formula for determining who gets what is so outdated and it plugs in values like a, it's called the cost of education index, which is like a cost of living, it's cost of doing business number. And it plugs in for Austin, for example, cost of doing business, cost of living equal to that of Killeens, right? Like that makes no sense. That may be made sense 30 years ago, but today we know a very different reality. We know that teachers can afford to live and work in the district that they teach in. And so there needs to be the political will to either update the cost of education index. And I'm at this point, I'm so frustrated with it that I'm ready just to do away with it and just put all the money into weights where you probably raise the weight for kids in special education. We also have to find it, in looking for solutions, where we have lost all along is that we pick communities against one another, right? The property wealthy versus the property poor, their rules versus the urban and, you know, I have, we have a large percentage of English language learners. We don't have any, I don't know if there's anywhere that doesn't have any, but give you an example of the fight. So we split amongst ourselves and we all lose. So we need to find when, when, something like an increased special education weight where we know, based on just reading the newspaper that this state has severe challenges when it comes to doing right by our special education, our kids in special education. And we know everybody has them. It, that, that it's not something that discriminates based on race or socioeconomics, right? So we need to find when, when solutions as well. And we need to, we need to make the pie bigger. We're not going to get where we need to be just by rearranging by cutting the pieces in a different way. There's some that that needs to happen, I think. And I do think, especially when, back to charter schools, if you look at charter schools, right now charter, so charter schools are getting, most charter schools are getting almost $1,000 more than public schools per, than public schools are. And so like per students, per students. So like I have numbers here. So when you look at a classroom for instance of 22 students, a classroom for a school district, and by the way, you should know that we have cut funding, the state has cut funding for public education from fiscal year 1617 to 1819. And we cut it for our public school districts, districts in a classroom of 22 students $7,667 for a classroom. Okay. And for a charter school, it's been raised $8,560. So we're pumping, and you should know for charter schools, their students, their operations, their maintenance operations funding, so they're, they're paid, the way they run their schools is paid for 100% by the state. At this point, Nassan, I don't think we're getting any money from the state. I think it's all local property taxes. But so it's a ton of money, and it is about the same amount of money that is taken in recapture. So the recapture is about 12% of the total state money that is, that there is, that that's all the districts together that are property wealthy that we paid is about 12% of the pie. Charters get about 12% of the pie. So it's not even going to the property for school districts like it was. It's staying within the same geographic areas in many cases because those are the urban districts like Houston and Austin. Rafa, I want you to respond to that. Right. So perhaps I have a different perspective than the representative. And let's do a little, I guess, overall background on what we do spend on education in the state. So out of the $216 billion of the state's biennium budget, roughly half of that goes towards education. And so currently for this current fiscal year, we're talking about $60 billion. That's a heck of a lot of money. And then the question is, do we need more money? I don't know, we may. But I think that what we need to do is that we need to really take a good look at how we spend the money. You know, at least I do that in my personal life, in my personal capacity. And I have a finite amount of money. And I choose very carefully where I want to spend that money. And I want to make sure that when I spend that money, that it's actually being used for the purpose that I wanted to achieve with that money. And I know that there's been a lot of talk about decreasing dollars for education. I want to point out a paper that a couple of my colleagues have done over at the Texas Public Policy Foundation called Texans Need More Education for Their Money by Dr. Van Skin and Stephanie Matthews. And they highlight that actually money for education has increased. If you take a look from 2004 to 2005 in inflation-adjusted dollars, education spending has increased by 29.7%. And per student spending, again inflation-adjusted dollars, has risen by 7.6% for the same time frame. And in hearing Senator Larry Taylor, Chairman of the Education Committee on the Senate side, you know, he has similar numbers that he's taking a look at. So that's a different perspective of taking a look at where we are with what we're spending for the education dollars. So and then when it comes to actual school finance, I definitely agree with the representative in that it is probably the trickiest issue that the legislature has to deal with. If not the trickiest, one of the trickiest. And unfortunately, the school finance system that we currently have is an archaic, convoluted, esoteric mystery that even baffles the most knowledgeable experts on where the money comes from and where the money is going. And then on top of that, again, as the representative has quite correctly pointed out, it's very contentious. And that you have property owners are clamoring, hey, we're paying too much of property tax. And what are we getting for our money? Especially in terms of education. And then also the whole Robin Hood issue that, hey, money's coming, we're paying money out of our pocket for education, but the money's going to other districts to help fund schools and economic disadvantaged areas. What I personally would like to see out of the whole School Finance Commission, and my hats off to them really, because they have quite a challenging task in front of them, is number one, I would like to see more equity and fairness in the system. I also like to see a lot of prioritization. Again, I come from San Antonio. And as I mentioned, at least what I've seen and what I've seen in other parts of the state is that there is waste mismanagement and corruption going on. Are we spending the money wisely? And what I would like to see, and I think that hopefully the commission will take this up, is that there will be a focus on student-centered learning. And that the money should go to the students. The money should go into the classrooms. The money should go into the teachers. The teachers are the backbone of the educational system. And I'm afraid that teachers are being shortchanged. Again, in the same policy study that we did, a policy paper that we did, we highlight that from 1993 to 2015, the student population increase in the state has increased about 48%. The number of teachers has increased about 56%. Yet administrative staff has increased 66%. That's a lot. And it's not commensurate with the student population growth. And from my economist friends, I learned that everything has an economic opportunity cost. And had we kept that administrative growth on par at the same level of 48% as the student population growth, we would have been able to save $2.2 billion from the education budget. And that's money that could have gone into hiring more teachers, giving all the teachers about a $6,000 pay raise, or it could implement a school choice program that would provide a school choice opportunities for over 270,000 kids. You can pick either one of those. You're not married to one of those. But I'd also like to see some sort of open enrollment. Again, I am livid and just in complete shock that we are forcing kids to go to low-performing failing schools. And not only that, but it is also a not only you have a system which I call almost a systemic failure, you have failing elementary schools that feed into a failing middle school that feed into a failing high school. There's no opportunity there for quality education for that child. So I do want to move on a little bit, because we're definitely not going to solve school finance tonight. But I do want to redirect our conversation to the issues of race, particularly when it comes to the disciplinary system. And I want to have Morgan definitely weigh on and on this. But I mean, what are the implications that we might see as we see more Latino students in our classrooms? Are there discipline issues that we need to be addressing now as we prepare for, you know, discipline policies that we address now so that we aren't leaving children behind that do come into our school? Yes. I was really afraid I was going to get the finance question. So I'm glad we're moving on to discipline. Yes, so there's a lot that needs to be done. I think that we need to focus on research-based ways to keep all children in class learning. I think we need to stop excluding kids through the school discipline process and through the criminalization process that happens in schools through the use of school police to handle minor incidents and the use of courts to address school-based behavior. And I think when thinking about the way race plays into it and changing population, discipline is such a huge issue that not a lot of people understand, but that we really need to focus on because black students and often Latino students are overrepresented in our school discipline system, particularly black students. So this is in school and out of school suspensions, placements, and alternative education programs, expulsions, contact with school police which includes arrests, ticketing, tasers, pepper spray, other uses of force, and then referrals to juvenile probation and the adult criminal justice system. And what are those lifelong implications? So the whole two pipeline part of the school to prison pipeline is that we know from, again, research and data that for students who are excluded from school, and this is even once for an out of school suspension, they're more likely to be held back to not graduate on time and to have future contact with the juvenile and adult criminal justice systems. So if we know that, and we definitely do and since we know that this has outsized impacts on black and Latino students, and whether or not those populations are increasing, we need to pay attention to this issue because it's happening to children today right now. Yeah, this is something that we definitely need to pay attention to. And another question I want to, that's somewhat tied to it is, you know, creating a safe home for students of color. And one of those things is ethnic studies. I know that the State Board of Education is exploring creating education standards for Mexican American studies. I mean, what do we, does Texas have the appetite to have that in our schools, to have ethnic studies of any sort in our schools? We need to get the appetite to have that in our schools. I mean, I think that it's clear that some people don't have that appetite. So, you know, the last big issue around Mexican American studies was the book that came out, that was clearly racist that, you know, had to be knocked down, fortunately. You know, there are fights in the city about whether or not we should keep Confederate soldiers' names on public schools where black and brown children go to school and understand what that means. And so, I worry about the appetite question because there are so many signals that, you know, people don't care about this issue or when they act like they care, they do it in a way that is not inclusive or sensitive to the people that, you know, want the ethnic studies programs. And yet, I think that there are certainly bright spots. AISD, for example, now has ethnic studies in several high schools and is planning to expand those programs. So, I think that in some ways it's hard to force these things on people, but in some ways we have to do it because these are children and that's who we should care about. And I wonder if there are, like, I mean, there are studies that show students perform better in school, not just in that particular class, but in, like, math, things that seemingly seem unrelated. I mean, can we be using that as a way to sort of sell it to lawmakers? I think we can. But before we even talk about test scores and other things, like, it's just the right thing to do, right? Like, we need to know about our history. I grew up not knowing about the history of, you know, the Mexican American community that part of my family comes from. And there's just a lot of issues that we have right now in education. We might know a lot more about if we knew that history, if we all in this room knew that history, if we grew up learning that history. So, it's just the right thing to do. You know, it's essential not just to righting the wrongs of the past. It's essential to the personal development of children, to know your own, to be robbed of your own history or knowing that is pretty evil in my eyes. And just one point also, there are actually champions of Mexican American Studies curriculum and programs here in this room. But, yes, I'm going to applaud them. And with that said, I think there is an appetite. I think some people, you know, they don't know how to participate or they may not believe that it's going to work because of the way the education system has been this whole time. But, you know, those numbers are out there, though, if you want that. And it's not just about test scores, but, you know, it improves attendance, it improves graduation rates, it improves GPAs for students. And not that, but you have to ask yourself, like, what are the broader implications of that too? Like, what kind of societal impacts would this have if we had, I think, studies programs, if we knew the mistakes that we made in the past, if we knew how schools were used to funnel black and brown kids and poor kids into trade programs while white and affluent kids got college bound tracks, and how that still continues today? And, Ruff, I want to give you the last word before we go on to questions. Yeah, just really quickly. I also think that cultural studies are important and are needed. And I am a student of history, and I, you know, and I've actually had the opportunity through different work opportunities to travel the world, and I understand the difference of learning about your own culture and learning about different cultures. I would say this, though. I think that we have to be mindful that although we do want to promote these courses, that, number one, that we make sure that the information in the textbook is factual. That's number one. Number two is that we also want to make sure that it doesn't lead to a cultural victimization, quite honestly. And that I think that learning about history is very important. But I think that, you know, hopefully part of evolution is not learning, not to relive history. So it's important to know what happened, but we need to move forward. I'm sorry. I don't know if I want that to be the last word. So I don't think ethnic studies curriculum, I don't think it produces a culture of victimization. You need to know about the injustices that happened in the past. We need to know that about our communities. What's happened, exactly what's happened to us, because we need to know, we need to be able to see it coming. We need to know how to, how to protect our communities and to protect the sanctity of our children. We need to know how to, and how to heal from that and move past that. It's not just about what's happened to us. It's also about what we've accomplished. The fact that we've contributed to the history of the state in this country, right? Kids don't know that. They don't, they don't see themselves in our, in our history. And when you, when that is, when that is the case, you tell them that you don't care about them. And when they don't, when they know you don't care about them, they don't want to participate. They don't like the schooling experience. Sure, they want to get smarter, but the schooling experience is not something that, that benefits them. And they have the proof because they can look at their communities. I don't disagree, but we also need to make sure I, I don't disagree. I was just pointing out a potential danger and that, but also in addition to the cultural studies, we need to make sure that our kids in the next generation really understand about American civics and how this society works and how government works. I think that that is also equally important. Okay. Well, great. Well, I think that our panel members can probably also agree with that. We can move on to questions from the audience. All right. Hello, my name is Benjamin Yapan. I formerly worked at the LBJ High School in East Austin where there's a charter school above it called LASA, a very segregated campus. But my question on the note of not reliving history, my question is for Rafael Bejar. What is TPPF's official position on having public schools being named after Confederate soldiers? We don't have one. It's not one of the issues that we deal with. Why not? As a representative of the state and being here on this panel talking about race and education, why do you not have a response to that? It's not one of the, it's simply just not one of the policy issues that we, that we focus on. We have about 10 different policy issues and that's just not one of them. Another question. Hi. Thank you so much for being here. So I don't come from Texas. I come from the Northeast and moved here as an educator. I was the first grade teacher in Maryland and came here to Austin and was hired from going from public school to charter school. And so I am on both sides of this coin here. And I guess my question or comments are when I was hired as a charter school teacher in 2009 for a charter school in southeast Austin Title I, I thought that I was really going to be able to make a difference because my naive approach to a charter school was that it must be something different, something better, something more amazing than public school because why else would a parent choose that as their choice for elementary education? And my experience at that charter school was that we had no guidance counselors at all for our children that had any kind of struggles. When I started my first grade class was 26 children. When I left my second grade class was 30 with no assistance. And I just want to know why it is that we continue to provide the funding which we were told was far less funding and that's why our salaries were less than what public schools got. We had no special ed help quite honestly for the children that came for special ed needs. Our ratios were lies. They took the total number of staff divided it by the total number of children and told parents that my ratio was like 16 to 1, not 26 to 1. So I just want to know what we're doing in the state of Texas to be more informative to our parents. I don't know what the right choice is for children. I really don't. I continue to educate not through the public school, not through the charter school, but we've got some serious problems and I think that the elementary level gets overlooked so often and those are those stepping stones, foundation building times that we've got to get in there and help these kids at that level. Your question is basically I mean how do you inform parents about these different you know options that are out there including some of the issues that. And how would charter schools more accountable? Why do they not have guidance counselors to help kids that are struggling with those low income at any level? I want to respond to that in this way. There is not and it ties into the last question too. There's not currently the appetite in the legislature to give parents information about their kids schools. The governor vetoed a bill this last session that would have told parents when there's not a school nurse on the campus. The governor vetoed it. So there is not and I'm sorry to be the bearer of bad news, but I'm thinking it's not a surprise to anybody in this room. There is not the political will to offer ethnic studies in our schools right now. We work hard to do what we can, those of us who support our public schools, but we are at a severe disadvantage because of who we work with. So all that to say go vote. And especially go vote in your primaries whether you're Democrat or Republican, especially if you're a Republican because right now we have extremes that have and I probably benefit from the extreme on the left frankly and the Democratic side, but we have extremes that have hijacked our politics in the state and in this country. And it is because even in the last presidential primary election where in the Democratic primary rate that was that was the primary everybody voted in that right. No, only less than 30% of Democrats and I think it was closer to 14%. But anyway, it was I think it was like 14% Democrats voted in that big primary. Nobody votes in the primaries, everybody waits till November. And so please get out and vote in your primaries. Hi, my name is Justin Thompson. I taught for two years in Dallas in a low performing school. And I just wanted to ask, so it's been shown in studies that students of color benefit from having teachers with their same ethnic background. And with the increasing rise in Hispanic students projected, I know at my school, we had about a 78% Hispanic population, but only 15% of Hispanic staff. So what can we do policy wise to recruit more teachers of color, especially Hispanic teachers into the classroom? So we actually don't have a problem recruiting teachers of color, we have a problem keeping them. Latino teachers just cross the nation in general, have some of the largest rates of joining the teacher workforce. They have very high rates, but the problem is that you can't teach them. And a lot of times it's the work atmosphere and lack of support as as a former public school teacher. I purposely went to these districts to serve. I went into and applied for districts in San Antonio ISD and Edgewood ISD, and I applied to different schools because that's where I wanted to be. That's where I wanted to teach. I have family. I come from family who are very much like, you know, group in these situations, these students. And I myself have a similar background. But, you know, when you don't get the support at school, when you have constantly people up top sending down all of these mandates that you have to do all these things in your classes, whether it's district administrators or state legislators or national legislators for various reasons, you get a lot of responsibility put on you. People don't leave the teaching profession because of the kids. I loved teaching the kids. I still keep in contact with a lot of my students. And I've helped them with a lot of things. That's not the problem. The problem is the adults. The problem is the top down reforms that come through and this pressure from high stakes assessments. And, you know, most of the school year is as assessment prep. We spend a whole two months. It starts in February. It starts in February. Forget the curriculum that we were teaching the whole year, which we were going on and off with for benchmark tests. That last two months before the test, it's nothing but test prep. We're not even teaching the teaks necessarily, as far as building on top of what students know. We're trying to reestablish what they're already supposed to know. We're not really doing a whole lot to improve our kids' education. And that's part of the huge problem is that we don't have that support. We have that pressure. We don't have the support. Just really quickly, I actually agree with Greg on that point. I think that there's a lot of pressure coming on top for a lot of these men that come down. But I also would say, I actually hope that as Victor pointed out with the opening slides, as the demographics change, I think that hopefully there'll be a lot more African-American, Hispanic, Asian, Native American, bright, young men and women going into the teaching profession. That's my sincere hope. And given the demographic pattern, I think that that will probably happen. I will also say, though, that unfortunately, I think that the education system almost cannibalizes its own. It cannibalizes teachers. So if you take a look at the average salary for teachers is about $50,000 a year. The average salary for an administrator is about $75,000 a year. The average salary for a district-level administrator is about $95,000 a year. If we are sincere in that teachers are the front line, the backbone of the education profession, we should do a better job in compensating teachers. Sorry, I think that's all the time we have for questions, but you can follow up with the panel members afterwards. I want to thank y'all for coming in and taking all the questions and all the meetings that also might have come with it. So thank you again.