 I wanted to take this opportunity to welcome you all to the Kerner Commission 50th Anniversary Education Path to One Nation. Thank you for joining us for this historic anniversary event. My name is Maria Heiler. I'm the Deputy Director and Senior Researcher at the Washington, D.C. Learning Policy Institute. And I wanted to kick us off and get us right into the event since it's going to be a full half morning. I'm going to start with introducing Linda Darling Hammond, the President and CEO of Learning Policy Institute, who really needs no introduction. So her bio is in the program, and it doesn't do her justice. But she is a person who has been fighting from the classroom to the White House for those students furthest from opportunity. She was the Director of Obanama's Policy Transition Team. She is a prolific author. Most recently, she has really empowered educators how high performing systems shape teaching quality around the world. And related to today's topic, the Flat World and Education, how America's commitment to equity will determine our future. Please join me in welcoming Linda Darling Hammond. Well, this is an important agenda, and I want you to know that many organizations around the country are hosting this week, Kerner at 50 events. So we are joined by folks in Berkeley, in Baltimore, Maryland, and Albany, New York, in Texas, and many other places, really taking a look at what's going on in our country today vis-a-vis the challenges that we have been working on for the last 50 years. I want to start off, of course, by thanking the people who made this possible, as that is always the case, that it's a village, takes a village to hold a meeting. You know that. And I want to start with Maria Heiler, who you just met, who really coordinated everything. Barbara McKenna played a very important role in this. Our logistics team here in DC, Shawnee's Hood and Crystal Azubu. Our comms team, Gretchen Wright, Mandy Rodriguez, Larkin Willis, Ryan Saunders, Maddie Gardner, Barbara Escobar, Julie Adams, and I probably forgot five or six other people, but I want to thank them all for making this possible. And my clicker is not here. There it is. So I'm going to just start us off with a little bit of history. And I want to start off because I've realized in planning this that I came of age in the 60s, was involved in marching and protesting in various ways. But for many of you younger people, the 60s feel very far off. So what was 1968 about? What was the Kerner Commission responding to? So I'm going to give you a little snippet from Bill Moyer's production just so you can see one version. Go ahead. So that's one account of what was going on at that time. I want to move to the next slide because what you didn't hear in that account were any black voices. So let's hear a little bit from folks who were actually involved. These are folks from Detroit. So there was all this head scratching that led to the Kerner Commission. But if you think about what was going on in the 60s, it wasn't so mysterious why there was this pent-up rage. In 1963, Birmingham March, the church bombing, March on Washington, JFK was assassinated. 64, you had riots in the cities in response to police violence. And you heard about that in the little video clip. The Civil Rights Act was passed. 65, Selma and Montgomery marches took place. There was more accounts of police violence both with respect to the marchers but also with respect to the daily life in cities. The Voting Rights Act was passed, but on the other hand Malcolm X was assassinated. 66, more civil rights action, anti-Vietnam War activism began to pick up and continued through the coming years. 67, riots sparked by police violence. 68, of course, was when the Kerner Commission report was finally issued. The Fair Housing Act was passed. The Kerner report came out. Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy were both assassinated. So for those of us who were kind of working our way through the 1960s, the level of intense violence both against leaders and against people in the streets and so on was a commonplace occurrence. And as we think about 50 years later, let me just note that in 2017, 282 black people were killed by the police. 70% were unarmed and nonviolent. 99% of the officers involved were never convicted of any assault. So what followed the 60s as people finally started to grasp what was going on was a tremendous set of social policy. The War on Poverty was launched by Lyndon Baines Johnson, the Great Society programs. There were employment programs, training programs, housing and urban renewal. I remember myself that in the summers, every kid could either have summer school or a summer job. It was part of what was going into the cities at that time. Education investments were substantial. ESEA was passed. The Education for Handicap Children Act desegregation assistance was going to cities. Magnet schools were started and other forms of desegregation aid. Teacher Corps brought teachers to high need communities. The teacher shortages that had existed were actually, by the end of the 70s, eliminated with the federal aid that was going in. Higher education scholarships occurred. And in fact, in 1975, black, Latino and white students went to college at exactly the same rate. That has never been true before and it has never been true since. But there was a moment where this set of investments made an enormous difference. School finance reforms were also going on to try to equalize funding. And what happened as a result was that the achievement gap between blacks and whites actually was cut in half by the 80s. And what happened in the 80s, of course, was that a lot of those programs were discontinued during the Reagan administration. And the gap has since increased. It's now 30% larger than it was at that time. This is in reading, and you can see the same thing happen in math. A huge reduction in the achievement gap as a function of those programs. And then growing again in the era where those programs were ended. If we had continued the policies that were in place during the 1970s, the achievement gap would have been closed by the year 2000. And we would be talking about something else by now. What happened in the 80s, of course, was that federal aid was cut substantially from 12% to 6% of school funding. Programs aimed at poor communities were cut, desegregation assistance was ended. And in fact, there were a set of lawsuits trying to undo desegregation orders, which did occur in many places. But also federal aid to states for other health, mental health and housing was cut. And that meant that states had to cut their education budgets in order to pick up the costs for other kinds of programs that had been cut. And if you are thinking about what's happening today, you can easily see the parallels between what was happening then and what is happening on this very day. The war on poverty was successful in reducing poverty. There was a sharp cut downturn in childhood poverty. By 1969, about 14% of kids were in poverty, about half as many as even a decade earlier. But since then, it's increased again to 22%. We have the highest childhood poverty rate of any industrialized country in the world. And the number of kids in deep poverty has doubled also over that period of time. One desegregation assistance was ended and when court orders were disbanded. What you can see here, and I want to credit authors who did the work around tracking all of this, that segregation was high and decreased substantially when a desegregation order was in place. And then in the years after, it returned and got even worse than it had been before. So we've seen that in place after place. So segregation is now much more pronounced than it was in the era after the Kerner Commission in the 70s as that work was done. And segregation goes along with concentrated poverty. The proportion of black students attending majority white schools has declined. So we're moving backwards on that. And so where we are now is more segregation, more poverty, more concentrated poverty, gaps in achievement and attainment have grown. The proportions of kids in high minority schools are, or in high poverty schools are almost exclusively minority students. We have created a set of apartheid schools that are more than 90% African American and often Latino, perhaps some other students of color, often Asian Pacific Islanders if you're in California, that are in concentrated poverty where almost all of the kids are poor. And that is a growing part of our education system. And while nine out of ten white and Asian students are graduating from high school, only about three out of four black, Latino and Native American students are graduating from high school. So we've got to contend with the issue of what this kind of inequality, which we are steadily reinforcing. And with the policies that we have seen and expect to see in the next year or two could exacerbate the costs to individuals. Of course, we'll hear more about what's happening in terms of mass incarceration and other things, the cost to the society as a whole. The fact of the matter is that the social compact in our country cannot be maintained if we don't have every child well educated and well employed to contribute to society. In 1950, there were 20 workers for every person on social security. Now there are three workers for every person on social security. Every one of them needs to be gainfully employed in making a very good wage and paying lots of taxes to support my social security and your healthcare benefits. The whole social compact falls apart if we don't invest in the welfare of every child. In the report of the Excellence in Equity Commission a few years ago, this statement was made, this calculation. If Hispanic and African American student performance were to be comparable to white performance and remain there over the next 80 years, the impact would be staggering, adding some 50 trillion in present value terms to our economy more than three times the size of our current GDP. This represents the income that we have forego by not ensuring equity for all of our students. So the issue is pronounced, we have to tackle the agenda that matters most. I wanna close this little part of the program with the words of Martin Luther King, who was assassinated just a month after the Kerner report came out. On some positions, he said cowardice asked the question, is it safe? Expediency asked the question, is it politic? Vanity comes along and asked the question, is it popular? But conscience asked the question, is it right? And there comes a time when one must take a position that is neither safe nor politic nor popular. But he must do it because conscience tells him it is right. We are at that time today, and we're gonna talk about how to do that in the coming couple of hours. And I wanna begin by bringing Claudio Sanchez to the four. He is going to moderate our first panel. Claudio, you may not know, is a former elementary and middle school teacher. Yeah. You probably do know that he's an education correspondent for NPR. He focuses on the three P's of education reform, politics, policy, and pedagogy. Claudio's reports are regularly on NPR's award-winning news magazines Morning Edition, All Things Considered, and Weekend Edition. He, in 2008 won first prize in the Education Writer Association's National Awards for Education Reporting for his series on the student loan crisis. In 1985, he received one of Broadcasting's top honors, the Alfred I. DuPont Columbia University Silverbaton. For a series he co-produced on Sanctuary, the new Underground Railroad. I'll note that Claudio, along with two of our other panelists, Gary Orfield and Patricia Gondra, who I'm about to invite up to the panel, all have to run out of here for another conference this afternoon, which is really on that issue of Sanctuary, the new Underground Railroad. So these issues are being tackled in multiple ways. And I want to invite the panelists to come forward. Claudio will do introductions. We are going to start off with some remarks by Gary Orfield, who's been working on these issues of desegregation for as long as I've known him and longer than that, and is a true hero in our national discourse on these issues. John King will be responding. John is our recent Secretary of Education. He raised these issues of integration to the fore for the first time in recent memory in his role there, having come from New York as commissioner, and before that also as a teacher in schools in New England. Patricia Gondra, who has been working on issues of immigration and the education of English learners, I'm not going to age us all this way for as long as I can remember. But we were all friends when we were very young. And we're delighted to be joined by Ebony Green, who is an executive director of equity and access up in Newport, New York. And I will turn it over to Claudio and the panel. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you for inviting me. Can everybody hear me? When I was invited to do this, I raised a very basic concern. And that was my fear that too often we preach to the choir and that perhaps one consequence of seeing so little progress 50 years after the Kernel Commission is the result of America talking past each other. So what I would like to do is inject a little bit of healthy skepticism in some of our debate here, in my question, certainly. And I was reminded that most Americans, and maybe this group is the exception, but most Americans are oblivious to this nation's disappointing progress and its efforts to further the civil rights agenda towards a more equitable union. And so we have a panel here. And we're going to start with Patricia, who can help us frame this issue, especially now with the extraordinary demographic shifts that we've seen in this country, particularly among the Latino population. Patricia? I got it. Forgive me. We're going to go to Gary first. Yes. Scratch that. Well, I gave you a good promo, okay? Let's go to Gary. Gary's going to give us a sense as well of this. And then John is going to add his commentary and his analysis. Then Patricia and Ebony Green. Go ahead, Gary. Well, it's great to be here with a number of people that I've known for quite a while in this room, and it's a pleasure to be back with you. I've been to Kerner Commission celebrations in the 20th year, the 30th year, the 40th year. You know, I'm getting sick of the lack of progress that we're making on so many of the issues that the Kerner Commission addressed. The Kerner Commission told Lyndon Johnson at the end of a period of tremendous social change that we weren't doing nearly enough. And a few months later, we elected Richard Nixon, who was opposed to what the Supreme Court had done, who was going to raise the issue of incarcerating people at a much broader scale, who changed the Supreme Court in a way that we haven't recovered from since with four court appointments and set us on a course towards racial polarization by his treaty with the Southern segregationists that made the Republican Party part of the reaction. This was a tragedy and has been playing out ever since. We have been through massive racial change in our society. This is school statistics. That tells you what the future is. In 1970, it was a 79% white society. It was 15% black, only 5% Hispanic. It's now a poor race society, and those of us from California know how deeply it is and how it's coming across the country. It's only less than 50% white students today in our schools, 15% African Americans, 25% Hispanics, and we now have as many Asians as we had Hispanics at the time of the Kerner Commission, more. So we're talking about a society that's been through a huge transformation, and the groups that have grown the most dramatically are impoverished. And have joined with African Americans having many similar problems of inequality and isolation. We have intense double segregation by race and class in our public schools. All of the progress we've made since the Kerner Commission has been lost. We're back behind where we were when the Kerner Commission reported in terms of isolation, and it's not just isolation by race, it's isolation by poverty and sometimes by language. It's directly linked to unequal opportunities, unequal quality of education, and unequal outcomes in terms of graduation, college completion, employment as adults, and many other things, even health. Students of color aren't prepared adequately for college, but college has become essential if you're going to enter the middle class. So there's still this huge gap that's actually growing, even though there's been a lot of progress in college access and high school completion. The gap has not shrunk for many years, in fact, and is still widening in terms of college completion. This is a catastrophe for the country because there's no other secure way to the middle class. The requirements for jobs have increased. And you can see the average employment level directly relates to the average educational level. If you were a high school dropout, you are in deep, deep trouble in our society. And if you're in high school completion, you have had a declining average income for a third of a century. That's the highest you go. We have engaged in massive imprisonment of our young people of color. The chances are one in three that a black person will be in prison sometime during their life. One in six that a Latina will be, this is for males. And one in 17 that a white will be. This is a social policy of huge scale. It's taken large chunks of the budget of our state governments, and that it's been incredibly destructive. This just shows you one of the effects. This is high school dropouts, whether or not they're incarcerated. If you are a white and you're incarcerated and you're a high school dropout, 60% probability you have jobs of 54%. If you're a black man, it's 25%. It's a tremendous social cost to our society. Racial wealth inequality is critical in our country now. We now have an average black and Latino family have less than $2,000 net worth. The average white family has a net worth of $122,000. This is partly caused by the great recession which resulted in all the people who had predatory loans in re-segregating or segregated neighborhoods losing their capital. The home ownership rate is, there's a huge gap in its growing actually. This was a catastrophe because we encouraged people to take bad loans in the 19, before the great recession and then they lost their homes in the great recession. We have a vicious cycle in our society. Low education and job discrimination produces less employment, lower wages. Low wages and discrimination means you have access to weaker neighborhoods with inferior segregated schools since desegregation efforts have stopped. Those conditions create a much higher probability of incarceration and we deny education to people who are incarcerated and lack of re-entry processes. Weaker schools mean lower success in college. The less college means the inability to buy homes in areas with good schools and where you can create wealth as your equity increases. Less wealth and discrimination mean that children face the same damn thing that their parents face and increasingly isolated actually in our schools. All of these things are multiplied for families who are undocumented which includes millions of families around our country. So what do we have to do? Well, we have to do everything. Lyndon Johnson understood that you can't deal with education without dealing with poverty. You can't deal with poverty without dealing with race. You have to help on each of these dimensions. Since then we have had no one who has had that kind of vision running our country and we have had a shrinkage on all these dimensions. We have to think about how to provide access to good schools of our regions for the student to need them. This means if we don't do desegregation we have to have choice plans that expand opportunity instead of increased stratification which is what's happening with many of our choice plans and voucher plans today. We have to have expanded college access funding and support. There's a huge gap in college access and completion by income. And income of course is related to all these other racial conditions we've talked about. We have to think about fair access to neighborhoods and housing. We haven't accomplished that yet and we do still have a tremendous problem of housing supply and discrimination steering. It's often steering by segregation of schools going on in our country. We need race based remedies for race based problems. Affirmative action is a classic example. You can't solve the problem of unequal preparation for college, unequal communities, unequal families without having a positive plan to deal with it. We have to think about ways to bring back the people we put in jail back into our society. We have to reintegrate them. We can't send them off to a dead end acceleration school or whatever they'll call it as they come out of jail. We have to send them back to a decent school and we have to give them Pell grants while they're in jail if they're adults. We have to think about ending all the obstacles of voting. The Voting Rights Act opened the door. It's being slam shut in many of our states around the country now and that's one of the things that has to be addressed. And we have to think about how to reintegrate or accept the integration of undocumented families that have been part of the society of our country for decades rather than terrorizing their children and harming those communities so deeply. We basically need a commitment to racial justice and training in all of our institutions and we need to stop thinking that we can have a magic bullet that we can change a little bit and who organizes our schools, for example, and that it will make a big difference. It won't. These things are interrelated. They are self-perpetuating and they can only be changed by a commitment to address them in a fundamental way in all of our institutions. Thank you. And with that, thank you, Gary. We're going to give the floor to John King, former Secretary of Education. John, your take on what Gary has laid out for us? Sure. So thank you for the opportunity to join all of you. Thank you, Linda. And by the way, a reminder, we're going to try and squeeze in some questions towards the end of this panel. Forgive me. So no speeches. Just questions. Yeah. So let me start on first note of additional pessimism. That's possible. And then turn to a more optimistic note. The note of deeper pessimism is thinking about this from the perspective of kids, having been a teacher and principal, just thinking about what this means for students, the facts that Gary described. Consider that in D.C., not far from here, you can find a school that has 11% low-income students and a school less than a mile away with 99% low-income students. So we are choosing as a society the double segregation that Gary described. We are choosing to concentrate low-income students and students of color in a subset of schools, and then we systematically under-resource those schools significantly. What that means for African-American and Latino low-income students is less access to quality early learning. So students arrive at school behind already. It means less access to well-rounded education. So all of us aspire to an education for our kids that includes social studies and science and art and music and the opportunity to learn a second language, but not all kids get that. We know from the Civil Rights Data Collection Survey that African-American students, Latino students, low-income students are disproportionately likely to attend high schools where you can't even take chemistry or physics or algebra too. Those courses aren't even available in your high school. We know that low-income students and students of color are more likely to be assigned to first-year teachers. They are more likely to be assigned to less effective teachers. We know that many of our students, low-income students and students of color, are in schools that don't have access to AP classes, which we know are a critical resource for successful entry to college and admission to competitive colleges. We also know that discipline is disproportionately delivered to low-income students and students of color. We know, for example, beginning in pre-k, African-American students make up 18% of the kids in pre-k, 48% of the students who are suspended from pre-k. Four-year-olds. The suspension rate for African-American students is in K-12, more than three times as high as for white students, and you can go community by community and find communities where it's five times, six times higher for students of color and it's not just boys of color. In many communities, the suspension disproportionality for girls of color is actually quite a bit higher. We also know that low-income students, students of color, have less access to school counselors, less access to the socio-emotional supports they need, less access to the college planning they need. In fact, in that same civil rights data collection survey, we showed that there are 1.6 million kids who go to a school where there's a sworn law enforcement officer and no school counselor. The consequences for kids every day in schools all across the country, including here in D.C., are quite dire. That's the note of additional pessimism, but it doesn't have to be this way. I think it's important in these conversations that we not only grapple with the reality of what we aren't doing, but also look to the places that are doing the right thing in important ways. My kids go to school in Montgomery County, just over the Maryland border. Montgomery County has a 40-year history of commitment to mixed-income housing and to integrated schools. It's not perfect, but both of my kids go to schools that are majority students of color, racially integrated, socio-economically integrated, and have very strong academic performance. Montgomery County has demonstrated that students who go to schools that are diverse actually do better over the long run than students who go to schools of concentrated poverty even when those schools get additional resources. The reality is diversity matters for academic outcomes. It matters for socio-emotional outcomes and not just for kids of color. White students, their educational experience is diminished by the absence of diversity in their schools. We know that going to a diverse school increases your likelihood of developing empathy, improves your problem-solving skills, and again has important academic consequences for low-income students and students of color. But Montgomery County isn't alone. There are places like Louisville, Kentucky where their school desegregation order ended, but the community is committed to school diversity. In fact, last year the community leadership had to resist an effort by the state legislature to break up their school integration strategy. Folks who ostensibly are believers in local control, but were willing to override local control to undermine school diversity in Louisville, Kentucky. There are places that are doing good work under court order like Hartford, Connecticut, where the chef decision is translated into a two-way integration strategy where you've got kids from Hartford going to suburban schools and suburban kids coming into Hartford to attend schools that are providing quality educational opportunities to kids. The Century Foundation had a report a year or so or two years ago on 100 communities around the country that are doing important school diversity work, and it ranges from dual-language programs that attract families who are English learners but also families who speak English at home but want their kids to learn a second language. Those schools are often racially and socioeconomically diverse. There are places that are intentional about their choice design, something Gary raised, places like Cambridge, Massachusetts, that has a long history of a controlled choice program based on socioeconomic status that's helping to maintain diversity in their schools. There are places that have strong magnet programs, arts magnets, STEM magnets, an increasing body of research around public Montessori schools and their ability to attract a diverse student population and get good academic outcomes. There are places that are being intentional about redesigning their school attendance zones. I think about a community that had two K-5 schools, both segregated, one largely white, one largely students of color, and so they replaced those two schools with a K-2 and a 3-5, both of which were integrated. So we have to lift up these examples of places that are doing the right thing so that we can encourage progress. There are also charter schools that are being created that are diverse by design. That is, they are intentionally designed to create socioeconomically and racially diverse communities. Again, we got to celebrate these examples and point people to them. Final point, we also have to acknowledge that diversity at the door is necessary but not sufficient for a diverse educational experience. There are too many schools we can walk down the hall. White kids are in the AP class and the low-income kids and kids of color are in the remedial classes. That's a matter of choices. We know that there are places where universal screening is not available for gifted and talented. So the gifted and talented program looks nothing like the student population of the school. That's a problem we've got to solve. We know there are kids who have the experience of curricula in which they don't see themselves at all. That's not good enough. Again, diversity at the door is not good enough. We've got to make sure that kids have a diverse curricular experience, a diverse classroom experience, and we have to make sure that they have access to diverse teachers and school leaders. We know that today a majority of kids in our public schools are kids of color. Only 18% of our teachers are teachers of color. Only 2% of our teachers are African-American men. This is true despite evidence that having teachers of color makes a big difference for students of color. Johns Hopkins did a study of a large dataset in North Carolina showed that for African-American students having just one African-American teacher in elementary school increased their likelihood of graduating from high school. It matters to see role models of the classroom or the front of the school, and it matters for white kids. I have a colleague who says it's a little bit harder to be racist if you're learning calculus from a black teacher. A little bit harder. So teacher diversity matters for all kids. We need white kids to see teachers and principals of color as leaders in their schools and communities. At the end of the day, this work couldn't be more urgent. I'm so glad that we are having this conversation. We have to acknowledge that we're having this conversation with a very important element where the country seems to be going backwards on these fundamental values, not just on policy, but on tone. When you have an administration that is unclear on the difference between the KKK marching across the college campus and those who are protesting against hate, when you have kids in classrooms scared of being deported, scared of their families being deported, when you have Muslim communities around the country, knowing that there was a travel ban put in place to target them specifically. When that is the tone that's being said, when you have the president of the United States referring to countries with unacceptable language, dripping with hatred, we got to worry not just about the policy victory that we need to win, but about defending fundamentally who we are as Americans and the notion that we are a people that recognizes the human rights and dignity of all of our people. Thanks so much. Thank you. Thank you, John. Your comments remind me of the emerging research on the impact of stress and the impact of trauma on children, as yet another layer on children. We're going to turn now to Patricia and then to Ebony Green and begin our conversation. And I want you, Gary and John, to feel like if you want to jump in on something, please do so and turn this into a conversation. Reminder again, you'll have a chance to ask questions. Patricia, the floor is yours. Yes, thank you. And somebody's over here keeping time, right? All right. Thank you, John, for that. Those were some inspiring words, too, that there's something to be hopeful about in the midst of all of this. So I want to shift a little bit into looking at immigrant kids. Gary has laid out, I think, very well the radical change in the demography of this country, but I think it's also important to note that at the Kerner Commission, at the time of the Kerner Commission, immigration was at an historic low. Less than 5% of the population was immigrant and those immigrants were basically Europeans. So that's a very different picture of the world than what we have today. Today, 13.5% of the population of immigrants, about 44 million people, and this is now multiracial. As a percentage, they're actually still lower than they were in 1890. So this is the second great wave of immigration that we've had in the country. And I'd like to point out that Mexicans are about 26% of all of the immigrants in the country. To hear the rhetoric around the wall on the southern border, you would think that they were 100% of our immigrants, right? But in fact, in 2016, three times more immigrants came from India and more than three times more immigrants came from China than came from Mexico. And once again, the south is a focal point of many of our racial challenges. So let me shift to children of immigrants. One in four children in the U.S. today is the child of immigrants, at least one immigrant parent. This is enormous. This is a significant portion of our population. But it's important also to note that 90% of these quote immigrant children are actually born in the U.S. There are kids, there are citizens, there are responsibility, there are future. More than half of the U.S. born children live at or near poverty, often in triply segregated situations of both race, poverty, and language, where they are isolated from the rest of the children in our communities. 40% of immigrant children live in families in which neither parent is a citizen. But this cannot be taken as all being undocumented. The important thing is they can't vote. Many of them are in fact legal residents, but they can't vote, so they're not contributing to the policies that we would like to shape. And again, the fastest growth for immigrant children is in the south. So, Claudia and I are going to run after this to another event in which we're releasing today a large study on the impact of immigration enforcement on children under the nation's schools. And we'll be talking about the study in which we had more than 730 schools from across 12 states, and 5400 people responding. Okay, two minutes. And the things that we're going to point out are that random raids and deportations of parents, of the children, of citizen children have the students in our country, these students, these immigrant students, overwhelmingly U.S. citizens, terrorized. 90% of administrators in the study across the country observed behavioral or emotional problems in these immigrant students. And one in four said this was really extensive. And again, it was most evident in the south. A Tennessee counselor tells us several students have arrived at school crying, withdrawn, and refusing to eat lunch because they witnessed deportations of a family member. Some students show anxiety symptoms. All of this impacts their ability to focus in complete work, which further affects them academically. We're undermining these kids academically with the terror that has rained down on them. And kids are losing ground in school. 70% of administrators from across the country reported an academic decline among their immigrant students. One in six counselors reported this to be extensive. And many teachers report that college-bound excellent students, their best students, are giving up on school because they doubt that they have a future in the U.S. And as a Tennessee administrator says, they're not thinking about college or the test next week or what is being taught in the classroom today. They're thinking about their family and whether there will still be a family, whether their family will remain intact. I can't tell you how depressing this is to read thousands of comments like this from across the country. It puts me into a depression. So let me just say that immigrants have always been good for this country. These immigrant students have, across time, have been our future. And they have realized great things for this country. But we frame them as a problem, as English learners, children who don't speak English, what they don't have rather than what they do have. And we contend that they can't assimilate because these immigrant students or these immigrant families are simply too different. Defined by what they don't have as an English learner, they look to be a problem. But in fact, these young people, these immigrant children, have at least five characteristics that prime them to be our very best learners in our schools. They have resilience. These kids face poverty, they face incredible fear, uncertainty, lack of support, and yet they come back and they come back and they come back. These children who come from Latino and Asian American families also tend to have an orientation towards collaborative learning. They like to work in teams. And that's something that employers are telling us, this is the way we need to educate our children. These children have hopefulness. They are optimistic. These are the true believers in the American dream. And these children have languages other than English to build on so that they are bilingual. And we now know that there are tremendous cognitive benefits to being multilingual. And finally, they are multicultural. They can see things from various perspectives. And that helps these children to be more innovative, more creative. It helps us all to be more creative. Unfortunately, we are squandering this asset with the way we are treating these families. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Before I jump in with a couple of questions for Patricia, let's go to Ebony Green. Ebony, I don't know if you have a presentation or not, but you have this pretty unique role in your school district. I want you to tell us about that. And actually, one question I've had once I read what you do, I thought, you know, for all the good intentions behind reintegrating or integrating schools, too often districts have engineered racially mixed schools and yet deprived minority kids within those same schools of the things that John was mentioning. AP courses, advanced placement, academic enrichment, and in the case of Latinos, you often find very so-called progressive policies limiting kids to language ghettos in schools under the guise of English language learning. I wonder whether you've experienced this kind of in-school segregation and what do you do about it, at least in your case? Thank you. So I think that, so to frame my job in terms of where it came from, we can start with all of the things that John alluded to in terms of how districts are disproportionately set up and their segregation within schools that are integrated was really a conversation and I was thinking back to my district and so historically it has been a district that was cited for disproportionately suspended students. It was a district that was sued to force integration and so that birth magnet schools within our district. It was a district that when you looked at AP numbers or student outcomes of students who are of color that there was disproportionately students not doing well. And by the way, what was the overall racial makeup? So we have approximately 50% Latino, around 26% African American and around 20% Caucasian and then two or 3% Asian. So the part of your question in regards to what do you do, I think that it's an intentional decision to make or have a conversation or start the conversation that says we've been talking about a need to integrate and to be equitable in terms of how we support students for decades. My position itself was a birth that the Board of Education, my superintendent was very aware of the current conditions and said let's move away from the conversation and let's move to action. So what do we have to do to be intentional about supporting students within our district, irrespective of who they are, their race, their gender, whether they're LGBT and so the district that was for decades seen as a place that we didn't provide access and opportunity to all students and that wasn't a secret. It took a conversation and a commitment from the Board and the superintendent to say we need to create a position that will allow us to be very intentional and reflective about the opportunities that we provide all students. Now what we can't do is look at it as a standalone. So equity can't be a conversation on the outskirts of a school district. What eventually must happen is that equity has to be woven into every single department or division within that district to provide appropriate opportunity which isn't something that typically happens. And so when you speak to or ask about whether the schools are segregated within the school, part of the conversation was, for example, for English language learners, do we have bilingual programs, transitional bilingual programs or do we have dual language programs? And so that's one example. When I say we've been very intentional about having that conversation to transition from transitional bilingual programs throughout the school district to say, well, let's move away from that unless it's absolutely necessary and provide a way for our students to really not be segregated. And so we have changed many of our schools to be more reflective of dual language programs which allows access for all students to that program. It creates a situation where students are then integrated and they're not isolated. And we can really value and leverage what those learners bring to our school district to ultimately provide more access to all of our students because as John said, students who are integrated perform better. And so keeping one type of student on the fringe is not beneficial nor does it ever bring equitable outcomes when we look at it. One question is, how do you measure success? How do you know it's working? So I think some will say you measure success by student achievement outcomes. I would put forth that that's one piece of a bigger puzzle. And so I think you also have to measure success in terms of school, climate, and culture. How do students feel about themselves? So it has to be qualitative data as well as quantitative data. When you only use one way to then ascertain the success of something, I feel, and I think maybe most of us would agree that it gives you a half of an answer. When you couple that with qualitatively, how do students feel about themselves and how do students feel with regard to their engagement in the classroom, their worth, that to me gives a better indication of where we're moving as a district and ultimately as a society. Let me get back to Patricia and her presentation. People are often surprised to learn that Thurgood Marshall in preparing for Brown versus Papica looked at a case in Southern California known as the Westminster or a Menendez versus Westminster. And people don't know that during the pre-54 era, there were Mexican schools, segregated Mexican schools throughout the Southwest. And that in looking at that case, and if you were to read the testimony or read the history of that case, you'd be flabbergasted to see how and why Latinos, Mexicans in particular, were segregated in those schools. And you fast forward and look at what Patricia and Gary have done to describe the landscape these days and you go, what did we really accomplish after Brown? What did we really accomplish? Patricia. Well, I remember certainly showed us some data that were very optimistic, right? That after Brown we did make enormous progress. We do know how to make that progress and it is something that is within our ability to do. The problem is, is that the politics of segregation have become really, really ugly. And that's why I wanted to talk a little bit about immigrants today because immigrants are really, it's become acceptable to talk about immigrants as being these awful people that don't belong here, that we need to get rid of. It's a little less acceptable to talk about people of color, although we've certainly seen those illusions, but it's become really quite acceptable to talk about immigrants and why they shouldn't be here and how we have to get rid of them. And we know how to integrate these young people, but we're not doing it. You helped me with the story that we did, NPR did out of Tijuana looking at the 800,000 or so U.S.-born Mexican children who've been deported back to Mexico because their parents have been deported. And I remember a little boy, a nine-year-old at a Tijuana school who said to me, when I lived in Barstow, California, I don't think I really ever belonged there. And he showed me his hand and he said, my skin, it wasn't like their skin. But I think I'm home now. You know, this sense of identity, even in that little boy, a nine-year-old, it seems to me is an enormous burden for children. How does that, and anybody who has any thoughts about this, how does that affect learning, this notion of identity, and whether or not they feel they're welcome and they're accepted? I think this is really important. And, you know, part of the Civil Rights Revolution was to retrain the people who are in all our schools all over the country. We had a billion dollars a year of desegregation assistance money that actually retrained teachers and staffs all over the country. There are clear results that were positive academically and socially. We know how to train people to do this. We have answers to almost all these problems that we don't apply. But, you know, this is something that people don't naturally know how to do. They need to have some help. They need to have some skills. And there are skills that can be disseminated. And when school districts or state governments decide to do that, they can make a difference. But we just think, when we surveyed teachers all over the country at one point in the Civil Rights Project, and we asked them what they do in terms of dealing with diversity, and they said, well we just treat all the kids the same. But all the kids aren't the same. And all the kids have cultures that have values and they need to be reflected in the schools and to be supported. We know, we learned many lessons that we've forgotten and we need to think about how to put some resources into conveying these lessons to people who are running our institutions. People who are running the federal government right now probably aren't very interested, but there's, you know, 99% of the people who work in schools work for local and state governments, not for the federal government. Yeah, Claudia, yeah, I want to follow up on that because really we have a huge, as I pointed out, 90% of the children of immigrants are actually born here in the U.S., they're U.S. citizens, and we have more than half a million that have been deported or have gone back to Mexico because it's simply become untenable to live here, even not being deported. These young people, many times, they see themselves as Americans, in spite of the color, they see themselves as being U.S. citizens and Americans, and there's every reason to believe that many, if not most of them, are coming back. But we are treating them in such a way, what kind of Americans will they be and how will they feel about this country because they have the sense that they belong in neither place. Going back to Mexico where they have never been, so they're really not going back, they don't feel truly Mexican either. We have the opportunity. The good thing is when the President of the United States says this is criminal, they're rapists, kids feel that they don't like us and people who run our country don't like us. And yet they will be our citizens. John, you recently moderated a debate here in D.C. and Howard Fuller from Milwaukee, to pro-choice pro-charter school advocate said something that I don't know if you remember, that I thought was really powerful, whether you disagree with it or not. He said, the very idea that by desegregating schools, U.S. society will become more integrated, more fair, more equitable is a hoax. Do you remember that? I do. Is it? From the vantage point of black Americans, I've done stories out of Louisville and out of Indianapolis where the black church has said, I don't care if my kid sits next to a white kid, I want my kid to sit in a classroom where the teacher is good, effective, and where my kid has all the academic options that white kids get elsewhere. Whether they're mixed or racially mixed or not, it's not important to me. What do you make of that? Well, two thoughts. One is, I think the reality in American society is that resources follow affluent white students, and that's just a descriptive fact. And so to the extent that we isolate low-income students of color in a subset of schools, they will never have the resources that are needed. Now, Howard's point is, we can't wait for better public policy. There are examples of schools. I worked in one. There are examples of schools that serve a concentration of low-income students and students of color that do exceptionally well. And so we can't wait, so we should focus on building those kinds of schools. And ultimately for me, I think we need a both and strategy. It is true. We can't wait, and for principals and teachers, they can't show up at school and say, I don't know what you're doing, but until we integrate all of our schools, there's nothing to be done here. That would be a tragic mistake. At the same time, we need to stay committed to changing our public policy to produce integrated schools for a reason that Howard didn't speak to as much in that debate, which is that if we want an integrated workforce and an integrated society and an integrated civic culture, a lot of that does start with schools that have experience in school. Beverly Tatum in her new book points out that for white folks in America, 70% of white folks in America have a social network that is entirely white. And that has consequences then for how we conduct civic discourse. It is part of how we end up with elected leaders who engage in hate speech on a day-to-day basis. If we want to change that, we have to change folks' experience as a society. Yeah. Reminder, in just a couple of minutes, we're going to go to questions. Is there going to be a person running around with a microphone? Okay, good. I'll call on you in a minute. Ebony, is there busing in your community? There is. Where you bus in kids who otherwise would not be going to those schools, those neighborhood schools? Yes. And do these kids tend to be black or Latino? Well, they do, partly because the majority of our district is Latino, but... So the mixing, then, is limited to the extent that the population is mostly black and Latino? Yes. The reason I raise this is because I've heard many African-American parents say, look, the problem is that the burden, initially, at least, with the busing issue, the burden was put on black parents and families. And it was, you know, a one-hour-to-hour ride back and forth to schools where they weren't welcome to begin with. So I don't know if that was one reason why the busing issue became, um, aside from just blatant, you know, racist views of importing black kids, but I don't know whether that ever was a practical solution. Does anybody have any thoughts about why busing just didn't work? It didn't work. Where it was done most dramatically, it worked best, the suburbs were both included. We worked with Louisville in designing their plan after the Supreme Court changed. We surveyed the students and the parents. They'd been desegregated for 45 years. Both said they wanted to keep it, that it had been valuable for their kids. The mayor of the city came into court and justified that it was a city where people could come in, employers could come in and know all the students were prepared and they knew how to work together. You know, it's not true that it failed. It was George Wallace is the guy who turned integration into busing. Richard Nixon is the one who popularized it. But most children in the United States go to school on buses, they have for decades there's no evidence that transportation is any threat to people. Actually, if you survey kids who are on buses, they like the experience of being together in the morning. This is, as Jesse Jackson said, it's not the bus, it's us. Well, I stand corrected then. I think it's effective in the sense of what is our goal, right? And so I think if you start from what is the intention? The intention is to provide our students with access to appropriate education. So myself as a child growing up, I sat down at the library in Bloomberg. What I will say is that I think parents, at least in my community, value the access to those opportunities that they feel most support their child. And so the busing to them is a minor inconvenience. But in a district, our district is very spread out. So the likelihood is most students get on a bus anyway. But I think when parents are thinking about what do I need to provide that they're worrying about, when my child goes to school, do they feel engaged? Do they feel as if they're welcomed by a teacher who understands who they are in the room and wants to educate them and help them reach their fullest potential? When my child comes home, when we have conversations, are they able to speak to what they learned or what they attained within that classroom? So I think for parents who are in a position where they feel that most of the time we failed them as a district, we failed them as a national, we failed them as a district. And an education that really is rigorous, I think they're okay with that minor inconvenience because they know in the long run their child is going to have an opportunity to go well beyond what we would say academy field where we're from to go to college and beyond. The practical problem that I think your question raises that we have to grapple with is because of the terrible Supreme Court decision, the Millican decision, which said then the urban district couldn't include the suburbs outside of Detroit, because of that decision and decades of white flight, we can now today really only tackle the problem of school segregation by thinking cross-district boundaries. Now there are places DC, New York City where there are significant white neighborhoods, gentrification that you could take advantage of to create more integrated schools. But there are many places around the country that are so racially isolated. Think about the city of Rochester in upstate New York. There's no solution to the segregation of Rochester schools that doesn't involve somehow bringing in the suburbs, but people will travel for good things for their kids, right? And so if you saying here's an art school that you can access as a suburban parent that wouldn't otherwise be available, folks will travel for that. We see that in Hartford, folks are willing to have their kids come in from the suburbs because there are good things in those schools that they want for their kids. And by the way the second panel is going to dig deeper into school issues, so we should look forward to that. Let's take some questions, squeeze in some questions in the last few minutes here. There's some questions in the back. I don't know who raised their hand first, but you all wrestle for it. Good afternoon. Could you tell us by the way who you are and limit your question? Is it on? Is it on? Okay. I'm Dr. Catherine Collins. A little louder. Would you speak a little louder? Dr. Catherine Collins New York State Board of Regents and I would like to ask Gary if he would tell us a little bit about the Buffalo project that you've worked on and some of the recommendations that you have given to us. I'm from Buffalo by the way. Buffalo, New York for those of you who don't know is once a great industrial city has had hard days and has been in decline for quite a while it has a overwhelmingly non-white school system it has the remnants of a magnet school system which was very successful in the desegregation days but now has re-segregated and it's very best school, City Honors School which is a famous school now has very few African Americans and almost no immigrants. What we found when we investigated there and we'll have a book coming out in a couple weeks on this called discrimination in elite public schools is that once you drop the desegregation plan that reached out and included students minority students in that excellent school it re-segregated by race and by class and in order to change that we propose that they change the way they use testing the way that they reach out for students how they recruit people put out literature in the name in the languages of the children are moving into the district and do a variety of other things the Office for Civil Rights really pressed them for some time and some of these problems have been resolved we propose that instead of just rationing this access to one really excellent high school they create a duplicate of it because it's not rocket science they create a magnet school you just have to get good teachers good administrators together and create a demanding curriculum and invite students in and recruit them across racial and ethnic lines it creates amazing things in old buildings we haven't been able to sell that yet but we have to think about all of these details in each of our cities because the guidance that we got used to get from the courts doesn't exist anymore we have to get it from ourselves another question up front here hi I'm Rebecca K acting superintendent of Oklahoma City Public Schools and my question I have a policy problem we're 54% Hispanic about a third of our kids are English learners we have gone community eligibility because it's the right thing to do for our kids to give them all free breakfast lunch and snack every day my district's about 90% for a new price lunch going to CEP is going to dramatically underreport the number of kids that I have that look like they're low income and the terror that you guys talked about is making that even worse because it's getting harder for our families to are undocumented to even raise their hand and say my kid is eligible for benefits and we're in this position where even when we did reapportionment for our school board districts two out of my seven board districts represent about 60% of my students because the census undercounts the kids that are in our undocumented communities so I'm really interested in like I'm sure that secretary king you've thought about this problem a lot I don't know what you guys are doing ebony in New York what advice you have about kind of solving this or making it better for our kids I think part of the challenges I'm not sure that can be solved by the district right and that's really a question of changing both federal and state policy we've got to change our politics in order to do that and I think this goes to Gary's slide about what a civil rights justice agenda should look like we need a movement across the country to make sure we elect folks to federal and state office that are committed to that agenda that's what's going to change what's going on in Oklahoma City not just on this issue but I know you are also struggling with the challenge of Oklahoma's unwillingness to invest in schools generally and the challenge of trying to recruit teachers when teacher salaries in Oklahoma are abysmal and the legislature has been unmoved by the evidence so we've got to change ultimately who's in those decision making seats but I have to ask maybe Patricia can respond in Oklahoma City even if you're undocumented a child still has legal access to public schools that was the decision and prior so isn't it an issue of having parents understand that they have the legal right to enroll their kids in public schools so that that sense of fear we've seen exactly the same thing in our data is that huge percentages of people were saying the parents would no longer sign permission slips they would no longer sign slips for free lunch because they have become wary even at the school district the district might be complicit 88% of the people who responded to you know these thousands of people who responded said we need to have forums in our community school community forums where we can talk to these parents of course many of the parents are afraid to come to school even but we need to break this down because this is starting in the home where the families are terrorized and they are afraid to show up and sign anything Ebony is that a problem in your community? Absolutely we have a large immigrant population and so when Patricia spoke to the terror I reflect on many students that I know our attendance took a hit because students were just fearful to come to school partly because some would come to school and then by the time they got home the parent was taken the notion that my parent could be taken we can't lead by fear and so to know that this is impacting students who otherwise have challenging lives in their community and so now we are re-traumatizing them with an additional layer it's just something we can't operate from that position I agree with her I think in the school districts across the country you don't know what to say well enough so that students believe you because they trust me but they are already in a place where they don't trust the system and so now we have added a layer because our leaders are saying that we are going to ensure that this will happen and so it was actually and we still battle with it but it's definitely a challenging situation for our students just to create a place where they feel safe and so we really made a lot of efforts to make sure students felt welcome to come so that when you're with us you're safe we can't guarantee out there but we can say when you come here that we will do everything we can to protect you we have about five more minutes for questions there's a gentleman up here who's raising his hand Mike thank you Raymond Pierce with the Southern Education Foundation just pick it up on a comment you said John about a both and strategy with the context of what Gary was talking about in terms of choice plans I'm sorry can everybody hear me back there a little louder maybe okay the pace of choice plans so-called choice plans vouchers, charter schools, whatever you want to name it in the south and the general assemblies throughout the southern states it's accelerating at a really rapid pace so I'd be interested Gary because you said something about that I took to mean that you can actually have some good choice plans so could you briefly either one of you describe a because you talked about this is this political I tell people all the time since when has education not been political so what would be a political platform a political strategy, a political response to the legislatures and the general assemblies throughout the southern throughout the United States in terms of these choice plans or right sizing these choice plans well we know from studying choice plans ever since the early choice days in the south that if you have choice without civil rights policies attached to it it will increase stratification it will increase inequality by race and by class because the people are most connected will figure out the way to get into the best schools and the people who have the least information won't even make a choice and they'll be sent to something that is the residual so the civil rights requirements you need for a choice plan since the 1970s you need to have a plan for diversity you need to have fair recruitment and information for all parents you want to have all parents make a choice if possible you want to make sure that children can get to the choices by transportation because otherwise you're just giving choice to people who have the ability to transport themselves you want to have a choice that's worth making you don't want to have sent kids across town to a school that isn't any better than the one in their neighborhood so you want to do a few things that we learned a while ago but we've forgotten and most of the choice plans that we've adopted in the last 25 years none of those things exist and if you have now a lot of the choice plans are being made even worse I understand virtually all of the magnet schools in Alabama for example are becoming selective once you become selective on the basis of things that are directly linked to family education and income and the ability to transport yourself you are re-segregating on a grand scale so you have to think about this and you have to be sure that like your minority caucuses your progressives in the state legislature and so forth understand that how you do choice makes a world of difference it can either increase equity and opportunity or it can increase and if you don't think about it it will do the latter I agree with everything Gary the one thing I would add is that what you see in some states is vouchers being advocated for in ways that are disingenuous so I think about the state of Indiana where the case for vouchers was made as a social justice case using students and families of color as a cover for a voucher program that now disproportionately distributes resources to affluent white families and basically is paying for kids who are already in private school to go to private school it was a scheme to shift resources away from public education to private schools and we know the history of voucher programs particularly in the south and the way they have historically been used as a way to maintain segregation to allow white families to opt out of the system and I worry that part of the political trend we're seeing around vouchers is really designed to recreate those old segregation academies if I may with regard to charter schools I think it's important that we understand how to leverage the resources in the room when we as districts have to figure out ways to work together and we don't have the skills or we don't know how to do that so for me my experience with the Southern Education Foundation or Racial Equity Leadership Network has allowed us to come together as leaders to create thought partners so if I don't know how to do something and you're doing it well we can't be shy in saying can you help me with that can you assist me can you support me when I'm hearing even yesterday a lot of the conversation every single piece of our economy leads us back to education if our students don't have access to healthcare if our students don't have access those issues and problems funnel their way into our schools and so it's essential that there are critical friends around us and thought partners that we can ask and leverage so how did those charter schools in Hartford for example they came and helped us out in Newburgh we were trying to figure out how those magnet schools should run and how we create systems that are most successful so I think one thing that can't be missed is that the information and knowledge is in the room with us and so what we really have to do is to work smarter and leverage those resources to bring people together to become thought partners to share what's working well to problem solve barriers problem solve barriers and essentially that puts us in a place to be able to leverage that information and then bring it to our government to say here's what we need and here are all the people that believe this is the better way to move forward we are out of time thank you panelists and we'll see you all in 15 years so now we're going to have a panel to really talk about where do we head what are some of the solutions how do we think about this moving forward and I want to quickly introduce our wonderful panel members the bios are in your folders so please take a look and you'll learn more about these amazing people that we're going to talk to over the next hour Zikia Ansari is going to talk with us from the perspective of advocacy director for the New York State Alliance for Quality Education it is the leading statewide organization that's been fighting for educational justice in New York State and Zikia herself has dedicated 20 years of her life to this fight for educational justice she also has a movement called Journey for Justice which she will likely tell us about this beautiful young woman is the mother of eight children and the grandparent of three and she brings all of that insight and experience and the struggle that has gone with it to the work that she does for educational justice Ann Holton is currently a visiting professor at the Shara School of Policy and Government she's formerly the Virginia Secretary of Education she currently sits on the Virginia State Board of Education continues to do so she is a lawyer by training she's worked as a legal aid lawyer serving low income families at juvenile and domestic relations district court judge she helped integrate the Virginia schools in Richmond Virginia when her father was the governor in Virginia and we'll hear more about that and she has been crusading both for equity in education and for how to bring high quality educators to students in high need schools for a very long time Nira Tandon is next to her Nira is the president and CEO of the Center for American Progress and the Action Fund she focuses on how both organizations can fulfill their missions for all Americans she served both in the Obama and Clinton administrations as well as on presidential campaigns she used to be about six foot two but she has lived to tell about it and has made contributions both in her roles in government and her role at the Center for American Progress she was also senior advisor for health reform at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services where she really worked on helping to bring into being the Affordable Care Act I remember hearing on the news recently from one person who was being interviewed out in some state that was articulating their views on health care and they said well I don't need Obamacare I have the Affordable Health Care Act so that accomplishment which lives on is an important one and then Roberto Rodriguez Roberto is now the president of Teach Plus an organization that really supports teacher leaders to play a role in education policy and practice but many of you know him he spent many years of service in the Obama White House he was the deputy assistant to the president for education and before that he spent how many years, eight years as the principal education advisor to the late great U.S. Senator Ted Kennedy he began his professional career here in Washington with the National Council where he directed education research and policy analysis so we have a star-studded very thoughtful people to help us really think about what the situation needs to be for us to make progress and I'd like to put one question in your minds as we start this panel that came up in the last one which was that we heard from Gary Orfield about the fact that quite often we have to ration the good stuff people have a school they say well then you got to compete to get into the school why do we ration the good stuff rather than replicating it so that we have good schools for all and when we think about choice when we think about schools that people choose how do you get a system of schools worth choosing rather than some schools that people want to choose and other schools that people have to go to because they couldn't get into the ones that they wanted so I think this is part of our theme and Zaki I'm going to really start the conversation with you you've been with the Alliance for Quality Education you mobilize communities across the state of New York and work with others who are working across the country to advance racial equity in schools can you speak to some of the progress you've seen in your work and what your advice is about how students and parents can make a difference sure first of all I want to lean into folks yesterday and today you know gosh it's so depressing you know how we're going to get through this and I'm reminded and I share with folks it's what Katherine said we don't have the obligation we don't have the right to sit back and say we're going to be depressed about this it's like get over your stuff and figure out how we're going to make change because I want you to understand the time that you spend wallowing and figuring out how depressing this is there are children and communities on the other side of that that you need to figure out generationally people intentionally try to sabotage kill and murder anything that looks brown right and so if we're willing to open our eyes to that and say you know what that's not something I need to turn the mirror on that's not something I can get down with in this moment then get over whatever is keeping you depressed and figure out how we're going to move and shake because our children at the end of the day are at the end and they're suffering and it's not okay it is my lifelong passion and mission to make sure that all those things that I've seen and witnessed over these last two days but even prior to this are things that I've committed my life to not only for my children for children out there and so as we sit and we and these things and we take them in one take a minute and feel it because those there's people on the other end that have been experiencing it it is their lived experience and so I think part of that is really something that we need to just like hold because I think if we're able to do that we won't get a number 45 again right it's because we we get over it too quickly and we try to not look at that but there are people that go away from work when I go to work and I go home it's no different the difference is that I have to be happy with my children and I have to portray another side of all that I'm fighting for on the other end to save the lives of children in New York and even nationally and so we don't have the right as Catherine said we must be optimistic we must be hopeful we must bring that into every room that we walk into because the people are most impacted need to feel that instead of radiating amongst themselves right they need to feel that from others who necessarily don't look like them that we're going to do something collectively to make a change towards educational justice as well as educational freedom and liberation and so part of the work that we do as AQE as I started as a parent volunteer with AQE probably four years before I became employed by AQE and so I believe in the passion and the vision of this equity lawsuit and so part of that and what I've seen over the years of bringing parents up like they always have a sense of hope right even behind the tears of sharing with legislators and others about the impact of not funding schools they always are hopeful they're hopeful because they don't have the right to be anything else other than that students come in they share the stories that are happening they're clear on the stories the things that shift that they want to see in policy rather than around school suspension rather it's the 12 year battle that we've been fighting in New York State around a campaign for equity lawsuit that was brought that was decided upon 12 years ago and we're still fighting for the 4.2 billion not million billion dollars but yet we're faced with a governor who says money doesn't matter right but we can we bring parents every year up to Albany and locally to share the stories about yeah it does matter when I can't provide art and music in schools if my children don't have access to after school programs AP courses right like that's that matters and it takes money to do that so it's not money for the sake of having money but I think the positive and the things that we've been able to do for 12 years keep that alive in the masses of brains of folks because it's not easy to make CFE sexy it really is not and we know in this vein of making things sexy and hot and something that people want to report on and want to understand like you got to do back flips to figure out what that is and so what we've been able to do is create have a website where parents can actually go and see how much money their school is old so that's the agitation piece what my school is old my son's school is old almost a million dollars literally what my school is old this much how is that possible what can I do and that's the moment that we kind of move in and we ask them what what are you paying for now copy paper all those things you know that everybody's paying for now and so that's the agitation to then say call this person this is the person you can call your assembly member and your senator and to be able to keep that alive in the in the media in the press on the ground for students and parents to constantly still be talking about that has not been easy but I think it has been really powerful because it has not let our elected officials off the hook and ensuring that they fund our schools because without our stories it becomes just a numbers game oh 20% of this that but what we know is that almost 75% of those dollars would go to black and brown children across New York state and so the question always for me is why aren't we doing this and that's kind of the threat I've heard over the last two days is like we have the answers that happen and all I can see is that black and brown and brown children or poor children that are not receiving the same crust of the the current report as well so until we're ready to send to racism I think we will find ourselves here again I'm sad to say but I'm hopeful that the folks in the room will like no that's not going to happen because we got you back well I just want to say coming from California for a moment the work that AQE has done well it hasn't achieved the goal of acquiring all of that 4.2 billion dollars it has moved the needle each year on funding in ways that wouldn't have happened without that effort and in California we had the slide from what some people call from first to worst where we were you know one of the best states on funding and managing schools in the 70s and became one of the lowest funded states in the country just a few years ago and people advocated for many years did research caucused etc funded advocacy and ultimately we got one of the most progressive school finance reform agendas in the country and we've been now seven years into leveling up the funding for schools that serve kids in poverty, English learners children in foster care and it's beginning to make a big difference we just did a study that found that in fact in those schools graduation rates are influenced as our test scores by the availability of those resources so one of the things about this battle and everyone has been in the civil rights movement at any point in time knows that it doesn't happen overnight and you have to get up day after day say what am I going to do today to keep my eye on the prize to keep making progress and it may happen in California one year in New York the next year it may happen in Virginia the year after that and you have to have that kind of as you say hope and perspective and let me ask you you've engaged in desegregation as a student, as a parent as a policy maker and now as a scholar you bring us insights from Virginia as a state and from Richmond as a city how does your experience both in the city and the state reflect the challenges and opportunities we've talked about today and where do you see the opportunities for progress thank you Linda and thank you for the chance to be here and for the Glory and Policy Institute's great work in bringing this terrific forum together yes so I hail from Richmond, Virginia once the capital of Confederacy still felt that way a little bit when I was growing up there in the 70s it doesn't feel that way now it's actually a very progressive exciting millennial place to live population going up in the inner city but and I want to reflect a little bit on my experience as a child, a little bit on my experience as a parent and policy maker Roberto and I sitting here listening to the last panel feeling the same things that Kia's talking about I promise to channel my inner Pollyanna so I want to enter with a little optimism as well but starting so my family likes to say we helped integrate the Richmond City Schools in 1970 it is true my dad was governor in 1970 a Republican governor the first Republican governor since reconstruction and announced in his inaugural address that he wanted to advance racial reconciliation in Virginia and a very few short months later had an opportunity to help live that reality when our schools were ordered bust I and my siblings went to formally all African American schools and they pretty much stayed all African American schools so the we say we helped integrate the Richmond City Schools but I've come to the point where I can no longer really say it that way because that school that I went to what was then Mosby Middle School named after a Confederate hero now Martin Luther King Middle School but that school that I went to in 1970 was 100% African American and then was maybe 96 97% African American by the time I left there it's 100% African American and 100% low income now and very very resource challenged and in ways, in ironic ways great faculty that that school had then well the good news is African American leaders women can get jobs in other professions now but that has pulled some of the great teachers out of African American schools certainly in the south so on the one hand the experience of segregation and desegregation is so different from one place to another but I don't think that our church in Richmond would look like the church you showed here frankly because I don't think we ever really succeeded in integrating our city schools on any large basis we do have a handful of schools within the city that are diverse my children all went to those schools and had great educations there but the vast majority of the city schools are segregated by income and by race and frankly very very challenged now an ironic twist is that our surrounding suburban jurisdictions have gone from entirely white jurisdictions the ones to which most of the city white population fled when the busing orders came down to now being actually having some significant racial diversity and some significant significantly diverse schools within those jurisdictions they've got more potential as John pointed out to integrate further but they actually do have working examples of healthy integrated diverse culturally and economically and racially diverse schools that are delivering great education so many things to reflect on but the one thing I think I'll jump to and then yield back is one of the biggest changes now in the Richmond City Schools and in our surrounding jurisdictions is this influx of new Americans so the Richmond City population division wide when I was a kid was white and black there were no brown there was no anything else and it wasn't just that we didn't see it it simply wasn't there the new American population throughout Virginia has gone way way up including in Richmond City now and in our surrounding jurisdictions and that's going to be my Pollyanna point what a point of strength that is frankly I think it's a big part of why Virginia politically has moved from a traditional southern state to a we won't call it blue because it depends on the election year but a purple much more mid-Atlantic state and a lot of that has to do with having a significant new American populations and frankly African American populations that are now very politically engaged in ways that they weren't allowed to be back in 1970 and in those school communities we've got diverse some diverse reality and a lot more diverse potential and the last point in my Pollyanna mode is our schools are doing great work by many of those communities so even though we see those achievement gaps on your charts Linda which are depressing as all get out all those charts are going up the academic achievement lines are going up for all populations and what a remarkable feat that our public education system has absorbed this huge influx of new Americans and helping them become full Americans helping them learn English helping them learn all their subjects and going on to be such successful parts of our Wouter population so that's my moment since you're being determinedly optimistic moment for the day I'll share a story that I heard recently which is that I share this with you that when you're short you have to be optimistic because the glass always looks half full from this angle maybe if you're a little taller it might look half empty but we'll go with the half full and I want to come back to you around this question of if it is really the active population that may change policy and politics what are the strategies we need to use around voting and around getting that mobilized and I'll come back around to that Nira, you have been leading considerable work on equity at the Center for American Progress and some of that has been around the school finance issues that continue to plague us some of that's been around the role of quality teachers and the role that resource equity plays in supporting their work and adequacy how are you thinking about the kinds of investments in schools that can move us towards racial equity so I'll just say a few words about that and it's a great honor to be on this panel with so many leaders and also in part of this critical critical discussion that's been taking place I have spent a lot of my time on healthcare but I did spend a year working for the New York City Chancellor of Schools where we confronted all of these challenges on a minute by minute second by second basis a few things just at the largest level truly the big challenge in public education around efficacy is money I like to say that I like to say that when we're having these battles with conservatives around education issues I always find it interesting that the conservatives believe in the free market everywhere except when it comes to public schools so everywhere else it's like you pay for what you get and the more you spend the higher quality it is and so when you're talking about what you invest it's like what you get back but in public schools everything is over-resourced already and teachers don't need to be paid more they're doing it for civic good and there's already too much money in this place so I think truly if you look at the investments over the last 50, 60 years we're just under investing in public schools that is the bottom line there's a deep chasm between both urban and rural schools and wealthier suburban schools and there's a deep chasm between higher income neighborhoods and neighborhood schools and lower income neighborhood schools so that's the number one challenge but why does that matter because if you believe that quality schools rely on quality teachers lower income school schools that cannot really finance higher incomes for teachers basically rely on less experienced teachers and so we do have this upside down world in which schools that have the greatest sets of challenges have the least resources to do that they have the teachers with the least experience they have school leadership with the least experience and that's why our whole system is really upside down what we really need to do is we care about this very simple principle which is equality of opportunity for every child in America we would make sure that those schools that have the greatest challenges have the greatest resources that is basically the opposite of what we do and why we have these conversations 20, 30, 40 years later and so essentially you know there's a lot of research around these issues which is that lower income neighborhoods pay teachers a lot less they spend much less per pupil they have fewer resources from art and music to everything else for their schools and you know year after year that has a cumulative impact and where we do see well resource schools in low income neighborhoods we have much better outcomes and so you know I think we get into all these conversations about choice and other issues but at the heart of the matter we really need to have a discussion in this country and with conservatives who are attacking public education like I haven't seen in decades and I do believe public schools are under attack because they are the last vestige of ensuring that everybody has a chance I mean if you think about it all the institutions that are about ensuring equal opportunity in our country are under assault right now and public schools are just one battleground for that assault and I hope that leaders across the progressive movement recognize that assault and will act accordingly and as we go forward recognize that some of these debates were having a bad choice we should admit debates and people should talk about them at the end of the day those are side issues compared to who's getting resources where are they getting their resources and like every other issue in our society every other economic issue or equity issue it's where you spend the money shows who you value and when we've gone through decades of disinvestment in public schools what we're saying is we care less about those issues than the Pentagon budget or whatever else massive tax cuts for the wealthy that are their priority in Washington so Cap did a report that was striking a few years ago which found that in 30 states a teacher heading a family of four would qualify for government assistance and last night I turned on the news and maybe you saw the West Virginia teacher strike they interviewed it was like one of your respondents to that study interviewed a teacher who said he was working two jobs and on food stamps and this morning I think it was there was an announcement or maybe it was yesterday that instead of the 1% raise that West Virginia teachers were being offered that led to the strike then they're not going to get a 5% raise which may not get everyone off food stamps would move the needle I would just say in 11 states 20% of teachers are needed to work a second job in 50% of the country truck drivers are paid more than teachers we have a lot of discussion about urban schools and suburban schools and coastal discussions about New York City but in many states in this country both urban you know they happen to be in the middle of the country in the south rural and urban teachers are basically the message we send to them is your salary your work is worth so much less than every other thing we do and I think that's you can't expect good you can't expect excellent outcomes from teachers who are basically paid 25 $30,000 a year and say that we really value those kids learning so on the optimistic tip keep digging let's be optimistic the West Virginia strikes this is not a state with historically successful strikes had their Republican governor buckle 5% and 5% wage increase is positive in a state where they have not been providing that level of raise in years basically when we use our power together we can get better results I note also that on this question of resources I mentioned California had recently enacted what they call weighted student formula to add more money for needy kids Massachusetts did that in the early 1990s and it propelled that state to become the number one ranking state on achievement they closed the achievement gap at that point they did a lot of other things around it invested in preschool and health care and so on so we do have that kind of activism across states New York is still fighting there are more than 40 states with school finance lawsuits and as John Jackson puts it every state has its state bird its state calendar its state school finance lawsuit but more and more of them are less successful and so in this last year and I think we're going to see in the coming years and this actually is like the 1960s there are more and more courts that are saying you must make spending more equitable Washington state is being fined $100,000 a day until their legislature gets it together to put that accumulated money into the school finance system that is more equitable and we're seeing that in other places we have nine court decisions I was a student teacher in Camden, New Jersey so this had a personal meaning for me there were no books in the book room in Camden, New Jersey when they finally did adopt an equitable finance system under a Republican governor Christy Todd Whitman in 1998 they brought up the spending of the mostly high minority districts Trenton, Newark, Patterson, etc and they propelled themselves to both cut the achievement gap and become one of the highest performing states in the country ranked number one in writing in the top five and everything else 45% students of color in that state more than a third of kids in poverty so when we do act we get results and there is a lot of activity going on Roberto let me ask you you've kind of gone from the White House to the school house in your focus right now with Teach Plus so you can approach this from both or either perspective but I know that Teach Plus is helping educators participate in policy conversations and advance their practices in support of students so how are you helping position teachers as allies to help advance racial equity and tackle these opportunity gaps? Well thank you Linda first let me just say how honored I am to be part of the conversation today and I want to thank UNLPI for hosting this and convening us because I think we've had a tough conversation this morning to date around unpacking some of the data here but I think this is really the important first step is for us to acknowledge as a policy community and as an American community the manifestation of growing segregation of inequality of racism of bias in our schools and we've had a policy conversation here I've been a part of for the last 20 years in Washington that has not fully owned those challenges has not put those challenges front and center in terms of the policy making process so I do believe this is the important first step as we also kind of wrestle and grapple with and reach for the solutions and the hopeful way forward also I want to give voice to some of the other opportunity costs that have been discussed already this morning we've talked a lot about the achievement gap and some of the ground that we've lost even over the last 30 years I think when we think about again from a student's perspective particularly our diverse students who are linguistic minorities the messages that policies are sent to them messages that devalue rather than reaffirm their identity their presence in their classroom policies that limit the use of their native language in their instruction that we've had to wrestle with that we're still working to recover from in places like California the policies around addressing social and emotional needs of our students or the lack of attention to that effort particularly for our students that have grown up in communities in poverty where we know that a number of our students are wrestling with the impact on the effects of poverty and of trauma and where we have failed as an education system to mount the efforts that are needed to reaffirm and support their success and in fact have perpetuated policies that subject them to disproportionate rates of discipline, suspension expulsion which further feeds the school to prison pipeline the the fabric of teaching and learning in our schools under two generations of standards based reform where we have a set of policies at the federal level that support accountability for all students that have high standards for all students but the nature of teaching and learning and you write so eloquently about this in your paper in the packet Linda about the curriculum the challenges around curriculum and the curriculum gap opportunities for active teaching and learning for project based learning for returning agency to our students and moving from a very didactic approach to teaching and learning which has I think dominated a lot of standards based reform and has been unfortunately I think a product of standards based reform in certain places moving to return that agency to our students so I think all of some of these are just kind of the opportunity costs that in addition to what we've talked about already this morning that are part of our lessons from Kerner and I think remind us and call us to a couple of things I think they call us to a stronger agenda and stronger policies that directly address these challenges and these disparities and we've had we've focused on a systemic level of policy in American education over the course of the generations of standards based reform we need policies that directly impact students and their teachers and directly address these disparities and these inequities and so I think there's an agenda that we can give birth to at this particular moment on that front we haven't talked much about the importance and I know it's on folks mind particularly coming off of yesterday too the importance of reinforcing a strong and robust office of civil rights because we have a whole set of laws that our administration really work hard to uphold and to reinforce that can be the foundation from which we build a more equitable environment for learning for our students but we need that robust enforcement and do you have advice about how what people ought to do to try to advocate for that yeah I mean I think we have fortunately great voices in the advocacy community that have helped to uphold the spirit of Lao and have helped to uphold the spirit of Title 6 and done more to address that I think we need to press the government we need to press the Department of Education to reinvigorate the office of civil rights and if you look at the amount of guidance that was done over the last eight years to uphold those laws we need that level of enforcement moving forward and we need voices behind that and then I think of where we are at this particular moment and I think of Gary's reflection of having been at three past commemorations of Kerner of the commission what makes today different well I think we're really in the need of a movement to address and to really take action to change the state of education where we are right now and for me that movement is about it begins with what you shared at the beginning of our conversation today Linda of Dr. King's aspiration and call to consciousness and to what's right and when we can recognize what's right and that we aren't moving in a direction that is not right for all kids and then when we couple that with the information that our teachers and our learners and our families need to truly be woke to be woken to the challenge and this is where I find and draw my hope because our teacher leaders across our Teach Plus Network are woke and their students and their students are woke and that is the second important tenant to being able to take action and the third is voice and bringing that voice forward so we have our teacher leaders across the country in 11 states and regions and we work we grow and support teacher leaders in instructional practice in school by school and teacher by teacher changing the conditions around teaching and learning for our students and we support teachers in policy and advocacy as you mentioned but we have teachers you know like who's building communities of restorative justice and pushing her district to have restorative justice coordinators in her schools in Maryland we have teachers like Ashley McCall in Illinois who are pushing and pressing the state legislature to take action on school finance equity they just passed a law this past year and they're doubling down on implementation of state laws around suspension and expulsion and making sure that schools behind the state level policy change schools have the dollars and the resources and the professional development to implement multi-tier systems of supports and behavioral supports for their students and we have teachers like Jose Rodriguez who are advocating on behalf of bilingual learners and a whole set of policy changes at the district level to help support and reaffirm bilingualism and for his students in Texas so I think this work is done school by school it's done district by district I think there's tremendous power we find tremendous hope in the voice of our teachers to also lift with their and alongside their learners and their families the imperative for change at the state level and that is where we're going to get particularly in this and which we're in now in DC it's the momentum at the state and local level that's going to make the difference I think your theme of being woke is the theme that takes us back to where Zakiya started us I mean teachers, parents students, school board members and others in a variety of roles so I want to open us up to questions from the audience so you can organize yourselves, raise your hand and I want the mic to come to you while you're doing that I'm just going to give people an opportunity to say if they want to identify one thing that they think is really making a difference in the context that you're working you just gave several good examples but I want to give Ann and Nira and Zakiya that opportunity too I mean if I could just say I think a little bit of a struggle not necessarily a pushback but just to say that I work with communities that 20 years old 30 years old and I would say there's been a movement for decades in black and brown communities but no one's been listening from Ella Baker I mean Reverend Barber talked about it we've been fighting it absolutely so no one's paying attention it's not just the media though it's like when people go into policy spaces and therefore you keep circling the same crazy policies and without asking students and parents and community members is this the one that's going to work this time how has it been working even when they're evaluated no one ever comes to us and said no one went to the people in New Orleans and said year into whatever the destruction that they did within that city and say how did we do with this is creating all chartered networks space working for you because I've been speaking to those folks there's about 500 black and brown teachers out of a system and you don't think that's going to have devastating consequences and there's no conversation that happens so I would just say the movement I think has been there for many many years no one's listening I think part of the shift to what we need to do is make sure that we can be in spaces when we can be in a White House when we can be some place that can change the policy locally or whatever that if we're not bringing together to begin to set that table not come in after the table is set but like let's move the fork over here and the knife over here that's not it but before we even put anything on this table let's talk about this because we have the historical context of what other things that we've done already so we can say to community members who've been doing this for 20 years who have seen mayorship who have seen superintendents roll over who have seen all these different things let's bring you into the space that has to be an automatic and the more we do that and the more we have been able to do that working with Journey for Justice and creating that space unapologetic space for black and brown people to be in to create and talk about what do we choose as community members so people see us we have to create a whole campaign and while it is Journey for Justice is an unapologetic of black and brown space the We Choose campaign is interracial but we know that in order to do this many of those folks get into those spaces but we need the people who have their hearts and minds ready to get black and brown and marginalized communities free to be in that space with us to be in collaboration with us to be in action with us to be in movement with us because just like we've seen many times in Black Lives Matter at one particular instance I never forget it was so powerful how white allies surrounded the black and brown folks from the initial attack that we're going to come by police and to see that happen it's in the same vein it may not be the existence of what I'm trying to get at it's like you have spaces that you can get in bring everybody along there are people that have been doing this work for decades all across and you can go anywhere and find people in this room there's no reason to reinvent the wheel as a matter of fact we don't have time for that we have solutions that we've been working on that we've been pushing locally at a statewide level like we've been doing this work and if we're not there then it's just as a matter of fact it's disingenuous when then we are invited to a space to be like oh what do you think well you know for the last 20 years we've been saying fun schools so we can have this for the last 20 years we've been saying stop suspending our kids put restorative justice practices in our classrooms and fund that to happen and I think also I would just say that we have to stop getting caught up in Democrat and Republican communities who have been marginalized that we keep talking about over and again and we're depressed about and it doesn't matter to me personally if you're a Democrat or Republican show improve, support these communities and we know what that looks like and then let's gather around and rally around as a community as a village to support what's happening and what we need to happen wonderful alright we've got somebody raising their hand now who's got the mic here we go, right there, Sheila and then in the back we've got somebody who also wants to get the mic Steve right behind, go ahead Sheila once again it's great to be here and to see people on the panel that I know whether from the Kennedy days with Casey Family Programs or Dr. Darlin Hammond all through New York State's standards development as well as other things but to my my young sister Zakiya Ansari I've watched her grow I've watched her to develop into the leader that she is today and I know she still has miles to go before she sleeps but Zakari even though I know your many accomplishments I don't think everybody else knows so can you just tell us one thing that you are most excited about that you and your group have been able to maneuver and manipulate on behalf of parents and students and what's the one area where you're still struggling I'll start the struggle first I think the struggle and I keep saying this and I'll keep coming back to it is that you know for almost 20 years I've been going up to a place like Albany you know before I knew I didn't know what organizing was when I started this work I had no idea I didn't know what unions were I had no idea about the politics that was entrenched in education no idea I was minding my business raising seven kids at the time you know I had no idea and so it's part of something is being done to children it's not okay with me and what can I do and it's been a journey of understanding what it is that I can do but along that way lately there's just been this I would say last year was a kind of the gut punch for me which is I've been going up to Albany for almost 20 years we had money there was no but there was not time to fund these schools yet the market crashed guess what still not time to fund these schools there's more money than they had before and guess what they're telling us right now there's still not time to fund those schools and now Betsy DeVos is in office we got a deficit there's still not time to fund these schools so what am I supposed to take from that I take that black and brown children and poor children on our priority period the problem is and the struggle has been to get the masses the media to really cover that and as I shared yesterday it's almost like they're allergic to the word racism and it's in vain that we're sitting in right now and granted you know you might see it a little more here a little more there but culturally insensitive maybe that person that said that about the KKK was just a little culturally insensitive no no right to sit there and have to actually talk to a report and say and explain why it's racist I want to tell you that is emotionally and psychological abuse it really is and that has been so that's been the struggle to be able to paint the picture and portrait of the children that have been impacted a decade a generation of children but 12 years we haven't funded schools in the year 4.2 billion dollars this particular equity lawsuit only supposed to be a four year commitment black and brown children are at the center of that so that's why as AQE we were able to frame legislators to proclaim February racial justice and educational justice month right so those are the things that we have to do to like get the media excited and maybe paying attention to this so that's the for me that's the struggle that has been to highlight the children that have been mostly impacted by this the positive has been is that even in those 12 years one we have built ourselves up as an organization that is the go-to organization that if you want to know what's happening in regards to equity and education you come to us that we have brought parents and continue to bring hundreds of parents every year up to Albany to share their stories that legislators are then many of them beginning to understand and to articulate the children that are being impacted is it enough not at all and so what I say also is we begin to be able to highlight that when you have again I go back to Democrat Republic our governor is a Democrat right but he says money doesn't matter wants to shut down the last monopoly as well as a whole host of other things well I'm Emmanuel as a Democrat what's he doing to Chicago shut in the shuttering schools even though parents in Chicago have to do on a five-week hunger strike he was a willing to allow them to die we had to walk 150 miles to Albany what are these are not gimmicks and our governor said publicity is done I've got better things to do than walk 150 miles for publicity is done I just want to be clear I think all that goes back to is just to say that for decades black and brown people have had to put their bodies on the line for what was right and or follow lawsuit so promise of Brown v. Board has not been met CFE promise that the 12 years has not been met the current report and all this other stuff we're still having these conversations I go back and I will continue to go back what has been different what have we not done because we've done so many other things we have not centered racism in class in any conversation so if we talk about policy and all the things that we can change we will get some movement but will we get the movement to make change I don't think so and we have to be uncomfortable in these spaces to have these conversations I can't afford to we don't want to see more children I don't want to see more children have to suffer education is a right there's no reason that there are children that don't have access that Baltimore they're freezing in schools we're not out raising on the streets there's no reason and I'm willing to accept that there are people out there that don't give a damn about my kids I get it and if we are more than willing to accept that then we can counter that and say then those people are those folks but what are we going to do what part are we going to play and making sure that children are okay the outrage is essential we have about seven minutes we've got a question right there and then if somebody else has one please raise your hand Barnett Berry with CTQ these two powerful statements of late parents and teachers 6% of America's public and even more parents have trust and confidence in teachers in this country one in four teachers are in some external network seven in ten are using technology to connect with each other in ways they never could before what might be a national strategy to bring parents and teachers in a powerful viral campaign to advance our cause here start with Roberto so I have a couple of ideas on that and I thank you Barnett for the question and I admire the CTQ work you do and the network a number of our teachers also connect to that network do wonderful work I do think there's a lot of power in teachers voice and teachers shared experiences across a city across communities across neighborhoods because we are still unfortunately in a system that suppresses that voice where the profession is not where it needs to be and I admire Nira's amazing work at CAP to begin to build that profession up because I think that's another key to us moving forward on the lessons from Kerner but that profession right now lends itself to isolationism when it comes to our teachers they close the door there's not opportunities to connect and to share the imperative for change to share the manifestation of inequity of racism of bias in schools but when teachers begin to connect with one another and these are teachers that are in the service of education because they care about learners because they care about families they care about communities I think there's tremendous power in teachers sharing that story so that we can share the imperative because I think Zakiya as you eloquently put forth the movement's been going on the question is it's not a shared movement there's certain folks that are very comfortable and pleased with how things look right now for their kids versus other kids so we need to bring that I think we really do need to bring that forth and I think teachers shared voices more networking across cities across states I was just with nine of our teachers last night electronically connected sharing stories about what the school finance advocacy play looked like in Illinois across the country to Texas where we have a working group that's beginning to look at issues around school finance equity in Texas and sharing strategies the importance of those teachers and the voices of those teachers not just being teachers impacted but also teachers from other communities who are not directly impacted by this manifestation but who understand it's now right who share the imperative and the conscious for change so I think that's how you build it so can I just add something to this which is to say we've seen the power of that connection between teachers and parents in I'd say in opposition so if you're going to look at what's happened over the last 10 years about the standard based movement I think what's a lot of what happened is that parents trusted teachers who felt like this you know the over emphasis on testing was it was having a negative impact and I'll say this about my kids I have my kids are in public schools in Washington DC and when a teacher would you know great teachers tell you that I have to teach through the test that means a lot to the parents and so I think one of the reasons why this this push on standards has been on testing has been pushed back is because there was a kind of informal alliance between parents and teachers saying enough already and parents really relied on teachers and I think that's an important thing so how do we make that stronger in the affirmative and I think the truth is that we need parents and teachers community wide suburban, urban joining arms around some of these issues because the truth is policy makers political leaders are it's easy for them to pit suburban schools against urban schools or rural schools against suburban schools and what we really need is for people to recognize that we have a shared commonality and increasing investment across arenas, no one's invested enough in some schools but that truly suburban schools have a vested interest or wealthier schools have a vested interest in the outcomes for lower income schools and I think everything that the kids said points to that this split has been too fundamental in education and we all have to own up to that can I just share that we are part of the lines to reclaim our schools table I think it might be almost four years old now and it was intentional to do just that to bring the two largest teachers unions are part of it as well as locals as well as community organizations, youth organizations, national youth organizations like the lines for educational justice our local organization AQE but also Journey for Justice is part of that and we were creating that table intentionally to be able to do that and so that's part of the conversation because we understand the importance of that that collaboration and work that we do together and I'll just chime in and I think we need to look for collaborative opportunities everywhere with every all possible partners I turn what's happening in Florida we've got to remember how powerful our student voices can be in Virginia we found our business community to be very effective partners on advocating for critical thinking, collaborative learning, communications have really helped us push on resource issues for K-12 education as well as for opening up a little bit more space for creativity in our schools project-based learning we've got a great one of the schools I'm most excited about in my hometown Richmond City right now as we just started a second year of code RDA regional magnet school with diversity as an express value and part of built into the system but it was something that was supported by the business community helping create the next generation of high-tech workforce so looking for partners everywhere I don't know that we can get the business community to be our partners on one of the fundamental things that comes back to politics which is I do think the increasing income inequality I have no I can't find any way to be optimistic about this other than to say that this increasing income inequality and its impact at all government levels and at all in schools and housing everywhere and your charts on the wealth gaps as well as the income gaps it's just so depressing that I think that's something that is going to come down to politics that's going to have to fix it and that's where I'll find my polyana that our new American community and our woke up communities of all sorts are going to have to address that on a wider societal basis just real quick I just think you know as we I think it's important for us as we the collective of us like there's words that trigger communities and so like to be conscious of you know some of the language and things that we use as we move forward policy and so for me like the word like integration and diversity it takes on different forms and I think sometimes we have to have a definition of what that looks like when we enter communities as well as maybe engage those communities and what you mean by diversity integration because often sometimes those things have been detrimental to us at the expense of us in regards to gentrification and things like that and so I think just to be conscious of and it's not just those it's anything to a community to like bring your full self and open self to be responsive and to pay attention to how people respond to that because it could just like just implode something that you really have good intentions about if we're not really engaging the community and are we using the right language as simple as that. So we are out of time I want to pick on this last theme of collaboration that people brought out as we were thinking about the next steps there's an old African proverb that if you want to go fast go alone if you want to go far go together we have a long way to go we need to go there together and help me thank this panel for their contributions. Thank you. Thank you. And I am going to invite the panel to get comfortable in the audience I'm going to invite up our last speaker who's going to close out this conversation. Oops I'm going to pick up my microphone and do that. And I'll introduce Kent. So I'm just delighted our last comments will be made by one of my favorite speakers who is always inspiring. Kent McGuire is one of the folks who has been in this business doing this work this very work for a long time he is now the program director of education at the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation and he is the prior president and CEO of the Southern Education Foundation and before that was Dean at the College of Education at Temple University my alma mater doing work in Central City Education and before that or maybe after that I can't remember the order he was assistant secretary for research in the Department of Education Kent has been thinking about these issues of equity the issues of integration, segregation school funding, deeper learning and how you bring all of that together on behalf of children in all communities in all classrooms for a very long time I'm delighted that he is going to send us off today with words of wisdom. Kent thank you. I am absolutely delighted that I am not going to take anymore of these you get the last word opportunity I really don't understand why I get asked to do this and each time I try it gets harder to do especially when I think pretty much everything that needs to be done has actually been said so what do you do I'm going to probably make a point about facts I'm wearing in here probably a point or two about transformation and maybe a point about power those are probably the three things I took from the two panels but let me just start this way Linda started by trying to date a number of people she spared me but I'm going to date myself just to give you some sense of the meaning that being here holds I was during those riots in Detroit on a trip to California in a brand new Oldsmobile station wagon I think my dad would have turned we stayed let me say this this was way back when there were this best western motel change probably only five people in this room remember a best western but it was the in the 60s it was the equivalent of a holiday in express you know it was brand new shiny and they build them all the way across interstate 80 and here we were stopping each night at a best western looking forward to jumping into the swimming pool while my dad would walk into the house into the hotel room to turn the TV on to see what was happening in Detroit now he might had it not been for my mother have turned around and gone back to Michigan for he was very active he was the president of local 652 of the united auto workers in Lansing Michigan very active in the civil rights struggles of that state his brother robert little in fact there were no text messages in those days right so you had to actually pick a phone up and call somebody and robert little Malcolm X's brother would call and give him updates about what was actually going on so I remember these times in a rather personal way and all I can say about the history lesson that Linda gave us with real confidence is that the infrastructure that came to exist as a consequence of the elementary and secondary education act and the larger war on poverty was that all that infrastructure accrued to my benefit unquestionably in fact in the wake of those Detroit riots an organization called New Detroit was created to help build the city right New Detroit found me sent me to Columbia University to participate in this brand new program in the politics of education I was an economics major so I spent half my time in the economics department and the other half over at teachers college it allowed me to do many things my wife would argue too many things and and for all those reasons I just appreciate the opportunity just to stand here and actually reflect now two really wonderful panels Linda is what I would say both to sort of put the record straight tell us where we've been remind us of where we are and also a panel to help us consider implications for for action near I think your burden is huge in terms of pushing on kind of national policy and trying to impact fiscal federalism in this country in ways that it needs to be touched I would just observe my point about the facts is that the facts speak for themselves Linda's facts Gary's facts Patricia's facts they're all working from publicly available longitudinal data so you know there's no quarrel we should have with the facts they're irrefutable the stratification with regard to both access and opportunity that the facts reveal we probably do need to think through new and more imaginative ways to sort of bring these facts into wider view that'd be one conclusion I would reach in many of us need to figure out what that would look like what it would entail as I'm learning to ask now what it would cost but that's one thing then there's another reality about the facts which is that this is not about the facts I certainly learned this up close in the last eight years I spent in the deep south where I ran an organization that got really good at putting the facts in front of people folks were not confused about the facts they really were they were not confused about the facts we told them kids are poor they're in deep poverty kids aren't learning they weren't confused about any of that they just weren't interested in the facts right and so that's the other reality with which we must contend we have to actually bring the facts we have into wider view and we have to also grapple with the facts that is not always about the facts and I think we've got to figure out how to work both those things um next thing I would say is that I was taken with Patricia's observations about the wonderful new qualities of this diverse majority we now have just how resilient how collaborative how multi-lingual and multi-cultural are today's right which leads me to observe a point about transformation we've really dropped the ball us adults not just with regard to public policy but also with regard to our conception of schools in this country we're still tinkering by and large around the edges of a system that was created 70 years ago for the express purpose of sorting kids that's what it was built to do now 70 years ago you were growing up in lansing michigan you could walk over to osmovia and you could get a job in the plant and you could make a very decent middle-class living there is no osmovia today right and we actually have to figure out how to create a system or transform the system we have evolve more rapidly toward a system that's actually designed to help young people learn to learn right and all those qualities that patricia laid out are just sitting there in front of us I say this to you corporately now as the person who has inherited something called deep learning you know I can't run from it but I better be careful how fast I run toward it if I can't figure out or help us figure out how to do it in a way that actually accrues to the kids who need it the most and I'm actually deeply worried about the extent to which we have actually figured that out that brings me finally to my third point about power as I promised I would do this in 15 minutes you are who I promised I would do this otherwise I would say I require much more time and it's this while we struggle with the facts and while we get clearer about the transformation that we also mean we might as well come to terms with the fact that the conversation we're having here and the fact that we're trying to do this on the occasion of the 50th year anniversary of the Turner commission is that this is inevitably about power it is inevitably about power and so when we bring the facts forward and marshal a conversation about school transformation we really do have the unfortunate burden I personally think of putting this in a broader political and social context greatly diminished public support for many things not just the schools gradual privatization of pretty much everything right the prisons healthcare system schools arguably correlated with the decline in the proportion of white middle class students of them that's number one number two changing public expectation I've looked at polling data in the sound and Raymond you're going to need to look at the data that shows it's not that folks don't care about the collective good it's just that it's dropped down the list of priorities in the times in which we currently live imagine a baby boomer taking care of his or her parents on the one hand and still paying for their kids college on the other they're sort of in this sort of track you know between these two tectonic plates they're increasingly focused on and are inclined to prioritize the returns to individuals over public outcomes and public ends couple that with the ascendancy of market theories as holding solutions to our most pressing problems we've just been through two decades of a rather focused, highly disciplined well resourced narrative about all the things bad with government reflect back to how Linda started this company in the days of the commission what had we been through we had fought two world wars we fought a Korean war we fought a cold war and we came out with a dividend that dividend we decided in the moment to turn to our most pressing domestic challenges the country thought that government to be brief was part of the solution not part of the problem that near has been flipped has been flipped completely on his ear and my time is nearly up actually my time is up but this is not new for me not new experience I'm used to bells ringing in my ear perfectly capable of ignoring them if I have a little more sake but I would just argue that we have to put the facts and our ideas about school transformation in the broader context of the kind of social dynamics that are operating at least right now and I think this brings me back to Zakiya and her arguments about building power and Gary's observation that we are a catastrophe in the making point is this we need to figure out how to help folks with power understand more vividly the implications of not addressing these issues with the quality of the lives they lead if we can't connect those dots this will just take that much longer and the longer it takes the harder this is to solve and the more kids to Zakiya's point be loosed I knew when I got up here nothing I would say would be particularly helpful but I just want you to know it felt good to say and with that I close the meeting now know why I ask to perform this benediction because there's always so much to take home just leave us with this thought it is not only about helping those in power see how this redounds to their benefit I think about a school bond issue that was being brought in a community in Southern California that had once been an all white community now mostly Latino many older voters etc and they had an ad on the television which showed the little kids playing and then made the point that these are the children and they have to support with their taxes your social security your health care the quality of your life how much education do you want them to have and so we got to bring that point but we also have to be about the business of acquiring more power for those who already hold these views don't forget to vote and on that note thank you for coming all the materials will be available on the website