 Good evening, everybody. See if this is working. Good evening, everybody. Welcome. And if you can take your seats now, we will be getting started momentarily. Welcome to Civic Hall. Welcome to New America NYC's event this evening. I'm really excited for the conversation to come. My name is Lisa Guernsey. And I'm the deputy director for education policy at New America. I'm just going to take a moment to introduce you to what New America is all about for those of you who may not know, although I believe there's many folks here who have been to New America NYC events in the past. And they know what kind of vibrant conversations take place in this room. So we're thrilled you're back with us tonight. So New America is based in Washington DC. But we are a think tank that's very different than other think tanks that may be much more focused on the federal policy and an ivory tower inside the Belt Way of Washington DC. We are trying to do what our president Ann-Marie Slaughter calls rethinking the think tank. We are working very hard to make sure that we are getting out into communities on the ground and understanding better what today's families, students, teachers, anybody who's in the social space, what they're experiencing. We have our New York base here. We also have a fellows program in California and some bases in California. We'll be opening up a Chicago hub very shortly. And then we also have a DC-focused New America that is focused on what's happening in the neighborhoods of Washington DC, which is also a very different way for a Washington DC think tank to think. In our education policy program, we are also working very hard to make sure we're really understanding what's happening in this 21st century world that families and students are living in. And we have programs that reach from birth all the way through college, career, and workforce. Our early and elementary education policy program is run by Laura Bornfront. And she unfortunately cannot be here tonight because of illness. But she has been running a program there that focuses not only on pre-K, but also on what comes before pre-K and what comes after in the K3 years. And you'll be hearing a lot more about that this evening. And we have a dual language learners national work group run by Connor Williams. And it focuses on children who are coming to schools with a language other than English and are learning both languages at the same time. And we are really promoting policies to help foster both those languages and their development as children grow up and thrive in school. And then there's many other programs as well. We invite you to check them out. And I want to turn now our attention to this evening's program, which is going to be, I think, a really fascinating conversation about equity, race, and how much our education system, especially for kids in their first 10 years of life, may not be helping all children, what we need to do to change it. So I just want to take a moment to introduce the amazing star cast that we have that will be giving us our conversation tonight. And then they're going to come up, and we'll start right in on the program. So with us is Dana Goldstein, who also is in the New America family. She's a former New America fellow. And as many of you know, is the author of the book The Teacher Wars, which if you haven't read or dipped your toes into, please do. It's really an amazing history that starts back over 200 years and really understanding what she calls in her subtitle, the most embattled profession. And we also have with us tonight Nicole Hannah-Jones, who is a staff writer for The New York Times Magazine. And I first came across, when I was in my car listening to This American Life, about a year and a half ago, and heard her amazing piece on Missouri school, a district in Missouri that was coping with issues of segregation, resegregation, integration in some really interesting ways. I'm really thrilled that Nicole is a fellow now at New America with us. And then lastly, but also one of the reasons that we're all together tonight, I'm thrilled to introduce Ruby Tekinishi, who is a fellow with the Education Policy Program at New America. And many of you may know Ruby because she's been in the world of education and child development and research for many, many years. She is a giant in this area. She was the president of the Foundation for Child Development. And before that was at Carnegie Corporation and has written a book that you'll see out there tonight, and I hope you have a chance to take a look and buy a copy. The title is First Things First, Creating the New American Primary School. And Ruby's argument is really interesting, complete and a retake on what our elementary schools, our primary schools should be and how they should be set up. So I think you'll agree it's gonna be a very interesting conversation tonight. And so with that, thanks again to everyone for being here, and I will turn the mic over to my colleagues. Thank you. Hey, thank you so much to Lisa, to Civic Hall, to New America, to Ruby and to Nicole for being here. We'll do maybe 40, 50 minutes and then we'll open it up to questions. So think about those questions as we talk. I wanna begin by reading a passage from Ruby's great book. It comes toward the end, but I hope you don't mind me reading it here at the beginning. It says, the stubborn flat line of education achievement since the 1970s leads to a clear conclusion. The American primary school deserves our urgent attention now. However, everywhere we look, we see that the American public is primarily concerned about the education of their own children, but not the children of others. One telling indicator of this disinterest is the number of store shelves devoted to books about raising one's own children versus those related to public education issues. How to engage the public to care for the future of other people's children? Our joint future on which the quality of life in our communities and nation depends will be increasingly challenging given the demographics of the child population and the fact that children below the age of 18 living in families are now less than 20% of all households. I thought this passage really resonated with me. Another thing I was thinking about about how the demographics of young children especially differ from the overall demographics of the nation is that they're more likely to be children of color and they're more likely to be poor. So one of the things you do really well in the book, Ruby, is talk about how we have failed to have a national consensus around giving these kids what they need. And I'm curious if you could start us out today by talking about why, in your view, has that failure persisted through the generations as our peer nations have decided to invest in national systems for early childhood? Great question and a big question and I actually wrote some notes about that before I came to make sure that I would say something about it. You know, I read Nicole's article in the New York Times magazine this morning and I was really taken by the last paragraph of that article because it basically I think says some of the things that you just read. First of all, I think what we have in the United States is an educational system that reflects, I think, our political philosophy and ideology and cultural values. And we have come to a place now that where it's basically we care for our own children and most of us in this room, including myself, have children who are either doing very well and will continue to do very well, but the vast majority of children will not. And so the question and here I again refer to Nicole's concluding paragraph in her article, do we care about all our children? Do we care about other people's children? And this is, I don't have a particular answer, but I think I know that we have to try to address this for these questions, for this particular reason. Even though our children grow up and will do very well or are doing very well, they have to live in a society where other people's children have not or are not doing very well. And I would say that the whole quality of our lives is diminished by this basic fact that the majority of American children are not doing very well. So what I would say is we have to be a better people. We will have to be a better country to address these issues. I think an answer to the question that Dana raised, I believe that at least up until now in America is a very young country. The values of the private lives of families, certainly until kids go to compulsory education and the emphasis on American individualism are extremely strong. And it's basically, I still remember in 1993, talking to an elected congressman from Louisiana, who, and this was after in the Clinton, Bill Clinton's administration, the House had turned democratic. So it was a major turning point. And we were talking about these issues and he said to me, this is a dog eat dog world. This is 1993. And I think that that was over 20 years ago. I think we've come further along in the society and we are now faced with the questions that Nicole raised and that Dana read from my book. How do we get to a place where Americans care for every child, not only our own children? So Nicole, the same question. I know you're writing and researching about history right now. In your view, when you look at other nations, they do have comprehensive national systems for children often from birth. We completely lack that and then feed them into a highly unequal school system. Where is the disconnect, do you think, in American history that leads to us being exceptional in this unfortunate way? I mean, I'm assuming you know what my answer is going to be. I mean, we're exceptional because we have to deal with race in this country. And you can look at other nationalized things such as healthcare and when you ask why does America not have universal healthcare and other countries do, it's because race. When we have created a system built on racial caste and with the understanding that certain children are not worthy or deserving of getting the same education or that certain people are getting something that they don't deserve, then you are very unwilling to create something that will be national because then those people who you find to be undeserving will benefit from that. And it's very clear in just me beginning to read about the history of public schools in this country, that the notion of schooling for children who were considered white and children who were considered black was very different. And it was an education that was to educate children into their lot in life and for black Americans, it was to be the laborers and not to be able to compete with white Americans. So I think when you look at today, you're still seeing those same ramifications. When I talk to people all the time, I say, do we really believe that black and Latino children are just as smart as white children? We say it, but do we really believe it? Do we really believe that those children are as deserving of the best? And the same thing that types of education that we provide for white children, I don't think we actually do. And if we have, then we sure don't do a very good job of showing that. And then one thing I've thought a lot about is if you look at Head Star, which is our single national preschool program, it is targeted toward the poorest of poor children. And so therefore it is a segregationist program by design. And that's one of the reasons why it potentially, maybe my theory, one of the reasons why it's somewhat popular, although still under attack for funding cuts constantly, but it doesn't require upper middle class parents to send their kids to school alongside the poor, which as we all know, remains controversial. I wanted to get to the policy question of universality versus targeted investments in the neediest kids, because I think this is one of the, I have found in my reporting, one of the biggest points of contention in the early childhood policy community. And let's use New York City as an example, Mayor de Blasio's UPK program, Universal Pre-K, is open to every single child in the city. And it's open to you even if you are a hedge fund billionaire, your kid can go for free. Now you could use another model where it was potentially a sliding scale program. So I'm interested, Ruby, I know you're a proponent of universality. Why do you think that model works? And then I'll have Nicole discuss what she thinks some of the implications of universality are for getting kids of different backgrounds in the classroom together. Okay, I think the argument for universal access to hopefully high quality pre-kindergarten for all children is based on, first of all, the fact that the United States, if you rank the United States globally in terms of the provision of early education or pre-K services, we're really in the bottom half. I mean, that's shocking, isn't it? But we're really in the bottom half. So when you think about our global competition, for example, we are not educating our children, let's say, as early as many of our competitor and friendly nations are doing so. So we need to change that. The second is that it's, what shall I say? Firmly established, based on large data sets and analyses that the inequalities among children in the United States, given some of the things that we've talked about in terms of social policy start very early in life, even before the age of two. And so we are a country that I think still believes in equality or certainly aspires to equality. So having that inequality start so early in life is something that we need to address. The third thing, which I try to use as an argument in my book, is that we now have the research knowledge about how children develop from birth on that really is amazing in terms of their capacity to learn and to develop and to really flourish. And for many children, not to have those opportunities so early in life, I think is a major contributor to inequality in American life. And then I say finally, in terms of access to pre-Kanagartan in early education, since in the United States, that access is still a private good in most states. There are a few states that have universal pre-K, but since it's so highly dependent on private family resources, there are many children who have no access whatsoever to those programs and the benefits of those programs. So what I finally argue in my book is that due to all of these facts, if you will, the lack of access, the lack of access to quality programs, the research that we have about the ability of children to learn they're not blank slates when they're born and so forth. I try to make the argument that all children's access to pre-K education starting at three, if not, and certainly no later than four, is a basic human right and a civil right in the United States. And the sustainable development goals of the United Nations, which I think are two years old now, do consider access to what they call pre-primary education to be a universal human right. So for all of those reasons, I think there's a very strong argument that we should have all children participate in pre-K education starting no later than four and preferably at the age of three. Of course, given a situation of scarce resources, which we're always in in the United States with taxes, the counter argument is made, okay, half of kids are not currently in pre-K, let's go get that half, the other half, hey, their parents have somehow figured it out. So let's go ahead and let those families continue to figure it out on their own. So what is in your view, for both of you, the argument in favor of subsidizing even those who are currently able to pay for early education privately? I would say it's a basic income distribution of the United States. The median family income in the United States is probably around 50,000. If the cost of pre-K education is anywhere from maybe a low of 12 to 20,000, you can sort of see how a family with two children is not going to be able to afford private resources, private family resources for these programs. That is a very large majority of American families. And certainly for low income families, there is no possibility whatsoever. So it's very clear that participation in pre-K programs is really very highly related to the incomes of their families and it's pretty much common sense. If you don't have the income, you can't spend it. So I think, I mean, basically what you're asking is, should we be subsidizing free pre-K for the wealthy who can afford to pay for it on their own? I think if you look at, for instance, a city like New York, or you look at public schools in general, that's what public schools do, is it doesn't matter what your income, we're all bringing children into the same classrooms ostensibly. In New York, I think it could have been an opportunity for great integration because parents' fears with three and four year olds are very different than their fears with older children. Unfortunately, it hasn't worked out that way. So what we found in New York is that pre-K is just as segregated and in some ways more segregated than the upper grades in schools. And I think the belief that you would draw white parents into integrated schools if you start with pre-K just has not borne out. People are still sending their children to highly segregated preschools. And I think that they're seeing is that black and Latino children are not getting necessarily the high quality pre-K either. So I think it's, as all things in America is, in the ideal way, they could be something for equity. Pre-K could be where you're starting to bring children who are not interacting with each other, different races, different classes together in the classroom, but on the ground, it's not happening. And in many ways, it's just recreating the privilege that those children are already going to get. And of course, we also know that all student achievement rises due to being in a racially diverse environment. And that's whether you're in the majority group or the minority group that exposure to other types of people helps all children succeed. Another thing I would just bring up about the New York program is one of the ways in which it has continued to segregate students is so many of the programs, I believe more than half of the sites are not actually affiliated with a school. They're through these community-based organizations. And those are often tuition-charging organizations for two-year-olds and three-year-olds. And if you have your child enrolled in that, say for $26,000 a year, like one I visited and wrote about, you're automatically in for the free pre-K at that same site at age four. And they are allowed in their lottery to favor their own population. So this is a simple way that the sort of selection criteria for placing kids in schools in New York City is kind of leading to some inequalities. Of course, there are some really excellent programs in the UPK, like in places like Brownsville and East New York that are totally segregated. But I think that's so typical of the fall stand bargains that we are constantly making in order to get something like the money for universal pre-K, to pass a tax, to pay for it. Then you're making promises to the elite in order to do that. And I think we see that all the time. Clearly, when you think about universal pre-K, I don't think anyone, well, some people clearly are. I think a lot of people are assuming that it's going to be in a public school and that you are not paying for someone's private school tuition for pre-K. And I think that actually flies in the face of what universal pre-K is supposed to be. That is not the common schools message. But in a place like New York, I think a lot of times, again, this is a progressive city that is willing to do a lot of things that maintain inequality. Yeah, and to bring Ruby's book into this, I mean, here in New York, we have the constraint of real estate. Real estate drives so much in this city. And it's true in our UPK system. We don't have the space in the public schools. So I would want Ruby to address some public schools. And some public schools. I want Ruby to address this because you make a really strong case that really convinced me to conceiving of early childhood education as something that begins at age three and goes all the way through the third grade. How can this be done when constraints like space mean that so often that these programs for the youngest learners are just not going to be managed by the same folks at the same sites as elementary education? Right. And I mean, I think that, you know, Nicole is right that except in very selected places, for example, the District of Columbia or the state of Oklahoma and so forth, where most of the universal pre-K provisions are in the public schools. In most of the states, for example, New Jersey and certainly in New York City, the role of the public schools is rather small. And so it's really most of the pre-K programs are in community-based centers and certainly not in the public schools. I think that we have to think of, I think, a period of transition when we think about pre-K. First of all, at the turn of the 20th century, there wasn't an American high school. And Ted Seiser actually wrote his dissertation on the American high school, which I found really very interesting. So the American high school, before the turn of the 20th century, was like pre-K now, was delivered in a whole bunch of non-public settings, typically all non-public settings. And then there was a policy change that high school, because of what we needed in industrial society and so forth, would have to be a public high school. And so over time, what happened was that most of the kids went to public high schools. And those children of the elite who had always gone to boarding schools and to private schools and so forth continued to do that. And I see a very similar scenario that could occur in pre-K. So universal, I should also say throughout the world when it's provided, is not compulsory. Even in France, for example, where it's 100% participation rates and so forth, it is not compulsory in any country of the world. And it shouldn't be compulsory in the United States. So what will happen is that most of the families will, for economic reasons as well as other reasons, send their children to publicly funded pre-K. Those families for religious reasons or because they have resources to pay for private pre-K programs will continue to do so. And families who want to raise their children at home will continue to do so. But I think that the vast majority of families and children who now have no choice in American society to participate in these programs will be able to have access to these programs. And again, I just look at the income distribution in American society. And what we have is for those poor children who are able to participate in the targeted means tested programs, they're able to do so. And I believe only 41% now of income eligible children participate in Head Start. This is 50 years after its inception. And so there are another 49% of children at the poverty line. And all of the families between the poverty line and the median family income in the United States who really would have an impossible struggle to have any kind of access or participation to these programs. And so I think that it's really important to be able to have public provision and public support of their children's participation in these programs, which is entirely voluntary. One of the things you write about compellingly in the book is the ways in which we now know more about the best ways to teach young children to learn. And you also talk about the professional ethos of elementary education, which has differed from early childhood education, to kind of paint with a broad brush for the purposes of our discussion in the early childhood workforce. There's a big focus on social emotional learning of children and sort of the whole child and family engagement is really important. And especially, I think, since no child left behind, what we're seeing more and more in the elementary grade, certainly when you get up to say third grade, is much more seeing schools as I sometimes use the word achievement factories, like the outcome is the academic achievement. That's what you're looking for. Hopefully it's measurable. You get the test score. It's going up. Student growth, all of this. So when we think about sort of combining these two systems into one, as you propose in the book, making pre-K much more contiguous with K through third, what do you see as the risks of that sort of narrow focus on achievements being pushed down to the youngest children? And I'll ask Nicole to reflect on this too, because when we think about equity, so often the schools that are most under pressure to raise those test scores are the ones serving our low-income children of color. If you have any concerns about sort of this achievement focus being kind of pushed down to younger kids, like your daughter, for example, who's in this age group. Right. I mean, I write about this a little bit in the piece I did on my daughter's school. And as someone who's covered public education for more than a decade, I think one of the saddest things that came out of high-stakes testing is the way that it takes joy and joy of learning out of schools, particularly school-serving black and Latino children who are often very low-income. So all of those things that white middle-class parents want for those children, all of those things that we remember about school as making young children want to come to school are stripped away at these schools. And I think that was one of the things that was so beautiful about my daughter's school, was a school that was serving housing projects that was refusing, even with low test scores, to take those things away. And I remember I was going to an assembly at my daughter's school, and I'm watching all the little kids come in. And they're so happy and joyful to be there. And I got really emotional because I knew what the road looked like down a few years from now when they began to hate school, not because they don't want to learn, which is kind of the common narrative, but because school has become so constricted for them that it has become all about the test and achievement. I remember I would cover schools where there was no art, there was no recess, there was no music, because every and even something like you couldn't teach history because history had to be about teaching literacy. And I understood that because if you can't read, you can't do any of the other subjects. But it would then mean that all day all kids were getting was being taught to this test and feeling like they were being punished. And so I think that that has been very harmful. And I think we think that's OK for low income students and for Black and Latino kids because we feel like they need to score better on the test. But this is not anything that would be acceptable for people who have choice and have options for their own children. I think it's been really devastating. I think it turns children who have a great joy for learning, which is natural in children, even though that's not the narrative. It is natural in children who want to learn. But not if learning feels punitive. And I think that's often what we see. Yeah, well, I'm not naturally optimistic. Actually, I'm more of a pessimist for people who know me. But I will say that I think there's reason to hope. American education trends are very fetish and change very rapidly. And I really see that with the new reauthorization of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act, the Every Student Succeeds Act, some real possibilities for change. I think there is less of an emphasis on testing. I think there is more concern with what is called social and emotional learning. There is more concern with a broader view of education in the schools. So there is a policy context that has been set. And of course, I think it is a large reaction to the no child left behind and whatever, the last 16 years, if you will, or even more. So I think there are some possibilities. The downside of ESSA is that much more of authority over education is now in the states and a lesser role for the federal government. And the federal government has always had the role of protecting the rights of children and also leveling the playing field for children. So that's, I think, a real worry. I think there are definitely risks of what people call push down of the, let's say, the stereotypical view of elementary education or K-5 or K-3 education. But I think it's really, there are some possibilities for change, I think, in the next few years or decades. And I think it's really, there are a couple of reasons for that. What we have done thus far, what Nicole has described, hasn't really led to any change. So the flat line, what we call the flat line, is clearly there. So we had all this stuff happening. And of course, populations changed and so forth. But we aren't really doing meaningfully better in terms of whatever we measure. So I think there is a sense that, certainly among some circles, that we need to do something different. And I also would like to think that more knowledge about the capacities of young children and children themselves to learn, given the appropriate learning opportunities, which I describe in my book, has been shown to and can lead to much better achievement and learning among children. So I think it's really all up to us to try to make sure that all of these changes that we have the policy context to operate under and using the knowledge we have that we can improve the educational conditions for children. And the last thing I will say, because of Dana's book on the Teacher Wars, is that a really key part of this is really the transformation of our educator preparation system. That's what I was about to ask you about. So we know from the research what type of teaching works. With young children, of course, it's play-based. And the teacher really needs to be a wonderful observer of children's interactions with one another and be able to stimulate the kind of conversation that leads to learning. It's challenging to retrain and train up all of the many, many educators that we're going to need to do this work in the coming years. You have some great stats in the book. This is a 90% female workforce. And they're making, on average, only 80% as much as a kindergarten teacher makes. So as we know more and more about what a sophisticated thinker you need to be to teach three- and four-year-olds, we still have not come nearly to the point of catching up on the educational qualifications we expect for folks doing this work or the pay. So what do you see as the path for Ruby for teachers and teacher training and preparation and funding of that really crucial work? Well, I devoted a chapter in my book to who the educators should be and what kinds of people they should be. I think I would say, except in spots or throughout the country, most teacher preparation programs are not preparing the kinds of teachers that were taught, as you just described, Dana. And so really, I think it's the responsibility of our society to really demand certain kinds of teachers. And because teachers are developed state by state to make sure that our state commissions and credentialing agencies are specifying and having institutions of higher education train different kinds of teachers. It's a huge predicament. I don't have any easy answers. I know that there are places that are doing this, but they're just too far and few in between. The other thing I would like to say is that I tried very hard to keep to the American situation and not to do very much international comparisons, even though that's really one of my passions and loves. Because I'm reminded that Americans don't like to be told that other places are doing it differently and so forth, because we do it our way in America. I think that's very true. But I think it's very important to look to international examples of how teachers are selected. In many countries, it's very well documented. In many countries that at least do very well internationally. Most of the people who want to become teachers never get to become teachers. They are selected for teacher training. They have a very different kind of teacher training. They are very well respected in their countries. They're relatively well compensated. In some countries, they're well compensated according to other professionals in their country. So we need to at least pay some attention to what's happening in other countries. And I will finally say one of the things that I don't know if it's still available, but John Merrow maybe in the 90s did a comparison of the training of early educators in the United States and in France. And if you watch that 45 minute video, I think you will see that the kinds of teachers that are prepared in the United States and France, particularly for young children, are so significantly different. And I think it really affects the education of children. I mean, I think a lot about international comparisons too. And also along the lines that Nicole opened us up with, I do feel that our racial diversity here sometimes is what sets us apart from other nations in terms of the lack of public consensus on spending on other people's kids to circle us back to where we started. I mean, as we see European nations diversify, their social welfare states also become more controversial as we're seeing in places like Denmark where there's a right wing populist movement against some of the benefits that refugees are able to access when they come to that society. So I guess I'll start with Nicole. Where do you see this conversation politically going on equity and universality of things like childcare, early education, just quality in general? And I will end with politics and we'll go back to it. But this is something that Hillary Clinton is talking about a lot. So I'm curious as to how each of you are hearing what she's saying. I mean, I've actually been, I don't know if I wouldn't say surprise, not a lot of surprises me, but I guess disturbed by how little public education has actually been part of the conversation during the election, I think it speaks to a lot to how American see public education. I fear as the country is becoming more brown, as public school students are becoming more poor, as we're seeing one demographic shift, so smaller numbers of white children being born, but also an increasing white withdrawal from the public system that in many ways, public schools are starting to be seeing the way of other public institutions. For instance, like public hospitals, where this is just the realm of the poor, or people who don't have choice, and it's not something that we're really talking about. So I think that there's been an astoundingly little amount of discussion about public education, supporting public education, and even, I actually haven't been that impressed with what Hillary Clinton has been saying about it. I think that we are at a place where we do not value public schools because we don't think public schools are going to be for white children that much longer. And I think the conversation is very different in cities where most kids are white than in cities where most kids are not white. I mean, we still have 90% of American kids in public schools, right? So I don't know. That's a really depressing thought. I don't know. Yeah, but when you look demographically at the shift in public schools, where public schools are not reflecting the makeup of our nation, and yes, we have an overwhelming percentage of kids in public schools, but white kids are still the most segregated group of kids in the country. We're talking very differently about public schools in those communities than we are nationally. And I think when we're talking about on the national stage, of course, the community conversation is very different. And the community conversation is reflecting the racial makeup of schools that tend to be either very white or very black and Latino. I think on the national stage, though, there is a sense that our country is changing. We know that the majority of kids being born are now black and Latino. And I think that that necessarily means that we are talking less about public education because of that. And I think it was just last year that the population of school children flipped to be a minority majority, though you can't really say that children of color are a minority anymore because they're not. So Ruby, what have you been hearing? I understand that this presidential debate is not the place to go for substance, but we do have Hillary Clinton saying that pre-K will be a priority for her. And she's also talking about child care for even younger children. In your book, you talk about targeting child care from birth to age three at the neediest kids, sort of distinct from your argument, actually, for universality for the older ones. For the younger ones, you're interested in more of a targeted approach. Hillary is actually not suggesting that. She's offering what she calls a cap, a cap for every single family in the US where you would never spend more than 10% of your income on child care. So how are you hearing this swirl of policy ideas coming from her campaign? Policy details matter and certainly in implementation. I think I would say that, first of all, I think we do need to make a distinction or try to think about whether there are any differences between child care and what I would call pre-K or early education. That's a very controversial statement, even within the field. But to just go further on this, as Dana said in my book, basically what I say in the American context and being totally a pragmatist or trying to be a pragmatist, that from birth to three, our federal dollars should be spent on children who are vulnerable or who are at risk for poor outcomes or who lack the opportunities and the resources based on their family income to really have the opportunities to develop their talent and potential. But that our public education systems should start at three years of age as universal voluntary education with kindergarten at five years of age being compulsory. So that's basically what I lay out. I think the reason we don't hear very much in the debates about education and this presidential, which shall I say season, is no different from many, many of the other presidential seasons where education is barely mentioned. Right now, education is not part of the federal constitution. So they are actually efforts to try to think about whether there should be a federal constitutional right to education. States really have in their constitutions what they define as basic rights to education. And what I suggest in my book recognizing the state's authority over education as part of our American education system, that one of the things we should do is to engage in legal strategies and litigation in the states around redefining basic rights to education, including changing the age at which public responsibility for children's education would begin. Because it's really right now in the states. So I think that's something I think a lot of people have not written about or pursued. And I really put a lot of emphasis on that. The final thing I will say here, Dana, is that the president and in the presidential campaign here, there have been mentions of pre-K, or preschool, or childcare, and so forth. The fact of the matter is that we don't have the resources now to serve most the majority of children in these programs that we all have in place. So what I also try to address in my book is that people who want to have these programs for children have to engage in battles around tax and budgetary reform. Because unless we are able to generate the revenues in fairly large numbers to support the things that are being proposed, they're basically kind of pie in the sky. The last question I have for you both before we open it up to questions is you introduced a really great idea in the book, Ruby, which is the moral case for doing the right thing in education versus the economic case. And I have thought about this a lot as someone who, like Nicole, for a decade has been writing about public schools. We hear the economic case constantly, constantly, constantly that if we can raise student test scores, we're going to see students earn 1% more when they're 23, which is the difference of $500 a year or something. So it's not a life-changing difference. Some of these studies that have come out that show this test score income link. How do we shift the conversation to a moral conversation? This is one of the reasons why I think Nicole's work has struck such a chord on this American life and in The Times magazine is that she brings us to the sort of ethical, moral core of these questions about where we send our own children to school and how we behave and what we do. So I would ask both of you to reflect on shifting from this narrow reason for why we want to do the right thing to a broader conversation about, as you say, Ruby, what children have the right to. Can you start? Okay, so I think that when you look at, when you just think about the words, public education, and what that is supposed to mean. And public education is not supposed to mean that I can secure an advantage and I can secure access into a publicly funded school that operates like a private school. The notion of public education, at least the way that Americans like it, what we like to tell ourselves and our belief is that this is in fact the great equalizer, that this is the place where it doesn't matter where you start out in life. You can come into these doors and the masses would be the one place in American life where the masses mix and intermigral and where if you work hard, you can escape your light in life. We know that that's not true. We know that what public schools do is they either replicate your disadvantage or they replicate your advantage. And I've been thinking about this for a long time when I first started reporting on school segregation. And I went back and I read Brown v. Board of Education and I realized that never once in Brown v. Board do they mention test scores? Do they mention achievement? That's not in that, in that ruling. That ruling is about access to citizenship. That ruling is about being able to be a full American and recognize your full potential as an American. And so this focus on, I mean, of course it's important that children achieve. Of course it's important that we are able to measure that children are actually learning in school. But the focus on testing is the wrong focus. The focus on school is as a place where one can get access, score a certain level on a test and get into Harvard is not actually what public schools are supposed to be about. Public schools are supposed to be about grooming citizens. They're supposed to be about giving children the ability to think, about giving children the ability to escape their lot in life and to understand their neighbors and their role in this country. And so when we've got a system that is only based on securing the advantage for your child, I think that is antithetical to the notion of public schools. And it has become really hard to say. So when I talk and what I wrote in my magazine pieces, I actually don't believe my daughter deserves more than other kids. And that is a hard thing to say in modern day America because there is a lot of pressure starting when I first moved to the city with my daughter as a one year old when people are like, you need to figure out what you're gonna do about your daughter's schooling. When you start getting test prep notices in the mail and the email when your daughter is three, so you can test prep her for talented and gifted as a four year old, you realize that the system has gotten very corrupt or understanding of public education, not that it was ever perfect and I'm not a racial, I'm not an optimist at all. I'm a private as I study history. It's not that we ever had a public education system that was fair. But I think we have lost kind of the moral charge when it comes to the belief in public schools. I think in a place like New York City, and a lot of places where middle class progressive people love the notion of saying I'm in a public school, but that public school is not a public school that looks like most of the public schools in the city. That public school is a public school where you're saving $25,000 a year because you have a school where every other kid in your daughter's class is rich and has connections and so you're not making any sacrifice to go to this public school. And I think that we, I don't know how we get that moral charge back when we're seeing increasing privatization of public schools when we have under the notion of school choice, which ostensibly is supposed to be a great equalizer because anyone can go to any school where we know what choice really does is it helps the privileged gain advantage. I don't know how we get that moral charge back and I think what my writing is trying to do, I never believe that any of the work that I do is gonna change anything. I think I deal with issues that are so deeply entrenched, but what I am saying with my work is that I'm not going to let us pretend that it's other than what it is. I'm not gonna let us ignore that we have great disadvantage within our public school system. I don't understand how we allow a system within the same school district where some schools have virtually no poverty and every resource in PTA can raise a million dollars and other schools are like my daughter's schools where in a good year we can raise $2,000 at our PTA where every single child in that school is poor. As long as we continue to allow that and convince ourselves that we can just throw some money at those poor schools and they'll be okay, then I think we have completely lost our moral obligation in public schools and I think we should stop getting bragging rights about enrolling our kids in those types of schools. Yeah, I agree that the mythology of education as the great equalizer in American society is not supported by the facts. Social mobility in the United States is even lower than Britain, for example, and so you realize we're not a society that is living the American dream. I mean, what I tried to do in my book quite carefully is that although I think we should strive for closing the divide for education equality, it does not lead to income equality. That's a fact. It helps, it definitely helps. If you don't have education, you don't have a chance even though your chance is small. An income inequality to go back to some of the issues that Nicole has addressed, income inequality does not lead to racial equality and that remains in American dilemma and so I actually was in a conversation this past weekend about these issues and the way it ended up was we should give up on the schools. I think that, and I came away with this idea, schools do matter. They matter a bit and I would say they can matter more than they matter now and so we just have some, I think, some choices and decisions to make about the shape of American education in the kind of society that we know where we are in or moving toward. One of the reasons why kind of like, what shall I say, stick with these issues is that I really am very concerned about what will happen if we accept the current situation as has been described, what kind of society our children and their children will live in. I don't want to feel that I gave up and did not try to contribute to at least stopping that or trying to make our society live to its ideals. I could just, I guess two things I'd like to add. One thing that I always think about, so those of you who know my story have heard my work, I was bust. I was bust out of segregated poor school into all white wealthy schools and I always keep in mind that I was the kid that parents didn't want in their school and I think I've done pretty damn good for myself. So I think we need to think about, I think what we don't acknowledge is the loss of potential of all of these children who are deserving of equality education and are receiving them. In my This American Life piece, Maria's mother, Nedra, what she says is how dare you deny my daughter because she could be the doctor who saves your life one day or the lawyer who gets your kid out of jail one day. I don't think we think enough about all of these children and it was one thing when our nation was 75 or 80% white to squander the potential of a small segment of the population but when you have a country that very quickly is going to be where half of children are black and Latino, to continue to squander the potential of those children is going to be to the detriment of our entire nation. I understand that we are not, as Americans, very altruistic. We want to do things that are going to benefit us as individuals and not as a society and so my argument is that we will continue to squander these children's future at our own peril and while we could contain that when it was a small percentage of the population, we are not going to be able to contain the harm of not allowing these children who could be the innovators of what our future is going to have to pay our social security, all of these things. So I think if nothing else, if we don't care about these kids just because they're children and we should care about them, we should care about them because it's going to come to our doorstep sooner or later. Thank you. Okay, so let's open up to questions and please keep your question brief and a question, not a comment. Okay, in the back. Hi, I'm a former early childhood teacher actually trained at Bank Street. I now work in higher education and workforce development and it seems to me that all the employers I talk to are complaining that they don't have soft skills. That's what they're missing in their employees and it seems to me that the argument is that we've stopped teaching soft skills. Is there a space for us to get together with early childhood advocates, higher education people and workforce development people to come up with a societal argument about why we need to be going up instead of bringing achievement down? Yes, I think the first step we need to do is to stop calling it soft skills. I think terms are really important. I think in my book I try to say core skills or fundamental skills or something like that. I can't even remember, but I never use the word soft skills. I think there is right now, I can't tell you how long it will last, but right now I see an ascendance of interest in those skills, not only in the workplace, but also in schools. The problem I will say is that we are not preparing our educators in general to support the development of those core skills. So I think we need to rethink what we're doing in our educator preparation programs. But again, I'm optimistic about it. Okay, gentlemen in the back, you have the mic. Hi, yeah. So my name is Will. I'm wondering, so whenever I hear the conversations about a flawed education system, usually they always mean foremost schooling. And even tonight we were talking a lot about foremost schooling. So I'm thinking, foremost schooling might be definitely a big part of the puzzle, but are we limiting our focus too much on foremost schooling as opposed to perhaps the other parts of the puzzle? Well, I think I'm not sure exactly what you mean by informal schooling, but it... Well, okay, I guess you should give an example. So part of our success, right, is not necessarily always because of where we went to elementary school or high school. For example, Warren Buffett, when he would go to the library and he would read all the finance books at least twice. And that's how he learned how to be sick so in that particular field. Okay, does anyone want to take that one? Yeah, I mean, I think that my work focuses on what the government can control. And the government can control public education. The government can't control whether a kid is going to want to go to the library and read finance books or whether a kid has good parents or not. I say, I don't even... We can't even get to the point of whether the difference is parenting or what happens in the home because we've never actually offered an equal playing ground within the realm of what the government control, which is public schools. So if we were offering all kids access to equal education, then maybe I would worry about informal schooling and parenting, but what I can say is if you have kids who are going in schools that are actually widening the achievement gap, what we know is that a child who starts school in kindergarten, a black child, a black low income child who starts school in a segregated kindergarten already has a gap and five years later that gap has increased. So instead of closing the gaps, public schools are actually widening the gaps. It's hard to go into the library and read finance books if you can't read. And so I think that that... I don't even know that you can have that discussion outside of understanding that our public schools are actually not even educating children to read and they're often, those children who are in those schools have come from parents who are also undereducated and miseducated in the public schools and who also are functionally literate. And they came from grandparents who are also undereducated in those schools. So I just don't think we can have that conversation until we've actually provided quality education for our children. I'd like to address the informal education part. I think it's really important. They are public libraries. They are ways in which nonprofit and voluntary associations provide all kinds of child and youth development programs. They are differences in informal education depending on the resources of families. Families may find themselves in neighborhoods where they are not the kinds of informal sites or resources for their children's education. And so children go to school maybe six, maybe eight hours and 180 days a year. So I would say informal education is really important and it's important and it's been very well documented that certainly based on family economic resources, children whose families do not have as much in terms of particularly the financial resources have less access to these informal sources of education if you will or learning whereas wealthier families or more affluent families kind of pile up these informal education opportunities on their children and is considered to be a reason for the gap or the divide in children's education. So I think it's very important. Okay, I don't know where the mic is. Hi, my name is Kelly. I'm a parent at a public school in Brooklyn in District 17 that actually happens to through a variety of factors, kind of a perfect storm of factors be very integrated at the moment. And the thing that we are learning is the integrated communities need support. And as we work on that, I'm wondering my question is, is there a way that we can think of public schools as actually being laboratories for integration, a very few of them and maybe even vectors for change on a larger scale if we are able to get it right, trying to be optimistic in the midst of pessimism, knowing that it's hard. If we are having some success and there's a panel Wednesday morning at the new school on integration success stories, I'll be very interested to see what exactly we talk about at that panel because it's tough. But if we get it right there, can it not then amplify? Isn't it even more important kind of to fix it there and then take that out into the rest of society? Yeah, I mean, one, we want it to be easy. Segregation did not come naturally. We put a tremendous amount of both social and governmental resources into creating segregation and we somehow then expect that integration will be this easy thing. It's not going to be easy. So I expect that it is and it always will be hard and we're always gonna have to work really hard at it because equity is something you have to work really hard at. But what the data shows, and there have been, particularly I'm thinking of Rucker Johnson out of Berkeley, longitudinal studies that have looked at the long-term impacts of integration and for black and white children, it can be transformative. It's not just a matter of kids sitting in a classroom together. There's nothing magical about white kids that make black kids smarter, much as we may believe that. But what it shows is that when black kids and get access to integrated education, it does change the entire trajectory of their lives. They're less likely to live in poverty. They're more likely to go to college. They're less likely to go to jail. They live longer. They live, they're healthier. They're more likely to live in integrated neighborhoods. And the same is also true of white children. White children who go to integrated schools are more likely then to live in integrated neighborhoods themselves and to choose integrated schools for their own children. So we know that if we can do this very hard thing in the schools, and the schools are having to do a lot. The schools are having to deal with housing segregation. They're having to deal with larger systems of inequality and we're all trying to fix this within the classroom, but the schools are also kind of like the single largest area that the government controls. So if there's one place that we can do it, this is the place, but it's very hard. So I think that, yeah, there are success stories. I mean, me being the pessimist, even the success stories aren't usually that great, but they're certainly better than the alternative. But I think if we are committed to equality, then we have to be committed to actually making these very difficult circumstances work. And it will pay dividends down the road. This is why I say it's important to understand that integration, that school equality is not about test scores, it just isn't. It really is about building citizens and it's about getting access to full citizenship, particularly for black and Latinos, right? It's about justice. It's not about diversity or something that feels good, but it's certainly worth working on and it should be hard. That's good. I also like to mention though that there is a new federal study out that shows that white children's test scores are the same in schools with high percentages of black students as in schools with no black students. So this is something I talk about a lot when I go all over the country to talk about these issues, because there are so many misconceptions that if you are a white or an upper middle class college educated parent, you're doing something bad to your child by sending them to a school with low income kids and that is just not true from research. Right, I mean, this is why one of the reasons I could make the decision I made for my daughter is understanding the research and my daughter will be fine no matter where I put her. The problem is when it comes to race, logic does not apply. Right, so when it comes to race, I can cite as many studies going all the way back, you can look at the achievement gap and test scores. If you look at national education statistics at the peak of desegregation, white test scores are continuously going up as black test scores are going up as our classrooms are becoming more integrated. But again, we're not talking about logic here, because if it was logic, people wouldn't be afraid to put a five-year-old in a school with black five-year-olds. That's not logical. So I think that's where we always run into it is there is a fear and all the data in the world is not going to make that fear go away. So my name is Christian and I'm a product of American, British, Swedish, and French public education. So, and I'm surprised that nobody said, nobody used the word capitalism yet. So I think that racism is a function of capitalism and I think that a lot of the problems we're facing today is a function of late-stage capitalism. So how do we repackage our desire for universal education, universal desegregated education in that context? Maybe Ruby can adjust this because one of the things you do talk about in the book with our current corporate and high-income tax rates, we are just not going to be able to do the things that we want to do and that you suggest. Yeah, I mean, basically, I would say that we need to change the way in which we tax individuals and corporations and businesses in American society. It's not only a fairness issue, but I think it's also a revenue issue. And we are not going to be able to do all the things that we want to do. Any of the things we talked about or any of the things we hope for without that particular change. I mean, and I try to, in my book, show the number crunching that goes into is the kind of supporting this kind of argument. So yeah, definitely there needs to be basic changes in tax budget policies in the United States. Let's take one more question from Susan up here. Hi, I'm Susan Oxhorn. This has been a great conversation. And Nicole, you used the metaphor, which is the title of my book, Squandering America's Future. And it was really just beautiful. My question to you is, we have one of the second highest poverty rate in among developed nations, child poverty rate. And we can talk from here until forever about changing our schools. But as Larry Cuban and David Tyak said from Stanford, historians, education historians, we're kind of tinkering toward utopia. What do we, in that our education reform, the aspirations that we have for education, which are not, we're not reaching the goal. So how do we approach this issue of poverty? Which is, we know is probably the key factor, I mean, along with institutional racism in children's academic achievement. Damn. I mean, one thing I think about a lot in terms of why our poverty and inequality conversation has focused so heavily on education is that it doesn't force us to give stuff to the adults that we have always thought of as undeserving, you know, especially to low income single mothers of color who have just been victimized again and again in our public debate, when in fact they are working, almost all of them, often more than one job. They're, you know, the hardest working people in our society. And yet when we talk about bigger fixes for poverty, like whether it be, say, a child payment that every baby born would go to their mother, that gets us into very dicey territory politically. Yeah, I mean, I think you can't disentangle why we have the second highest child poverty rate in race, clearly, right? There's a reason for that. And that is also the reason why we don't invest in certain social programs that all of these other countries that have a safety net invest in. And you can look at the history of almost every social policy that we passed, particularly in the last century, race was right in the center of that, who we would and would not support, what these programs would look like. We're all driven by a fear that poor black people would be getting something that they don't deserve. I don't know, you know, there's a reason. My Twitter bio says I cover race from 1619 because I say that everything goes back to that first decision to enslave black people on the soil in this country in 1619. And it's not being hyperbolic. It has driven everything in this country. And so whenever people are like, how do we fix something? How do you go back and fix that? How do you, we can't. I mean, the answer I can't even say on the record, which are we recording this, is revolution, right? Like you have to, I mean, you literally have to start, you have to start from scratch. There's nothing that race does not touch and corrupt in this country. And everything is driven by that, even when we think that it's not. I mean, that's what I'm talking about when I say from the founding of public education in this country was to create schools that we're not gonna equally educate black and white children. That we're gonna prepare black and white children for very different futures. And that is what we are continuing to do and we can't get past that. Ruby, would you like to have the last word on where the poverty debate fits into the primary education debate? Yeah, it's not the last word. Hopefully it's the continuing word. You know, in my book, I devote a chapter to investing in families. You know, because I do believe that, you know, the school can do much more than it does, but it can't do the job alone. And particularly for young families, the educational level, the literacy, the economic power of families is really important. And so one of the things I argue for in the new primary school is the connection to family workforce development, for example. And there are some really interesting efforts in that regard. And so, you know, I would also like to say that I recently was thinking about the war on poverty and the other America, and since I have a very good visual memory, you will recall that the photograph on Michael Harrington's The Other America is of white children. That we started the war on poverty, really, if you accept the fact that Michael Harrington was a major factor in that, because of poverty in Appalachia. And, you know, in my interpretation, Nicole, of history in the 60s, was that that became very much came in connection with the civil rights movement. And so that's how I think some of the things that Nicole is saying about the association with poverty, with, you know, African-American children and so forth may have occurred over time and now what our image of poverty is. But let's remember that was one of them. And so I think, you know, I think what we need to do is to not give up on the schools. And I really think that sometimes when we have these conversations, there's a tendency to give up on the schools. And I think some of us are here because the schools did not renege on their responsibilities. So I think that's very, very important. But clearly, we're not here because we're well educated. You know, there were a lot of other things, our families, good fortune and luck, mentors, a whole bunch of things that happened that brought us, you know, in front of you. So I try to talk about this in my book so that I don't put, you know, education at the center of it. But at the same time, I really don't want us to give up on what I think the possibilities might be. Thank you so much to Ruby and Nicole. Thank you to all of you for coming.