 Hello, everybody, and welcome to our lecture. My name is Keeley Nelson, a staff member from University Development and Alumni Relations. I'd like to say a big thank you to our donors. We all benefit from the support of generations of donors. Please put your questions for today's speaker into the YouTube chat feature. Now it is my pleasure to introduce Chris Gutierrez, Carol Lou Professor and Associate Dean in the Graduate School of Education. Thank you. It is my extreme pleasure today to introduce Professor Janelle Scott. Professor Scott holds the Robert J. and Mary Catherine version of distinguished chair in educational disparities at the University of California at Berkeley in the Graduate School of Education, African American Studies Department and the Goldman School of Public Policy. A member of the National Academy of Education, Professor Scott is one of the foremost educational policy scholars in the country whose work focuses on the relationship among education, policy and equality of opportunity. Her work examines policy issues in racial politics of public education, the politics of school choice, marketization and privatization and the role of elite and community-based advocacy in shaping public education. Prior to earning her doctorate at UCLA, Professor Scott taught elementary school in Oakland. Please join me in welcoming my colleague, our colleague, Professor Janelle Scott. Thank you, Chris, for that incredibly kind introduction and thank you to everyone who has helped coordinate this event today, especially Dean Ebley in the Graduate School of Education and Dara Tom and Alicia Boulware and all the folks behind the scenes who are providing technical support. And thanks to all of you who are here, alumni, supporters, current students, faculty and staff, I cannot see you in this very odd time in which we find ourselves, but I hope that we can continue the conversation that we start today. And so with that, I wanna start with an invitation. I want you to think back to your own K-12 schooling and if you're a current K-12 student, you can just reach into your present. And so whether you went to a public school, a private school, a charter school, or homeschooled or some facsimile of a combination of those domains, I want you to think about a time where it felt like you had everything you had, everything you needed to learn. And I'm thinking about learning quite broadly here, a concept, a skill, a life lesson, a new idea or a new way of solving a problem. So once you've identified that moment, whether it's your entire period of schooling or something in between a moment and an entire period of schooling, I want you to think beyond the classroom or the score that happened for you and to be curious about the set of decisions and supports that made your experience possible. Let me just pause for a few minutes and let you sit with those examples. I think so often in our public discourse about schools, about K-12 schooling specifically, these moments are often relegated to the power of a teacher for good or bad. The teacher is imagined as the sole cause of breakthrough or suffering. And I think the reality is far too often schools have failed families and communities are struggled to serve all students well, but schools themselves have also been failed. They've been failed by narrow policies from disinvestment by the state and federal governments and by reductive imaginations about the purpose of schooling. And for this failure, we all share a cup of ability. And I think in the last two decades, especially, we've often confused disrupting inequality with destabilizing the very systems that serve those least well-served by public and private institutions. And so today, I want to call on us to see teachers, to see staff, to see students and families and researchers in the broader communities as nested within an ecology that through policies, through philanthropy, through elite actors, through social movements, this ecology determines ultimately what's possible in these very important micro-level moments of classrooms and life in schools more broadly. I wanna offer a vision informed by my own background as a policy researcher and a researcher of the politics of education about how we might better realize the very lofty ideals and hopes we hold for our public schools as parents, as researchers, as policymakers, as donors, as advocates and students. And I think we do that by being clear about that vision. What is our vision for the role of public education in our multiracial and deeply unequal society? I wanna be clear, this is not about where you send your own children. This is not about those individual personal choices. This is about imagining what we decide is possible for the majority of children who grow and learn and create and develop their sense of who they are and who they can be in public schools. And so it brings me to my talk today. We've started October. The promise of fall is here on this beautiful day in California. Fall is my favorite season, so it makes me smile. Fall is a season that brings to mind harvest, but it also brings to mind indigenous dispossession, right? These paradoxes that I wanna struggle with you all together today. And as the days go shorter, we hope to gather, we reflect on the end of the year. We are midway through Latinx, Latinx Heritage Month and a state where we benefit from these rich traditions and contributions of this very important community. And we share across faith and cultural traditions, rituals that revive and sustain us for the winter ahead. The Delta variant of COVID-19, as we all know, continues to make safe in-person gathering and challenged, and many of us are longing for the ability to reimagine and indeed recenter our collective spaces. We need these spaces to heal, to mourn those we have lost, to care for those who continue to suffer and grieve, who struggle to afford food, housing, who lack work and work that is meaningful, who experience addiction and mental health concerns. We need to reframe our approach, given these challenges, to reimagine what a public education rooted in democratic values and abundance might look like, how it might allow us to achieve something different together. We need to imagine a society in which we can contend with disagreement, with divides, and with our shared and divergent paths. And today, I will argue that in order to achieve this, we must set a full table for our students and for public education more broadly. Before we turn to possibility, we must confront and remind ourselves of our present challenges and their historical antecedents. These challenges include so many things. They are overwhelming. They include environmental crises that are becoming more frequent and devastating and particularly affecting poor people in the United States and around the world. We've seen constitutional crises and ongoing democratic assaults to voting rights and equal representation in our elected bodies and our courts where too often wealthy interests prevail over the well-being of the rest of us. The 2020 murder of George Floyd and the attacks on Asian Americans have forced too often delayed and hard conversations about the ongoing role of race, racism, power and violence resulting in global outpourings of outrage and demands for deep structural and systemic change. And finally, our schools have been deeply affected by these challenges. Remote schooling characterized much of the 2021 school year and protracted local politics over mask mandates, in-person school reopening and school board ranker over curriculum are characterizing the current academic year. Amid all of this, we need to acknowledge that we have lost so many lives to COVID-19 and COVID related issues. This picture depicts the memorial in Washington, DC and in the two weeks since this picture was taken, we've now lost 700,000 people. In September alone, we lost 58,062 people in the United States and we know that this loss has been disportional by race and socioeconomic status. The Landsat estimates that in the US alone, some 150,000 children have lost one or more parents. The loss of life on a global scale is staggering. It's unprecedented in our national and global memory and students and their families are continuing to contend with housing insecurity and food insecurity, income insecurity amidst deeply rancorous state and local politics that have attacked the teaching of race and racial inequality and in many cases have made such instruction indeed illegal at a very time when students are really trying to make sense of their current contexts and the historical precedents that have led to it. And in the meantime, we have much to learn about the long-term effects of COVID on children, on adults and school-aged children in particular who represent the biggest increase in COVID transmission. School-aged children, college students, everyone is trying to make sense of challenge, coping with loss and imagining their worlds and possibilities and thinking about our shared fate. And most of them in the K-12 setting, some 80% school-aged children and adolescents are doing this hard social and emotional and academic work in public schools. And so my question is, are we providing them a context, a rich set of conditions that are up to the task of our current challenges? Climate change, constitutional crises, the rise of white supremacist movements, explicit expressions of racism and violence. To put it mildly, this is a lot, it's a lot. But it reflects, I think, the magnitude of our current challenge of loss, the ongoing suffering that we will be dealing with for years to come. And so we also know that many of the issues of inequality and injustice in schooling predate our current challenges. It includes things like segregation by race, by language, by socioeconomic status, our tendency to track students by what we perceive their academic ability to be. A long and multiple decade road of state disinvestment from public school funding and equitable school funding, which has triggered private fundraising in schools, thereby advantaging some schools over others who are able to generate private revenue through parents and other sorts of fundraising strategies. We've also seen the rise of school choice in neoliberal approaches to schools and districts that have invited the private sector to take on the responsibility for administering schooling. And we've also seen disproportionate school discipline and unequal access to things like extracurricular activities and school counselors and health supports across schools. Food and housing insecurity predates COVID but has been amplified by it. And we also need to contend with what many researchers call the carceral continuum, this tendency to target and punish through discipline practices, but also in prison in and out of school. I turn to my dear friend and mentor, Mike Rose, who I know many of you also love and value, professor at UCLA who we lost just over a month ago. And Mike Rose has shaped my thinking about the role of public education and a democracy in immeasurable ways. And in his wonderful book, Why School, Reclaiming Education for All of Us, Mike writes, we live in an anxious age and seek our grounding, our assurances in ways that don't satisfy our longings that in fact make things worse. We've lost hope in the public sphere and grab it private solutions, which undercut the sharing of risk and keep us scrambling for individual advantage. We've narrowed the purpose of schooling to economic competitiveness of kids becoming economic indicators. And so as Mike and others have argued, we've often addressed these very complex issues with narrow and technocratic solutions. And yet the past scale and current amplification of that scale really requires a multifaceted and interconnected approach if public education is going to live up to its democratic ideals. Moreover, we have sound evidence that a set of approaches taken together with bold and committed leaders working with families and communities can help to transform schooling, but we need to generate the political will and the resources to do this. I wanna make sure even as I talk about these public purposes of public education that I refrain from romanticizing all that is wrong. And here I turn to Pierre Bourdieu, sociologist who tells us that we find ourselves in these really difficult situations where we need to defend our programs or institutions that we deeply wish to change, right? And so public schooling is a part of that. Claire Green helps to articulate this in the New York Times last year, I think in a way that is deeply eloquent. And she says, we can either take this moment to continue that pattern by retreating into the comfort of our own advantages or we can act to dismantle racist educational policies, fight for equitable distribution of school funding and build authentic community with one another. Now is the time to reimagine our beliefs, our lives and what we're willing to do to create a future that works for all children. I want us to think about how these ideas and this knowledge about how the past predicts our present and future manifests in the case of COVID. And I think this rendering here from the Community Reinvestment Coalition helps to depict this in a very evocative way. On your left, it shows a map that depicts our racially discriminatory housing development in the Bay Area and quite literally where you see the red is where black people particularly were relegated to substandard housing and how their housing devalued. And what this group has done is they've estimated communities that were most vulnerable to COVID transmission and that's on the right. And you can see it maps quite neatly, unfortunately into this past legacy of state-sponsored discrimination. And so we know that housing and labor and health are all deeply intertwined with education. We can go even further back though. We can think about Plessy versus Ferguson, right? This foundational Supreme Court decision that most people agree was adjudicated in the wrong direction. And this was the decision that the Supreme Court rules that state-sponsored segregation is legal if provided the states allow for equal facilities and opportunities and in doing so, the Supreme Court allows Jim Crow laws to flourish and undermines all the progress that formerly enslaved people had begun to make under reconstruction. And this becomes the law of our country for 60 years until the Brown versus Board of Education decision overturns Plessy. But we know that school segregation has persisted through both overt and more subtle policies and the voices and expertise of black teachers who were central to advocating for school desegregation as Finnesses Sittle Walker, a professor and a historian who's wrote meticulously about in her trilogy, recentering the voices and visions of black educators who themselves imagined the kind of interconnected, approach to school desegregation that we ignored. And so if we just focus with up close for a moment, we have a situation in which we know that schools have often targeted children of color, black and Latinx and indigenous students specifically with disproportionate discipline. They're more likely to be targeted for surveillance and violence by the police, but also within school. They are more targeted for minor behavioral infractions that become escalated into major ones. And so more likely to experience suspension and expulsion, but also more likely to be segregated into schools that are slated for school closure or whole turnaround in terms of replacing staffs. And they lack access to academic counselors and nurses and mental health supports that other children are able to avail themselves of. We also know that there's a way in which violence was expressed and has been amplified and growing through explicit racist incidences. And just in the days following the 2016 election, for example, the Southern Poverty Law Center found that there were more than 700 incidences of racial harassment following the presidential election. And we know that many school policies have themselves been shaped by state and local approaches. And so the federal requiring schools and states to develop zero tolerance policies allowed schools to expand the criteria for disciplinary action far behind weapons to things like what schools call willful defiance. So having lots of discretionary power over black and brown children. Even at the level of preschool, we know that black children are disproportionately disciplined and we know this because we started to collect data again. And so this is a paradox that we have this terrible information but only as a result of public investment and knowing about what we have done to children in preschool and in K-12 education. And so what I want to propose today is a way forward, right? I want us to think about in the tradition of the fall harvest a policy and politics that embraces an abundant multifaceted approach to writing past wrongs, to remedying what students experience and which in turn limit their ability to fully participate in the democratic society. And so I'm sure you have ideas. I'd like to offer some here. I think we start with funding, right? We need to correct the deep disinvestment at the federal level, at this level of states in our public schools. And for that, we need both public and private sources again to sustain and develop our robust systems of schooling. We need to focus on curriculum. Of course, we want to have rigorous curriculum but that curriculum should be informed by rich understandings of the role of culture and power and the multiple ways of knowing and a broad appreciation for how intelligence shows up in children and adolescents. We need to rethink our use of testing and accountability. This idea that data will naturally lead to intervention just that are productive for children and families has not played out in the way that theories of testing and accountability might have held. Testing and accountability certainly have their place but they also have the tendency to distort what's important and valuable about schools. And they allow us to misread the incredible learning and joy and creativity that's happening in our public schools. We need to think about the fact that all policy is educational policy and not segment our approach. So as we think about developing a housing policy as my colleague Elizabeth DeBray and Cara Finnegan and others have thought really about how to connect planning with educational awarenesses around segregation, around poverty. And similarly with COVID-19, we've learned all too intimately that public health is inseparable from public education. We need to keep our eye on not only diagnosing racial injustice in our schools but developing remedies and collaboration with communities for that injustice and to think about how we can support and stain true integration. Not out of an emphasis that requires children of color to be next to white children but out of a desire to actually realize the multiracial democracy that we imagine we want for all of ourselves. I think we also need to support and sustain and strengthen democratic governance. We've seen polls to privatize the ways that schools are governed to decrease public input at a time when again our challenges are so significant. And so I think we need to think about the current challenges that school boards are facing. Just this week, school boards have asked for federal protection because they have been threatened with violence from parents and other advocates who are resisting mask mandates, for example, in schools or are angry and worried about the teaching of race and racism in schools. And so we need to think about how our democratic governance is up to the task of the challenges it's facing. We also need to think about how we join and our collective efforts and interconnected with communities who have long been working on the ground within local nonprofit organizations and faith communities to focus on the health and wellbeing of children. And too often researchers speaking for myself and my community have maintained a distance from those efforts. And I think we need to be working much more in collaboration with these communities. I think we need to take seriously grassroots social movements. Many movements on the ground in the case of school discipline and policing have been working for decades to rethink the use of policing within schools and outside of schools. And as a result of all of the hard conversations and advocacy after the George Floyd murder, many of these groups were successful in enacting measures to get rid of school police within schools and to reinvest those funds, that money in supports for students. And for researchers, I think we need to foster, engage multidisciplinary and multi-method research that's deeply in the service of developing and sustaining public schools. So this vision that I'm offering, I didn't invent. It's born out of engagement with the research literature with an understanding of community. And so I just wanna highlight some ways that I think this work is already happening. I've talked a lot about what's wrong. So let's talk about what's right. We have the Learning Policy Institute who offers this graphic for what a community schools model might involve, right? The sort of wraparound students, their success, but also their social and emotional development and their preparation, not only for work, but also for civic participation and how that might emerge. And in fact, the community school model, while still being developed, I think is a promising direction. In California, we have now offers free school meals for everybody. What a radical notion to feed children while they're at school so that they can better thrive and grow. Jamal Bowman, congressman from New York, and himself a former teacher, has put on the table a new deal for education that would require deep investments around the issues that are research-based that matter. And finally, Matt Gonzalez at NYU with his colleagues has offered a new way of thinking about school integration. And these very active efforts to continue to put school integration on the table across the country. But I also turn to our own community. In the GSE, we have incredible faculty and staff and students who are working very hard as engaged scholars at the intersection of culture, of learning, of law, of leadership, of policy, and of psychology. And this is just a sample. I don't want anyone to think I'm slitting you. It's very hard to choose amongst such wonderful colleagues. We also have incredible alumni. Our alumni, I think, along with our faculty and staff and current students are at the cutting edge of thinking about these intersections that I've tried to talk about today. Let's focus on some particular alumni. We have on the left, Haria Jabar. She's an associate professor at the University of Texas at Austin. And from Professor Jabar, I learned so much about her careful research on the role of market-oriented reforms and school choice reforms and some of the limitations that they present in terms of the use of competition to create equitable opportunities for school districts and students within those school districts, like New Orleans, which is characterized by multiple school choice reforms. Professor Jabar's work is situated in theories and deep knowledge of the history of such policies and the inequalities on which they are layered and how they can often distort the role of school principals, for example, as they compete for what they've received to be valuable students. I think about Professor Ilana Horn, Vanderbilt University. Professor Horn's work helps us to rethink our deeply problematic notions that some people are just good at math and helps us to understand the complexity of cognition and how schools and classrooms can be set up so that we can understand that everyone is smart and can be high-achieving. Her democratic and egalitarian approach to the learning sciences is helping us to show the deep cultural context of learning and helps to point to how teachers and school leaders might better support the learning of all children. Dr. Otoko Garcia, Superintendent of the Sausalino-Morin City School District is leading this school district through a deeply uncertain time. The first California school district to be under the oversight of the Attorney General's Office to desegregate their school district in 50 years. Otoko leads his district with empathy for his students, deep concern about their social and emotional and health needs and is determined to work in a collaborative fashion. He was able to offer all students in his district in-person learning through much of 2020. One of the few districts in California was able to do that. And Professor Maxine McKinney-De Royston, assistant professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, her research operates at the intersection of learning sciences, of culture, of power, of race, and she centers the political and her research of how classrooms honor the intelligence, especially of black children and his work to establish a public scholarship that allows her to translate her work for practitioners, for policy makers and the public. From Maxine, I understand that ideas about teaching and learning are also ideas about society, about the kind of society we have and the kind of society we might otherwise imagine and create. So I wanna conclude with another provocation. I want you to think about this idea that many have offered in the public sphere. What if we had never created public education in the first place? Given the way our values are expressed, could we create it now? And I wanna worry that much like public libraries and public parks, that if we didn't already have them, our pull toward individualism and competition might prevent us from re-imagining our democratic society in a way that all are included. So we have much work to do, but I hope that we can finally together insist that democratic ideals, which are always intentioned with the paradoxes and hypocrisies of racism, colonialism, and ableism, but that these ideals that have been part of the building and rebuilding of our very imperfect union, that if we yoke our vision to join policies and practices and partnerships with families and communities, maybe we can realize a more just and democratic present in the future. And so I think educational leaders and change makers to live up to this charge, we will need an understanding of the purposes of schooling, the processes of teaching and learning. We need to be steeped in the history of racial injustice and we need to understand the multifaceted remedies that we can deploy to reimagine and revitalize public education with equity at the center for the health and wellbeing of our students and the future of our democracy. And in that vision, funders, policymakers, parents and researchers all have a role to play. Thank you. Thank you, Janelle. That was so provocative and thoughtful and just such a wonderful call for us all the day. So you've discussed the challenges of education and raised this call, which I love for a new social imagination of abundance. So given our audience, what can parents and families do both immediately in the long run to support this vision of abundance in education? Yeah, I mean, I think we've been working under a scarcity reality and a scarcity mindset for so long that I think it's very difficult probably for parents and interested parties to imagine anything else. But I think we are at a moment where it's possible to not only mend and anything else, but advocate and actually gain some very important traction. And so just as an example, I think at the federal level, there's incredible support from the Biden administration to revitalize and support schools and to provide the infrastructure improvements that schools so desperately need. And so parents, communities, donors, advocates can contact their representatives and indicate their support for that. One thing that happened that I think because we've all been so distracted by all the things that are going on, so many fires burning both literally and metaphorically is that in the CARES Act, we got rid of a provision that has been enacted for what, 50, 60 years, which is that we can now use federal money for busing in support of school integration efforts. Not many people know that that was disallowed by law for my entire lifetime, right? And so that's a huge win. And so I think we also need to take account of these wins and celebrate them when we get them. Thank you. So some questions from the audience. You've talked about some innovative and just models of schooling, but could you elaborate on aspects of Congressman Bowman's proposed New Deal for Education? Has that been presented to Congress yet as a bill or where is it? So if you could elaborate on that. Well, I think Representative Bowman is trying to build political support. I think within the Democratic Party, Democratic Party with which he's affiliated, there's not agreement on an agenda for public education. And so I think he's at the phase where he's trying to build support for it. I think there's support for some aspects of it. He's calling for major investments in infrastructure, both physical infrastructure and other parts of the infrastructure for public schools. And so I think it's a long road, but I offered it because we often think that there aren't ideas on the table. And I think we do have ideas and those ideas are grounded deeply in research evidence and in community desire. And what we need now is to build the political will to actually enact those ideas, be it in legislation or another form. Another question, given the magnitude of the current challenges you described and the pre-existing obstacles to educational equity, what's a realistic timeframe to be able to reimagine a public school rooted in abundance? I mean, I think my honest answer is I don't know, but I do know that time's gonna pass whether we do something or not, right? And I come from parents who were born under the Plessy doctrine. So who were born when Plessy was the law of the land and came of age as Brown became the law of the land. And so in my own deeply racialized personal history, I know that things can change very quickly in ways that people could not imagine, maybe in the ways my grandmother and great-grandmothers could not imagine. And so I understand the pull to pragmatism, right? Because children are going to grow and come of age, you know, childhood is short. So I understand that pull, but I worry that that pragmatism, that pull to pragmatism can often cause us to settle for very narrow approaches as my dear colleague, micros and friend micros worried about these sort of one-off approaches that aren't connected to this broader ecology. And I think we've seen how that plays out all too well in the inequality around COVID. You've really lifted up though, even though you described some of the most difficult challenges, which I want to ask you about in a minute, but you've really lifted up hope and possibility. I'm reminded that 125 years later after Plessy versus Ferguson, the audience may not know that Keith Plessy, the great-great-great cousin of Homer Plessy and the great-great-granddaughter of the judge, Ferguson are now working together consciously to educate people about the legacy of Plessy. So it's such a perfectly hopeful example that I think you're lifting up in your work. So given all that, the hope and possibility, you did talk about a lot of challenges. So what is the most difficult challenge? And you just already said, I can't really disentangle one from the other. What is the most difficult challenge right now? I think for me, it's hands down the historic levels of inequality because I think if we can fix or make deep progress on economic inequality, we can do so much about other forms of inequality. So economic inequality, for example, leads to political inequality. We have very important research that shows that unequal societies just have terrible outcomes for everyone no matter where you fall in the hierarchy. So societies marked by inequality have people live shorter lives, they live lives that are much more marked by anxiety and worry and fear about where you are and that you're falling behind. Whereas in more egalitarian societies, the indicators of wellbeing are much more robust. And so for me, I think inequality is my north star. And to really think about how, both in terms of policy, but also in terms of advocacy and philanthropy, we can really take on this question of inequality. I think it's everything that I talked about, environmental, democratic and other challenges, inequality is implicated. One additional question from the audience. If it will be hard to agree on a future public education policy, how can we achieve the goal you presented for saving all policy as educational policy? So wait, read that question again. That's a hard one to take in. If it's hard to agree on future public education policy, how can we achieve the goal you presented of perceiving all policy as educational policy? I guess I'm not so sure that it's that binary. I think that one of the things that COVID I think has opened our minds to is how deeply connected our systems are, right? We can't think about health without thinking about education because a public health crisis caused most of our schools to be unsafe, right? So I think we've already accomplished that awareness. Now the question is what we do with it. Do we become complacent as things are starting to slowly reopen? Or do we insist that we provide the physical upgrades to schools and the systemic upgrades to schools so that the next crisis that comes and there will be a next crisis. Like we know that for sure that we are better able to respond in a way that's good for children, for families and for communities. And so I think in some ways we've already accomplished that through this terrible, terrible tragedy of COVID-19. You mentioned wraparound models such as those lifted up by the learning policies to sometimes the wraparound models become insular to the school. And there are other models of wraparound that don't disconnect it from community. Can you say something about that? Yeah, I think that's absolutely right. I'm so glad you raised that. I think it helps me to talk about something else. We have a tendency to do an educational policy and practice which is to grab onto panaceas, right? So I think in some circles, community schools have become a panacea. And I think we just don't know all that we need to know although I think we have some promising information about the power of the model. I think that there are some models in terms of wraparound services, as you say, Chris, that are very insular and also don't really think very hard about racial justice, right? And so we think about social-emotional learning as skills, right? Rather than skills that help you to learn rather than a disposition toward understanding yourself, your identity, your role in a broader collective society. And we often, I think that insularity, that tendency toward insularity can also leave out these incredibly robust and important community-based organizations that have long been doing this work to support families and students. These are spaces, after-school programs, faith-based communities, other organizations that are just sites of deep cultural wealth and knowledge. And so I think we have this incredible opportunity to bring that in and integrate that into our broader-school communities and not create these false divides. And so I hope that some of the more promising approaches to community, this community-schools model will center issues of race and racial justice, but also think about community in a much more dynamic way. And maybe finally, in a time of scarcity, right? Thinking about a model of abundance, right? It's challenging, particularly when you have so many wedge issues that pull apart communities instead of bringing together. What have you seen in your research that has been hopeful for you about the kinds of coalitions that are forming across communities? So I think the research that informs a lot of my current thinking has been the collaborative work that I've done with Christopher Libyansky and Elizabeth DeBay on evidence use. And we've done some work in five-school, urban-school districts around the country and really just asking people when they've taken a position on a particular educational policy, what information they're using, right? To substantiate and solidify their position. And I think one of the things of the many lessons we've learned in that work is where districts are governed through democratically-elected school board members, there's not a guarantee that evidence can help to bring people together and people can come together over-deliberating. Evident there's not a guarantee, but it almost, our work suggests that it's a necessary precondition. That in districts that have become more corporatized, more privatized, more top-down, more influenced by private sector actors, that this deliberative space gets lost. And so I'm not trying to say that democratic processes are always clean and neat. They're often messy and anyone who's ever attended a school board meeting in a very charged climate knows that those meetings can go on sometimes for four or five or more hours and maybe not the best model of democratic deliberation. But I think we need those deliberative spaces to figure out what values we share, how our values are different and how we can come together even across those differences. I'm hoping that there might be a policy potential, emergent policy scholar in the audience. Why go into the study of policy? Why go into the study of policy? Because it matters. I think policy scholarship and the study of policy helps us to see and notice policies in our everyday lives. If we get into a car and we put our seatbelt on, that's a result of policy. I would not be here serving as the homecoming speaker, given my family's background and situation in this country without a set of policies and advocacy that made today possible for me, to be in conversation with you all. And so policy matters. It matters in terms of how we decide what we're gonna prioritize and whose lives matter in this country. And I would like a policy that's generous and abundant that has room for all of us. Somebody just got in one last question and they got close and they said, how do you envision the process of democratic dialogue when different groups have such divergent views on the very purpose of education? And you started to talk about that a little bit. I wanna get that last question in. Well, I think that's the promise of public education we're providing our students with the opportunity to develop those skills. And I think because of the deep inequality that has characterized public education for so long, our students are learning to do these things in very stratified and segregated ways. And so I think one of the ways we do that is that we center that in our vision of public schools. And this is why I think integration matters so much that we learn that if we, you know, to paraphrase, if our children don't learn to live, learn together, how are we gonna learn to live together? Thank you, Professor Scott, for such a thoughtful and important discussion this morning. And to the audience, I'm sure that you have so many more questions and so many more ideas. And I just think this is a topic that I hope we as a university can continue to engage collectively. It has profound implications for who we are and who we can become. Absolutely, Chris.