 So I'd like to introduce to you our lecturer today, Jesse Hagopian. He teaches history and is the co-advisor to the Black Student Union at Garfield High School, the site of the historic boycott of the MAP test in 2013 if you heard of standardized testing. That would sound familiar to you. Jesse is the Associate Editor for the Social Justice Periodical Rethinking Schools and is also the editor of more than a score of new uprising against high-state testing. He is the founding member of Social Equality Educators and a recipient of the 2012 Abe Keller Foundation Award for Excellence in Innovation in Peace Education and won the 2013 Secondary School Teacher of the Year Award and the Special Achievement Courageous Leadership Award from the Academy of Education, Arts and Sciences. In 2015, Jesse received the Seattle King County NAACP Service Award, was named as an education fellow to the Progressive Magazine as well as a cultural freedom fellow for the Lannan Foundation for his nationally recognized work in promoting critical thinking and opposing high-stakes tests. Jesse is an activist, public speaker, author, and so much more. Literally, his biography is super, super long. There are so many great things that I read about Jesse on his website. You google his name, there's like a bazillion things that come up. So he is doing good work. He is doing very meaningful work and people are talking about what he's doing and sharing it through various different media sources, not just one single media platform here locally or nationally. So I encourage you to look him up after this lecture, learn more about him, the work that he does, but we are so privileged today to have him join us right here, right now, and to share that with us today. So Jesse, welcome to our community. It is wonderful to be with you all today because today is no day to be alone, am I right? Today is no day to suffer and fear and silence alone. And it's great to be with a group of young people to talk about how to resist and how to fight back. And although if you get up and walk out at any point, I won't be offended. I know there's lots of walkouts happening, including at my own school today, so I'll take that as a sign of joining the movement. But I want to say that we're going to have a great conversation today about the fact that, you know, many times you hear that Donald Trump's election means that we need to give him time to give him the benefit of the doubt to see what's going to happen in our country. And I want to say today there can be no doubt. We've seen the video where he brags about sexual assault. There can be no doubt. He's said racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamophobic comments over and over again. And today is the day to initiate the resistance. And there was no better example of why we need to build this resistance than at my son's own elementary school the day after the election. Because that day there was a young Muslim girl who came to class and hadn't yet found out who won the election and she found out at school. And she dropped to the ground when she heard the news in tears pounding her fists into the ground. She was terrified at what could happen to her and her family, possibly being split apart or violence being visited on them. And what happened next, though, I think is an example of where we need to go because my son's teacher didn't let her just suffer alone in silence and fear. She gathered all the classes together at that grade level and she held a forum right then and there impromptu to tell those kids that they won't suffer alone, that this is a safe place for you, regardless of your background, that she would be there to help protect them. She did it wearing this shirt that says Black Lives Matter and the hashtags say her name to highlight the violence, the state violence against women that's happening across this country that often goes unnoticed or unchecked. And she was able to wear this shirt because earlier in the year we had organized a Black Lives Matter at school day and 30,000 teachers wore these shirts to school in a mass demonstration of solidarity with the Black Lives Matter movement and our Black students. And it's that kind of initiative inside the schools, right? Bringing together students and teachers that I think we need to see more of and we need to transform our schools into sites of resistance to everything Trump stands for, right? He emblazons his name on everything he owns, right? The Trump Towers, the Trump Hotels, the Trump Golf Courses, the Trump University. And that's a name that's synonymous with bigotry and sexual assault and hatred and I think we need to emblazon on everything that we own in common on the public schools, on our reader boards, right? Black Lives Matter, right? Sanctuary campus, immigrants are welcome here, right? LGBTQ families are welcome here. And this is the type of resistance that I want to help build across Seattle and across this country. And it's one that has a long tradition, right? And I want to talk about some of that history today and I'm so grateful for the work of Dr. Martin Luther King that gives us a platform, a way to come together today and many lessons that I want to pull from today. And he wrote a book in 1967 called Where Do We Go From Here? Chaos or Community, right? The year before he was assassinated and you really have to read this book because in it he pens a polemic for what he calls phase two of the movement, right? So by the time King was writing this book they had won the legal formal rights, right? They had struck down the Jim Crow laws. They had won the Voting Rights Act, right? Now black people could sit where they wanted to. They could go into the restaurant and sit anywhere they wanted but the problem was it doesn't mean they had enough money to buy the food, right? So phase two of the movement had to include strong economic demands, right? And so he says, phase two has to challenge economic inequality and he says, dignity is also corroded by poverty. No worker can maintain as moral or sustain as spirit if in the marketplace his capacities are declared to be worthless to society. And he compared the cost of creating real equality the civil rights movement, he said the civil rights movement victories were cheap to America. It didn't cost them much, right? We need to fight farther than that for real gains. He said the practical cost of change for the nation up to this point has been cheap. The limited reforms have been obtained at bargain rates. The real cost lies ahead. The stiffening of white resistance in recognition of that fact. And he says the discount education that Negroes will in the future have to be purchased at full price if a quality education is to be realized. And he famously said that the function of education is to teach one to think intensively and to think critically. Intelligence plus character, is the real goal of education, right? And so that's the fight we're in today. Still, to fully fund our education system, right? They can't do it on the cheap. We know in this state, in Washington state, we have the most regressive tax structure of all 50 states. So that means rich people pay the less. Why do you think we have Amazon Boeing, Microsoft, Starbucks, Bill Gates, right? The richest people in the world. And they live here and they don't pay their fair share. And what happens is our children suffer because of it. And the state Supreme Court has ruled that the state legislature is in violation of the constitution. Our state constitution says it's the paramount duty to fully fund and provide for education. And our state legislature is just continuing to neglect the law, right? And they refuse to fund education. And instead, they give away huge tax breaks to the wealthiest corporations, right? So that's the state that we live in. And those funding priorities, refusing to follow the law and giving away money to the rich has real consequences in my classroom and in classrooms across this state. And it's part of what is known as the School to Prison Pipeline, right? And I think the School to Prison Pipeline is consciously being constructed. And it's very easy to see how it is being constructed in this city and across the country. And I want to raise a few examples for you today to give you a sense of what this pipeline looks like. And I think it begins right in the classroom, right in the curriculum. And the most vivid example I can give you is what happened to a young student named Kobe Byrne last year at his school in Texas. He opened up his textbook to the page the teacher assigned, and he's reading the passage on Europe and Africa and the slave triangle. And he notices, though, that the word slave is missing from this arrangement and instead has been replaced with the word worker. So workers were brought from Africa to work in America. They did point out that indentured servants from Europe were brought over and into forced, unpaid labor. But when it came to the African slaves, the word worker was used, giving the impression that they had come here looking for a better life, right? So Kobe takes out his cell phone and takes a little picture of that and texts it to his mom. He says, Mom, we was real good workers, wasn't we? And his mom was getting her PhD in history. And she didn't take too kindly to this. She got on Facebook and opened up the textbook, did a little Facebook video walking you through who all the PhDs were that signed their name off on this book, right, that had reviewed this material. And not just that they had replaced the word worker for slave, right? It's that they put the chapter on slavery in the section of the book on immigration, as if black people were just traveling here looking for a better life, right? So thankfully because of that resistance, because of a mass letter writing campaign and a viral video from his mother, the textbook company, the largest textbook company in the United States had to issue an apology and had to retract that book and begin to replace at least the word, right? They have a problem with the whole section being that's harder to do. So the fight has to continue. I want to talk about also a girl in Ohio, excuse me, a young 12-year-old boy in Ohio who was in a staring contest with a girl. And he was pulled out of class and he was suspended because it was said that he was intimidating her, right? And so then it went beyond the school, he appealed it, but it went all the way to the Ohio courts and the courts upheld the suspension saying that the girl felt fearful even though this young boy wrote an apology to her and he said, quote, I never knew she was scared because she was laughing. I understand I've done wrong. This thing will never happen again. I will start to think before I do these types of things in this situation. Can you imagine the humiliation of a young boy who did nothing wrong having to write an apology letter and then be reprimanded anyway for it, right? Or we can talk about a young girl of a video you may have seen, a very disturbing video from South Carolina where she's ripped out of her desk and thrown across the classroom by a police officer and then she's charged with disruption of the class, right? I think that all these examples highlight different aspects of how the school-to-prison pipeline is built. It starts with a curriculum that doesn't reflect our youth that hides the truth about our struggles and contributions and then kids check out. And a lot of people call that disobedience when the kids check out, but I think it probably is better understood as resistance to a racist curriculum, right? And then when they check out, we have zero-tolerance discipline policies and officers there ready to rip them out and or suspend them and then they're less likely to graduate when they fall behind in their work and they're suspended, right? And then they're less likely to have that diploma and less likely to get a job and far more likely to end up incarcerated. And we know that the high-stakes testing regime that's been put in place in this country is only fueling that problem because recent studies show that exit exams, the only outcome of attaching high-stakes to graduation requirements has been increased incarceration rates as kids are routinely denied their diploma based on one test score. Even if they've done, their teachers say they are ready to graduate and they're ready to go on, right? And in Seattle, the school-to-prison pipeline has been laid totally bare in the last few months, completely exposed because in the Seattle Public Schools we have a $74 million budget shortfall for the schools and yet somehow politicians in our county have found $200 million to build a new youth jail, right? So we're getting, we're depriving them of the resources they need to be successful on the front end and we're investing hundreds of millions of dollars in locking up our kids. That's the plan that these politicians have ready for the kids in my classroom and that's why we have to fight back. And so I think really it's the contradictions of what's promised in public education and what's actually delivered that makes campuses and schools such explosive sites of struggle. And I think it's why the struggle for black education has always been a major part of the black freedom struggle, right? So much is promised with education. It's gonna be the great equalizer. If you just work hard, put your nose to the grind, right, and do your homework, you can get ahead, right? Except for if you're black or brown, except for if you're living in poverty. At Garfield High School, we have 150 homeless students, right? In a state dripping with this much wealth, that's an outrage. And how are you gonna do homework if you don't even have a home, right? So there's so much promised and yet the reality has been so different from the very beginning of public education that that contradiction has created massive upheavals in public schools and in college campuses throughout time and throughout our country. I think the first organized effort of black people to fight back using education, I think you have to start during slavery when it was illegal to be literate. When it was, when being, if you were caught reading, punishment would be lucky, death would also be a possible outcome and slaves nonetheless resisted and did a thing called stealing a meeting. They called it when they would sneak off and teach each other to read and write as a basic form of resistance because you could forge a traveling pass and escape, right? I think that you have to look at how the public schools actually started in this country after reconstruction, right? When the south lost the Civil War and there's actually a period of reconstruction in the south where you have integrated schools of black and white students, poor black and white students and black people taking the lead and outpouring of building new schools and demanding literacy as part of the struggle for freedom. And actually my, my grandparents toured the south throughout the Jim Crow era building schools and seeing that as a key contribution to the black freedom struggle and then you have the Brown versus Board of Education decision to desegregate schools and you have courageous young people like Ruby Bridges going in and integrating schools despite white mobs spitting and hurling insults. And you have an incredible legacy of the freedom schools, incredible educators like Septima Clark who used really innovative, dialogic, pedagogy methodology to teach formally illiterate African-Americans to empower them and to not just teach literacy but to teach it through civic action, right, and collective organizing. And then the black power movement is often thought of as just the urban rebellions and the riots but I think that you have to look at the way the black power movement transformed education. You know, the Black Panther Party got started from a study group at Merritt College, right? You have to look at the way the black power movement entered the college campuses with one of the main demands being black studies. We want the right to learn about our own culture and history and people and the way that people had to sacrifice just to get a basic education of themselves. You know, at the University of Washington in 1968 when the Black Student Union was founded there with Larry Gossett and the founder of the Black Panther Party of Seattle, Aaron Dixon, there wasn't a single book written by any African-American used anywhere on the campus, right? And so they held massive demonstrations to have a black studies department and even receive solidarity from white student radicals in groups like Students for Democratic Society, SDS. And they had to fight and win those black studies department. My dad was at the University of Wisconsin and, you know, Martin Luther King was assassinated in 1968. That following fall, they had huge demonstrations to demand a black studies department. They had to bring in the National Guard to try to quell the student protestors. But at the end of it, they finally were able to win the black studies department. And these are just a little taste of the type of explosions that have happened throughout history in the struggle for education. And I think today, given this overt bigot that we have being coronated today in the White House, we are poised to see a new round of explosion for civil rights, for human rights on college campuses and in schools across the country. We need it more than ever. And I'm really proud of my colleagues in the Seattle Public Schools who have begun to organize along these lines. And you can see some of them here in these photos. I want to talk about what this Black Lives Matter at School Day was and what it started and where we're going with this movement. And I want to talk a little bit about how we can build this movement broadly and use it to really confront not only Trump, but the ingrained institutional and structural racism, sexism, and homophobia of our society and create a much better education system and a much better world. And I think some of the work that my colleagues have done in the last few months this year is really inspirational and I hope gives you guys some ideas for how to fight back. This movement for Black Lives Matter at School really started with John Muir Elementary School in Seattle. There's a group called Black Men United to Change the Narrative and they were organizing to have a day where you bring in black community members out front of the school and you celebrate the black community at that school. So they were high-fiving all the kids as they came into school. They're going to have a big assembly and rally to celebrate black achievement. And the teachers at John Muir wanted to support this effort and so the art teacher actually designed the shirts that they were going to wear and they said Black Lives Matter, we stand together. Well, the media got a hold of this, found out that teachers were going to wear Black Lives Matter shirts and then it went to a group called Blue Lives Matter to support police officers and then the hate mail started flooding in to John Muir Elementary. And then some hateful person went as far as issuing a bomb threat to the school and saying if you show up to school in these shirts, this is the violence we will visit upon your school. So the school district had to formally cancel the Black Lives event there but the teachers and community members to their credit went ahead and did it anyway and it was smaller than it would have been without the threat of violence but they still held their event and it was an inspiration to teachers across Seattle and I said we have to figure out a way to support them and to let them know that we see their courage. So I invited them to a planning meeting of the social equality educators, the social justice caucus of teachers in the teachers union in Seattle and they came and shared their story and we decided to bring a resolution to the broader teachers union that represents some 5,000 educators in Seattle and we made the case that every teacher should wear a shirt that says Black Lives Matter. We'll pick a day and they can't threaten every school in Seattle. We'll all stand together. Well I figured maybe a couple dozen of us hardcore activists would wear the Black Lives Matter shirt and I was shocked when first the resolution passed unanimously and then the orders for the shirts just started going through the roof. It became a full-time job driving shirts around oh there's a school up north that needs an extra large. It became a huge project but it was absolutely breathtaking the day of and you can see just a smattering of some of the schools that participated here. The elementary schools, the middle schools, the high schools, there's my school Garfield right on Bulldogs. All right we got a couple of y'all and you can see you know over 3,000 teachers put these shirts on but it wasn't just about wearing the shirt hundreds of teachers, many hundreds of teachers taught lessons about structural racism in their class that day or showed the movie 13th. There were families that just began organizing, getting materials, setting up tables out front of the schools with information about how to talk to your kids about race. We had an evening rally that was packed to the rafters with community members and families from all over Seattle to come hear from our black youth and see their talents of tap dancing and poetry and music and speeches and it really was an incredible rebuke of everything that the hateful right wing had been trying to shut our movement down with. They said, don't politicize the classroom. And you can't wear those shirts into the classroom and bring politics into the classroom and I say tell that to Michael Brown's mom tell that to Rachea Boyd's mom or Sandra Bland's mother. To say our black students lives matter is a basic declaration of humanity and we saw the power of what that could do because now starting on Monday there is going to be a whole week of black lives matter at school in the Philadelphia public schools and now we see it spread across the nation and I think that's just going to be the start of a new phase of the black lives matter movement entering the public schools. I'm really excited about the way this movement is developing and I think that what student radicals and radicals of all times during the last major social upheavals of the 60s and 70s learned we're going to start learning again today and I want to share some of those lessons and then I want to take some time to have some interaction with you all and get questions and figure out what ways we can support you to organize right here. But what student radicals I think learned in the last social upheavals was that the struggle would often explode on campuses but to make truly lasting and impactful and structural change it had to go far beyond the campus itself the struggles for racial justice against war for women's liberation for gay liberation none of those fights could be one without linking them to one another and to actually beginning to examine the economic structure that we live under the very foundations of capitalism that are built around inequality division and oppressions of all kinds and so literally millions of students drew the conclusion that we had to have a revolution in this country to overturn those who are in power and a lot of times we talk about how we contrast Martin Luther King and Malcolm X and we see Malcolm X as the revolutionary who wanted to build a whole different society by any means necessary and we look at Dr. Martin Luther King as someone who was merely peaceful and wanted slower change and you see lots of quotes important quotes from Malcolm X things like you can't have capitalism without racism and we see the militancy of Malcolm X that was so important to those movements but I want to suggest that there's far more overlap between these two leaders especially in the ends of their lives towards the ends of their lives and I want to draw some lessons from these two leaders to help guide our way as we enter what Trump has planned to be a very scary dark era and what many of us have a whole different vision based in where I think Martin Luther King and Malcolm X were really going towards the end of their lives so I want to look at a couple of quotes from these leaders and towards the end of their lives because Malcolm X said it's impossible for a white person to believe in capitalism and not believe in racism you can't have capitalism without racism and if you find one and you happen to get a person in a conversation and they don't have a philosophy that makes sure and they have a philosophy that makes you sure they don't have this racism in their outlook they're usually socialists or their political philosophy is socialism now Dr. King had this to say you don't usually hear this on Martin Luther King day we get the endless repetition of the I have a dream speech on loop and they try to freeze him in 1963 as if his ideas had never developed beyond that but if you start to look at the direction he's going you'll see that he is coming much more closer together with the direction that Malcolm X was going at the end of his life he says, quote, capitalism does not permit an even flow of economic resources with this system a small privileged few are rich beyond conscience and almost all others are doomed to be poor at some level that's the way the system works and since we know that the system will not change the rules we are going to have to change the system he said, you can't talk about solving an economic problem of the Negro without talking about billions of dollars you can't talk about ending the slums without first saying profits must be taken out of the slums you're really tampering and getting on dangerous ground because you are messing with folk then you are messing with the captains of industry now this means that we are treading in difficult water because it really means that we are saying that something is wrong with capitalism there must be a better distribution of wealth and maybe America must move towards democratic socialism that's where Martin Luther King was going and towards a whole analysis of the structure of our society confronting all forms of oppression and seeing how they were rooted in a system of basic inequality and today that system is more obvious I think than ever a new study came out did you all see this about wealth distribution in the world? last year 62 people had the same amount of wealth as the bottom half of the world this year the richest 8 people have the same amount of wealth as the bottom 3.5 billion people on the planet that is an obscenity that leads to all a myriad of other problems that we face and struggles that we face whether it's healthcare, housing, education that fundamental inequality is driving so many other problems we have immense challenges in our world today we have a mass incarceration system that means that more black people are behind bars or on probation or parole than were slaves on plantations in 1850 think about that we have just locked away and torn apart so many families and not just african-american families latino families even under President Obama he split apart more families than any president in the history of our country with these immigration raids and deportations we have an epidemic of sexual assault in our country where 1 in 4 women report having faced sexual assault and it goes so unchecked on college campuses often just swept under the rug and then we just see the proliferation of objectification of women in the media that leads to these sexual assaults we have endless wars that our country is perpetrating mostly on brown people, muslim people around the world we are investing trillions of dollars to go bomb people and children in the Middle East and we can't find the money to lower the class size right here in Washington state and I think perhaps the greatest challenge we face as a community, as a country, as a world is climate change because scientists tell us that if the temperature increases by three degrees globally that it could trigger runaway climate change that is irreversible that would make human life on this planet impossible and would end civilization as we know it and yet our country gives massive tax breaks to fossil fuel companies that are destroying the possibility of human civilization these are the real high stakes that we face not these ABCD bubble test questions that we ask the kids to endlessly take in schools we need to develop a whole different education system that trains our kids to be critical thinkers to challenge these real problems that we face in our society not just eliminate wrong answer choices endlessly but to learn how to cooperate with one another we need an education system that develops imagination and critical thinking and civic courage and collaboration to begin to organize together and to figure out how to collectively act so that we can challenge all of these problems beginning with this president but going far beyond replacing a president with a new one to actually fundamentally challenge the inequity and the structural barriers in our society so I want to thank everyone for having me here today and I look forward to hearing your questions thanks so much so at this time if you have questions that you want to ask we've got two microphones right here feel free to come on up to the microphone I know folks are going to have to leave some of you have to leave for class in about five minutes so feel free to do that when you need to just be mindful of the noise that the chairs make when you're heading out to not disrupt the conversation too much but now is a great time bring your questions come down to the mic and it's an opportunity to interact and have a conversation with Jesse it's not a question it's more of a thank you a lot of people in this room may know I am the black student union president on campus but more so thank you but more so wanted to give a special thank you to my high school BSU advisor who is Jesse Gopi and as well as our speaker for today it's so good to see you here continuing the work that's a really beautiful thing thank you so much and good luck with all you're doing and we need to figure out ways to get our students collaborating and building the resistance you know from college to high school and I look forward to that work with you I know some of you all have to leave for next class for me it's also a thank you because you are an example that we have to start thinking on doing for those who are not fine the brave in your heart to do things like you are doing we have started supporting each other who are able to speak up thank you because of the work that you are doing as an example as a Latino student I would like to know more about it how to get organized my community because all the results that you as a black movement are having are impacting us directly because we are suffering not too much as you but we are suffering too and I would like to ask you how do you promote this unity between your parents in your school because our high schools and other levels are suffering because they don't know how to call parents in order to be united with the teachers and get in respect for our own communities and again thank you for what you are doing right on thank you that's a great question I mean unity is that's the way we can win because their advantage is they have all the money but they have very few people and our advantage is we have a lot more people the only way we can press that advantage is if we can overcome the divisions that they have set up they divide us based on nationality or on race or on sexual orientation and they try to convince us that our enemies are each other around us because otherwise they are only 1% there are so few of them that we would just take over our schools and our communities and our workplaces and run them for ourselves instead of for making them wealthy so figuring out the concrete details of how we build unity in our school is really a great place to start one initiative that we have in the Seattle Public Schools that we just launched is a fight for ethnic studies there's so much research that shows that ethnic studies dramatically improves educational outcomes for students especially students of color but it's not just the academic outcomes it's also the empowerment that they get to change their society when they know the history of their struggles and their community and I think fighting for ethnic studies programs can be a way to bring communities together you know we were inspired to do this by the fight of the Latino families in Arizona because in Arizona those bigots down there banned ethnic studies specifically the Mexican American Studies program and some courageous teachers and parents and students fought hard to try to keep the program to allow Mexican students to learn about their culture and there's an amazing film if you haven't seen Precious Knowledge you really have to watch this film about that struggle and so we want to we have a petition going the teachers in Seattle along with the NAACP have a petition to demand ethnic studies programs and I think that that's a great way to bring together families of many different backgrounds to demand that our kids be able to have African American studies and gender studies programs and Latino study programs you know all kinds of programs like that and I'll just end by saying that when any one group moves into action it often helps inspire and encourage others and so to me it's not so much about like who's the most oppressed or who's suffering the most but how can we all link our struggles together because we only get free if all of us get free and so it's about you know during the black power era the black power movement rose up but look at what it brought with it the American Indian movement the gay liberation front rose up you have the huge anti-war movement on campuses against the Vietnam War movement that all learn from the civil rights and black power movement how to collectively organize and challenge power and I want to see that same dynamic so I want to see how the black Lives Matter movement moves forward how the courageous people at Standing Rock who fought to protect our water and their land rights is now inspiring others across the country and I can see how we could soon be coming to an era where one struggle inspires the next and we begin to link those struggles together like Fred Hampton of the Black Panther Party in Chicago wanted in the Rainbow Coalition right of different groups fighting for the same cause so Molojip Program here at Highland I'm studying to be a paraeducator wonderful also probably go to get a BA in teaching and as you being a teacher I want to be a part of a kid's journey and getting their education I notice that that kids that are a little slower and learning things are given different work than what other kids that are in regular classes are getting and and I was in special aid as well and I found it like really confusing to why am I looking at their work and I'm like completely confused and why can't we all be taught and learn the same thing so we can all grow together and my question is how can I when I do when I graduate from college how can I make that change that's a great question and thank you I think that when I was in school I had a learning disability that went undiagnosed and it was difficult I had lots of challenges and hated school and was often found it very humiliating and so I definitely think that there's an important role for differentiating instruction in certain ways in the classroom but the biggest problem I see in our schools is this rigid tracking system that separates kids the lower tracks, the low track or the high track and those tracks people should know have nothing to do with intelligence have nothing to do with ability for a long time I was convinced that I was not intelligent I had the proof in my test scores and I could show you why I wouldn't really amount to much and I was in the classes but what I came to find out when I eventually was able to take courses that mattered to me that we're talking about challenging forms of oppression and seem to help explain struggles that I had been through then I started to excel right and so we have another initiative we're working on in the Seattle Public Schools because we know really what the tracks measure is not intelligence but your wealth and your proximity to the dominant culture and mostly white middle class society right and so the tracks are built for segregation that's the main purpose to rank and sort our youth to sort this stratum of youth into becoming owners and managers right to sort this track of youth to become low-wage workers and to sort this track of youth directly into the prisons right and we are working to tear down those tracks at Garfield High School this year we got rid of the honors and general Ed in ninth grade and put them together we have honors for all now right and there's role for differentiating instruction within the classroom based on different ability levels in very specific ways but segregating and separating our kids really has no place in the public in a public school system that thank you so I got it JB my name is Liz Ward and I'm the coordinator for the Emoja Scholars Program here at Highline and Mackenzie left but she's one of our students as well at the BSU in Emoja one of our principals is the ethic of love in the effective effective domain when practitioners move with an ethic of love they touch their students spirits moving with an ethic of love means having a willingness to share ourselves our stories our lives our experiences to humanize and make real the classroom this leveraging of the effective emotion trust hope trauma healing moves the discourse deliberately as an in road to the cognitive domain approaching one's practice with an ethic of love implies a holistic approach body mind and spirit can you talk to us how you implement the ethic of love in your classrooms yeah that's beautiful I love that I tweeted it oh great no I want I want those words so I can I can use that I completely believe that you know we have to have a loving caring classroom in order to educate kids have to know that you care about them before you can teach them anything you know the story I started off with with my son's teacher gathering the kids together and telling them this is a safe place for you she can't teach those those kids mostly immigrant families anything until they know they're safe and their love there right in my classroom before I teach anything about history we have our first unit is called who am I what is history what is history have to do with me and that that unit is about figuring out who my students are as people what they care about what they believe in what their identities are and having the students explore their identities learning concepts about intersectionality how to support each other for who we truly are and what we believe in and that's the foundation once once they can begin to answer the question who am I then we connect it to how history relates to their own lives what historical forces have gone into shaping their identity and then only then once they can they can answer those questions can we begin to actually get into the curriculum because now they can see how it relates to their own lives and now we've built a community of learners where we care about each other and when it's working well that's the only way to learn and that's what I was missing and that's why I never connected to school because I couldn't answer those questions and no one ever asked them right and so that's where I try to take my pedagogy but thank you for that hi my name is Jonathan I work in our student activity center on campus I think when I heard you say that you were your BSU's advisor at Garfield I really felt compelled to say thank you I and I also just think there's something ironic about you being here we had other opportunities for major speakers to listen to as a crowd right now because you're talking at the exact same time as the inaugural address and I'm pretty sure I've learned more from you during this time than I would if I was watching TV I am inspired by the leadership pipeline that I saw between you and Mackenzie and her being here and being a leader and to contrast what I'm going to hear later when I watch this address I'm interested in some of that hope and specifically looking at that as a leadership pipeline as you develop student leaders in high schools and you're sending them forward please continue to send them to Highline because this is where we need them what are your hopes for the things that you want to see the students that you're moving forward into their colleges doing maybe your top two things that you feel like all would be right in the world if my future students at college were doing this and this thank you it's just so great the most gratifying thing of this work is seeing the student leaders continuing the work so that really is important I mean to me what I want to see them do is what they feel like they need to do so I want to see them act collectively I want to see them work together to unite different forces in the students together around the issues they care the most about I think I would imagine that some of the struggles that we're going to see in the coming months that will be organized collectively around are going to be around police violence because they're going unabated and unchecked and we never know when the next video we're going to see of some horrific by someone who will never be held accountable will be and that needs to stop, that needs to change and needs to be confronted and I think college campuses are likely to be the sites of resistance to bring students together on those issues I would think that tuition is something when college is so prohibitively expensive and we want to diversify and bring in more people that's an issue that I think students are likely to organize around but with this new maniac in the White House we're going to have plenty of issues to fight around if he begins talking about deportations we need to start building our sanctuary campuses we need to open our homes to refugees we're going to have to figure out new forms of resistance we're talking about internment camps like one of his advisors flippantly said might be appropriate for Muslims then we're going to have to build mass resistance right and so just hopeful that students will take that and fight around the things that they care most about and that are impacting them hi Jesse thank you so much for being here my name is Doris and I'm chair of Lipper King week my question to you Betsy DeVos she is Trump's nominee for secretary of education and I don't know if some of you or most of you may have seen the youtube videos in regards to Elizabeth Warren definitely grilling her in regards to what she knows this is a multi trillion dollar budget that she's in charge of and she doesn't really know much as an educator and for many educators that are here in this room today what can we do to prepare because if this woman which I'm pretty sure will be the secretary of education for the next four years it seems frightening so what can we do to start yeah thank you and thanks for organizing this whole week of action and yeah to all the committee yeah Betsy DeVos is a train wreck of secretary of education I want to say a few things on that and try to highlight a few of her initiatives I also have a music video that some black students made in Baltimore that I think get at some of the key inequities in public education that maybe we can end on to look at resistance that's going but you talked about how she was grilled on that it didn't take much to grill her like you could ask her like what's the school and she had to pause for a while right or it didn't take much to grill her because she has no experience at all with public education in fact that makes her more qualified in the eyes of the elite the less experience she has the better because the idea is not to support public education the idea is to privatize and erode public education so she never went to public schools of course none of her kids go to public schools she never taught the less experience the better the only experience with public school she has is being on privatizing the schools right or her family foundation that invests in gay conversion therapy right and this is someone who is supposed to be nurturing all of our kids right and then she said it was a clerical error that she had been listed as vice president of this foundation for what 14 years in a row that's a massive clerical error it's really a joke the thing that's disheartening to me though is that as crazy as out of touch as she is with public education really the groundwork for this was laid by the previous education secretary Arnie Duncan who also had no experience in public schools who was also interested in privatizing with a much with a smile he's not going to be in your face being a bigot at all but flowing money towards charter schools and away from public schools has laid the groundwork and put in place the situation that we could be in right now and I'll just end on this by saying that they want to continue their project of reducing public education the intellectual process of teaching and learning the emotional process of teaching and learning to a single score right so promoting high stakes testing and then once they've done that then they want to punish you based on that score so they can close down schools that they label failing on those scores rather than bring resources to them lower class sizes get more counselors they want to just shut those schools down or deny the kids graduation based on the score and then once they've labeled the score the school failing based on these test scores then they can convert them to charter schools to be run by private entities right so this is their project that they want to roll out in New Orleans after the storm they had a huge gift because now the schools were in such disarray Arne Duncan said Hurricane Katrina was the best thing that ever happened to the New Orleans public school system a really disgusting comment because now they could come in and redo them as charter schools and now there's I think five public schools left in New Orleans and the rest are charter schools so this is what they want to now roll out across the country for public education and what they will try to do without resistance but I'm proud to say that we are in the midst of the largest uprising against high stakes testing never before have more students refused to take the exams parents opted their kids out or teachers like Agarfield High School just refused to give the test altogether and what was an incredible boycott of the map test and ended with the superintendent of the Seattle schools threatened the teachers at Agarfield with a 10 day suspension without pay for refusing to give the map test and we said it's not giving us any information we need they already take a myriad of other standardized tests the average public school student in America takes 112 standardized tests right it's become a multi-billion dollar industry it's not about understanding what our kids know it's about lining the pockets of the Pearson testing corporation and we won't continue to administer this test anymore we were threatened with the 10 day suspension without pay my colleagues in the tested subjects of math and reading didn't back down not a single one of them administered the test and we got so much overwhelming solidarity from not only our own PTA and student body government but thousands of letters of support from around the country that by the end of the school year the superintendent not only did he not suspend anyone he actually got rid of the map test altogether for Seattle public high schools so as scary as Betsy DeVos is what matters is the size of our resistance right and our people willing to boycott and strike and walk out not how scary they are but how ready we are to resist so I'm not sure who was next so my name is Abdul I'm a student here so I have an issue happening in high school as a Muslim and there was a girl she was going to pray and before we pray we have to wash her hands it was called Wudu and there was an American girl in the bathroom and the American girl she saw her and she threw the hijab like you covered your hair with the bathroom and the Muslim girl she came out like without no hijab and I gave her my jacket to cover her hair and she was scared to tell even the teacher I was like why are you scared there's nothing to be scared of and I stood up and I got called the office and the security I was like you guys have to look into this like problem and they spent her for like three days and she came back and did another problem another fight I was like about to graduate and I saw the fight like there was like a lot of people around and just like taking videos and stuff and nobody tried to stop it but when I got in like a different girl she tried to like hit me I was like what are you doing I'm just trying to break a fight and she tried to like you graduating like you cannot like do in a fight or something and she's like oh we're going to spend you and send you home and you're not going to graduate and like the office is like oh you have to make a report I was like I'm not going to make a report just go watch the camera and I just walk out Thank you for sharing that story it's hard to even hear you know the proliferation of hate crimes that have happened since Trump was elected is really scary you know this had been happening far before Trump I think this whole narrative of the war on terror is really about demonizing Arabs and Muslims and has nothing to do with safety it has to do with justifying a bloated military budget and justifying endless war on people and it has to do with dividing us against each other here in this country and making us instead of being angry and fearful of a 1% who's robbing us all and using the wealth of our country to line their pockets trying to make us fearful of our neighbors and when it visits us in school like that and we have to build alliances against Islamophobia so thank you for sharing that story so I have another idea before I come to America I read the rules we get freedom of speech freedom of religion and so on but why is Trump not talking about those ideas he's just talking about to build the wall nothing stabs that's right I mean what this country promises delivers have always been two different things all men are created equal this country was founded on oh except for my ancestors who were slaves I mean there can't be a bigger contradiction than the founding of this country and that just continues right we see over and over again the rhetoric is soaring the rhetoric is lofty right work hard and you can get ahead except for when the banks sabotage the economy and the banks destroy based on their own faulty practices and lose all their wealth then our nation is ready to bail them out at the snap of a fingers but if you have economic difficulties too bad we're getting ready to lock you up so the rhetoric has always been one thing but the ideals of freedom of speech and freedom of religion have been put on the the lips of politicians when it when it's useful to them but have rarely been been carried out in practice and that's about building social movements to defend each other and not relying on what the politicians have my name is Clara I'm 17 years old I was born and raised in Tucson, Arizona and I was put into those tracking programs my dad is white and my mom is black and I've been made to feel my entire life like I can't appreciate both sides like I'm not black enough and I'm too black to hang out with the white kids so people always ask me I'm just sad and I'm not sad I'm just frustrated because people preach equality but they don't actually mean it and it just it really bugs me and I'm glad that you're here because this entire week people have been talking about how you just have to forgive and stuff and I don't think that you have to forgive you have to remember and you have to use that and I just I really appreciate what you're saying because this entire week thank you, thank you for sharing that I know it's hard and I'm also mixed race and also have had those kind of struggles right and it wasn't until midway through college that I learned that race actually isn't real racism is very very real but that blew my mind that actually in the late 1600s the first laws in world history were enacted around race that for most of human history there wasn't this concept of race there was lots of other divisions based on geography or religion or who was deemed civilized or who was deemed barbarian right but this division of race was an invention and actually a very recent invention when you look at human history there was white indentured servants and black African slaves working together in fields in the early 1600s for a long time and when they rose up collectively together in Bacon's Rebellion and took over the colony of Virginia the most profitable colony to the crown they held it for eight months and they were going to take all the profits from that tobacco and everything that they were raising and have the wealth themselves and that collective action of black and white laborers together showed the king that he had to do something and so that's where the first laws dividing black and white people came from because the 99% together were far too powerful they took over the whole colony and they had to be suppressed and what do we do to make sure they never work together again like that because we're only 1% of the population how are we going to control this colony if they unite and so the first laws of racial segregation that mandate black people as slaves and white people will get paid not very much but enough to make them feel different enough to separate them right and enough to build a division that we're still dealing with today and so I think we have to to understand the commonality of our struggle that way and Frederick Douglass put it best when explaining slavery he said they divided both to conquer each and he meant they were conquering all the poor white people as well they were conquering for very little and but just enough more than the slaves and those terrible conditions to never unite together again right and so that's the division that we still have to figure out how to overcome to fight back so thank you for sharing that though I like how you just brought up Frederick Douglass's name I like to say one of his quotes I think I might be saying it wrong the best slave is one who thinks he or she is free and I personally believe that our society most of us are enslaved mentally through the systems at hand and how we think that we're educated through public schooling and even college courses I like how you brought up capitalism as well and how it promotes inequality and you were bringing up the 1% and I think how do we turn this movement of directing black lives and projecting although police brutality is a very serious issue how do we raise the bar with classism and how it's affecting the entire population right on man that's the question I'm going to ask right there that gets to the fundamental of how we are going to transform our society I totally agree our public school system was born out of a great contradiction on the one hand with the advent of the industrial revolution cities are being formed in this society in the 1700s and masses of people are leaving the countryside coming into urban spaces they no longer have some of the traditional discipline forces of the family of the church that were there to bring them into society the way they were supposed to be raised they're coming by the millions into cities and corporations wanted public school systems as a way to discipline this population to teach discipline and to get them ready to be workers in their factories corporations demanded public schools be set up the way they are right with very rigid separate classes with the bell system and being on time being the most important aspect of school right with following your teachers demands rather than learning collectively with discipline and suspensions and these form being ever present in our schools corporations saw public schools as a way to discipline the workforce to then go and fill their factory so they could make money off of our kids at the same time parents and families saw education as a way to get ahead as a way to get literacy and as critical to their liberation and there's always been that tension in the public schools of which vision we're going to have is it going to be this public school system as a way to discipline our kids and teach them the dominant narratives of our society that America has done nothing wrong that we're the beacon of hope and freedom in the world that all those in authority are there because they're right and just or our schools going to be a place that teach critical thinking and teach kids a way to question and talk back to authority right there's always that tension and which one prevails is about what we do and how we struggle and I think the last thing you said about how we go from a Black Lives Matter movement that challenges police unaccountability and police terror in our communities to building a class wide movement of people of all backgrounds and colors uniting not just to confront police brutality but a system that demands police brutality because you can't have a system of this type of inequality how do you maintain eight people having the same amount of wealth as 3.5 billion people you can't do that without a massive police state right and so we can begin to challenge that police state but we got to look at the fundamental inequality that's under underlying that problem my name is Seth I'm with the emotional scholars part of the emotional program when you caught my attention when you said the decision it made me think of you know Black people you know in urban neighborhoods and what not and I was thinking like we talk about police brutality and as being mistreated as being discriminated but how do we fix you know like sorry how I put this we talk about police brutality but a lot of the a lot of other brutalities that we face are within each other I grew up some parts some parts in the urban communities and I saw my own Black people fighting each other and shooting each other, killing each other so how do we fix that how do we change our vision from how we change our vision from us being the target and each other facing our anger towards each other and more towards the cause that makes sense absolutely I've heard this debate I think most visibly I saw this question being debated out by the Seahawks did you see Richard Sherman and Michael Bennett have a debate around the question of Black Lives Matter I was pretty impressed with the discussion they had because Sherman did say you guys are raising Black Lives Matter but then you're in your own neighborhoods killing each other isn't that as bad as what the police are doing and Michael Bennett disagreed and I really valued what Michael Bennett had to offer to the discussion because number one he pointed out well when one Black person kills another Black person the police will be there quick to deliver justice what they call justice which is locking you up or killing you there will be a consequence when a police officer kills you we know there won't be a consequence or almost never so that's one fundamental injustice we have to look at but the larger question is why are we why is there violence in inner cities why is there violence in Black communities is it that you either have to say there's something wrong with the people there's something fundamentally wrong either biologically or with our culture or you have to say there's something wrong with the nation and structure and our society that has produced this level of inequality that has produced ghettos and once you start to learn about the history of how our neighborhoods were formed I think it puts it in a whole different light I started teaching in Washington DC one of the most impoverished ghettos in the nation is Southeast in Anacostia there where did these communities come from why is there so much violence there well in the 50's after World War II the Federal Housing Authority constructed massive projects and the Federal Transportation Administration put highways right from the white communities out to the suburbs and they consciously constructed ghettos and all types of trauma that stem from poverty and they fight each other then they're called violence or backwards but we have to look at the policies that led to the problems the disinvestment in our communities the disinvestment in the schools that produce these problems and instead of just blaming each other for that look at the larger policies that are undermining our communities and our schools and look to that I think as the source of the violence my name is Walter Heyman III I'm a part of the module Black Scholars also I'm a direct product of that school to prison pipeline and it's taken me decades to have the courage and the self-confidence to be able to relearn who I am to identify with myself of who I am to be taught by others of who I am so all of this has taken time all of these structural injustices and problems have taken time and the society that we live in breeds our kids to be that way to not be self-confident to think about competition as a better or worse thing and not an equity thing so my question is is how do we begin to acknowledge to acknowledge I mean to acknowledge differences in our kids and shape their thoughts and feelings around everyone being important and equitable breaking down the stigma of competitiveness making one better than the other right on it looks like we're coming up on time so I don't know if we have time for anymore or if we'll make the last question okay first I gotta say that thank you all this have been really incredible questions people have shared some really painful experiences today and this have been a real conversation so thank you all for your bravery and sharing what you've been through because then we can use those stories to help fuel our resistance right now we know what we're fighting for from the very questions that people asked in this room today and looking down this individualist mentality is really key they want us to think of ourselves as individuals and to have our whole life's pursuit be about bettering ourselves at the expense of the collective and it's about getting ahead that's what you hear school is the purpose is to get ahead we'll grade you on a curve and there'll be some that do well and the rest behind this is what they try to indoctrinate us with and really the reason why is because the power of our collective action could transform this world to make it much better for all of us and so we have to transform our classrooms into being places that teach cooperation right we have to look at how to structure pedagogy so that our kids are working collectively so that they have a voice in the education process in my classroom it's not about me just lecturing like I did today but it's actually about posing questions and having them actually have to do research to represent different viewpoints and figure out what they believe in and what actions would need to be take to solve that problem and it's about breaking down a high stakes testing system that's about that's designed to rank our kids and to pit them against each other rather than teaching them that there's many different forms of knowledge that there's many different ways to be smart and that we need all those forms to come together to collectively solve solve our problems and I guess I just want to wrap up by saying a Howard Zinn quote for today on inauguration day as we enter this new scary era of a man who's appointed openly white supremacist into his cabinet of a man who has proudly bragged about sexually assaulting women a man that proudly brags about being a xenophobic and wanting to build a wall to keep out Mexicans it's a very very scary time for many many different communities but I think what Howard Zinn says is something that drives me forward both in my classroom and in my activism and he said what really matters is not who's sitting in the white house but who's sitting in in the streets at the lunch counters at the demonstrations that's always been what's most decisive about what type of society we have we didn't just end slavery by voting in the right president actually Lincoln was going to allow slavery when he was elected we didn't end Jim Crow segregation by electing the right president to dismantle the system it took hundreds and thousands of people mostly actually the youth we celebrate King today for the incredible legacy that he's left and the incredible work he did but we shouldn't forget the thousands of young people who are part of that we should especially remember that it was the youth in Birmingham that filled the jails we're talking about middle school students and high school students that filled the jails so full they couldn't arrest anyone else right and we're thankful for Ella Baker who often gets overlooked in the civil rights movement who actually argued with Martin Luther King that the students need to be separate and have their own voice and be allowed to have the student nonviolent coordinating committee come to their own conclusions in that group playing such a decisive role right the Vietnam war didn't end in that era because Richard Nixon thought we should stop killing people in Asia the war end because college campuses became ungovernable right and I mean on and on every single thing that we have whether it's the eight hour work day that used to be 14 right or the weekend that we have it didn't happen because we got a president who said well I'm going to challenge the wealthy and take away some of their profits it happened because in the 1930s there were the biggest strike waves in U.S. history there were the sit down strikes in Flint Michigan on my mom's side my family participated in that and won us the right to unionize and collectively bargain and every single thing we have we have today any rights we have is not because they were written down in a constitution in a declaration of independence or promised by a politician they were because we fought hard for them and won them in my classroom today I'm getting ready to go back to Garfield to show my kids the film about how women won the right to vote to get ready for the women's march tomorrow women won the right to vote during World War I organizing and challenging president Wilson out in front of his White House even when they were told you can't oppose the president at war time you'll be called unpatriotic and they took the beatings they had to go on hunger strike in jail they had to organize mass marches and mobilizations to win the basic right in this country to vote it will be the very same today when Trump comes to talk about building a wall or starting a registry when he unleashes police in our communities and tell them they have the right to brutalize us when he tries to cut the funds for the education all of these things will either happen or not depending on how ready we are to collectively organize and fight back and then not just stop him from the worst atrocities but really work to build a whole different society built on collaboration built on looking out for one another and redistributing the wealth on a mass scale to build real equity in our society so thanks everyone for having me here today I really appreciate it