 Gary's at the other end and you know this was this is billed as a fireside chat right so where's the fire we have to bring it okay that sounds good but I hope this is gonna be really a conversation rather than presentation lecture now we will default into that if if required but I'm gonna try to push for conversation amongst us and then to engage all of you as well I'll throw out so we have these three key pillars of this conversation will be race reform and writes the other three ours and I want to begin with a sort of historical reference and that you know we are in an historical moment when we are reconsidering and reflecting on seminal and iconic moments in American history this is either the hundred and fiftieth anniversary of something very important around the subject of race or it is the fiftieth anniversary the hundred and fiftieth anniversary this year of the Emancipation Proclamation the fiftieth anniversary of the March on Washington I won't quote Lincoln and I won't quote King but I will quote Frederick Douglass the great black abolitionist runaway slave who said in his first of several autobiographies education is the pathway from slavery to freedom so I'd ask both Gary and Gloria to reflect on where the great great grandchildren of those slaves are today on the pathway and whether race is still a barrier an obstacle along that path from slavery to freedom Gary it's a long path and it's really more of an escalator than a path because you have to get further along now to be in the same place that you were a generation ago when Brown was decided less than a fourth of black students in the country were graduating from high school obviously we've made big gains in that respect when Lyndon Johnson came to office there was no college scholarship program at the federal level we made big gains in that respect when we in nineteen states there were legally separate higher education institutions for African-American students in the middle 1960s night when President Kennedy said the civil rights bill to Congress in 1963 99% of black students in the south were still in segregated schools the south was defying Brown straight up we had a revolution in the middle 1960s with the civil rights act voting rights act and the Johnson administration's commitment of very powerful political resources to actually changing things and the truth is that the south changed apartheid was ended by apartheid by law there still exists in some ways education expanded there was actually a brief period in the middle 1970s on African-American Latino students who went survived high school were equally likely to go to college at that point we were expanding college opportunity we were expanding financial aid and we were expanding affirmative action that was a brief period it hit and that and the course we expanded federal aid education with the first national big prep program and title one 1965 we created under the poverty program work study upward bound many important things head start we had a title wave of innovation and concern and the march on Washington was called the march on Washington for jobs and freedom there was a tremendous amount of economic mobility that happened during that period we then hit the the Reagan era when which all of those things were reversed in important ways we cut back on funding we transformed the Supreme Court to become an enemy of civil rights by the end of the Reagan and Bush years we went backwards on no civil rights enforcement was done really there was this preposterous notion put forward by the Reagan administration that it was just as bad to work consciously for integration as it was to work for segregation you should just pretend that race didn't even exist well they have five votes on the Supreme Court who have been implementing that policy like policy of colorblindness gaps open segregation revived middle 1990s the Supreme Court said segregate desegregation is temporary just a temporary punishment you can go back to segregated neighborhood schools almost all of our big cities under court orders except some of the very courageous and creative ones like Louisville it's in the house right and they've gone backwards our magnet schools have been segregated we've created a gigantic system of extremely segregated charter schools with no civil rights policies attached to them we're in a bad situation access to college which right now we have to think about education not just as K to 12 but as P to 16 because preschool is very important good preschool and college is necessary you can't be in the middle class unless you have post-secondary education now we're creating a lot of barriers to college financial barriers we're not keeping our aid programs high enough to make up for those barriers we're not building enough colleges we're having more and more selective admissions we got a lot of problems we were looking at data in California last week and we looked at who's in the top 10% of schools in our state because we have an extremely competitive admissions to the University of California and even to the California State University system in the top desalas schools are half of the Asian students in our state one quarter of the black student of the white students 4% of the black students is 3% of the Latino students if you look at the other end locked in the doubly segregated or triply segregated schools which are segregated by poverty and race and sometimes language that's where kids are who have virtually no chance of being ready for college and we accept that segregation and do nothing about it back the major court orders in California have now been dissolved and think that we can make everything equal just by putting pressure on those schools where all those kids with problems are concentrated and where we have all the newest teachers we have the least experience that's nonsensical and we have come we can we construct this colorblind discussion that just say it's your will all you need to do is wish hard and that if you if you say that it's hard and you say it's unfair and you say the structure is racist in important ways then they say you're making excuses you know that's not an excuse that's the nature of the society we have to face up to it colorblind solutions in a color polarized country don't work and we have to make that message very clear to people and we have to make clear to people what our objective is which is to have schools that are diverse and fair and really lead to something and to make all the changes that are necessary for that to happen sorry talk to a lot no so Gloria either building on or moving in a somewhat different direction does race still matter oh it definitely matters and I want to build on some of the things that Gary has said I think even more pernicious than than the Reagan is if you go back and look at the stuff that Nixon did yes you know we have documentation where Nixon tells his attorney general start filing cases to roll back brown and keep filing until we get a reversal so you see the the chipping away Millican and the San Antonio cases so brown is and Nixon tells his chief of staffs that it doesn't matter because African-Americans are incapable of learning we have this overall structure that basically is said this group of people is not entitled to participate fully in a society and one of the ways in which we ensure that is we make sure they don't have educated and that's been our history it was literally illegal for us to learn to read but then we turn around in the 90s and have people say oh black kids don't want to learn they call learning acting white well actually they didn't start saying that from their beginning they were told whenever they learned who do you think you are do you think you're white so it's an odd turning on its head the other thing I think is important that I'm sure all of you are saturated with this notion of the achievement gap and I have been arguing and arguing for the last six or seven years that what we have is an education debt Kevin Welner is here he and Prudence Carter just published a book which I contributed to called closing the opportunity gap so if you go back and look at the legislation around education from goals 2000 plan 2000 NCLB there's one moment in the Clinton administration where they add another standard and that standard was called the opportunity to learn standard in other words you cannot hold people accountable for things that they don't have an opportunity to learn guess which standard fell off the table so we've we've had this situation in which historically we have not allowed African-Americans and Latino students to participate fully in education and I know you don't want me to do a slide but I need to show a picture you're in control okay so if you would just show the second that well that's the book on that one so you can see here what high school graduation looks like for African-American males and those cities with the double circle some of which are represented here you know Milwaukee right have among the lowest performing large districts for black males so when we get up on the other end and say oh why don't we have more black teachers well it's pretty hard to be a teacher if you don't graduate from high school I you know and so I think you know Gary talked about the the entire p16 pipeline I'm actually looking at some data right now on what's happening at the college level the 468 top tier universities in his country are largely white and Asian the three thousand two hundred and fifty two year four year lower tiers schools are black and Latino they are overcrowded they are under resourced and you are less likely to graduate from one of these you're more likely to have to work while you're doing it and so the system is unequal all the way through add to that the issue that the economy has changed immensely when I came out of high school I would say and I went to a good high school in Philadelphia I would say about half of us went on to four-year colleges another segment of us went into the armed services which was a at that time a good deal and in another segment went straight to the workforce into good paying jobs with which they could raise families by homes and live quality lives that no longer exists so the post-secondary experience is mandatory and yet the kind of post-secondary experience that you are likely to receive is really racially determined one of the things that we've been looking at since we submitted a brief to the Supreme Court in the in the Texas case was the probability of students going to selective colleges and universities because that's what affirmative actions about black students who graduate from high school have one-fifth the chance of going to a selective university than white students do Latino students have one third the chance you know this is with affirmative action and affirmative action of course is under threat but you know we're we're falling behind badly many many colleges are no longer need blind and admissions and truthfully the Pell Grants frozen it's going to be a larger and larger financial gap every year and if you look at families now after the great recession the average black family had one-nineteenth the end the wealth of the average white family had one-sixteenth the Latino family had one-sixteenth the wealth of third of black and Latino families have no net worth how are they going to provide resources for college we have to think about supporting kids we have to think about having a path to college that actually works both in terms of preparing students and in terms of making it possible making it financially possible for them to go because we were really going in the wrong direction on these issues we have a level of education that is as necessary today to be in the middle class as high school was at the time of Brown and it's not accessible you know without families being able to make substantial contributions and many families can't that's immoral I think to have an led level level of education that you have to have to have a chance through the middle class that you can't possibly afford if your family just doesn't have resources so a high performing low-income student of color has about a one-in-ten chance of going to and completing college and a moderate performing high-income student not of color has about a 90% chance so that might suggest that race still matters and it's so I want to I want to probe this a little bit more you both have referenced the role of presidential leadership or the lack thereof in the case of Ronald Reagan and Richard Nixon and as a native Californian I don't know why you're just picking on Californians but you know one of the things that I say is both of the two worst presidents on civil rights come from the suburbs of Los Angeles and all of Southern California is now 75% non-white in terms of its public school enrollment they have fouled their own nest well as a as someone who grew up in the Los Angeles public schools and was educated there in the 1950s and the 1960s I will tell you that their tracking of students of color and setting very almost impossible barriers to prepare for college you know is a rich tradition in Southern California and it affected generations of black and brown students who you know were didn't have the opportunity I tell people that I went to college at the age of 16 from LA high without graduating because my parents and grandparents forced the issue made sure I got into the college prep track but I can tell you and I took gardening of print shop you know all of the manual arts because that was the expectation and the school I was supposed to go to was manual arts and I knew that that was not gonna get me into college what about so presidential leadership matters how do you think how do you rank the leadership of this president in terms of addressing conditions of race and public education you know I'm a big supporter of president Obama I was out knocking doors in in Las Vegas before the election compared to the alternative it's wonderful to have Barack Obama and down there a few blocks from here but the education record has been very mixed and really disappointing to a lot of people who study schools where it was pretty good was that he in the beginning he put a lot of money into college scholarships I thought that was a very important move he put a quite a bit of money into community colleges now that they're losing that in the agreements that they're making in order to keep the country from going bankrupt with the idiots running the House of Representatives but his policy towards elementary and secondary education has been really really disappointing to me and the appointments that he's made many of us were hoping that the person who ran his transition team Linda Darling Hammond was going to become Secretary of Education which would have been a tremendous boost for the country the Democratic president since the Education Department was created have never named an educator as Secretary of Education then they named a judge under Carter a former governor under Clinton and a manager who managed the Chicago Public Schools for City Hall in Chicago we need a serious educator actually thinks about these issues running the Education Department but I think many of us think we've got basically the the Gates Foundation Broad Foundation agenda with Teach for America on the sidelines as as the other major source and we're implementing we're getting rid of no child left behind because its absurdity has been manifest to everyone as was predicted before it was enacted every state in the country would be now officially declared as a failure so they have to get out of it so they're negotiating these chaotic waivers and the waivers are requiring a new stupidity I think which is you know an inappropriate unproved method of evaluating teachers as part of the deal to get out of the waivers now I would have liked to have seen some serious work on issues of race and equality there's a coalition of 20 civil rights organizations and civil rights research centers that constantly go to the Education Department and ask for help in supporting diverse communities and we're creating some preference under these waivers for good more good public magnet schools instead of charter schools without any civil rights provisions and on and on we have had a very disappointing response from the Obama administration now it is true in the Justice Department and the Office for Civil Rights we have much better people and they really know what should be done but there really isn't any central leadership from the White House on these issues and now there's a lot of reasons for that and they are not doing the evil things that were being done under the Bush administration but it's much less than we could hope for Gloria I would concur with Gary and being one of those people out knocking on doors I sat on the Education Panel State Panel in Wisconsin for the campaign in 2008 campaign but it's not unpredictable if you look at the context in which the president came into office in 2008 economy in freefall two wars and his central agenda being a health care education was not on a radar and so it gets farmed out to someone he trusts but doesn't actually know what he's talking about I'm really frustrated with Chicago always being held up both in the Clinton administration and this administration as a success story one of these people been in Chicago please I can't figure out how Paul Valis keeps failing up I mean from from Chicago to Philadelphia to New Orleans to Haiti if I had that many failures in my life he's in Hartford now he's in Bridgeport Bridgeport you know so literally you know that the discourses that Chicago is quote fix it's not fixed it's in worse shape than ever before so I think it really I just don't think education was really on the radar in this administration I'm also frustrated with the way in which you know as Gary alluded to us it's actually stated that folks like Gates Broad TFA Kip have all decided they know how to do this better and there's no evidence that they do in our own my state of Wisconsin we have evidence that our voucher programs are literally worse than our public schools in terms of actual performance and what was the response well we just need to expand the voucher program I don't understand this logic I think we are in perhaps one of the most dangerous times since the Civil War literally about around issues of race I also want to point out you know you gave some statistic about likelihood of getting into college I don't wonder how many of you realize that 70% of African-American students who are eligible based on their PSA T scores for advanced placement never take an advanced placement course so this is not about quote affirmative action this is about basic fairness at this level where the students have no access to those things that will allow them to move forward in the society so rationing of rigor has been a long and cherished tradition in this country you know you go back to rigor in the 17th century was literacy and you know it was illegal as you noted Gloria to teach a black person to read in the 20th century rationing of college preparatory curricula throughout the country not just in the south but you know California everywhere rationing of that as if somehow or another this was a scarce resource that only the few and today rationing of college preparatory curricula continues now so I want to switch over there for to reform and but I want to begin there with this is reform which is gonna have the name of Barack Obama and Arnie Duncan all over it and they are too I I would say you know maybe there's probably a pretty good number of people in here who support the the president for reelection because of the alternative but they have a I would disagree with they have a very clear and proactive and aggressive p through 16 education agenda and Gary it's very much reform oriented and you know so let's just begin with the K through 12 part of that common core alternative approaches to certification and coming into the profession Charter schools now they I don't think vouchers are in their agenda but Charter schools very much in their agenda so I mean I I hear the critique but this is the landscape is changing and and so if the federal government is gonna approach this and you think there's an alternative what is the alternative and how how do you and how do you bring that to bear well if we take these things one at a time each of them has better and worse ways to do it if we do common core and there are things about common core that I happen to really like which is you know much better to have one or two pretty good tests than 50 crummy ones that can't be compared much better to have students focus a little more on advanced skills so that I can teach them in college rather than just learn how to recite things and and drill drill drill on basic skills you know there are things in common core that I really like now there are some real dangers in common core being implemented stupidly so you know basically I believe in opportunity to learn you should not be tested on something you haven't been instructed on that's immoral you should not be tested in a way that does not respect your linguistic background one fifth of all the kids in the United States are growing up in non-English speaking homes language matters a lot in the society now and I don't think the common core people have come to terms with how to appropriately test kids whose native language isn't English that's really important because if we start pushing people out because of that because I'm not thinking that through that's a shame and if we really use it to raise the standards without raising the capacity and we do it too fast we are going to be flunking more of the kids that we're talking about the ones that are in the lowest-design schools the ones whose families are poor the ones who have to move all the time because they can't afford any housing you know all of those kids are going to be they're disadvantaged already and they're going to be more disadvantaged so thinking thinking about how to do this and whether we use it for high stakes or whether we use it for diagnosis is another absolutely critical thing as far as using it for diagnosis and finding out where our kids are on things and trying to figure out what to do next to make them more successful I'm all in favor of that we're going to use it to retain them in grade which means in increasing their probability of dropping out of high school we're going to use it to not to deny them their high school diploma after they passed all their courses that's wrong that's really wrong so thinking about how to do this is really important and I just don't see any depth of thought on some of these issues if you do it in a colorblind class bind way and just assume that you can do it in every school right away without any preparation and that the chips should just fall where they may the chips are going to fall on the people that are most vulnerable and their schools are going to be punished another time so i want to probably hit these three things actually too because i think gary's done a great job of explaining the issue of common core so i won't go over that again but the two things that i think are sort of critical in this discussion of reform are the issue of teacher preparation versus alternative certification i have to tell you that uh i'm getting increasing calls from suburban districts uh i was always an urban district scholar but more suburban districts are coming because of their their changes uh and then last week i was here in the area to talk to the association of independent maryland schools so these are these schools where people pay believe it or not thirty three thousand dollars a year to go to high school i just can't figure out what you get for thirty you know for thirty three thousand dollars you better come to my house but what struck me what struck me is i i ask the question all the time when i go to these suburban districts how many of you have come into teaching through alternative certification zero so these are the teachers that are teaching quote are best kids i love jonathan kozol's statement if money is good for rich people think how much better will be for poor people if certification is good for the top students think how much better will be for the lowest students so this notion of constantly raising what teachers have to do in through the traditional teacher preparation programs at the same moment you have a back door that says oh you don't do any of that stuff you just you just need a degree in in chemistry that's crazy making and when the people on the main line of philadelphia the people in naperville or new tree in illinois when the people on whitefish bay in wisconsin when they start clamor for teach for america teachers then i'm a clamor for them but until they think that's the teachers they should have why are we boasting them on the least of these we have a really funny idea in in america that this is a zero-sum game we don't understand that when we help the least of these you invariably help everybody case in point none of curb cutouts on and on streets anybody who was able body didn't want that we didn't lobby for that but the disabled community pushed and pushed for curb cutouts so now we have them in every city guess who's happy they're there the way i travel oh i'm so happy pulling that roller board past that curb cutout that mother with the stroller she didn't ask for curb cutout but guess what really happy that dad who has a son who rides his bike and wants to stay off the street is really happy that his son doesn't have to jump a curb so you did something for the least of these but we all benefited it's the same thing in education it is not helping us as a society to continue to keep these kids in the outside of the workforce outside of productive citizenship then the the other point that reflects reform i think is this whole notion of well we'll just close the school that is the most bizarre thing i have ever heard of in my life i have been on six of the seven major continents i've only one i'm going to is Antarctica do you have any friends there tell them don't invite me i'm not going there but everywhere i go from the largest city to the smallest village people show me two things the place they worship and the place they go to school when you take a school out of a community you destroy it you absolutely destroy it and i can you know philadelphia is my hometown i live near chicago 132 miles northwest of it the idea that you know you can look at the numbers and say well we don't have money for this whatever happened to all these smart people who thought about something like multi-use building you don't have to just have a school in the building you can rent space you can do other things but the idea was that these kids don't deserve it just just let's close the school um and at the same time in chicago what we're seeing is now the management companies are coming in and saying oh no we'll open that school so they're going to be kip schools in what used to be public schools in chicago and we're going to pay those people to do it when we already paid tax tax dollars for you to do it i think one of the conversations i had uh with one of the um conferees yesterday was about the degree to which many of these superintendents are happy to let somebody else do the work okay my fundamental question is if you're going to let the management company do it why why do we have you why are we paying you how do you justify your job if you're willing to give it to somebody else on the teacher issue there's a central concern that i have which is basically that the best most experienced teachers are in the the richest most affluent places in our country and the brand new teachers with no experience and from the not great teacher training institutions and so forth are in the schools that have double and triple segregation they're in the schools that have tremendous turnover of students and staff and very little stability and those schools are being constantly sanctioned as failures how do we how does our policy relate to this i believe that one of the real tragedies of no child left behind is that it made life so unpleasant for teachers in the in those schools that were struggling the most and under warnings or under sanctions that it accelerated the departure of qualified teachers and administrators and and it lessens the likelihood that they'll even start a career in a school that's under those kinds of pressures and it forced them to teach in a rigid way with no imagination and to focus only on the test i think that that has been a tragedy and i think that what i worry about about the waivers and the you know the added value added model is that it's going to do the same thing again that your teachers are going to have a tremendous incentive to go to the places where the kids are ready where the peer group is vast where the instruction is advanced and where your kids are going to add a lot of value to your test scores um you know and that's going to be we have to think about a set of policies that do the opposite let's say that if a teacher goes to a school that really truly needs her or him they're going to be respected and what difference they make is going to be honored and rewarded and they're going to be treated like adults and they're going to be permitted to teach off of a narrow curriculum an extremely narrow curriculum and their work is going to be valued and praised you know we have to think about that and what teachers and principals are doing is rational in terms of this crazy system they're going to someplace where they can survive um we need to think about how to get them in the places where they can really make truly great difference because we know that good schools make a bigger difference for kids from really poor families with few educational resources than they do for affluent kids who almost always turn out no matter what because they've got so many other resources in their lives and such a rich group of peers and so forth so think about the fact that these two reforms which are made to meant to raise the quality of teaching have a tendency to put the best teachers even more in the schools where they're the least needed and to drive them out of the schools where they're most needed that is a terrible terrible policy dilemma we can come up with a much better solution to that and i want to switch and and bring the audience into this conversation but i'm concerned and let me just i know you they didn't say this in the introduction i'm on the board of teacher america and i'm on the board of the kip foundation i'm actively engaged in uh and by the way uh my son-in-law who is a teacher america alum runs a kip school where my grandson goes and is doing and it's an exceptional school in atlanta so i mean i i i i put my most precious resource into that environment so i mean it's just all truth and and advertising up here but i'm concerned that we are both um there's a tendency here to reject and perhaps on very good grounds uh the quote unquote reforms but there's also a tendency here to either sugarcoat what is the status quo or to sort of create this notion that there was a time when something better was happening we talk about who's in the classroom or who's leaving the classroom uh 14 percent of the teachers in the lowest income schools only 14 percent come from the top of their graduating class so i mean that that you the the there's a you called the teacher prep programs mediocre uh so if if it's if if alternative certification isn't good if drawing young people out of the tops of their class to participate in teacher america and about 40 of them will remain in the profession that's not good oh what what i mean you want to challenge my facts but but what what is what is good uh what is the better approach let me jump in here because i think one of the places where we often get bogged down is we're trying to fix something way up here that we didn't fix way down here i mentioned this to gary coming in there are two bottom line issues for me that we have never addressed one is we never fully desegregated these schools never never we never did that secondly we never funded them equally so those are the two bottom line issues for me please don't talk to me about the curriculum and all these other pieces until we say we're going to follow the law of the land and we do have law on these things of course they get they get rolled back so those are fundamental rights and there's rights is the third part of this right that we have not addressed so yeah you end up having these these things on the other end and i will say uh as a teacher educator on my campus the lion's share people who end up going to teach for america if you talk to them about why they went their excuse on my campus i can't say for all these other campuses is i could not get into the university of wisconsin teacher ed program because the qualifications were too high and they i got rejected from them so while it may not be true in other places many of our folks who who take an alternative route we didn't accept them in our program and i and i don't want to be an apologist for bad programming there are some bad teacher ed programs out here we have to acknowledge that i've had lots of teach for america students in graduate school at harvard and at ucla and a lot of them are wonderful people i mean they really are dedicated i have undergraduate students going in to teach for america um they really aren't as they work hard they get put in god awful schools lots of times they just don't know what to do i mean they have almost no preparation and almost all of them that come to talk to me about it say you know now i want to learn how to do it i was i suffered in this school i i did my best i don't think i did too much harm because i was working 18 hours a day but i really didn't know what to do um and i want to learn because i really do care about the kids that i got to know and i think in terms of teach for america the best thing that's coming out of it is some people who decide to become really serious educators um because they've been there and they've seen and they know and they know what the need is and they do care and they understand that a few weeks of preparation really didn't leave them prepared to do what the kids needed for them um so i don't look down on those folks they they're people who care they treat they're people who try and if they stay in the field they're people who decide they need to learn somehow i think they need to learn much better than going to some road academy or something like that because i think that's a very superficial kind of training but um you know we should try to draw draw those people seriously into the education profession the ones who really are motivated and smart and care and realize that they need to learn something from master teachers and so forth now the practical problem about teacher quality is that we have really not for produced a good career model for student for teachers to go to and stay in really disadvantaged schools and we are not doing anything to disestablish that extremely intense segregation by race and poverty and sometimes language we know from we we did this national survey of teachers from the NEA membership list and what one of the things we found was teachers leave schools as they resegregate they're leaving suburban schools as they resegregate teachers like stably integrated schools they stay there they really like them very positively why don't we try to create more of those most of our suburban rings are going through big changes now is anybody in your area trying to figure out how to remain successfully diverse by race and class those are good schools to teach in they're good schools for children they actually prepare you for the future of the society um why don't we have a policy to try to make support those schools and to try to keep them most of the black and latino families in most of our metros now or middle class don't live in the city anymore they live in the suburbs but they're being resegregated in the suburbs you know but they're being resegregated it's just it's by not because because as black people move and latinos move into those communities white people move out that's because we have absolutely no policy to stabilize those communities nothing is being done for them and there is massive real estate steering going on partly using test score data we have to address those issues if we're going to keep communities stable because when we do as you know I lived in Hyde Park for years I lived in in central square in Cambridge I lived in and Capitol Hill here in Washington where all my kids started school in the DC public schools those are healthy vigorous neighborhoods where everybody wants to live we have had almost no work on making more of those or helping the suburbs not resegregate we just published a book Harvard at Press resegregation of suburban schools look at it it'll tell you some important things to think about you know we can we have to figure out how to make really disadvantaged schools a tolerable and acceptable places where teachers are supported and given a chance to do something good without being hit by asinine policies you know a lot of teachers would like to if they were given support and rewarded for the difference that they make well you do have an opportunity right here in the district because whites are moving back into the city and you know the the big storyline here today is the reintegration of these schools now the question is whether they'll balkanize all over again I was in Denver a day before yesterday and you and the superintendent is you know bragging about the numbers of middle-class families that are moving back into central to central Denver but will they just balkanize into those neighborhoods where they are the majority well my kids all started in the DC schools and I know the DC schools you know their their DC is no longer majority black it's gentrified as a city but it hasn't reflected in the public schools or the charter schools and the whole new set of charter schools have been created with under a lot of pressure from congress the white house and so forth they're even more segregated than the public schools we've just been looking at new york city where the public schools are about nine tenths non-white the charter schools are virtually 100 segregated you know why don't we try to do something about gentrification that's positive why don't we try to draw both groups of kids back into the same schools you can't do it without having a plan to do it and telling people that you want to do it supporting those neighborhoods and drawing them in right now we we have gentrifying neighborhoods full of what they call dinks double income no kids we have the gave we have the empty nesters we don't have the families raising their children because we haven't thought through how to do the school part right it takes some brains to do that but it can be done it's a really good place for really good magnet schools public magnet schools that have an integrated goal and that speak to both sides of these communities and draw them into public schools we're just not putting our imagination into these kinds of possibilities they exist but we're not realizing them and some of the things we're doing are just making a bad situation worse and i think gary's point good quality magnet schools in most major cities such a school exists and white people will take buses subways and trains to get to them nobody has problems going to bronx science they don't care that's in the bronx it's bronx science people come in to whitney young uh in uh chicago people still go to central high school in philadelphia or low high school in san francisco because they know that these are schools that set their kids on the road to high quality post-secondary experiences so we have these little models um it's it's not just a pipe dream but we have not thought about how do we expand those ideas and as gary said how do we create the sort of stability that all families are looking for not just white families all families are looking for places where teachers stay where administration is stable and where they can be fairly well assured that their students will get a high quality education experience so we have a little more than 10 minutes left and questions from the uh from the audience so this gentleman right here you with beard there's lots of beards well all right wrong you with the beard okay go ahead all right uh yes um it seems to me that and i really appreciate the work that's been done to expand gaps from achievement gaps to whether we talk about education depth or opportunity gaps and so forth but i think that there's a step further that we need to go than to just look at deficits what kids don't have or aren't bringing if we define our solution by only the gaps we see versus the strengths that we want to nurture and desire we will have not defined our solution well and i i would talk about a little bit and hear what you have to say about how our 30 years with reform since a nation at risk and by the way when does something that's been done for 30 years become status quo it's not been successful the reform market-based style is the status quo when for 30 years has not worked all right is there a question here the question is how do we get a strengths-based capacity kind of approach to school where we literally are having more empowering engaging kinds of teaching and learning going on than ones that just get shown on test scores which is a merit-based system how can we use that as our way forward to be seeing our children as having strengths to nurture and develop and giving them the life-giving experiences develop all those rich capacities not just to improve on a test all right thank you gloria well i would say you know we don't want to fall into the trap of either or dichotomous thinking but on the same yeah on the same plane that we need quote preventative medicine you can't just do preventative medicine when people come in with diabetes you you you've got to treat that so it is a both and approach that we have to deal with the crisis in urban communities is real it's real and i know probably better than most of these kids have incredible strengths they have resilience but the reality is they are in deep poverty they have teachers who are less than well prepared to teach them they're an under-resourced school so despite their assets despite their strengths they are fighting real structural barriers we got to deal with both of these things let me say something about this um my firm belief is that in every neighborhood there's a kid who could go to any school in the world that has the genius the talent and so forth doesn't have the opportunity it doesn't never comes to a situation where he takes a grade level class with a challenging teacher that enables him to turn on when we did the city suburban exchanges in chicago and with public housing there were kids who were getting f's in the city who got a's in the suburbs because they were so bored and they were so frustrated so we have those kids we don't have a system that identifies and develops their talent and that's a shame and there are a lot of positive things about kids we have 20 percent of our kids know another language fluently that's not a deficit that's an asset we're a country you know we're a country that is monolingual in a world that we don't compete in very well can't we figure out how to use that asset as an asset with the dual immersion language schools and things like that where we enrich the experience of the english speakers and we we treat the kids who speak spanish or chinese as really big assets because they are if they're used properly um why don't we think about things like that another thing pet peeve that i have is you know i lived in chicago for a long time chicago was a tremendous formative influence of jazz it was a huge place where gospel emerged as music it was a place of tremendous creativity and the creativity was in the inner city it wasn't in the suburbs and we take those arts those things that really motivate kids the creativity and we take it out of the schools all together and we just drill them constantly that's a sin against our culture and that's a sin against those kids it's telling them that something that they know doesn't exist and doesn't matter one of my daughters taught in an inner city school in boston and she said dad these kids say they can't remember anything but they know 300 raps you know as soon as something's on the radio they've memorized it can't we figure out how to use that that's a talent can't we can't we figure out how to cross those lines and use that capacity um gary there's a perfect setup for me perfect so she's going to another i'm going to show you i'm going to show you a kid from milwaukee who has combined it's two minutes who's combined who has combined uh science and that artistic ability he asked a question about assets i tried i'll never get on panel this wasn't rehearsed our ovens with windows and as the knob on global warming increases lives are preheated until a soul inflates pancakes that projects are poured over with a humid as thick as molasses heat and humidity are the perfect appetizer on death's plate it's an all-you-can-heat buffet from made of october and senior citizen discount is every day if the mommas can measure temperatures they should be able to measure human anxiety as the temperature rises we reach boiling points attitudes of those around us rise quicker than mercury and the pressure of staying cool causes us to explode compressed living complexes circulate heat and cause compressed feelings to converge upon our neighbors in the hood so that 90 percent release of excess body heat talked about in science class has contributed to our local temperature rising we crack open fire hydrants until we hear lights crying raising taxes by lowering our body temperature and if you couldn't afford a wind replacer fridges and freezes were propped open until your two brothers faces are frozen audiences applaud the ice cream man once that familiar jingle mingles with our ears this sweet release of flooded heat is a godsend but what do you know the ice cream vendor's name is noah as the temperature rises so do attitudes death rates bills and ice cream stocks heat affects the elderly more than it does us their lungs resemble the dow exchange rises and drops until they crash ambulances are summoned riding down the street flooded with the contents of the only fire hydrant we have only just begun to fry just want to tell you the upside to that story we offered that kid a scholarship and at the university of wisconsin and he's an environmental studies major it was his art was understanding the melding of the art was science that we said that's the kind of kid we're looking for all right we've so harry it says three or four more questions yes right here i'm here as a hybrid educator i've been a public school teacher and a college teacher most of my life but the last 13 years i've been an adult educator when we look at the numbers of dropouts i waited in 2012 during uh barack obama's state of the union speech i waited for him to talk about adult education he was a community organizer in chicago he had to have worked with a lot of the dropouts what are we doing about them when they do drop out they they still need everything that we've talked about here today we did a book called dropouts in america some of you might be interested in it and we held a national conference up until the early 2000s almost all of the dropout statistics in the united states were fraudulent they radically underestimated the number of dropouts we now kind of know how big it is and we know where they are they're in about 2000 high schools in the united states um um professor balfan said johns hopkins has identified them as the dropout factories of the country they're almost all segregated high poverty urban schools except for some schools in the rural south they are one of the costs of the tremendous isolation we have for these kids and we really don't once the kid dropouts drops out we don't do much about it people don't know there was a title in no child left behind about dropouts it was because of some of the studies we did in the early 2000s we were in gallbladder helping write the dropout accountability into to into no child left behind it was gutted by the bush administration they did nothing about it they asked for a zero appropriation for the dropout title there is no significant funding for adult education or for dropout prevention there's a lot of kids who are close enough to graduating who could graduate if they don't drop once they leave school bringing them back is extremely hard now what we're doing is we're raising the standards on the gd so that it becomes harder to pass i just think that we've neglected we've written off people who dropout or on the path to dropout and we can tell who's on the path to dropout in ninth grade we need massive ninth grade interventions we need summer tutoring programs we need credit recovery programs and we need a last second chance we need education programs in jail since we're sending so many of our kids to jail this and we need we need federal funding for students who are in jail exactly education exactly i mean what are these kids supposed to do when they come out of jail they can't be employed really there's no full-time employment for them there's no welfare for young men if you have no job and you have no income um and there's no welfare program for you you're going to live off as a predator you know there you don't have any real choice we have to have a different choice a better choice than that and we have to support it seriously it's unconscionable the number of losses that we're taking especially in young men of color across this country i'd add one point to that and that is that if you add to people who haven't completed the people who haven't completed college who have some college and haven't completed it's about 35 million americans who fall in that category and so that this issue of adult education is really broader than high school dropouts i mean we have people whose lives would be materially changed if we had policies which drove more of them to pursue education and uh you know the fact of the matter is that that's a very large adult population which is utterly underserved right now i saw a question we have a we have a question back here already with the mic yeah two questions do you believe there's a policy role for differentiated pay in attracting teachers to the most challenging schools and secondly does having a teacher of color matter for the achievement of minority students that's two very different questions all right so i'll speak to the second one you want to take the first one okay i think that we don't have conclusive evidence that differential pay makes a big difference but i do feel that teachers who are making a difference in really disadvantaged schools should get something expert extra and teachers who can make the language differences into an asset also i think our teachers who are very important in this time i know that this is a problem in any union but i think it's something that's worth thinking about i don't expect it's going to make a huge difference there's a conservative economist who's kind of run the numbers down in texas and he says he thinks it would take at least 25 000 a year to keep really good teachers in very disadvantaged schools nobody's talking about any incentive like that but i think some recognitions and some rewards both financial and and just plain rewards and recognition in the community of of the profession are important for teachers who take on extraordinary jobs and stick with them gloria and i want to take on the question of teachers of color for students of color i would argue that all students regardless of their race or ethnicity need to see a teaching force that more accurately reflects the country who are in most danger of not being able to deal with the human relations issues that we confront as adults are white students who have only seen white people in authority and white people as their teachers we see it all the time at the university we have a large number of international scholars who teach particularly in our stem fields and the the resistance to our scholars from korea or the the arab world or all parts of asia is just unconscionable because these students have not been in classrooms with people who are look different than they are are in authority so yes it it would be helpful for students of color but it'd be even better for for all students to have a more diverse workforce final question right here wow the pressure's on yes julian vasquez highly guti austin uh first want to say that this uh this new rising next generation of academics were of course very inspired by gloria and gary my question is about what do we do when the data doesn't actually line up with the ideology so for example my own peer reviewed research on kip in texas shows that 40 percent of african-americans leave kip over the last decade that's looking at the texas data it's publicly available you can look at that and i've i've addressed that with mike feinberg or how about the fact that the mathematical study shows an effect of point oh seven which is seven hundreds of a standard deviation for teacher america when we have other interventions if you look at meta-analysis even haneshek's most conservative meta-analysis of class size reduction shows a point two zero effect which is 200 more effect than teach america if you look at um uh say pre-k there's 1412 percent more effect relative to teach america so how do we get that message out that sometimes data doesn't align with the ideal the current ideology i know gary's gonna give you the i i know gary's gonna give you the scholarly response i'm gonna i'm gonna give you the on-the-ground response if data changed people's mind al gore would have been the president the information i quoted about milwaukee's voucher program we had splashed over every newspaper in the state saying this program is not more effective than what they consider to be is worse school system nps is not more effective and yet the governor had no problem pushing forward the expansion of the program i wish data mattered in this way it matters to us but it doesn't seem to matter to the powers that big gary yeah i think that one of the most amazing thing is this we've been doing the same basic kind of high stakes assessment reform for 30 years it clearly has not worked you know both of the the goals 2000 and the nclb both ended in disaster without meeting any of their objectives and so what people are saying is let's do more of that stuff when liberal policies come you know policies like integration for example if it doesn't solve all the problems within a year or two they say that failed we tried that and that failed but if it's a policy that's kind of ideologically backed they just say well if it didn't work let's do it try another 30 years let's do it in deeper um but data does matter sometimes and i think preschool is a good example preschool is partly on agenda now across the country because james heckman a Nobel winner in economics at the university of chicago has come up with some very good data that says high quality preschool can change your life and people are listening to that and data can be very important in a situation like that especially if it's that powerful and done from that powerful opposition i think that's one of the reasons we are talking really seriously about preschool and we're talking about preschool at a higher quality more professional level and i think we will have more preschool at a better level as part of our future because it's something that doesn't have a real ideological dimension it just makes pure sense and there is data to back it up and the fact that there is data is helping persuade legislatures around the country to put some money behind that data so let's give this great panel a hand