 Good morning. I'm Michael Foyer. I'm the Dean of the Graduate School of Education and Human Development here at the George Washington University on behalf of my great faculty and staff and students. It's a pleasure to welcome you. My first assignment is to introduce a great American statesman, Congressman Robert Bobby Scott, who has represented Virginia's third district, which includes, I am proud to note, the GW campus in Hampton Roads, Virginia, since 1993. Congressman Scott is in his 13th term. He's the first African-American to be elected to Congress from the Commonwealth since Reconstruction, the second African-American to be elected from Virginia. Congressman Scott, we are so honored to have you with us today. And the last thing we want is to keep you from the work of restoring sanity and civility on the hill. So I'll keep the introduction short. Please welcome the distinguished Congressman Robert Bobby Scott. Thank you, Michael, for your very kind introduction and certainly a pleasure to be here. But when I looked at the program, I was reminded of the old man that survived the Johnstown flood and he was a child when it happened and he grew older and older and liked to tell the story. And as he got older and older, he noticed that there were fewer and fewer people who were alive at the time who could actually validate the facts. And he took full advantage of that that flood grew and grew and grew when he died. He showed up at the pearly gates and said, Saint Peter, I'd like to tell the story about this flood. And he said, okay, we'll listen to it and got everybody together. And he said, now, when you tell this story, remember that Noah is in the audience. I looked up. I'm supposed to talk about the Colonel report. And on the program, you've got two people who actually wrote the report. You've got, I'm supposed to talk about education. You've got Linda Darling-Hammond, one of the premier experts in education across the nation. You've got the Economic Policy Institute who give me all the information I've got on on jobs and other economic stuff. I'm supposed to talk about civil rights. You've got the chair of the Civil Rights Commission. You've got Mark Maurer here. You can't give a coherent talk on criminal justice without citing some of the statistics that he developed. And finally, you've got William Barber on the program who is the premier voice on the morality of public policy. And so I feel like that man, after being told that Noah was in the audience. So in that context, let me say a little bit about what Congress is doing, about education, criminal justice and jobs. Fifty years ago, President Johnson charged the Colonel Commission to consider three questions, what happened, why, and what can be done to prevent it from happening again. And so the Commission began the analysis by concluding that the root of the disparities in education, income, policing and other key areas was in quote, the racial attitude and behavior of white Americans towards black Americans. Five decades later, the old saying that rings true that we've come a long way, but we still have a long way to go. Progress has been made, but there still remains persistent gaps in education, the workforce and criminal justice. These gaps are due in part to the unfortunate choices made by the federal government when funds were diverted from the successful great society programs to fund the Vietnam War. More things changed, the more this stayed the same. Just a few days ago, Congress made a policy choice to pass a 1.5 trillion dollar tax cut where 83% of the benefits go to the top 1% in corporations. The President's budget shows how it's going to be paid for, tax cuts going to be paid for by cuts in education, jobs, and safety net programs. In education, the Colonel report made several recommendations, including elimination of de facto segregation through substantial federal aid, revision of state aid formulas, and the vigorous enforcement of Title VI of the Civil Rights Act. There's been progress as a result of federal investment in education, primarily through Title I funding. We have seen that high school students are graduating at the highest rates ever recorded. Dropout rate is historic low, and the greatest progress has been made amongst students of color and low-income students. Nevertheless, in 2016, the GAO confirmed that educational achievement gaps persist, and segregation is about as bad as it was decades ago and getting worse. Our nation schools are re-segregating by race and class and getting worse, not better, at an alarming rate. We've attempted to address the Colonel Commission's report by working to pass, about two years ago, the Every Student Succeeds Act, ESSA, or ESSA, which reauthorized the Elementary and Secondary Education Act and replaced No Child Left Behind. The ESSA requires the implementation of evidence-based strategies to identify and eliminate achievement gaps, and it's up to the Department of Education to hold states accountable to fulfill this responsibility. We're obviously concerned about cuts in funding for the Civil Rights Division, the Department of Education, and the Department of Justice. Meanwhile, I've introduced the Equity and Inclusion Enforcement Act to address segregation in schools. The main provision in that bill is to restore an individual right of action so that individuals can bring civil actions and cases involving disparate impact based on race, color, and national origin. Under present law, only the Department of Education can bring these kinds of cases. With regard to post-secondary education, the Colonel's report recommended reorienting vocational education to emphasize work experience, training, and involvement in business and industry, and expanding higher education opportunities through increased federal assistance to disadvantaged students. To meet these goals, the House has passed a reauthorization of the Caldy-Perkins Career and Technical Education Act, which will transform the programs, making them higher quality and better aligned with academic and labor market demands. The House has passed the bill, and it's been awaiting Senate action. In fact, the House passed it in last Congress and awaited Senate action. We passed it again this Congress and was still awaiting the Senate to act. There's also bipartisan support for additional funding for apprenticeship programs. Regarding access to higher education, I'm leading the opposition to a partisan bill to reauthorize the Higher Education Act, the so-called Prosper Act, which incredibly is reported out of the Committee of Education and Workforce on a party line vote. The bill cuts grant programs, requiring students to take out larger loans and then makes it more expensive to pay back those loans. When President Johnson signed the Higher Education Act, he said something in effect that this bill will mean that any student in any state can apply to any university, college, or university and not be turned away because the family is poor. Here you're making it more expensive to go to college. As the richest country on earth, we have the resources to ensure that all students have multiple high-quality educational opportunities. You remember, I guess it was about two years ago, Bernie Sanders offered a program, Free College, at a price tag of $900 billion. A price tag so extravagant that most people just dismiss the idea as being fiscally irresponsible, $900 billion. As I said, we passed a $1.5 trillion tax cut. Nobody complained about that. $900 billion is .9 trillion. We had the opportunity to do Free College, but we chose tax cuts instead. Even if we don't do Free College, we have the resources to significantly increase the Pell Grants, support historically black colleges and universities, and come up with loan programs where repayment and forgiveness options allow borrowers to repay their loans without surrendering their economic freedom. In the area of employment, the current commission found that pervasive unemployment and underemployment are the most persistent and serious grievances in minority areas. In 2018, despite the fact that we have record low unemployment, the unemployment rate for blacks and Hispanics chronically exceeds white unemployment by a ratio of about two to one. The current commission recommended the federal government develop job creation centers, create new jobs, remove artificial barriers to employment and promotion, and vigorously enforce Title VII of the Civil Rights Act through the EEOC. In response, we could create jobs if we make the right choices. The $1.5 trillion tax cut, heavily weighted to the wealthy, is expected to create 300 and some thousand jobs. If instead we're chosen to put that money into infrastructure, we could have created 20 million jobs. At the height of the recession, there are only 15 million people unemployed. Now the rate is the number is below 7 million, so with that kind of money, we could have, if we had made a different choice, virtually eliminated unemployment. One area that needs to be addressed is unemployment, is unemployment about youth. There are about 5 million young people, 16 to 24 who are both out of school and out of work, and so we need to meet and meet to make sure that we address that problem. In the matter of vigorous enforcement of civil rights, we unfortunately are going backwards again. The Obama administration had a plan for the EEOC to collect pay data. The Trump administration has reversed that. The pay data right now, the employers only have to submit data on their employees, disaggregated by race. What they were looking for was add on the salaries. That would allow you to see instantaneously disparities in income. You're paying whites much more than blacks, men much more than women. You can't see that just looking at the number of people employed. Unfortunately, that regulation that was supposed to go into effect soon has been reversed. Again, we need to look at the budgets of the EEOC and the civil rights divisions of the Departments of Education, Labor and Justice to see what the anticipated enforcement might be, and so far, those don't look too good. On criminal justice with regard to community and policing reform, the current commission was critical of the aggressive patrol practices, the indiscriminate and excessive use of force, and expressly condemned moves to equip police departments with weapons of mass destruction such as automatic rifles, machine guns and tanks. The commission concluded that weapons which are designed to destroy, not control, have no place in densely populated urban areas. Bills to prohibit the Department of Defense for giving this kind of surplus property to local police forces have not been successful, and it just seems to me that if it's appropriate to bring in tanks and grade launchers and that kind of thing, then it's more appropriate to call the National Guard than the local police. Criminal justice policy in general is pretty easy to do, but you first have to make a choice. You have to choose whether your goal is to reduce crime and save money, or to codify a bunch of slogans and sound bites that might help politicians get elected, but only serve to load up the prisons, waste money, and do nothing to reduce crime. Unfortunately, politicians peddling poll-tested slogans and sound bites are winning, three strikes and you're out, mandatory minimum sentences, and if you can get it to rhyme, it's even better. If you do the adult crime, you do the adult time. That little rhyme has been studied at nauseam, and all the conclusions are that it will increase the crime rate. These slogans and sound bites have gotten the United States the number one in the world in incarceration, 20 to 25 percent of the world's prisoners, despite only representing 5 percent of the population. So many people in jail that their studies show that the incarceration rate is actually counterproductive. You're getting so little criminal justice benefit from it, but you're increasing crime by having so many children being raised by parents in prison, people with felony records can't find jobs, so much of the Department of Justice budget going to prisons that aren't doing anything that could have been put to better use to actually reduce crime. A lot of this policy has been exacerbated by the war on drugs launched by President Nixon and supported by just about every president since then. Now, because mass incarceration is not free, a lot of states have decided to change and make the better choice and go to things that will actually reduce crime and save money. Texas led the charge when their Appropriations Committee was told that they need to come up with $2 billion to keep up with the growing prison population, $2 billion, one state. Somebody said, well, if you spend about 10 percent of that on prevention, early intervention, and rehabilitation, you might not have to end up spending all $2 billion. So in desperation, they tried. Spent $200 million prevention, early intervention, rehabilitation, and they looked up. They didn't need to build any new prisons. In fact, they were able to close some of the prisons they had. That creates an interesting coalition. A lot of people like to save money. A lot of people would rather spend money on prevention, early intervention, and rehabilitation than waiting for people to mess up and then get into slogans and sound bites of what kind of sentence they're going to serve. And so based on evidence and research, I've introduced the Safe Justice Act that puts money into prevention to reduce crime before it starts. Police training, after you finish your debate about who's fault it was, what the police are doing, the answer is going to be police training. If you don't have money for police training, that debate was a waste of time. A bail reform so that people who are charged with crimes can get out on bail based on risk, not wealth. A lot of people with a couple of hundred dollars spend months in jail because they didn't have a couple hundred dollars. Other people can get out of jail because they have money. It ought to be based on risk rather than wealth. When you get to court, problem solving courts like drug courts, mental health courts, so that you can solve the problem rather than sentence somebody, wait a couple of months and then write back, deal with the problem and solve it. An end to virtually all of the mandatory minimums and drug cases, which is a major driver of mass incarceration. If you want to know how bad the mandatory minimums are, just look back at President Obama's commutation plan where he had a plan and was giving commutation to low-level, nonviolent, essentially first defenders who had served 10 years. He would consider them for commutation. Well, that sounds like a reasonable plan, except the first thing that ought to occur to you is how does a low-level, nonviolent first defender get 10 years to begin with? Well, more than 10 years, because at 10 years they still need help. Well, that's because the judge had no discretion but to impose draconian mandatory minimums. If you get rid of them, you can save a lot of money. Prison rehabilitation, rehabilitate everybody in prison and second chance programs after they're out. The savings and mandatory minimums can more than pay for all of the things that cost money like prevention, police training and all of that. Elimination of mandatory minimums can pay for those. Now, there are other bills pending, but because some increase and then decrease mandatory minimums, others decrease and then increase other sentences, it's hard to see exactly what they do. But I would recommend, as you look at all these alternatives, to look at four things. What is the impact on mass incarceration? Get a CBL study and score and see what how many people fewer or more will be in jail as a result. What do you do for racial disparities? Do you make them better or worse? How do you fight the war on drugs? Is it like we're fighting opioids with the public health approach or like crack from a criminal justice approach and lock them up? And finally, are you using evidence and research or slogans and sound bites to develop your bill? You'll find that some of the popular bipartisan bills will fail on all four measures. Now, finally, on criminal justice, we have to do something about juvenile justice. A house is passed, a juvenile house and Senator both passed juvenile justice and delinquency prevention reauthorization. There's one little glitch that we can't get through the Senate and that is elimination of the valid court order where you through a back door actually lock up status offenders. Status offenders are those who are in offense, that is only an offense because of the status as a juvenile, like delinquency, underage drinking and that kind of thing. There is no reason to put somebody in jail for those kinds of offenses and we're trying to eliminate them. In closing, I would note the observation of Dr. Kenneth B. Clark, the distinguished scholar and psychologist who said to the Colonel Commission, I read the report of the 1919 riot in Chicago and it is as if I were reading the report investigating the committee on the Harlem riot of 1935. The report investigating committee on the Harlem riot in 1943, the report of the commission on the Watts riot. I must again in Canada say to you, the members of the commission, it's kind of like Alice in Wonderland with the same moving picture re-shown over and over again the same analysis, the same recommendations and the same inaction. It's my hope that today's report healing our divided society will get us off the hamster's wheel and it will propel us to actually address and eliminate the racial disparities outlined in the Colonel report 50 years ago. Thank you very much. Thank you Congressman Scott. Words of wisdom, inspiration. Thank you so much for your service to our nation. Well, we have a busy day ahead so I promise to be brief no matter how long it takes. I want to start with a special thanks to our staff here at GW who have helped so much in organizing the logistics for today. Turan, Victoria, Jenny and their team, let's thank them please together. We are here to commemorate, celebrate, contemplate and most important to commit. We commemorate the 50th anniversary of the Kerner commission report, its extraordinary architects and its noble vision. We celebrate the progress limited though it may be that our nation began to make toward addressing the problems enumerated in that report. We contemplate the challenges we confront in the face of overwhelming evidence of unfinished business and unfulfilled promises and the work that awaits us if we are truly going to heal our divided society. It is fitting to hold an event like this here at a university devoted to the ideals echoed in the Kerner reports. Our education school, for example, is a tapestry of programs and disciplinary traditions, but the thread that unites us is the goal to prepare leaders with the knowledge and skills to advance the cause of equity and excellence for our country's gloriously diverse population, especially in our communities and classrooms with the greatest needs. The report released today provides stark evidence that many of the problems identified 50 years ago have not yet been resolved and that early gains have in many aspects been erased. Those data are certainly depressing, even to a congenital optimist like me, but I am encouraged by the powerful and perhaps audacious message of hope in the report, hope nourished by the determination to apply rigorous evidence toward the understanding and correction of our society's most vexing flaws. The philosopher George Santayana taught us that those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it, fair enough, but here's the thing, memory and knowledge of the sort documented in the Kerner reports are necessary for progress, but they are not sufficient without action. We must be vigilant, we must be ready, and we must be together. So we need to move from contemplation to commitment. If we want a better way, we must find fuel and sustain our collective will. It is not a task for the easily discouraged. Martin Luther King taught, every step toward the goal of justice requires sacrifice, suffering, and struggle. The tireless exertions and passionate concern of dedicated individuals. It is my pleasure now to introduce three truly remarkable Americans whose lives and work have been models of tireless exertion and passionate concern. First, the great former senator from Oklahoma, Fred Harris, who knew that the riots of 1967 had deep roots and that we needed to understand them and who persuaded President Lyndon Johnson to establish what became known as the Kerner Commission. Senator Harris is a believer in the application of research and evidence to social problems. He is the author so far of 19 nonfiction books and also three novels and is a worldwide champion for civil and human rights. If you want to know what tenacity means, recall Senator Harris's words from 1972. A fair distribution of wealth and income and power ought to be an explicit goal of government. Please welcome Senator Fred Harris. Thank you so much. Thank you very much. The first novel I wrote, I was talking to a former senator and he said to me, I understand you started writing fiction and I said yes, and a guy with me said, I thought that's what he was always writing. You talked about persuading Lyndon Johnson to appoint the Kerner Commission and it had been announced that I'd introduced a resolution to create the Kerner Commission and had it sent to the subcommittee I chaired and we held hearings on it, had Daniel Patrick Moynihan, who wasn't then a senator and wouldn't a young head of the urban league come and testify in favor of it and then it occurred to me that the president could do that without waiting for congressional action and so I began to press for that and soon it was announced that he was going to make a statewide, I mean a nationwide broadcast to appoint a citizens commission to look into these riots and so we brought a television set into the living room out here in McLean Virginia where I lived and some people got some neighbors over to watch and about 10 minutes, not more than 10 minutes before he was to go in the air, my youngest daughter Laura who was then in the second grade came running out of the kitchen where we had a wall telephone and she said Daddy, President Johnson's on the phone for you, caused a little stir in the living room, I went into the living room, got the phone and I said yes sir, Mr. President and he said I hope you're going to watch television tonight and I said yes we are, he said I'm going to appoint that commission you've been talking about and I said well I'm glad I think that's the thing to do, he said I'm going to put you on it and I said well I hadn't expected that but I'll work at it, he said and another thing he said Fred don't you be like some of your colleagues, I appoint them to things and they don't show up and I said no I'll show up, he said one more thing Fred, I said yes sir, he said I saluted when I said yes sir, he said I want you to remember you're a Johnson man, I said yes sir I am a Johnson man, he said if you forget it I'm going to take my pocket knife and cut your blank off he did not say blank, I went back into the living room and they said what do you say what do you say I said well some of it was kind of personal, Johnson thought unfortunately Johnson and sadly Johnson thought I did forget I was a Johnson man you know he rejected our report misinformed about its contents and himself terribly preoccupied with the Vietnam War he rejected our report would not meet with us to receive it and that I think was very sad especially sad because of the fact Johnson did more against racism and against poverty than any president before or since well I've been honored to work with Alan Curtis and the Eisenhower Foundation in bringing the Kerner report up to date this book Healing Our Divided Society is a kind of Kerner report 2.0 and I just say basically it's about four things I could I could say quickly in a prefatory way okay number one we made progress on virtually every aspect of race and poverty for nearly a decade after the Kerner report and then that progress slowed then stopped and in many ways was reversed so that today as I'm sure you know racial and ethnic discrimination is again worsening we have we're resegregating our cities and our schools condemning millions of kids to inferior education taking away their real possibility of getting out of poverty there's more poor there are more poor people today than there were then millions more there's greater child poverty poverty is harder to get out of more poor people are in deep poverty than was true 50 years ago and income inequality is worse now and worsening that's the message of this book is that's bad for all of us and the book goes into a great detail of why that's true and it goes on to say that doing something about racism and poverty is good for all of us and the book goes into detail about why that's true but I want to just wind up by saying I'm heartened by several things that I want to mention to you and that we mentioned in this book one is if you look back to the beginning days of the civil rights movement under the leadership of Dr. Martin Luther King and people like John Lewis who I think is a living saint the things were far tougher then than they are now Jim Crow laws for example were the laws not just practice racism was at its harshest the odds were against them but still they resisted they persisted and they ultimately prevailed and furthermore the public opinion is on our side on all of these issues that we're recommending the polls clearly show that furthermore there is more activism in this country right now and I've really seen in my lifetime the women's march indivisible black lives matter people want to do something and they are doing something and then lastly Dr. King I think pointed us in the way we must go to try to put together the will and the majority to get something done you remember that he was engaged in the people's march it was just the beginning then and the poor people's march and also you remember that he was in Memphis when he was assassinated he was in Memphis to support a multiracial garbage workers strike and that poor people's march its slogan as you recall was jobs and freedom I think one of the great men in the country one of the great people in the country today is Reverend William Barber of North Carolina the leader of this new poor people's campaign and of the moral Mondays movement which is rapidly spreading and you're going to be hearing today from Reverend Barber but I agree with what he says we can't stay in our separate silos with as he says labor over here and civil rights activists over here we we've got to recognize that we've got common interests and if we get ourselves together we're a majority in this country and as I always say we don't have to love one another I wish we would all we've got to recognize is that our interests overlap and are in common and Reverend Barber is showing that that's true you can get people together across race lines and across other lines gender lines and so forth and make a difference and that's what I think gives us some hope thank you senator Harris by the way before I continue just as a reminder for you who want wireless connectivity the instructions are in your folders don't ask me how to do it I'm now honored to introduce Dr. Alan Curtis founding president and CEO of the Eisenhower Foundation who worked in the administrations of President Jimmy Carter and President Lyndon Johnson has continued to dedicate himself to programs aimed at reducing inequality poverty racial injustice fear and crime and to improving education job training employment and trust between the community and the police founded in 1981 the Eisenhower Foundation is a private sector continuation of the Kerner Commission and the 1968 national commission on the causes and prevention of violence dr. Curtis is a social scientist with degrees from Harvard the University of London and the University of Pennsylvania please welcome Alan Curtis good morning thank you Michael for your introduction and for being our host today I encourage you all to hang around senator Harris and try to have dinner with him he'll tell you some real lbj stories the best presentation today probably will be by our fifth grader but I first want to stage set the stage a bit more Tracy Felder and Leela McDowell have done so much to make healing our divided society possible I just want to praise them I want to recognize and honor red Harris and Linda Darling Hammond and all our contributors they've been noble and tireless partners our co-sponsors at the learning policy institute and the economic policy institute have worked long hours and I especially want to thank Barbara McKenna we are here today because of the visionary financial support of in alphabetical order the Casey foundation the Ford foundation the Kresge foundation and the open society foundations we will continue to speak out on healing our divided society throughout this year and next the essence of the 68 Kerner commission was that america had a long way to go in reducing poverty inequality and racial injustice 50 years later we conclude that america still has a long way to go but we have built up much more evidence on what works and on what doesn't work we now need to generate what the Kerner commission called new will among the american people to scale up and legislate what we know to work for the poor the working classes and the middle classes of all races over the 50 years since the Kerner commission we have twice elected an african-american president there has been a dramatic increase in the number of african-american and latino elected officials the african-american and latino middle classes have expanded and everyone has seen the movie black panther yet mr. coats as mr. Baldwin speaks truth to power neo nazis have become emboldened in charlottesville and many other places black lives matter has revealed what americans did not want to see in furguson and in many other places zero tolerance policing against people of color has failed sentencing laws remain racially biased 200 000 people were incarcerated in 1968 today the prison industrial complex holds 1 million 400 000 and they are disproportionately people of color in some ways mass incarceration has become our housing policy for the poor and that housing policy has included conscious purposeful government created segregation child poverty and public school segregation have increased since the kerner commission deep poverty has increased in part because of the failure of so-called welfare reform income and wealth inequality have increased and were accelerated by the supply side created great recession of of 2008 none of this has to be i'm we're saying in the book there is today a new movement to base policy on evidence not ideology in terms of current priorities that means for example we need demand side kainzian policy that links job training first with job creation and job placement in terms of economic policy education policy as as linda will describe in great elegance we need school integration combined with more equitable financing of public schools and more training of public school teachers in poor and working class neighborhoods across the nation we need genuine community policing the community policing should encourage community economic development corporations to build affordable housing the housing construction should create jobs framed as both employment and youth development strategies the youth development should scale up mentoring and life skills training for at-risk high school students the evidence-based models for doing this include youth build and quantum opportunities after school mentoring by neighborhood non-profit organizations should extend down to middle and elementary schools and all eligible low-income children should receive preschool essentially when you think about that the reality is that evidence-based policy that works is complementary and interdependent it is not separate and unequal the scaling up of what works needs to be financed by the scaling down of what doesn't work like supply side tax cuts for the rich and prison building for the poor criticized by the kerner commission in 1968 the media today need to better cover evidence-based policy and the media finally need to recognize that the real story is dog bites man not man bites dog with sufficient investment in human capital a new evidence-based kerner strategy can reduce poverty inequality and racial injustice in a way that increases american soft power globally and that communicates to russia china and the rest of the world how american values matter yet new soft power and new evidence-based policy cannot emerge without new political will 50 years after the kerner commission the creation of new will may be harder than ever to achieve but we must begin some see things as they are and say why we must dream of things that never were and say why not reverend king asked why not when he was assassinated in 1968 shortly after the kerner report was released his emerging vision was a multiracial coalition for economic justice among the poor the working class and the middle class that coalition needs to be the point of departure for the generation of new will today reverend william barbers poor people campaign against the immorality of poverty and inequality can help lead the way as senator harris has already expressed william barber cathard layman and joe stiglitz our keynoters today are striving to create new well to make gentle the life of this world and to remind us of the dream deferred what happens to a dream deferred does it dry up like a raisin in the sun or a fester like a sore and then run does it stink like rotten meat or sugar over like a syrupy sweet perhaps that dream just sags like a heavy load or does it just explode thank you thank you alan for any of my doctoral students in the room let me say that i have alan kurtis's email address and if you want him to be your advisor i'll broker it finally someone who needs no introduction about to be introduced by someone who needs all the introducing he can get linda darling hammond has been a friend mentor colleague and inspiration to many of us for a very long time i've known her since her days at the rand corporation i have watched in awe as she combines her passion for educational progress with her skills as a researcher at stanford in the national academy of education and now is head of the learning policy institute linda is the quintessential public scholar a tireless fighter in the battles for educational equity and social justice linda thank you for your work and for entrusting us here with this most important event we've had quite an overabundance of eloquence already this morning and the day is just beginning and there's so much more to hear and i stand between you and probably our most effective speaker so i'm going to keep this very brief in the 1960s civic activism was spurred by the civil rights movement by the anti-war movement by the horrors of ongoing police violence in our cities the assassinations of jfk medgar evers malcolm x martin luther king robert kennedy for those who were alive in the 60s and engaged in this work there was an overwhelming sense that change had to be made and in fact those changes those events did lead to tremendous policy changes in this country the investments in the great society programs the war on poverty in education the elementary and secondary education act the education for all handicapped children act were passed the desegregation assistance act urban teacher corps was created the national defense education act brought teachers into high need schools it was a transformative period of time and in fact it did increase employment reduce poverty significantly investments in cities created a renaissance in many places and we saw the outcomes of those investments and that's an important message that we can make a difference in fact the black white achievement gap shrank by more than 50 percent during the 70s and into the 1980s a college going for whites latinos and blacks was equivalent in 1975 for the first time ever before or since there was a tremendous improvement in the quality of urban schools and poor rural schools lbj was himself a school teacher before he became president went to southwest texas teachers college taught on the border and when he signed some of those education bills he did point out that he was thinking about the students that he had worked with at that time if we had continued on that path the achievement gap would have been closed by the year 2000 instead these policies were reversed in the 1980s the education gaps grew unequal funding of schools increased again segregation which had been declining increased again as desegregation orders were put aside poverty increased again in fact there are more poor children today 60 percent more children living in poverty than there were at the nadir of that poverty statistic in fact there are as many homeless children today as would fill all of the nfl stadiums on a sunday with children left over to sleep under the rafters right now about one in four u.s. children lives in poverty for the first time ever in our history most children in american public schools are eligible for free and reduced price lunch and that is the result of a set of power of policies that undid the gains that we had accomplished that have allowed and in fact even encouraged the resegregation the concentration of poverty and the inequality of resources that plague our our schools the situation we find ourselves in today which has so many analogies to the era of the late 1960s is one that needs to be reversed for the survival of the nation inequality in all forms including in education is america's achilles heel for all of our rhetoric of equality while we undid those gains many other societies around the world that were going through similar processes in the 1970s continued to move towards equity and so when you look at things like the pizza rankings of achievement across countries one of the drivers for the low rankings of the united states is the degree of poverty in our schools and of the heroic efforts that many educators make to deal with the trauma the the concentrated distress that that level of poverty brings we should take several lessons from this history that social activism can create meaningful change in progress and that such activism on behalf of a renewed commitment to equity is essential for our survival and success today as a nation our social compact currently is at risk if all young people are not well educated and supported to contribute to society in the 1950s there were 20 workers for every one person on social security today there are three workers for every person on social security i am in that generation of baby boomers who are aging and without every single young person being prepared to engage in productive employment to pay high taxes to pay for my health benefits and your social security we will not be able to maintain the social compact that is the basis of a functioning democracy in 2013 the excellence in equity commission for each and every child included this statement if hispanic and african-american student performance grew to be comparable to white performance and remain there over the next 80 years the impact would be staggering adding some 50 trillion dollars uh in present value terms to our economy more than three times the size of our current gdp this represents the income we forego by not ensuring equity for all of our students current activism as the senator noted provides hope black lives matter women's marches marches on behalf of the dreamers boycotts against guns efforts to support voting rights many new people running for office it is time for us to take up the tools of democratic action to heal our divided society and i am able and honored to represent that spirit of civic activism and introducing uh on behalf of our younger generation uh chanori kone if you would just come forward and i will uh i will meanwhile give chanori a proper introduction chanori was born in 2007 in houston texas she is a fifth grade honor roll student at gregory lincoln education center in houston independent school district she is the first place winner of houston's 21st annual gardare martin luther king junior oratory competition uh chanori thankfully believes in civic engagement in running for office and voting to change things she believes that young people who are committed to helping their community should be convinced to run for local state and even national offices because we need sympathetic people who can change things i hope that chanori will be one of those uh please join me in welcoming her look around you on your street in your city or in your country what do you see well i will tell you what i see i see people living in tents under the freeway and under bridges i see parents going to jail because they use their false address just so the child could get a good education i see people getting sicker and even dying because they can't afford the medical attention they need to stay alive in the years leading up to 1968 dr martin luther king junior looked around and saw these same problems it has been 50 years in the situation for the poor our education system and health care system having virtually the same the promise of dr king's dream of improving the lives of the poor and granting equal and fair access to education and health care has not been fully realized if dr king were alive today he would be proud of our country's achievements and civil rights he would marvel to see our first black president brock obama but he would be disappointed in our large homeless populations our failing schools and struggling health care system my dream for today's world is to eliminate poverty and for every human being to have equal and fair access to education in health in health care in april of 1968 dr king planned to hold the poor people's march in washington three thousand poor people of diverse backgrounds set up tents on the washington mall he wanted the top officials of our government to pay attention to the problems of poor americans he thought that the nation was more invested in the vietnam war than ending poverty and building up its people here in america and one of his speeches dr king said it is estimated that we spend three hundred and twenty two thousand dollars on each enemy we kill in the vietnam war while we only spend in the so-called war on poverty fifty three dollars for each person who is classified as poor my solutions to these problems are very similar to dr king's i want all of our top government officials to take poverty filling public schools and health care seriously the way to do this is to political action and voting like dr king said we must also realize that the problems of racial injustice and economic injustice cannot be solved without a radical redistribution of political and economic power well i believe we cannot change things with some of the current politicians we have an office now but like dr king i have a dream i have a dream that from the sincere caring people here in america they'll arise some young people who are committed to helping their communities i believe if we convince these people to run for local state and even national offices then we can vote for them and have sympathetic people in power that can change things if we can do this then we'll be the true realization of chanora's dream and dr king's i have a dream speech dr king said i have a dream that one day right here in alabama little black boys and little black girls will be able to join hands with little white boys little white girls and sisters and brothers well i believe only a few children who are joining hands are not hungry have had a good night's sleep in a decent home and have received the best education and the best health care then we will be able to say that dr king's dream has really come true thank you