The following program is a PBS Wisconsin original production.
We have to talk about that elephant in the room.
Racism has been a part of Wisconsin history since it began as a state.
Gosh, as white folks we have so much to learn.
History can help us understand why we are where we are.
Wisconsin in black and white is provided by
Ira and Aneva Riley Baldwin, Wisconsin idea endowment.
The Adley Family Foundation.
Joe and Mary Ellen Sensenbrenner.
Lau and B. Christensen.
The Evu Foundation.
The charitable arm of the Capitol Times.
Madison College.
National Guardian Life Insurance Company.
Point Health, Meritor.
Donors too.
The Focus Fund for Journalism.
And Friends of PBS Wisconsin.
Hello, I'm PBS Wisconsin's Special Projects Journalist Murf Seymour.
In a series of special reports we take an in-depth look at systemic racism here in Wisconsin.
Its history across the state is painfully complex and opens lots of old and new wounds.
In this first episode of Wisconsin in black and white, we take a look at history and the criminal justice system.
There are more black Americans in prison than white Americans right now.
That is and should be completely shocking.
It is apartheid.
It takes a society to look at this in a different way.
That's a statistic that I don't think any of us should be proud of.
Oh my God, this is such a big problem.
We ask the question, how did we get here?
Systemic racism means that within that society, you have factors about people's lives that you can predict the outcomes of their lives on a day that they're born, based on the racial groups that they belong to you.
Reggie Jackson educates people about diversity.
Racism has been a part of Wisconsin history since it began as a state.
I oftentimes joke with people that are called Wisconsin, Mississippi, because we generally think of racism in the south.
Lincoln opposed slavery's expansion, not its existence.
Dr. Christy Clark-Bajara is an author and she teaches African American history at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Systemic racism, much of it, is an extension of the creation of race-based slavery.
And race-based slavery was created through law, and that was done in the colonial period.
Jesus gave me some tough love.
Racism is huge.
Here in Wisconsin, and it's worse than it's ever been.
Milwaukee is kind of special. This is the Selma of the north.
When I go to other places, people don't even know that Milwaukee have black folks living here.
Is there black folks in Milwaukee? Yeah.
And they're being oppressed like crazy.
Not surprisingly, the highest demographic representation of African Americans.
University of Wisconsin law professor Ian Maine teaches race in the law, civil rights, and wrongful convictions.
White society is addicted to racism.
He has a lot to say about the racial climate in Wisconsin.
I don't know what makes Milwaukee the most segregated city in the United States.
It is. And I don't know what makes the practices in Milwaukee generate an over-representation of black people in prison, so that's the highest in the nation.
If you're a black person, a black resident in Wisconsin, you have a 12 times higher chance of being incarcerated than a white Wisconsinite.
History tells us the over-policing of blacks in Wisconsin and across the country dates back to the end of slavery.
When the 13th Amendment to the Constitution was ratified in December of 1865, most people never read what it says.
It abolishes slavery, and then there's a semicolon, except for punishment for those who have been found guilty of a felony.
It creates the ability for you to be back in slavery in a different form.
Something like Lordering, which had never been illegal before, becomes illegal.
Whistling in public.
Like, I mean, like that level of nonsense, walking along a railroad track, not being able to produce employment papers on demand.
You still a pig, you go to prison for life.
Instead of sending you to prison, someone who owns a plantation, or a mine, or some business who wants some free labor, they'll be able to come in and grab them.
And put you into that system so that you're not going to go to prison. Now you're going to go back and work for free.
Society says, oh my gosh, black people have a propensity to commit crimes versus what was going on.
Which was, they were arresting black people for committing no crime, and then sending them to slavery.
The small town of Appleton was once the center of one of the most racist tactics used across the country to keep blacks out of white communities.
Appleton doesn't really have any black people, and if you ask people in Appleton, it's just because black people didn't want to move there.
A lot of people lived in Appleton before the 1880s, and they attempted to join a growing community during the 40s and 50s.
But it was a sundown town through 1970, and enforced by the police.
Sundown towns were places that didn't allow blacks and other people of color after dark.
They were all over Wisconsin.
Nearly 250 in all, according to a database created by Washington DC sociologist James Lowen.
So black people can be there as workers that can come to fish during the day, but you better be out by night.
Some places had a horn that would ring in the evening when it was time for black people to get out.
Some places literally had signs on the side of the roadway that said, you know, after the sun sets, black people, you're now welcome here.
About that time, the prison population in Wisconsin and everywhere else begins to explode.
Six days of rioting in the Negro section of Los Angeles, after the watch riot, white people blame black people for the problem.
The response was a call for federal funding to provide a more robust policing of these areas.
We started to see this war on crime.
I'm aware that the current criminal justice system has a disproportionately large number of persons of color involved in it.
It makes me somewhat sensitive to hopefully being able to address the needs of that population in a way that is fair to everyone.
Former Madison police chief, Noble Ray, sits on the governor's pardon board.
The politics back then was tough on crime, tough on drugs, say no to drugs.
It was, you know, a zero tolerance approach.
You're not going to hire all of these police officers for them to sit around and do nothing.
It was billions of dollars.
Open the door, man.
It was changing the face of corrections and policing.
All of that money focused on those communities of color.
You end up with a disproportionate population that are under the criminal justice system.
If you live in the quote unquote hood and in poor areas, you are policed in a way that people in affluent areas are not.
And so you are just more likely to find yourself in front of a judge.
White individuals, their cases get dismissed at a rate 50% higher than the black individuals.
There's a higher rate of sentencing black individuals for the same crime and every part of the system.
By the way, there's a higher rate of black individuals for the same thing being sent to a higher level of security prison.
And then there's a higher rate of white people in prison getting good time credits than black people.
If you look at every part of the system, it doesn't matter where you look.
You're going to find these drivers of disparity.
Today, former Governor Tommy Thompson and others admit building more prisons was the wrong approach.
Now retired, Thompson is a passionate advocate for more educational opportunities for those incarcerated.
The increased crime indicated that we needed more prisons at the time, which I accommodated.
But every time I did this, I always tried to balance on the other side.
I was big on welfare reform.
I was big on workforce development.
I was big on expanding education.
In February of 1992, I had been expelled.
At age 15, Dominique received a life sentence for taking the life of Warren Smith Jr., an innocent bystander.
Dominique believes he and other black and brown teens receive harsher sentences compared with whites the same age convicted of the same crime.
When I was incarcerated, I only met one person that was white.
That was sentenced as a juvenile to life in prison.
They took black boys and said that y'all are black men.
And they punished us like men.
They didn't do that to white boys.
Not in their numbers.
They gave them help.
In Wisconsin, the number of criminal referrals was three times higher for black kids than white kids.
You got two or three generations of black parents who have been incarcerated.
The majority of people locked up are black and brown.
So when you got the majority of us locked up, you can't be a parent from prison.
So when that child looks for that, only place he goes to get it is in the streets.
So we need five to figure to step up somebody to be that I can call at two o'clock in the morning and say,
Murph, I'm locked up. Can you come get me or Murph? I'm scared. Can you come get me or Murph?
And when I disappoint Murph, that still is going to love me like Murph will love his own children.
In 2020, Dominique walked out of Oak Hill Correctional Institution after 28 years.
He says he doesn't feel free.
When I left prison in September, one hole was filled, but one wasn't.
A warrant can never come back.
And hug his mama, hug his baby girl.
I live my happiness and I live this life, but I never forget about war.
The goal is to prevent another dominate from killing another war.
Dominique is a former student of Odyssey Beyond Bars, a college jumpstart program at Oak Hill.
Peter Moreno runs it on behalf of the University of Wisconsin out of four institutions in the state.
We've learned through experience that long prison sentences, while they may be appropriate for certain crimes,
are not appropriate for a lot of crimes.
And long prison sentences combined with a lack of programming in the prisons can be especially harmful,
because we're keeping people in an environment where they're unable to learn, unable to grow, unable to socialize,
and then we're letting them go back to their communities, expecting them to do well.
Moreno encourages a closer look at the conditions of neighborhoods
and fixing problems leading to people entering the criminal justice system.
We know how to deal with many of these issues.
With a recidivism rate of just over 31%,
Ray says there are four support systems proven to help close the sometimes revolving door back to prison.
Do you have a place to live when you get out?
And is that place solid? Does it reinforce, does it support you?
Two, do you have employment, which is big?
Three, do you have the people around you that support you and that will help you in terms of doing the right things,
making the right decision? And the fourth one is treatment.
Wisconsin should be less worried about getting a bad rap and more worried about improving the lives of the people in this state,
who live at our communities of color.
In 2016, Supreme Court Justice Jill Tarosophy took part in a course called Justified Anger Black History for New Day.
Program is run by the Madison organization Nia Maya,
which focuses on strengthening the African-American community in Wisconsin.
Justice Karosophy says the course on racial disparities in the criminal justice system gave her a new understanding of how at times the criminal justice system unfairly impacts people of color.
This country was founded by white men who were well-intentioned and who created a system of the laws and the constitution that was built on the idea of freedom.
But back in the late 1700s, we know that they didn't mean freedom for all people.
Because of that, it has been the white majority who has been in control of so much of this country, business, of government, of the financial world.
It is going to need to be leaders in those areas that are going to have to help make the change that so many of us want to see.
Justice Karosophy says inspiration from attending Justified Anger led her to bring the Nia Maya anti-racism trainings to other judges across the state in the form of intense one-day sessions.
Do you think that we have too much emphasis on race these days?
No.
Most Supreme Court justices don't do interviews like this.
The reason I am doing this interview and I agreed to do it is because I think and I believe and I know and I see that it is a problem in our state.
And maybe if I stand up and sit here as uncomfortable as it may be for me, that that may help be part of the change.
One of the ways we can do that is to try to reach out to our colleagues of color, to mentor them, to learn from them because their experience is very, very rich and could be different than ours.
And then to help them succeed should they want to run for judge or should they want to ask for an appointment.
Secretary Karos says he sees a share from simply locking people up for public safety to providing more treatment, more education, more trauma-based care.
We have started to rely more on alternatives to revocations such as short-term sanctions and community-based programming.
And for instance like drug treatment referral for minor possession cases as opposed to sending that person back to prison.
Each of us needs to figure out what is it that we can do. If it's only one thing, then it's only one thing.
We really wanted to have a brick and mortar space like in the heart of the city where people could come together.
Short-stack eatery in Madison serves up a lot more than food.
Gosh, as white folks, we have so much to learn.
Its owner says their spot serves as an example of how to help equalize what they consider beyond even intersections of race and inequality.
We're definitely unapologetically trying to become less and less racist every day.
That's our goal.
We figure if we can unravel some of our racist tendencies and indoctrinations, everybody can.
At her restaurant, London Myers' job applications look different.
There is no box to check if you have a felony conviction.
The fact that we don't have a box on our application and we don't do background checks and we don't do drug testing and all those things.
For years, they have also routinely sent its managers to the Neomized 9-week Justified Anger course.
We have huge, huge systems to figure out how to disassemble and reassemble, and so it's going to be lifelong work.
They said 92% of our community didn't even know that there was a mayoral election.
Black folks can't do it alone. They can't do it without us. We're the one causing the violence.
Stop running people over here out in these streets. Stop shooting folks, man.
Yeah, they need to fix it. We ain't going to fix that, man. We're the hated ones.
We continue our reporting on race and the criminal justice system in Wisconsin.
We are here at Shortstack E.D.R.E. in Madison and we are joined by the owner of Shortstack E.D.R.E.
Alex Leonard Meyer and we've also got Dr. Alex Chief from Neomized Justified Anger Project.
And Carl Fields, who is with Expo, which stands for X Incarcerated People Organizing.
And he's also representing Wisdom, a faith-based group that operates out of the state of Wisconsin.
Alex, I want to start with you. You mentioned during our pre-inverue that you felt like Wisconsin business owners could do more to help impact the disparity that we see in the criminal justice system.
What do you think they can learn from some of the things that you're doing here?
And I'd love to hear what you guys have to say about it too.
People that are justice involved have so many things that they're dealing with.
So employers need to internally start having the conversation about what the criminal justice system even looks like now.
If you're not justice involved or you don't have a family member or you don't have an employee that's justice involved,
it's designed our purpose for you to not care, for you to not know.
And so employers really need to get educated internally about what's going on and what these barriers are that people are up against.
And then figure out how they can set up support systems within their culture and within their organization to make sure people get what they need.
And we know that you purposefully hire folks that do have barriers.
Carl, how does that help folks that are transitioning?
To know that there are companies that are sticking to what society intended for criminal justice to be is huge.
And that is tangible to say, yeah, all you pay to do is come on.
Not only would we like to work with you, but we'd be honored to because you got something you want to show.
You got something you want to prove.
And we're also creating an opportunity that that's a real job, you know, opportunity to give to somebody who is really in need of that.
And Dr., your organization runs a reentry program?
It does, it does.
And how do you see businesses being able to impact things?
If we want to attract large businesses to this community where, again, there's low unemployment, we have to help people who are in this community wanting to work, willing to work to become employed.
So one of the things that we do through our reentry program is we help find jobs for men and women, particularly men who are programming to find jobs.
You know, my vice president for entry, gentlemen, Anthony Cooper has placed over a thousand men over the past eight or nine years.
That's significant because when you come out of prison and you have stable employment, you can have stable housing, which means you can live a stable life in the community and it drastically reduces the temptation to recidivize.
So we have a responsibility to our own state's economy and to the well-being of good people.
We need them in order for our economy to be stronger in this community.
I'd love to hear what you folks think are some of the biggest challenges facing our criminal justice system.
When we talk about alternatives to whether it be a deferment program through the court on pre-trial or during incarceration or post incarceration, those programs, those options that come up are always met with a zero margin of error.
And that is so problematic to me because the current system and what it produces is not held to any sort of standard on that level.
But in fact does have a low effectiveness rate, but we can't seem to take some chances to try something else because it's not politically advantageous, always.
It's not classy, it's not sexy.
What role do you think our federal government and our state government, what role do you think they play in affecting the criminal justice system here in the state?
I think that these governmental agencies need to really own up to the fact that this criminal system is really producing what it was designed to produce.
This ugly, ugly cycle, it needs to be called out and dismantled so we can build something that's equitable and that really does rehabilitate.
The history of how systems were built and what they were built for, that plays out, continues to play out even to this day, 100 plus years later.
And that is a weight on any person who enters the system.
As an ex-knucklehead, myself turned professional, I messed up in life.
I made some poor choices.
But no one anywhere in the criminal justice system told me that felonies were going to be favored.
I've seen that the barriers just continue.
I've seen that no matter what I do or how much of a great effort I put forward, society is still allowed to socially acceptably mistreat me.
You could buy someone a house and send them a college for what it costs.
You know, at least put a down payment on the house for what it costs to incarcerate.
So what are we really trying to do? We have the money.
Are we locking people up when we could use resources or redirect them to really help people out of a hole?
I learned in my reporting the term crimeless revocations.
I'd love to get you to let our viewers know what exactly it means and how it leads and feeds the pipeline to prison.
The working definition of a crimeless revocation is placing a person into prison or placing a person back into incarceration for not having committed a new crime before technical violation or rules violation of some kind.
The way that plays out specifically is perhaps you bought a car and didn't get it clear with your agent.
You used a computer. You used a computer. You got married and then asked for permission.
I know that those are some extreme things, but I know folks who are feared for their lives or their freedom for doing things just like that.
But just think about this, the crazy numbers to Alex's point of people in prison are folks who have returned on technicalities.
We look at states like Oregon. We look at states like Washington that are putting huge dollars into programs of figuring out how to get parents things they need while they're locked up.
Figuring out how to get families reunited while folks are locked up, figuring out how to get families that have somebody locked up, the resources they need.
Our state has a lot of catching up to do for sure.
Minnesota has a comparable demographic to Wisconsin, but they don't incarcerate nearly as much as we do.
It really is big business. That's not just cliche. It's really big business.
Another learning process I went through in this reporting is I learned about language and I learned that I'm guilty of saying some things that aren't humanizing people.
How important is the language of incarceration?
When we're talking about felons or convicts or inmates, last I checked, I was a person and I continued to be that.
And so a person's first language is something that we've been driving on in this work that we do for quite some time.
It's the language that helps us to reinforce barriers. This person can't be trusted. I don't want you around my family.
You can't come to my church. You can't work at my job.
So it begins with even the language and again what it conjures in our minds about what this person is capable of.
But when you use those terminologies, you don't really think that they're really ex or former.
It's just you did some time, but you're still in that same place and that's why we keep that same title. We just put X in front of it.
I have employees that go to UW who are 19 and white and I have employees who are 45 on paper and we have some disparities, some differences.
And if we actually want to figure out how to make this a safe place for everybody to work, it's a lot of internal conversation about things like,
hey, you can't say convict. You can't say felon. Here's why. We got to figure out how we got here.
I can tell, I can preach at you all this stuff about the lingo and the language and why it's ineffective or what have you.
But until people have a basis or an understanding of how we ended up here, it's a mute point.
And Dr. Jeter, we get all Wisconsinites to get vested on this.
I don't even know if that's my expectation, but if I can have an impact on employers and their new employees or individuals who want to make a difference,
when you invest in people who want to make a difference, you trust in a ripple effect. But I've learned that if I want to live a healthier and longer life,
I can't keep beating my head against the wall for people who want to argue these points.
I need to take the time to invest in people who want to be allies, who want to speak out, and who want to make sure that everyone has judicial justice in their lives.
And so I try to invest in the people who want to be a part of the change and hope that at some point we will have an impact on Wisconsin,
but I don't go after the whole state. I just try to really work with the people who want to get it.
We have to leave it there. Thank you all for being here, Dr. G.
My pleasure. Mr. Fields. Sir. Alexander Meyer on behalf of PBS Wisconsin and our crew.
We appreciate you for providing a space for us to have this important conversation. And we thank you folks for joining us too.
In this episode of Wisconsin in Black and White, we take a look at the history of race and education in this state.
Educators and students weigh in on long-time challenges black and brown students face in the classrooms throughout Wisconsin.
And we hear about the work being done to increase opportunity and put all students on equal footing.
Look at how black students aren't doing. It is terrible.
Whatever efforts there have been by the federal government to create integrated schools have not worked.
Education is the kind of a defrito. We have a lot more work to do.
Wisconsin, we're a microcosm of the nation. We want to create change.
A conversation about race and education in this state.
It is a complex one. We've never given full education access to everyone.
Author and retired University of Wisconsin education professor Dr. Gloria Lassen-Villeings
travels the world learning, teaching and training people about education.
It's Thomas Jefferson who says, listen, we're not going to be able to maintain a democracy unless the common folks
are educated. It goes all the way to the Wisconsin Supreme Court.
Dr. Christy Clark-Bajar is a UW-Madison history professor and also works with the Madison organization Nehemiah.
She's an instructor in his justified anger black history for a new day course.
Nehemiah focuses on strengthening the African-American community in Wisconsin.
The nine-week course teaches people about race, history and justice.
She and Lassen-Villeings help explain why the playing field of education began to take shape
out of balance across the country, including here in Wisconsin.
The laws against teaching enslaved people to read actually come into play
after the founding of the nation in response to enslaved people doing things like forging fake passes.
Written by their owners, passes were required for slaves to leave the plantation for extra work or errands.
When we're talking about access to education, post-slavery, you just have cities, states and counties
not investing in the education of black people who are taxpayers.
They would have inferior school buildings, inferior materials, inferior books or no books, right?
The teachers were paid less and so it was an active disinvestment.
My father was functionally illiterate. His family was poor and he was sharecropping cotton most of his life
and his labor was essential to his family survival and the school that he could attend was underfunded.
During the Civil Rights era, Milwaukee was the epicenter of protests, demanding compliance to
education and continued segregation in schools.
We tend to think about the Civil Rights Movement like the institution of slavery as something that is uniquely southern and it was not.
While the U.S. Supreme Court's Brown versus the Board of Education ruling in the late 1950s
ordered all U.S. schools to desegregate, Milwaukee and other parts of the state, like much of the nation, didn't do so for decades.
The schools in Milwaukee are not in line with Brown versus the Board of Education until 1979.
The city of Milwaukee's public school system decided, well, we're going to do schools but we're going to build them on the south side,
which is primarily the white part of town, right?
The schools that black people have access to were severely underfunded.
What you saw in black communities was a continual kind of decline in the tax base and the ability to support public education in those communities.
A declining tax base due to declining property values and housing like this in Milwaukee.
Housing policy is education policy.
You go to the schools in your neighborhood and we tend to fund schools through property taxes.
Better than 60% of black and brown kids still go to segregated schools.
Schools of the Milwaukee metro area are more segregated for black and white students than any other metro area of the country.
That's comparing Milwaukee schools to those in the surrounding counties of Ozaki, Washington and Waukesha.
Whatever efforts there have been by the federal government to create integrated schools have not worked.
There are many white children who go to all white districts and nobody says, oh, this is a segregated district.
They say this is a good district.
If you look at performance, black and brown kids continue to lag.
Those students test below white students in math in the early grades and it's not just math.
It speeds over a hundred miles an hour.
If there's one indicator of how students will perform.
Reading proficiency is important across the races.
It's their ability to read by third grade.
And state assessments show that just one year later, in the fourth grade, reading scores for black and Hispanic students also lag.
The most revolutionary thing we could do is teach these kids how to read.
Educators across Wisconsin are working to reverse these trends.
At One City grade school in Madison, the focus on reading is key.
It kind of continues on.
Third grade teacher, Kirsty Blattner, teaches reading skills at this public charter where more than 80% of the students are black, Hispanic or multiracial.
Blattner is passionate about making sure her students embrace reading.
I have a deep passion for helping scholars that are struggling academically.
If you have a scholar that doesn't feel confident and comfortable with reading, then they'll find other ways to sort of mask that.
Because no one wants to be seen as not knowing.
Instead of, I can't do this, I can't do this yet.
Instead of, I'm not good at this.
What are you good at? Would you like to be good at this?
America has trouble talking about race, period.
Sarah Shaw researches education for a nonprofit think tank out of Milwaukee called the Wisconsin Policy Forum.
There's a trope in literacy circles that before third grade students are learning how to read.
And after third grade students are reading to be able to learn.
Think of how many of your daily activities become more difficult.
Everything from reading street signs to menus to engaging in the legal system or going to the doctor's office.
Education is the kind of a to freedom.
From grade school achievement to high school, where one superintendent can boast the benefits of a diverse student body.
We're approximately 35% students of color here in the Brown Area School District.
We celebrate diversity here in the Brown Area School District.
And we understand that a diverse clientele and the students that we serve allows us to be a better district.
Inside the district's signature $150 million high school,
the Brown Area School Superintendent Dr. Tremaine Clardy is straightforward about his commitment and obligation
to create equity for all students in his district, especially those that are black and brown.
It is our responsibility to move barriers, but never, never lower next expectations.
While recent statewide data shows a gap in the graduation rates of black and brown students compared to white students,
Dr. Clardy and other educators believe the difference in achievement has less to do with performance and more to do with something else.
Opportunity. It's definitely not skill. It's not intellect.
There's not any other internal barrier on behalf of our black opportunity. It's purely about access.
Opportunity and access are why this school has windows in place of walls and wide open common spaces.
We are modeling, you know, other students seeing that collaborative process.
We set up our furniture that way. We set up the classroom structure that day because you know the power of peer-to-peer interaction
and what that means to strengthen education.
What is that thing that's in you?
Meet guidance counselor, Carrie Hale.
There's no typical day in the world of a high school counselor.
In the spirit of strengthening education, in 2018, the district sent her and every other teacher to the Neema Justified Anger Black History IV New Day course.
We really had to get to the root and heart of the history of the systems that have caused barriers that we're trying to dismantle.
For Carrie Hale, it just fed me.
The course has been life-changing.
It's just grown in me over the years, and I realized at that time there was so much I didn't know.
It benefits me as an educator so that when I'm working with a student who doesn't look like me or their family speaks another language, whatever.
It might be that I can respect them and value them and see them and honor them for who they are in this space we're in.
I definitely struggled trying to figure out who I was, just like everybody else.
Senior Gerald Montgomery says attending this diverse high school has made him more culturally aware than ever.
When I came here, it was kind of like a cultural shock seeing not too many faces looking like me.
It's one of the reasons Gerald got involved with the school's black student union group.
It's just more like celebrating black culture which anyone can join.
The first BSU here, it was like small, like 10 people when I was a freshman, but now it's like 80s.
Just seeing like that group of black folks around me, I feel like that really helps keeping like that balance of me going through school and everyday life.
Gerald says he plans to go to college.
If he goes to a University of Wisconsin school, he'll be one of a few black students doing so.
Enrollment numbers show that in 1975 just 2.5% of students were black.
Nearly 50 years later, their numbers in 2022 still make up just 2.9% of enrollment.
Law professor Iain Maine believes the numbers should mirror the demographics of the nation's black population of about 14%.
I guess the 3% is that progress?
No.
We're not close to progress.
We're not close to even reckoning with our problem.
The UW Relief System lists diversity as a core value, and its five-year plan calls for boosting African-American enrollment to 15% by 2028.
College is an aspiration that is not afforded to all.
It's our honor to serve and be one of the only majority of minority institutions in the state of Wisconsin.
Dr. Iquan Burrows is the Dean of Students at Milwaukee Area Technical College, where more than half the full-time student population are minorities.
It's important that we level that playing field.
I look forward to being the mentors.
Dr. Burrows runs a mentoring program with about 100 black male students called the Men of Color Initiative.
The goals are to educate and empower students.
The program hopes to give students like Jeremiah Crawford a better chance to finish college and keep pace with other students who eventually gain their bachelor's degree.
I've always wanted to go to college.
My home life was in shambles.
It was rough having a father on drugs.
If that wasn't enough, high school was a point where I started to retreat into myself.
Jeremiah has something else that makes learning in life more difficult.
My sickle cell stood in the way.
He copes with the blood disorder sickle cell anemia.
The last thing that you want to do is pick up a book and my illness will just take over.
The men of color give us an opportunity to meet and share our emotions and our feelings and struggles we're having.
When it comes to reading, it's the skill that a lot of people are missing in this day and age.
Jeremiah knows its importance.
Every day he says he does about an hour to two hours of reading.
I was set alarm for 15 minutes, read, stop reading, take a break.
He agrees with experts like Dr. Latson Billings who say reading about things you like organically leads to more reading.
If you like self-health books, you should look for that.
If you want to learn how to work on a car, you should read those type of books.
I think that's really good. I liked it.
Hitting the books is often new for a population that schools can leave behind.
People lose incarceration, cut learning short.
An innovative program hopes to change that.
There are many, many justifications for higher education in prison.
You opened up a really important conversation.
This college classroom is inside a prison.
Odyssey Beyond Bars conducts this college-level English composition course at Racine Correctional
and three other prisons across the state, on behalf of the University of Wisconsin.
It transforms how they look at their lives.
Virtually all of our students have reported to us at the end of the class that the experience in Odyssey has made them want to take more college classes.
There are people in prison who look around and think, I don't ever want to be back here again.
And I want to do something about my life that ensures that I don't.
I gave the, quote, commencement speech at Oakwood Correctional Center.
Each time Dr. Latson Billings says, she'd ask one question.
Raise your hand if you were ever suspended.
I've never had less than 100% of the hands go up.
Suspensions and exposures from high school can lead to what has been called the school-to-prison pipeline.
And at the very least, disrupt graduation and college attainment.
Now the prisons are having to go back and say, listen, let's make sure you get the education you should have gotten.
If fixing the opportunity gap for Black and Brown students as a puzzle, another important piece of it is the shortage of minority teachers.
They talked about how my dad would move out and how me and my sister would start.
Our students want and deserve to see someone that looks like them.
For his part, Superintendent Cloudy is proud of his efforts in his district to diversify staff with people like Camby Hall, teacher of the year.
And then if you look at this paragraph, for so many kids of color, they feel like, you know, they feel like, you know, you know, you know, you know, you know, you know, you know, you know, you know, you know, you know, you know, you know, you know, you know, you know, you know, you know.
You've never had a teacher of color. A lot of the university programs are not diverse.
So if your feeder pool of teacher applicants is not diverse, then, of course, you're not going to have a diverse teaching workforce.
In 2020, researchers at the Wisconsin Policy Forum took an extensive look into the racial diversity of Wisconsin teachers and the student-to-teacher pipeline.
The takeaway?
We have a lot more work to do.
Shaw says, ideally, that the diversity of the student body would be reflected in the diversity of the teacher population.
While almost a third of students in Wisconsin are students of color, only about six percent of their teachers are.
And many don't stay.
Teachers of color who come into the workforce are leaving at a faster rate than our white teachers.
Okay. Many educators say a diverse teaching staff positively impacts all students in a lot of different ways.
We see positive impacts across everything from student motivation to strong student-teacher relationships to absenteeism graduation rates and going on to college.
When you look at the educational inequities, I think it is just intrinsically tied to the inequities that are in society.
But it's going to take policy changes, not just talk.
For his part, Verona Superintendent Clardy is moving beyond talking and taking action.
Not a warrior, I'm a doer. So we're about doing the work.
We continue our reporting on race and education in the state of Wisconsin here from the campus of the University of Wisconsin and Madison.
Here to continue the conversation we are joined by Dr. Alex G from the Nehemiah Center for Urban Leadership and Development.
Mr. Colleen Kerr, Superintendent of One City Schools here in Madison.
And Dr. Courtney Bell, who is with the Director of the Wisconsin Center for Educational Research.
As I've traveled and talked to folks across the state about this issue, I get the sense that it's a very touchy subject.
Is there something to that?
Race is a touchy subject in the United States.
I think when we think about systemic racism, which exists in education,
we think about these sort of interlocking layers of systems and policies, right?
So you only need to think about how do we draw the district boundary and the way that interacts with the neighborhoods,
the neighborhood attendance zone, the teachers of school can attract, the outcomes that then wind up in that neighborhood.
Those are interlocking systems, so it is contentious.
I think partly because people do care, but the persistent inequalities are hard to look at in the state in particular.
Do you want people afraid to talk about this?
Because I think it's difficult to face up to the culpability.
We like to quote statistics, but we don't really want to look at our ownership in the problem, or why we've allowed it to persist.
In educational services and systems, we want to fight against racism, but when we don't properly address it,
the educational systems themselves become breeding grounds for racism.
And I think we just like to pass the buck to someone else without taking full responsibility.
I think we're both absolutely spot on, but I also think that we have divorced ourselves from the problem.
That it is not only something that I'm embarrassed or don't want to be culpable in, but it's been persistent for so long.
And if I know about it, I'm tired of hearing of it.
And so it brings me down. I've heard people say that I can't focus on the problem because it just brings me down, because it's like we've not solved it, it's not going to be solved.
And so I think there's a lot of hopelessness.
I also think that we also live in a state that by and large has been privileged for a very long time, particularly in an area where we are in Madison.
And so when you're privileged and things are going okay and you don't have to focus on the issue, you act like it doesn't exist.
But this lack of success that we're seeing is it more to blame on the teachers or is it more to blame on students?
I think there's enough blame to go around, actually.
But I think if we ignore the systemic issues and only point fingers to the parents, the students, teachers that look at the larger issue, I think we continue just to kick the can down the road.
And so I think we have to look at really how we got here.
I think what makes it even more difficult is that education has been deemed the great equalizer.
Education is what brings you into the mainstream and it keeps you from being discriminated against. It keeps you from being poor.
And when that system that's meant to elevate us as keeping certain people down, it's the antithesis to what we think of when we think about education.
And then we have to really begin to ask ourselves real tough questions.
But we're trying to educate children in a system, in a world, in a reality where there's so much brokenness and pain and disregard for who they are, they're pain in their culture.
So I think we really need an overhaul in how we even look at what education means for us.
And we know a lot of times we find solutions looking at other communities, other school districts, things like that.
Dr. Bell, we know you work across the world. The country is looking at different ways. People do research to solve these kinds of issues.
Is there any district out there anywhere that's doing things well in terms of addressing these issues with black and brown students falling behind?
You know, there are success cases. My colleague, Gudielle Crosswaite, is the superintendent in Linwood, unified, which is in LA.
They have community-based schools. They have colleagues of color, professionals of color, in those school buildings, not only colleagues of color, but some.
They are committed. They believe that all those kids can learn. They have tons of AP courses in those high schools.
They are starting with early pre-K. And so they hold them tight and they treat them with dignity and those families with dignity the whole way up.
They claim you've built a pretty unique environment of one city. What are some of the things that you're doing that you feel like other districts can learn from?
Well, there's quite a few things. First and foremost, it's the number of our young people that are coming to us who are so far behind academically.
It doesn't matter the grade level that they're at, but it's even more depressing when they come to you in 9th and 10th grade.
And we have a third of our kids are at the somewhere between 1st and 4th grade level in math and reading.
It's like you've just passed them along to 9th and 10th grade without intervening to address their real core challenges.
First six days, weeks, we get to know our kids. Then we pivot.
As we see where they're at, we test them, we look at how they interact in school, how they show up at students every day.
And two hours in the morning, students are in math, two hours in the afternoon. They're in language arts.
And it's not just instruction all day. The first part of that is instruction at their level.
And then we bring in tutors that we've trained. We've trained over 50 tutors to come in and work with them one on one, no more than one on two, to help them get up to grade levels.
So we have a personalized learning environment for them so we can move them forward so we won't be passing kids in our school forward to 9th and 10th grade who aren't ready to be there.
Dr. G, you've got one superpower I'm going to give you to fix this problem. What are you going to do with it?
We've got to really embed the importance of helping students to, and I'll speak specifically to our work with African American children with really understanding and appreciating the culture.
If we were to go back in time 60 years ago, we would not be having this conversation.
Black people were going to historically black colleges and universities, building historically black colleges and universities, building churches and businesses.
Highly successful educationally with integration. One of my mentors, and she probably mentored all of us, Dr. Gloria Lads and buildings has always said, but Alex remember, with integration, 30,000 black teachers lost their jobs because they were not integrated.
Black students were, black teachers weren't, and many of them became domestics. And so we have to understand that this is somewhat new because again, 60 years ago, we weren't saying how do we educate our black children.
We were probably asking how do we vote, but black children were becoming dentists and doctors and nurses and professors, and then something happened.
So my superpower would be, let's get them in places where teachers can relate to them, understand them, celebrate them and where they see themselves in textbooks.
I came to Madison Advanced in second grade, but I had a black teacher in first grade who told me I was going to be the President of the United States.
She's 102 years old and we're still pen pals.
We're talking as if we have to fix black children, but we have to really ask ourselves, how are we breaking black children?
So we know most parts of Wisconsin have a very tiny population of students of color, if any at all.
So when you talk about the folks that sit at home right now and say this has nothing to do with me, how do we get those folks to have a stake in this game to make things better?
I'd like to go back to something that was said earlier about the function of education in, and I'll say, a democracy.
This affects all of us.
Every single one of us, no matter what our racial background is, no matter where we live.
If we do not have a democracy that functions with civility, where people can consider issues of science in the public domain, of policy around all manner of things.
Housing, poverty, you name it, all the things, social services, farm subsidies, whatever it may be, we need an educated citizenry. That's what the country was founded on.
So for me, this is about all of us. These are all of our children. This is our country.
And I would say America's at risk.
If you produce children who lack an interest in passion to solve the big problems of today and tomorrow, who's going to be there to solve them?
We have to focus on education and make it, I believe, our number one priority in this country. And if we want a country that's not divided, we also have to have an education that unifies people rather than devise them.
And so if we do those things, we'll succeed. If not, our demise is, we already have science, what it will look like.
If we don't know how to work together and work for and with, be educated by and educating people who don't look like us, we can't fool ourselves in thinking that we're ready for a global market, that we want to compete in the global market.
And so we can't boast of having world-class school districts or universities if we don't know how to talk to people who are from our own state who look different.
And so I think we have to own the broader problem, otherwise we can't boast in producing people who can compete internationally for jobs or awards or opportunities.
We'll have to leave it there, Dr. G, thank you, sir.
My pleasure.
Thank you very much.
Funding for Wisconsin in Black and White is provided by Ira and Aneva Riley Baldwin, Wisconsin Idea Endowment.
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