cc >> Well, hello, everyone.
Thank you for coming this evening.
I'm Margaret Lewis, the executive director of the
Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts and Letters.
And I'm just delighted that you could all join us for Dr. Gloria
Ladson-Billings presentation called "Keeping
the Dream Alive." Some of you, this might be
your first exposure to the Wisconsin Academy and its
programs. So we hope as you learn a little
bit more about the Academy, you'll consider becoming a
member. We are an independent non-profit
organization that was chartered in 1870 by the state
Legislature, and are governed by a statewide council
and foundation board. There are a couple of our
council members here tonight, including Millard and John.
Why don't you raise your hands so that people know who to
complain to. And some of the great Wisconsin
Academy staff, that I think you've probably met, Gail,
Laurie, and Barb, are all here. The Wisconsin Academy's job, its
mission, is to connect people and ideas for a better
Wisconsin. We try to bring the public
together with some of the leading thinkers in our state to
shed light on important issues in a wide range of areas, the
sciences, arts and letters, as our name indicates.
We try to offer the best knowledge available in a
respectful agenda-free environment.
Outside the room, you might have seen on your way in that we have
more season schedules and copies of our magazine.
Oh, who's on the front? Gloria Ladson-Billings.
So if you want to hear more from her, you might want to check out
the articles in the magazine. In addition to our lecture
series, we do publish our magazine, Wisconsin People and
Ideas. We do have an art gallery here
in the Overture Center, the James Watrous Gallery, which
currently is exhibiting two great Wisconsin artists.
Our home is right under the dome.
So I hope you'll feel free to check out those other wonderful
aspects of the Wisconsin Academy.
Our last of our four programs is a public policy program called
The Wisconsin Idea, at the Wisconsin Academy, aimed at
outlining solutions for a better Wisconsin.
These public policy programs are multi-year studies generating
guidelines and recommendations that have had a direct effect on
legislation and education in the state.
So you can see our work crosses many disciplines and boundaries.
And again, as I hope you learn more about us, I hope you'll
consider becoming a member. It's just $25.
That helps us continue to offer these free programs.
Also very important to us are your suggestions for future
topics and speakers. You've all received a little
card on your way in. We surely would love to hear
your evaluations and your suggestions for future programs.
You can put your thoughts on that card.
And also, this is the card we use for our drawings.
You'll be notified by email tomorrow if you are a winner.
And we wanted to thank our door prize sponsors, the University
Book Store, that has donated a copy of Gloria's book, The Dream
Keepers: Successful Teachers of African American Children.
We want to thank A Room of One's Own for their $25 gift
certificate and other drawings of a complimentary one-year
membership in the Wisconsin Academy and a box of Wisconsin
note cards. Just one more thing before we
begin. I'd like to thank our generous
sponsors, the Pleasant T. Rowland Foundation, the
Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation, the Wisconsin
Education Association Council, represented here tonight by
Mary. Mary, raise your hand.
We appreciate your new sponsorship.
The University of Wisconsin-Madison.
The John and Sally Mielke Family Fund.
And a number of individual donors that I see here in the
audience tonight. For our friends and supporters
who can't join us tonight, we really thank Wisconsin Public
Television and Wisconsin Eye for making this and other
presentations available on the Internet and for rebroadcast to
many others around the state that can't join us tonight.
The Madison Community Foundation has been another key partner for
the Great Performance Fund, which also makes these programs
a reality. So thanks to our sponsors, the
Wisconsin Academy offers only the highest quality programs.
And it's not too late for you or your organization to sponsor
Wisconsin Academy Evening topics.
So if you have that interest, please join me or find me after
the program, and I'd be glad to talk to you further.
I'd now like to introduce to you Laurie Dies, the Academy's
director of special events, who will introduce our speaker.
Thanks again for coming. ( applause )
Thank you, Margaret. And thank you everyone
for being here tonight. Regarding tonight's program,
there will be time for questions.
Gloria will be happy to answer those Q&A.
Gloria Ladson-Billings is the Kellner Family Professor of
Urban Education in the Department of Curriculum and
Instruction, and a faculty affiliate in the Department of
Educational Policy Studies at UW-Madison.
Gloria's research examines the pedagogical practices of
teachers who are successful with African American students.
And she also investigates critical race theory
applications to education. She is the author of critically
acclaimed books including The Dream Keepers: Successful
Teachers of African American Children, Crossing Over to
Canaan: The Journey of New Teachers in Diverse Classrooms,
and Beyond the Big House: African American Educators on
Teacher Education, along with more than 50 journal articles
and book chapters. She is the past-president of
the American Educational Research Association, and is the
former editor of the American Educational Research Journal.
Her work has won numerous scholarly awards.
And she received an honorary doctorate from a university in
Sweden. During the 2003-2004 academic
year, she was a fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the
Behavioral Sciences in Stanford, California.
And in 2005, she was elected to the National Academy of
Education and the National Society for the Study of
Education. Most recently, she is a 2008
recipient of the State of Wisconsin's
Martin Luther King, Jr. Heritage Award.
We are so pleased that Gloria has joined us this evening to
present Keeping the Dream Alive. Please welcome Gloria
Ladson-Billings. ( applause )
That was kind of surreal to hear those introductions.
You think who are they talking about.
( laughter ) First of all, let me thank the
Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts and Letters for both
this invitation and opportunity. I don't take it lightly to be
invited to this venue. Second, thank all of you for
coming out. We finally have some decent
weather. And we've gotten through
Daylight Savings Time, so it's nice and light.
You could've been doing so many other things, including going
next door to River Dance, so thank you for being here.
And last, and certainly not least, let me thank my husband
Charles Billings for his never ending support.
So, Chuck, you've got to stand up and let people see you.
( applause ) You never get to do all the
kinds of things I get to do without somebody who really
supports you all the way. So I don't take that for
granted. Well, let me start by saying
that most of us academics rarely know how to talk to anyone
except other academics. That's what we get rewarded for,
talking to each other. So to avoid the typical,
esoteric language of my profession, I've decided to
frame this talk so it can reach what probably would be the most
dense audience I will ever have, not referring to you.
( laughter ) So just imagine that I have
a specific audience in mind. And I'll tell you in a minute.
So even though we've been calling this Keeping the Dream
Alive, I've actually decided to change the title.
The substance is the same. And it's okay that it had that
title. So, let's see.
( laughter ) So I'm calling it, "A Letter
to Our Next President." Dear Mr., Madame, President.
The very fact that this letter begins with addressing either a
man or woman in the office of President of the United States
is in itself a cause for celebration, and a tribute to
the historic nature of this year's presidential contest.
For this, we all, regardless of political persuasion, should
feel more deeply invested in the promise of democracy to include
all Americans regardless of race, class and agenda.
My letter to you is specifically linked to the
question of public education and what I believe are the more
pressing issues facing your administration and the nation at
large regarding the future of public education, and the future
of our society. To address these issues, I want
to speak specifically to the question of what has been called
popularly, the "racial achievement gap."
The achievement gap has been on the lips of almost every
politician, educational researcher, educational leader,
and educational policymaker in the nation.
The provision of the Reauthorization of the
Elementary and Secondary Education Act, more
conventionally known as "No Child Left Behind," profoundly
illuminated this achievement gap because of its requirement to
disaggregate the student test scores based on categories like
race, special needs and English language proficiency.
We know that African American and Latino students score
substantially lower than their white, and in some cases Asian
American counterparts. According to the nation's
Governors Association, the achievement gap is a matter of
race and class. And across the U.S., a gap
persists between minority and disadvantaged students,
and their white counterparts. It further states that this is
one of the most pressing educational policy challenges
that the states currently face. We want to erase this
achievement gap. Indeed, that sounds like a good
and noble goal. However, as a new president,
with presumably a new vision, I want to suggest that it is
important to begin rethinking this notion of the achievement
gap. Instead of an achievement gap,
I believe we have an education debt.
This debt language totally changes the relationship between
students and their schooling. For instance, when we think of
what we are combating as an achievement gap, we implicitly
place the onus for closing that gap on the students, their
families and their individual teachers and schools.
But the notion of an education debt requires us to think about
how all of us, as members of a democratic society, are
implicated in creating these achievement disparities.
So permit me to use an economic metaphor to explain what I mean
by this notion of an education debt.
No doubt, you've already sat down with a team of economic
advisors who have briefed you about the economic challenges
that the nation faces. Now key among that is that gas
is now $3.29 a gallon. So one of your first jobs will
be to construct a budget to present to Congress.
If you keep within spending limits, people will celebrate
your ability to produce a balanced budget.
But no matter how successful you are in producing the current
budget, lurking prominently in that budget on line 3, after
defense and entitlement programs is debt service, or what we know
as the "National Debt." That is a debt that the
nation has accumulated since its beginnings.
It does not go away by balancing the budget of one fiscal year.
And it robs us of opportunities to do creative things for our
present and future. Because we must continue to pay
the huge bills of the past. So I liken this yearly exercise
of constructing the federal budget to the notion of the
achievement gap. Every year, public schools
publish the results of standardize test scores.
And at some schools, we celebrate and say we have
"balanced the budget." At other schools, we bemoan
the fact that the standardized test scores have revealed that
we have produced yet another deficit budget.
Again, lurking behind this yearly exercise of producing
achievement test scores, is the educational debt of longstanding
inequities and educational disenfranchisement.
I believe that this debt is historical, economic and moral.
So in the following part of my letter to you, Mr. or
Ms. President, I will briefly explain each of these
contributing factors. One of the oft stated critiques
of Americans is that we have no sense of our histories.
And I've deliberately spoken here of a plural form of the
term history. There is not just one history.
There are histories. The complexity of a nation such
as ours is that as it moves throughout time, it has not
moved in a straight line, or in the same way for every group or
individual. The history of groups intersects
and overlaps, producing many histories, not just a single
one, not just a unitary one. So as you look at our
histories, you see that over long stretches of the American
narratives, there have been systematic and regular
exclusions of certain groups of children and their families.
They've been excluded from schooling and the public
education process. So scholars in the history of
education like James Anderson, Michael Fults, and others,
have documented the legacy of educational inequity
in the U.S. Those inequities initially
were formed around race, class and gender.
Gradually, some of those inequities began to recede.
But clearly, they persist in the realm of race.
In the case of African Americans, education was
initially forbidden during the period of enslavement.
After emancipation, we saw the development of Freedman Schools,
whose purpose was a maintenance of a servant class.
And during the long period of legal apartheid, what we call
Jim Crow, African Americans attended schools where they
received castoff text books and materials from white schools.
In the rural south, the need for farm labor meant that the
typical school year for rural black students was about four
months. Indeed, black students in the
south did not experience universal secondary schooling
until 1968. Not 1868.
1968. In the lifetime of many of us
here, there have been places in the south where there were no
secondary schools. In fact, the state of Kentucky
had no secondary schools for African American students until
a group of Quakers chipped in and built them one school in
Jefferson County. So all the kids went to that one
school, because there were no schools.
So if we haven't had these opportunities, why then, would
we not expect there to be achievement disparities between
African Americans and whites? We have been accumulating this
debt over time. The debt has a history.
Similarly, the history of American Indian education is
equally egregious. It began with mission schools to
convert and use Indian labor to further the cause of the church.
And later, boarding schools were developed as General George
Pratt asserted the need to "kill the Indian" in order to save the
man. This strategy of deliberate and
forced assimilation created a group of people, according
to Pulitzer Prize winning writer N. Scott Momaday, "Who
belonged nowhere." The assimilated Indian could
not fit comfortably into reservation life or the
stratified mainstream. No predominantly white colleges
welcomed the few Indians that successfully completed the early
boarding schools. And only historically black
colleges and universities like Hampton Institute opened their
doors to them. There they studied vocational
and trade curriculum. Latino students also
experienced huge disparities in their education.
In the report entitled, "Black, White and Brown," Latino
school desegregation efforts in the pre- and post-Brown v.
the Board of Education era, we discovered the longstanding
practice of denial experienced by Latinos dating back to 1848.
Historic desegregation cases, such as Mendez v. West Minister,
and the Lemon Grove incident detailed the way that brown
children were and continue to be excluded from equitable
and high quality education. How many people have ever heard
of the Lemon Grove incident? Okay, I've got one person.
We don't talk about it. We talk a lot about
Brown v. the Board of Education, and we know Linda Brown.
But the Lemon Grove school district in southern California
was an integrated district until one day the school board members
who were all white got together and decided they didn't want the
Latino kids in their school anymore.
And one day, the Latino kids came to school and there was a
sign there telling them, you don't go to this school anymore.
Your school is down the street. And they put them in a barn, and
said that's where your school is.
They were able to successfully argue in front of the Supreme
Court that they had been discriminated against.
Now, of course, the problem with their argument is the Supreme
Court approved, sided with them as plaintiffs, but based on the
fact that they were "white." The Supreme Court said if you
had been Indian or Negro, at the time, then the Lemon Grove
district would have been justified in what it did.
So they basically argued themselves white into the
ability to go back to their original school.
But these are histories that determine a lot of things about
what we now see in schools. So it's important to point out
that this historical debt was not merely imposed by ignorant
masses that were xenophobic and virulently racist.
The major leaders of the nation endorsed ideas about the
inferiority of black and Latino and Native peoples.
So if Mr. or Madame President, as a new leader of the nation,
you care about our existing educational inequities, you
cannot ignore the history out of which our current educational
disparities emerged.
Call this next section, "follow the money."
So again, as I've said I'm speaking to our next president,
so I say to this person, having just completed a successful
presidential campaign, you know as well as anyone how much money
is required to make a run for elective office.
If you're like me, you get a letter almost every day from
somebody. But what is your sense of how
much money it takes to educate young people to fully
participate as democratic citizens?
And how might we ensure that we allocate for education money
that is more equitably spent? The legacy of separate,
segregated schooling has produced incredibly inequitable
funding streams that helped to create this education debt.
In current-day dollars, the funding disparities between
urban schools and their suburban counterparts presents a telling
story about the value that we place on the education of
different groups of students. The Chicago Public Schools
spends about $8,482 per pupil each year.
But nearby Highland Park spends $17,291 per pupil.
The Chicago Public Schools has an 87% black and Latino school
population, while Highland Park as a 90% white pupil population.
Per pupil expenditures in Philadelphia are $9,299 per
pupil per year for a population that is 79% black and Latino,
while across Cityline Avenue, in lower Marion the per pupil
expenditure is $17,261 for a 91% white population.
New York City Public Schools spends $11,627 per pupil for a
student population that is 72% black and Latino, while suburban
Manhasset spends $22,311 per year for a student population
that is 91% white. Now one of the earliest things
that one learns in statistics class is that correlation does
not prove causation. But I think we have to ask
ourselves, why the funding inequities match so neatly and
regularly onto the racial and ethnic realities of our schools.
Even if we cannot prove that schools are poorly funded
because black and Latino students attend them, we
certainly can demonstrate that the amount of funding rises with
the rise in the number of white students.
This pattern of inequitable funding has occurred over
centuries. For many of these populations,
schooling was non-existent during the early history of the
nation. And clearly, whites were not
prepared to invest their fiscal resources in what were perceived
to be strange others. The fundamental question that
these figures raise in my mind is why does a nation regularly
allocate $10,000 per pupil less for African American and Latino
students in urban areas than it does for white, middle class
students in suburban areas. This ongoing funding disparity
is another component of this education debt.
The third aspect of this education debt of which I speak
is what I call the socio-political debt.
You know better than most, how important the franchise is to
the free society. In addition to being able to
vote, democratic citizens have the right to participate in a
variety of decision-making processes that impact their
children and their community schools.
For long periods of our history, communities of color have been
excluded from the political process.
In 1965, Congress wisely passed the Voting Rights Act to begin
to eradicate the social-political debt.
In March, 1965, Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana,
North Carolina, South Carolina and Virginia had a gap in voter
participation between white and black voters that ranged
from 63.2% to 22%. But in 1988, after more than 20
years of the Voting Right Act, the voting disparity between the
white and black voters in those southern states range from
a -2%, meaning that actually 2% more blacks voted
than whites, to 7.4%. While you are probably
intimately familiar with this voting participation
information, after all, knowing voter habits is a big part of
what campaign staff do, I call this to your attention to remind
you that the dramatic voter participation changes that I
reference are a result of bold and decisive action on the part
of President Lyndon Johnson and the Congress to remedy a
longstanding wrong by passing the Voter Rights Act of 1965.
In a hole of the constitutionality of the act,
the Supreme Court ruled Congress has found that the case by case
litigation was inadequate to combat widespread and persistent
discrimination in voting because of the inordinate amount of time
and energy that's required to overcome the obstructionist
tactics invariably encountered in these lawsuits.
After enduring nearly a century of systematic resistance to the
15th Amendment, Congress might well decide to shift the
advantage of time and inertia from the perpetrators of the
evil to its victims. Now, while the Voting Act
applied to adult citizens and the franchise, the closest
example of such dramatic paying down of the education debt is
affirmative action. Rather than wait for students of
color to meet predetermined standards, the society decided
to recognize that historically denied groups should be given a
preference in admission to schools and college.
In the case of African Americans, this policy literally
helped create what we now know as a black middle class.
In today's political environment, the notion of
affirmative action has fallen into disfavor, and is treated as
if it represents special preferences for undeserving
people. Now, this is actually something
that I've spent a lot of time looking at.
And I don't know how many of you all are aware.
But at Harvard, Princeton and Yale, 40% of the freshman class
are what are known as legacy. In other words, their parents
went to Harvard, Princeton and Yale.
That's affirmative action. It's not that their parents were
good alumni. ( laughter )
It's that they were alumni. Now, anybody in business will
tell you this is only good business practice because you
want alumni to give. Well, one of the quickest ways
to keep alumni from giving is not to let their kids in your
school. So this notion of affirmative
action is not that different from legacy or the GI Bill.
We let all GIs take advantage of the GI Bill, not the good ones.
If you were a GI, you were entitled to take advantage of
the GI Bill. Okay, so let's talk about this
last thing that I think contributes to the debt.
And I ask the question, who are the people that we want to be.
This is about the moral imperative.
So in this section of the letter I send to you Mr. or
Ms. President, I raise the question of the moral debt that
we, as a society, owe. In the summer of 2007, the
Supreme Court determined that race could not be used to assign
students to schools, even when schools have created a diverse
learning environment as one of their central goals.
The result of such a ruling is likely to contribute to the
continued re-segregation of our schools.
It is pointed out that not only has school segregation
persisted, but it has been transformed by the changing
demographics of the nation. It is also pointed out that
there has been no serious discussion of the cost of
segregation, or the advantages of integration for our most
segregated population, white students.
So while we may have celebrated the 50th anniversary of the
Brown decision three years ago, we can point to little evidence
that we really gave Brown a chance.
America's public schools are more than a decade into the
process of re-segregation. And it's interesting in a
community like Madison that it doesn't happen school by school,
but it happens within school. So you can have a school that
produces more national merit finalists than any school in the
state, but also has one of the highest dropout rates of African
American students. So it's really interesting.
I took a group of my colleagues from the university on a school
tour right here in Madison, because we've been together for
a tour in Milwaukee. And they were like, "Oh, this is
so bad," and "What a shame." And I said, "What are you
talking about?" Incidentally, they were not
educators. They were from agriculture,
law and medicine. And they said it's a shame about
these Milwaukee schools. I said, "Have you been in
Madison schools?" So I actually was able to plan
a trip for them. And we went to one of the high
schools. The principal gave us little
schedules to follow like you do on back to school night.
And every time we'd to go a room, I'd look at the title of
the course. I'd tell my colleagues before we
got in there who was in the room.
They're like, "How are you doing this?"
I said, "It's not that hard." Calculus.
There are no black children in this room, you know.
Basic science. They're are black kids in that
room. So even though the school is
"integrated," from the standpoint that all of the kids
are permitted to go, there is a re-segregation going on by what
courses people have opportunity to have access to.
Almost three-fourths of black and Latino students attend
schools that are predominantly non-white.
More than two million black and Latino students, that is a
quarter of the black students in the northeast and the Midwest
attend what researchers now call apartheid schools.
The four most segregated states for black students are New York,
Michigan, Illinois and California.
Now, I recount this issue of school desegregation to remind
you that although the current education legislation is
entitled, "No Child Left Behind," we enacted it when
hundreds of thousands of children were already far
behind. Indeed, they were so far behind
that no attempt at leveling the playing field by just
requiring that everyone pass the same standardized tests would
have any impact on them. The failure to fully implement
school desegregation, and indeed to retreat from it, as a
principle, along with our failure to provide school
funding equity really contribute to the moral aspect of the
education debt. These are the kinds of things
around which a president can use his or her bully pulpit to rally
the nation. Almost every school child in
our nation knows some portion of what we call
Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.'s "I Have a Dream" speech.
We focus on the dream portion of the speech.
But we regularly omit the portion of the speech that
admonishes us that African Americans and others have
marched on Washington to get the nation to make good on a
promissory note that that nation had written to each of her
citizens. Unfortunately, in the case of
African Americans, that promissory note came back
stamped "insufficient funds." And Dr. King said that "I
refuse to believe that the bank of justice is bankrupt."
Or that there are insufficient funds in the great vaults of
opportunity in this nation. So today, as the next
president, you inherit both the assets and the liabilities of
the nation. Prominent in the liability
column is something clearly marked "education debt."
It requires your immediate attention, and cannot be paid
down by more testing, less funding and disinvestment in
public schools. It cannot be paid down by
attacks on teachers and their preparation.
Since the debt is so enormous, it cannot be paid down quickly.
But it cannot be ignored. The results of that debt show up
every year in our increasing prison population, our rate of
teen pregnancies as compared to other western democracies, our
loss of economic competitiveness, and most
important, our low participation in the democratic process.
The primary mission of public schools is to make citizens.
I feel like some kind of idiot saying this, because nobody says
this. It is not to be the farm team
for the corporate sector. It is to make citizens.
That's its primary purpose. Now in the context of making
citizens, we want those citizens to be economically capable of
participating in the economy. But the thing that we do, and
are supposed to do well, is to make citizens.
What kind of citizens can we make if we regularly tell some
students that they are less worthy, less deserving, and less
likely to be full-fledged citizens who will know what
it means to participate in a democratic and multi-cultural
society. Mr. or Ms. President, you have
an awesome responsibility as a leader of the wealthiest
developed nation the world has ever seen.
Along with all the security concerns, and the rising
healthcare costs, and economic challenges, you have to steer
a course for how the federal government will respond to an
education system that is failing us on many levels.
The debt is massive. But you have the next four years
to start on a payment plan. And just in case you cannot
visualize what this massive debt looks like, I'm enclosing a
slide show in this letter that should jog your memory.
WHAT HAS HAPPENED DOWN HERE IS THE WINDS HAVE CHANGED
CLOUDS ROLL IN FROM THE NORTH
AND IT STARTED TO RAIN IT RAINED REAL HARD
AND IT RAINED FOR A REAL LONG TIME
SIX FEET OF WATER IN THE STREETS
OF EVANGELINE THE RIVER ROSE ALL DAY
THE RIVER ROSE ALL NIGHT SOME PEOPLE GOT LOST
IN THE FLOOD SOME PEOPLE
GOT AWAY ALRIGHT THE RIVER HAD BUSTED THROUGH
CLEAR DOWN TO PLACKER MINE SIX FEET OF WATER
IN THE STREETS OF EVANGELINE LOUISIANA
THEY'RE TRYING
TO WASH US AWAY THEY'RE TRYING
TO WASH US AWAY OH, LOUISIANA
LOUISIANA THEY'RE TRYING
TO WASH US AWAY THEY'RE TRYING
TO WASH US AWAY PRESIDENT COOLIDGE COME DOWN
IN A RAILROAD TRAIN WITH HIS LITTLE FAT MAN
WITH A NOTE PAD IN HIS HAND
PRESIDENT SAY LITTLE FAT MAN
OH ISN'T IT A SHAME WHAT THE RIVER HAS DONE
TO THIS POOR FARMER'S LAND OH, LOUISIANA
LOUISIANA THEY'RE TRYING
TO WASH US AWAY YOU'RE TRYING
TO WASH US AWAY OH, LOUISIANA
THEY'RE TRYING
TO WASH US AWAY OH, LORD
THEY'RE TRYING TO WASH US AWAY
Thank you. ( applause )
Thank you, Gloria. We'll let you catch your breath
and some of us catch our breath, I think, after watching that
video. I invite the audience to raise
your hand and ask questions. Gloria, if you will repeat the
question, that will help everyone hear, and future
viewers of this presentation. >> Yes?
I have a question about disproportionality when you look
at African American kids being labeled in order to receive
services. Can you talk to that in
Wisconsin? >> Okay, the question is about
what we term as disproportionality in terms of
how many African American kids end up in special education, for
example. You know, statistically, you
should show up in a population the same way you show up in the
general population. So if you are five percent of
the general population, you should be five percent of every
other population, the gifted and talented population, the special
ed population. We have numbers approaching 40%
or 50% for African American students.
And when you actually do the males, it sometime goes higher.
The same is true for Latino students.
That you have this disproportionate number of kids.
And so part of it is that we have many schools systems that
really don't have a choice about placing kids in special ed,
because the nation, or the states reward the label.
So if I'm a poor, single parent with limited income, and one of
the things that I hear from the state is if you can get a label
for this kid, we'll increase your SSI.
I mean, commonsense says get the label, because now you have more
income in the household. But the problem with that is
then the kid ends up in a set of educational experiences that
doesn't benefit that kid. So I always say, you know,
it's sort of like chemotherapy, but you don't have cancer.
The only thing that's going to happen is your hair is going to
fall out. Okay, you're not going to be
healed from anything. So this notion of putting kids
in special education when they don't belong there, and the
mislabeling of kids. The other thing we know, and
that's sort of from outside of the school.
What we know from inside school is that African American males
in particular, are much more likely to receive both special
ed assignment and get disciplined for what we call
non-contact offenses. So what's a non-contact offense?
Wearing a hat. Or saying something back smart.
I mean, those kinds of things. They didn't hit anybody.
But when you look at the records.
And one of the things that I often will urge my own students
to do when they're out in schools is look at the
assignment of suspension and expulsion.
And then see if you can figure out why the kid was suspended.
They're supposed to tell you why somebody is excluded from
schools. There's an interesting pattern
that African American students, particularly male students, are
much more likely to have been suspended for what seem to be
fairly innocuous, you know, 14-year-old kind of things.
It's not like 14-year-olds are the brightest group we've got,
you know. They make a whole lot of dumb
mistakes. And yet, we're seemingly
penalizing one group of kids more than others.
So that disproportionality is not just special ed assignment,
but it is also gifted and talented assignment.
In other words, there's far fewer of them.
Maybe last year it was that Isthmus ran this big article in
the paper about is Madison short changing its gifted kids.
And I looked at it and said, "Yeah, because you're not
identifying them." So there is that
disproportionality. And I think any time we see any
kind of pattern that attaches to race, that attaches to
ethnicity, that attaches to language, we have to ask the
question, how did this pattern occur?
It's not a random assignment. Yeah?
It was noted that Wisconsin ranked number 50 of the 50
states in terms of reading and math test scores of black
children. We spend more money
proportionately than many of the other states in the country on
the education of our children. What are we doing wrong?
You always tell us the right thing to do.
It appears that we hear you, but we're not listening to you.
Can you talk to us a little bit about what Madison is doing
wrong. >> Well, that particular
question really gets to something that bugs me.
I happen to be in Washington the day before the scores were
released. And I actually ran into the
state superintendent of another Midwestern state.
And she was just crowing about "Oh, I can't tell you, but we
did really good. And we're closing our gap.
I can't tell you the numbers, but I'm excited."
So I called the people I know. And I said, "I realize this
information is embargoed. It's going to be out next week,
but what can you tell me?" She says, "You're not going to
be happy." I said, "Well, am I not going
to be happy we're in the bottom, near the bottom?"
She said, "You're going to be even less happy."
( laughter ) I said, "You're kidding me."
She said, "You guys are dead last."
I said, "Are you sure?" So what we're talking about
when we look at the national assessment of educational
progress, which is the one test that is taken across all states,
so it's not like there were different tests, like the NCLB
thing. Wisconsin has the largest
disparity between black and white children in both reading
and mathematics. Larger than Mississippi,
Louisiana, and the District of Columbia.
We're dead last. So it's interesting, because if
you take the white students in our schools, we're among the
top. So clearly, kids are
experiencing two different kinds of education.
I made an appointment, right after I got the data, with the
state superintendent and her cabinet.
And my question was, "What are you going to do about this?"
It's an embarrassment. With all of the resources,
and this has been an education-friendly state in
general, for us to be dead last is unconscionable.
The question is for me, when do these kids start to matter.
What also is interesting to me is that even in our local paper,
that particular information was in a small article in the bottom
of the paper. When they put out all the other
test scores, it's going to be the banner headline.
So it's as if we don't want to know this bad news.
Part of it for me is political will.
The other part is more curved. When we say that these kids
matter, that they matter a lot. And you know, you lay those
figures next to the fact that we are incarcerating at a rate that
it's unbelievable. And almost every youngster that
I've ever encountered who was in the justice system struggles to
read. So we know something happens to
kids in those really early years, where they ought to be
grabbing hold of education. I met with the Dane County
probation folks. And I told them if people in my
profession were able to do the job we're supposed to do, you
guys would be out of work, because we wouldn't be sending
you any kids. And almost every kid who is in
jail has an education problem. Yeah?
It seems to me that our legal structure is entrenching this
inequality and the Supreme Court is limiting what schools can do
to integrate their schools. The very school finance
structures we have are entrenched inequity in funding.
( inaudible ) My question to you is what's
the potential for the law to fix any of this?
Okay, so the question is can the law help us.
And it's interesting because we have had a shift.
There used to be this notion that if we can't get anything
done, at least we can go to the courts.
The courts have shifted, in case anybody hasn't noticed.
And the court is not very friendly.
In fact, I wrote a paper last year called, "When The Court Is
No Longer Your Friend," that really looked at the way in
which the decisions now seem to come out.
The new strategy for public school activists is around
funding equity. So instead of going at the
Supreme Court level, there are state by state efforts to look
at the way in which states are failing to provide, and many of
them have in their charters. Because remember, the U.S.
Constitution says nothing about education.
But states will often have in their charters or constitutions
some statement about education. So in New York, the South
Carolina case in which I actually was an expert witness
for, there's a line that says that children, all the citizens
were entitled to an adequate, basic education.
So we've been able to get pro bono attorneys to come in and
charge that the state is failing to provide adequate, basic
education. I was on a panel in North
Carolina. Actually, I was on a panel with
Senator Edwards two years ago talking about this.
And I gave a paper that the law people kind of said, "Hmm."
And all the Ed people said, "Oh, my gosh,
she's lost her mind." The name of the paper was,
"Can We At Least Have Plessy," because I argued that a real
Plessy was better than a fake Brown.
( laughter ) You know, if we really had
the same schools, the same well-prepared teachers,
we'd take it. We don't have to go to school
with you, if you actually gave us what Plessy said we were
supposed to have. Of course, that was tongue in
cheek. I actually got it published in
the North Carolina Law Review, though, because the law people
thought, "Let's think about this."
( laughter ) But the thing's that's happening
then, is that we're getting judgments.
We got the New York judgment. We got the South Carolina
judgment. There's one more judgment
I can't call to mind. But we can't get people to pay.
So you can get millions and millions of dollars of
judgments, but the state legislatures say they don't have
any money. And the state taxpayers are
saying they're not putting in any more money.
So you get judgments. You can't collect on those
judgments. Perhaps the best strategy for
us to begin to think about is not the courts, but the
legislatures. And so to the degree that we can
move state legislatures, we may have some opportunity.
Now often what will happen, if you have to have sort of a
progressive legislature somewhere that does something,
that shows you something. And then your state doesn't want
to be embarrassed, and they go, well, they've got it, let's see
what we should do. But it gets harder and harder,
because the cost of public education is going up.
The cost of living is going up. I don't know why we would think
it would stay low. And yet, the support for public
education begins to decline. We have a really funny
demographic shape of our nation. We're getting much more older
people. People of my generation of baby
boomers, and then you have a little bit of a boom, but we
certainly don't have the same amount of kids that we had
coming through the system that we had 30 or 40 years ago.
So how we begin to develop some sympathy.
And one of the things I have to say, and my politics will show
here. The right has commandeered the
language. And we have to get the language
back. You don't let people say
things to you like, "Government schools."
They're not government schools. The government
doesn't have any schools. Remember the constitution?
These are public schools. And they have a responsibility
for the public good. We've gotten in a place in this
society where the word public is now pejorative.
Now I've lived long enough to remember where, you know, you
took public transportation. If you needed to get a polio
vaccine, you went to the public health clinic.
If you were struggling in a tenement housing, you got your
name on a list so you could get public housing.
Because all of these things were reliable, dependable, and met a
certain standard. And if you had any hope of
getting your children up out of poverty, you sent them to public
schools. Now, all of this is seeming to
go away. Nobody wants to ride public
transportation. Certainly, no one wants to live
in public housing. And everybody wants their own
doctor, so we don't have the public health.
So the last little domino that we're fighting to hold on right
now is public education. So we can't let people tell us
that these are government schools.
We can't let people tell us that they're all bad.
Because some kids are doing quite well in public schools.
The question is how do we ensure that all of the children do well
in public schools. Yeah?
I heard the comment that you made earlier about public
schools are for educating citizens.
They're not a farm team for corporate America.
But then at the same time, every senator, every legislator, is
talking about that we don't have money.
They're pulling out the empty pants pockets.
We don't have money to do these things.
So I wonder if what or if you feel there is an appropriate
role for the private sector. I'm thinking about, I don't know
very much about it, but what Bill Gates had tried to do.
Is there an appropriate role for private sector businesses?
Good question. Is there an appropriate role for
the private sector in supporting public education.
I'd say yes. I went and talked to I think
it's called the Milwaukee Round Table.
They weren't exactly my crowd. ( laughter )
But I made an argument that we always make these comparisons
to public and private education. And that those are the wrong
comparisons to make. That a better comparison was
between public K-12 education and public higher education.
What makes the University of Wisconsin still the most desired
place to go? Is it a government college?
No. It belongs to this entire state.
And it has a couple things in it that I think are missing from
some of our worst urban schools. And one of the things that it
has is that it has wonderful co-curricular activities.
What do I mean by co-curricular activity.
It's got a sports team. You've got 22 sports teams.
The athletic board, I know. It's 22 sports teams.
It's got a band. It's got all these other things
outside of the classroom that bind, not just the students, but
the community to the institution.
It has multiple funding streams. Unfortunately, the state is
kicking in less and less each biennium.
In fact, I now call us a state-assisted school.
We're not a state school. But we have money from the
state. We have money from the feds.
We have money from private foundations.
So that makes us accountable to multiple constituencies.
Here's a place where private can.
But you don't do it so that you can turn out a worker.
You do it because it's in the public interests, and it adds to
the public good. So even if the money you throw
in doesn't turn out a worker for your industry, but indeed turns
out a physician or an attorney, you've now added another citizen
who is not someone you are paying for in either
incarceration costs or public dole.
So it is about those companies and corporations that have
broader visions about what it means to participate.
In other words, it can't have strings attached that you've got
to turn out 20% of your kids so that they can go work
for Kraft Foods. It can't be that kind of
partnership. Yes?
One of the basic assumptions of this discussion so far has
been that money helps, which I certainly agree with.
But when you get down past the policies, on the ground level,
where I work, I'm a teacher, what would your ideal classroom
look like for educating an African American student?
Okay, he started out by saying we have the assumption
that money helps, but wanting to know what my ideal classroom for
African American students would look like.
Let me address that first little aside.
I love the statement that, "If money is good
for rich people..." ( laughter )
Think how much better it would be for poor people.
You know, the people all telling me that the money doesn't matter
never need money. So yeah, the money by itself
won't do it. However, I'm talking about
classrooms in which kids come in and know that that person who
stands before them is invested in them.
That it matters to them that they're there.
I've talked to a lot of kids. And you know, kids tell me
things like, "Well, you know, it doesn't matter if I do my work
or don't do it. Whatever I do is okay."
Kids shouldn't be thinking that way.
We looked at some schools in California.
And one of the things that sort of cracked us up about these
African American students, and the teachers will walk across
the school yard in the morning. The kids would do things like,
"Ms. Jones, I did your homework."
In other words, their sense of connection is not about
I did something to help to myself.
I have a connection with you because you care about me.
They would walk into classrooms where teachers were deeply
invested in them. They would walk into classrooms
where they maintained some level of dignity.
I was in a school in Kansas City.
And I talked to some middle school kids.
And you know, middle school kids are a trip, you know.
I refer to them as the people from another planet.
My first teaching job was seventh and eighth grade.
Whoo! But I said to the kids,
"Who's your favorite teacher?" They told me.
And I said, "What does she teach?"
And they said Social Studies. Well, that bowled me over
because I was a Social Studies teacher and nobody likes Social
Studies teachers. And I said, "Well, what is it
about her that you like?" They said, "She speaks to us
every day. When she sees us in the hall,
she smiles at us. She looks us in the eye.
She always says please or thank you when she asks you.
She always tells you..." And I'm thinking, okay,
this is just civility. You know, you don't have to
go to a teacher ed program to learn how to be civil.
But what it was saying to me is that they don't get this on a
regular basis. So to the degree that kids feel
valued, and feel that there is a mutual respect and investment in
them, you begin to see some different things happen
in classrooms. It sounds so simple, but you'd
be surprised how disengaged many of our kids are because they
don't feel like there's any sense of investment in them.
Now, I'm not being Pollyanna-ish here.
There are kids with some severe family situations that you and I
can't even get our minds around. We've got kids coming to school
who haven't eaten, haven't slept, don't know where they're
going to be living tomorrow. You have kids who have parents
who are incarcerated. It's like one thing after
another. I'm not suggesting that just
going and being nice is going to change that.
But it does take this sort of long term investment that says
my job is to teach you and I'm going to figure out
whatever it takes. I might make some mistakes.
I might make some big mistakes. But you have to know that I'm
doing what I do because I care about you.
In fact, I understand that our futures are connected.
If you don't leave here as a productive citizen, then I still
have to take care of you in some way.
You know, I tell my kids that all the time.
You know, I'm looking for you to take care of me.
We have three older kids and we have a young daughter.
There's 17 years between our daughter and her brothers.
I thought of her at the time as my insurance policy.
( laughter ) It ain't quite working out
like that. ( laughter )
It was a good idea. But the idea that, you know,
the kids don't evaporate when we push them out of school.
It's not like they drop out and it's like a Star Trek moment,
and they get beamed up by Scotty.
They're still in the community. And actually, wreaking all kinds
of havoc. We want them in those school
buildings. We want them to benefit from
those schools. Because our futures are linked.
Yeah? I thought so, how are you doing?
When you look at the enrollment in schools every
year, there seems to be a higher number of children of Hispanic,
Latino backgrounds. That's, you can see that in the
urban centers, as well as in the rural areas of the state of
Wisconsin. For that matter, throughout the
country. And yet, I think the schools are
not ready for these children. They're not ready to receive
such a significant number of kids with other kinds of needs
that they've never seen before. And it continues to be a harsher
problem in the public school system in general.
And at the same time, the public institutions of higher
education are not necessarily prepared to address those needs,
either. So I'm wondering what your take
is on that. >> His question is about the
changing demographic of increasing numbers of Latino
Hispanic students in our schools.
And the school's seeming inability to respond in
appropriate ways to meet their needs.
I'm a person who likes what I call existence proofs.
In other words, I don't need 4,000 cases to tell me something
is so. Show me an example that
something is so, then I can say to myself, well, what do they
do, and how might we do that. So here's the existence proof
around Latino students. Early 1960s, on a little island
off the coast of Miami. The Florida Miami Dade schools
were inundated by Latinos. They did pretty well.
So what was happening in Miami Dade that's not happening in
Arizona, California, and increasingly Illinois, Wisconsin
and every state of the nation? Well, earlier in the talk, I
said we have no sense of history.
The United States has a long history of bilingual education,
starting in the mid to late 1800s with the Germans.
The Germans approached the very school boards where they were
large in number and said, "You're not going to teach our
kids without teaching them German.
Because German is an important language, and our kids come from
a rich cultural stock." So indeed, they put enough
pressure on schools to be teaching them German.
And the non-German speakers said, "Well, you're not going to
teach those guys German without teaching us German."
When those Cubans arrived, and they were middle class for
the most part, they made the very same argument.
You've got to teach our kids Spanish, because it's culture is
much older than your culture. Come on, you know, this is rich,
important culture. And the non-Spanish speakers
said, "You're not giving those Spanish without giving us
Spanish." So is it the language or is
it the speaker. There's an interesting thing
that has happened. Now Spanish has become almost
wholly associated with poor Latinos.
So we've got to begin to understand that we have always
made a level of accommodation for language.
Every major city in this nation has a French school.
I don't know where all these French speakers are going.
I guess they're all going to Quebec.
( laughter ) And a few of us are going
to Louisiana. Maybe three of us
going to Paris. Because we value French
as a language. So we've placed a status of
Spanish somewhere where it's now seen as lower.
And we've got to get people to understand this is the only
nation in which knowing more means less.
You know, a kid comes to school with more than one language and
we think, oh, this is not a good thing.
This is exactly the thing that we want our kids.
We shouldn't be graduating any of our kids with less than two
languages. So this push for bilingualism is
not just about schools, it's tied to what kind of nation do
we want to be. How do we want to engage with
the rest of the world? So, that's my response, that we
actually know how to do this. We have not made a commitment to
do it. Yes?
You addressed your letter to the president of the United
States. And yet, you seem to imply that
you don't think that the federal government is going to be able
to do much about the problem. If you're asked to be the next
Secretary of Education. >> Oh, my goodness.
( laughter ) Well, first of all,
that's not going to happen, because I wouldn't make it
through the security clearance. ( laughter )
You haven't, you know, I'm a child of the 1960s.
I've got a file. ( laughter )
But I'll play this game with you.
One of the things that has always bothered me is the degree
to which we make children economic units by saying they're
entitled to a good school if they're in a good neighborhood.
And what counts is a good neighborhood is if they have
good property. These children are citizens.
And it behooves us as a nation to say this is what a citizen of
the United States is entitled to.
I mean, one of the places that we are really stuck is this
constitution issue of leaving education in the 9th Amendment,
basically saying it's a function of the state.
But we have got to begin to see our kids as citizens, not
members of neighborhood X. And what does it mean to be a
citizen? So one of the things that has to
happen is we have to talk about what are the very minimum things
that all citizens are entitled to as a consequence of being
citizens in relation to their education.
One of the places I think we're stuck around NCLB, although I
don't know how long they'll have it, is that prior to the
enactment of that legislation, there were things happening in
schools that we couldn't defend. We just really couldn't.
That's why many poor communities I worked in, people would say at
least they have to teach to the test.
They didn't have to teach anything before.
At least that was their feeling. So I think that the Secretary of
Education has to be someone who has this broader citizen vision,
who can begin to talk with the various state superintendents
and commissioners about what the pressing needs are in their
various states. And the way in which those,
whatever those needs are, they can't fall beneath some level of
civic preparation. Now, to me, civic preparation
means you do have to be able to read.
You do have to be able to write. You do have to be.
In fact, for me, in 2008, civic preparation means high school
should leave you prepared to go to college.
Not that you have to go. But prepared to go.
And I know I run into friction with colleagues who think that
no, everybody shouldn't go to college.
Well maybe they shouldn't, but they ought to have the choice.
And we should not be leaving kids in a place where they can't
even make the choice because the kind of high school education
they received doesn't prepare them.
You know, if you're prepared to go to college and you say you
want to be an auto mechanic, that's fine.
You haven't been diminished because you can read Hawthorne.
You're not diminished because you can do algebra.
So we've got to be clear about what that civic, ability to
engage with the larger civic community means.
And I think we have to have that conversation as a national
conversation, although it will devolve to states because of our
constitutional issues. There was one more thing back
there. >> I have to ask a question
about, the legacy of slavery is a huge elephant in our society.
Do you have any strategies on how to teach about slavery in a
way that's not painful to students?
It just seems like it must be really so much potential for
inflicting so much pain on African American students in
learning about slavery. And I'm wondering in learning a
way of teaching that without further victimizing them.
So her question is about the legacy of slavery and how we
might teach in ways that kids don't feel disempowered and
angry and upset about it. It's like I just set her in the
audience, because I used to be a U.S. history teacher.
One of the ways in which we teach U.S. history, is we
teach it as a sort of linear, great people, great events.
But history really is about all people.
It is about, you know, the labor movement where a bunch of people
decided, you know what, we're not taking this anymore.
It's about social movement, as well as it's about individuals.
So one of the questions, when I taught U.S. history,
what I would ask students, that totally reframed
the debate, was what kind of society was Europe, that people
thought it was okay to capture people and enslave them.
That takes us back to feudalism. Because what is a serf,
if not a slave? So that's a very different
question than what's wrong with those Africans that they got
captured? What happened is that you have
this encounter in which there's a society that thinks some
people are better than others. They are called nobles and
kings, and everybody else works for them.
That took that thinking to a place where there was a big
supply of people. Slavery occurred in Africa.
But when you actually investigate that slavery, it was
about conquest. What made you eligible to be a
slave in Africa is that your group had been defeated, not the
color of your skin. You'd been defeated.
In fact, your folks could come back with money and buy you out
of it. You didn't lose your humanity
because you were a slave. You just happened to be on the
losing end of a battle. So there's no way for those
Africans to know that the slavery planned in the New World
would be a different system. So when we begin to look at all
the things that are happening, we often talk about slavery as
an "American phenomenon." It was an international
phenomenon. The world was involved.
When we decided to end the slave trade in 1848, it didn't
just have implications for the U.S.
If you've ever looked at a map of the U.S.,
there's this long peninsula called Florida.
Then you come around and you get the Gulf of Mexico,
then you get Texas. Okay, there's something
attached to Texas. It's called Mexico.
Then there's all these islands. And there was slavery
in all of these places. Every U.S. history book
I pick up at the high school level has a section
called "Sectionalism." And it's only talking about
the north and the south of the U.S.
This is an international enterprise.
You talk about globalism? There were slaves moving
throughout the Caribbean and the Latin American area.
And whether or not there was going to be a maintenance of
slavery mattered to folks in those areas, too.
So you have a much bigger, international discussion with
kids about what was happening in the world.
There's a wonderful children's book called, "The World in
1492," by a number of authors. And what it does is it tells
kids, look, this is what was happening in 1492 in Europe.
This is what was happening in 1492 in Great Zimbabwe.
This is what was happening in 1492 in Oceana.
This is what was happening in 1492 in the Americas.
This is what was happening in 1492 in Asia.
We teach that as if everybody was sitting in front of some big
screen TV saying, oh, is he going to make it?
I hope he get there. You know, like it's a CNN crawl,
you know, 20 miles from the coast.
( laughter ) So our kids are very confused
about the way in which the world sort of fits together.
So one of the things you've got to do is to help them understand
that slavery is a longstanding practice.
Pick up the Bible. There were slaves.
But slavery didn't decrease your humanity.
There was a particular form of slavery that took place in the
Americas that the world had not seen before.
And we have to ask ourselves what was happening in Europe and
in the Americas that could make this an okay way to treat
people. Thank you.
You've been wonderful. ( applause )