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Thank you for coming this >> Well, evening.veryone.
I'm Margaret Lewis, the executive director of the
Wisconsin Academy of Sciences,
And I'm just delighted that you could all join us for Dr. Gloria
Ladson-Billings presentation
the Dream Alive." Some of you, this might be
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Why don't you raise your hands
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Academy staff, that I think Andyou've probably met, Gail,in
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Oh, who's on the front? Gloria Ladson-Billings.
So if you want to hear more from
the articles in the magazine. herIn addition to our lectureout
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Our last of our four programs is Academy.
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Keepers: Successful Teachers of copAfrican American Children.eam
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begin.
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Mary. repMary, raise your hand.by
We appreciate your new
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So if you have that interest, please join me or find me after
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I'd now like to introduce to you
director of special events, who will introduce our speaker.
Thanks again for coming.
Thank you, Margaret. ( applause )
for being here tonight. Regarding tonight's program,
there will be time for
Gloria will be happy to answer questions.
Gloria Ladson-Billings is the Kellner Family Professor of
Urban Education in the
Instruction, and a faculty Department of Curriculum and
Educational Policy Studies at affiliateUW-Madison.artment of
Gloria's research examines the
teachers who are successful with pedagogical practices of
And she also investigates Afrcritical race theoryts.
applications to education.
acclaimed books including The SheDream Keepers: Successfullly
Teachers of African American
Canaan: The Journey of New Children, Crossing Over to
and Beyond the Big House: TAfrican American Educators on,
Teacher Education, along with more than 50 journal articles
and book chapters.
the American Educational She is the past-president of
former editor of the American REducational Research Journal.he
Her work has won numerous scholarly awards.
And she received an honorary
Sweden. During the 2003-2004 academicn
year, she was a fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the
Behavioral Sciences in Stanford,
And in 2005, she was elected to the National Academy of
Education and the National
Education. Society for the Study of
recipient of the Most recently, she is a 2008
Martin Luther King, Jr. StHeritage Award.n's
We are so pleased that Gloria has joined us this evening to
present Keeping the Dream Alive.
Ladson-Billings. Please welcome Gloria
That was kind of surreal ( applause )
You think who are they talking to hear those introductions.
( laughter ) about.
Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, First of all, let me thank the
this invitation and opportunity. Arts and Letters for both
invited to this venue. I don't take it lightly to be
coming out. We finally have some decentr
weather.
Daylight Savings Time, so it's And we've gotten through
You could've been doing so many other things, including going
next door to River Dance, so
And last, and certainly not least, let me thank my husband
Charles Billings for his
So, Chuck, you've got to stand never ending support.
( applause ) up and let people see you.
kinds of things I get to do without somebody who really
supports you all the way. So I don't take that for
granted.
that most of us academics rarely Well, let me start by saying
except other academics. That's what we get rewarded for,
talking to each other.
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,
( laughter ) not referring to you.
a specific audience in mind. So just imagine that I have
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.
title. And it's okay that it had that
( laughter ) So, let's see.
to Our Next President." Dear Mr., Madame, President.
The very fact that this letter
man or woman in the office of bPresident of the United States
is in itself a cause for
the historic nature of this cyear's presidential contest.
For this, we all, regardless of political persuasion, should
feel more deeply invested in the
all Americans regardless of promrace, class and agenda.lude
My letter to you is specifically linked to the
question of public education and
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
popularly, the "racial question of what has been called
The achievement gap has been achievement gap."
politician, educational researcher, educational leader,
and educational policymaker in
The provision of the the nation.
Elementary and Secondary Reauthorization of the
conventionally known as "No Child Left Behind," profoundly
illuminated this achievement gap
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
American counterparts. white, and in some cases Asian
Governors Association, the According to the nation's
race and class. acAnd across the U.S., a gapof
persists between minority and disadvantaged students,
and their white counterparts. It further states that this is
one of the most pressing
that the states currently face. educWe want to erase thisnges
achievement gap.
and noble goal. InHowever, as a new president,d
with presumably a new vision, I want to suggest that it is
important to begin rethinking this notion of the achievement
gap.
I believe we have an education Instead of an achievement gap,
This debt language totally debt.
students and their schooling. cFor instance, when we think ofn
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
how all of us, as members of a debt requires us to think about
implicated in creating these democratic society, are
So permit me to use an economic metaphor to explain what I mean
by this notion of an education
No doubt, you've already sat debt.
advisors who have briefed you about the economic challenges
that the nation faces.
is now $3.29 a gallon. Now key among that is that gas
be to construct a budget to So onpresent to Congress. will
If you keep within spending limits, people will celebrate
your ability to produce a balanced budget.
But no matter how successful
budget, lurking prominently in you are in producing the current
defense and entitlement programs that budget on line 3, after
as the "National Debt." is dThat is a debt that the know
nation has accumulated since its
It does not go away by balancing beginnings.
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.
publish the results of Every year, public schools
And at some schools, we celebrate and say we have
"balanced the budget."
the fact that the standardized At other schools, we bemoan
we have produced yet another test scores have revealed that
Again, lurking behind this deficit budget.
achievement test scores, is the educational debt of longstanding
inequities and educational
I believe that this debt is historical, economic and moral.
So in the following part of my
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
term history. There is not just one history.
There are histories.
as ours is that as it moves Ththroughout time, it has notch
moved in a straight line, or in the same way for every group or
individual. The history of groups intersects
and overlaps, producing many
one, not just a unitary one. histories, not just a single
histories, you see that over So as you look at our
narratives, there have been longsystematic and regularican
exclusions of certain groups of children and their families.
They've been excluded from
education process. schooling and the public
education like James Anderson, So scholars in the history of
have documented the legacy Michael Fults, and others,
in the U.S. Those inequities initially
were formed around race, class
Gradually, some of those and gender.
But clearly, they persist in the inequities began to recede.
In the case of African realm of race.
initially forbidden during the Americans, education was
After emancipation, we saw the period of enslavement.
whose purpose was a maintenance develoof a servant class.chools,
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
typical school year for rural black students was about four
months. Indeed, black students in the
south did not experience
until 1968. universal Not 1868. schooling
1968. In the lifetime of many of us
here, there have been places in the south where there were no
secondary schools.
had no secondary schools for In fact, the state of Kentucky
a group of Quakers chipped in Afand built them one school inl
Jefferson County. So all the kids went to that one
school, because there were no schools.
So if we haven't had these
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.
convert and use Indian labor to further the cause of the church.
And later, boarding schools were
Pratt asserted the need to "kill developed as General George
man. the Indian" in order to save the
forced assimilation created a Thigroup of people, accordingnd
to Pulitzer Prize winning writer
belonged nowhere." N. Scott Momaday, "Who
not fit comfortably into The assimilated Indian could
stratified mainstream. reservation life or the
welcomed the few Indians that successfully completed the early
boarding schools. And only historically black
colleges and universities like
doors to them. Hampton Institute opened their
and trade curriculum. ThereLatino students alsoonal
experienced huge disparities in their education.
In the report entitled, "Black, White and Brown," Latino
school desegregation efforts
the Board of Education era, we discovered the longstanding
practice of denial experienced
Historic desegregation cases, such as Mendez v. West Minister,
and the Lemon Grove incident
children were and continue detailed the way that brown
and high quality education. How many people have ever heard
of the Lemon Grove incident?
We don't talk about it. OkaWe talk a lot aboutson.
Brown v. the Board of Education,
But the Lemon Grove school and we know Linda Brown.
was an integrated district until district in southern California
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
sign there telling them, you came to school and there was a
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
Court that they had been argue in front of the Supreme
Now, of course, the problem with discriminated against.
Court approved, sided with them as plaintiffs, but based on the
fact that they were "white."
had been Indian or Negro, at the The Supreme Court said if you
district would have been time, then the Lemon Grove
So they basically argued justified in what it did.
ability to go back to their themsoriginal school. the
But these are histories that
what we now see in schools. dSo 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,
you care about our existing aeducational inequities, youn,
cannot ignore the history out of
whichdisparities emerged.onal
Call this next section, "follow the money."
So again, as I've said I'm
so I say to this person, having spjust completed a successfult,
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
somebody. But what is your sense of how
much money it takes to educate
participate as democratic young citizens? fully
And how might we ensure that we allocate for education money
that is more equitably spent? The legacy of separate,
segregated schooling has
funding streams that helped to produced incredibly inequitable
In current-day dollars, the funding disparities between
urban schools and their suburban
story about the value that we couplace on the education ofing
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
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
expenditure is $17,261 for a 91% lower Marion the per pupil
New York City Public Schools white population.
student population that is 72% spends $11,627 per pupil for a
Manhasset spends $22,311 per black and Latino, while suburban
that is 91% white. year for a student population
that one learns in statistics class is that correlation does
not prove causation.
ourselves, why the funding But I think we have to ask
regularly onto the racial and ethnic realities of our schools.
Even if we cannot prove that
because black and Latino schools are poorly funded
certainly can demonstrate that students attend them, we
the rise in the number of white the amount students.g rises with
This pattern of inequitable funding has occurred over
centuries.
schooling was non-existent For many of these populations,
nation. duAnd clearly, whites were note
prepared to invest their fiscal resources in what were perceived
to be strange others. The fundamental question that
these figures raise in my mind
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
The third aspect of this education debt.
is what I call the education debt of which I speak
You know better than most, how socio-political debt.
the free society. iIn addition to being able to
vote, democratic citizens have
variety of decision-making the right to participate in a
children and their community processes that impact their
For long periods of our history, schools.
excluded from the political communitiesprocess.r have been
In 1965, Congress wisely passed the Voting Rights Act to begin
to eradicate the
In March, 1965, Mississippi, social-political debt.
North Carolina, South Carolina Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana,
participation between white and and black voters that rangedter
from 63.2% to 22%.
years of the Voting Right Act, But in 1988, after more than 20
white and black voters in those thesouthern states range fromthe
a -2%, meaning that actually
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
you that the dramatic voter thparticipation changes that Ind
reference are a result of bold
of President Lyndon Johnson and and the Congress to remedy aart
longstanding wrong by passing the Voter Rights Act of 1965.
In a hole of the
the Supreme Court ruled Congress constitutionality of the act,
litigation was inadequate to has found that the case by case
discrimination in voting because combat widespread and persistent
and energy that's required to ofovercome the obstructionistime
tactics invariably encountered
After enduring nearly a century of systematic resistance to the
15th Amendment, Congress might
advantage of time and inertia from the perpetrators of the
evil to its victims.
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
preference in admission to denied groups should be given a
In the case of African schools and college.
helped create what we now know Americans, this policy literally
In today's political as a black middle class.
affirmative action has fallen into disfavor, and is treated as
if it represents special
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
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
That's affirmative action. Yale.
good alumni. It's not that their parents were
It's that they were alumni. Now, anybody in business will
tell you this is only good
want alumni to give. business practice because you
to keep alumni from giving is not to let their kids in yours
school. So this notion of affirmative
action is not that different
We let all GIs take advantage of from legacy or the GI Bill.
If you were a GI, you were the GI Bill, not the good ones.
the GI Bill. entitled to take advantage of
last thing that I think Okacontributes to the debt.his
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
Ms. President, I raise the I send to you Mr. or
we, as a society, owe. question of the moral debt that
Supreme Court determined that race could not be used to assign
students to schools, even when
learning environment as one of schools have created a diverse
The result of such a ruling is their central goals.
continued re-segregation of our likely to schools.te to the
It is pointed out that not only has school segregation
persisted, but it has been
demographics of the nation. It is also pointed out that
there has been no serious discussion of the cost of
segregation, or the advantages
segregated population, white of integration for our most
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
process of re-segregation. more than a decade into the
community like Madison that it And it's interesting in a
but it happens within school. dSo you can have a school thatl,
produces more national merit
state, but also has one of the finalists than any school in the
American students. highest dropout rates of African
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.
so bad," and "What a shame." And they were like, "Oh, this is
talking about?" Incidentally, they were not
educators.
law and medicine. And they said it's a shame about
these Milwaukee schools.
Madison schools?" So I actually was able to plan
a trip for them.
schools. And we went to one of the high
schedules to follow like you do Thon back to school night.le
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
I said, "It's not that hard." Calculus.
There are no black children in this room, you know.
Basic science.
room. TSo even though the school ist
"integrated," from the
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
More than two million black and Latino students, that is a
quarter of the black students in
attend what researchers now call the northeast and the Midwest
The four most segregated states for black students are New York,
Michigan, Illinois and
Now, I recount this issue of California.
you that although the current scheducation legislation isind
entitled, "No Child Left
hundreds of thousands of Behind," we enacted it when
behind. Indeed, they were so far behind
that no attempt at leveling the playing field by just
requiring that everyone pass the
have any impact on them. same standardized tests would
school desegregation, and indeed The failure to fully implement
principle, along with our failure to provide school
funding equity really contribute
education debt. These are the kinds of things
around which a president can use
the nation. hiAlmost every school child inly
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
marched on Washington to get the Americans and others have
promissory note that that nation nation to make good on a
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
opportunity in this nation. funSo today, as the nexts of
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
down by more testing, less attention, and cannot be paid
public schools. fIt cannot be paid down byin
attacks on teachers and their preparation.
Since the debt is so enormous,
But it cannot be ignored. The results of that debt show up
every year in our increasing
teen pregnancies as compared to other western democracies, our
loss of economic
important, our low participation competitiveness, and most
The primary mission of public schools is to make citizens.
I feel like some kind of idiot
this. sIt is not to be the farm teamys
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
participating in the economy. But the thing that we do, and
are supposed to do well, is to
What kind of citizens can we make citizens.
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
society. a democratic and multi-cultural
an awesome responsibility as a leader of the wealthieste
developed nation the world has
Along with all the security concerns, and the rising
healthcare costs, and economic
a course for how the federal challenges, you have to steer
education system that is failing government will respond to an
The debt is massive. us on many levels.
to start on a payment plan. BuAnd just in case you cannotars
visualize what this massive debt
slide show in this letter that looks like, I'm enclosing a
WHAT HAS HAPPENED DOWN HERE IS THE WINDS HAVE CHANGED
CLOUDS ROLL IN
AND IT STARTED TO RAIN FROM THE NORTH
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
IN THE FLOOD SOME PEOPLE GOT LOST
GOT AWAY ALRIGHT SOME PEOPLE
CLEAR DOWN TO PLACKER MINE THE RIVER HAD BUSTED THROUGH
IN THE STREETS OF EVANGELINE SIX FEET OF WATER
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
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. TO WASH US AWAY
Thank you, Gloria. ( applause )
and some of us catch our breath, We'll let you catch your breath
video. I think, after watching that
your hand and ask questions. I invite the audience to raise
question, that will help Gloria, if you will repeat the
viewers of this presentation. everyone >> Yes?nd future
I have a question about disproportionality when you look
at African American kids being
services. laCan you talk to that inve
Wisconsin?
what we term as disproportionality in terms of
how many African American kids
example. end up in special education, for
should show up in a population You know, statistically, you
general population. tSo if you are five percent ofe
the general population, you should be five percent of every
other population, the gifted and
ed population. talented population, the special
or 50% for African American We have numstudents.oaching 40%
And when you actually do the
The same is true for Latino males, it sstudents.oes higher.
That you have this
And so part of it is that we disproportionate number of kids.
really don't have a choice about have many schools systems that
because the nation, or the placing kids in special ed,
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
I mean, commonsense says get the your SSI.
income in the household. label, because now you have more
then the kid ends up in a set of But the problem with that is
doesn't benefit that kid. eSo I always say, you know,t
it's sort of like chemotherapy, but you don't have cancer.
The only thing that's going to
fall out. haOkay, you're not going to beo
healed from anything. So this notion of putting kids
in special education when they
mislabeling of kids. don't belong there, and the
that's sort of from outside of The other thing we know, and
What we know from inside school is that African American males
in particular, are much more
ed assignment and get ldisciplined for what we calll
non-contact offenses. So what's a non-contact offense?
Wearing a hat.
I mean, those kinds of things. Or saying something back smart.
But when you look at the They didn't hit anybody.
And one of the things that I records.
to do when they're out in oftenschools is look at theents
assignment of suspension and
And then see if you can figure expulsion.
They're supposed to tell you why out why the kid was suspended.
schools. somebody is excluded from
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
you know. They make a whole lot of dumb,
mistakes. And yet, we're seemingly
penalizing one group of kids
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
And I looked at it and said, changing its gifted kids.
identifying them." "Yeah, because you're not
disproportionality. And I think any time we see any
kind of pattern that attaches to
ethnicity, that attaches to language, we have to ask the
question, how did this pattern
It's not a random assignment. Yeah??
It was noted that Wisconsin ranked number 50 of the 50
states in terms of reading and
children. matWe spend more moneyack
proportionately than many of the
the education of our children. other states in the country on
You always tell us the right What are we doing wrong?
It appears that we hear you, but thing to do.
Can you talk to us a little bit about what Madison is doing
wrong.
question really gets to something that bugs me.r
I happen to be in Washington the
released. And I actually ran into the
state superintendent of another Midwestern state.
And she was just crowing about
did really good. "Oh, I can't tell you, but we
I can't tell you the numbers, And but I'm excited." gap.
So I called the people I know.
information is embargoed. It's going to be out next week,
but what can you tell me?"
be happy." She says, "You're not going to
to be happy we're in the bottom, I said, "Well, am I not going
She said, "You're going to be even less happy."
( laughter )
She said, "You guys I saidare dead last."ng me."
I said, "Are you sure?" So what we're talking about
when we look at the national
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.
disparity between black and white children in both reading
and mathematics.
Louisiana, and the District of Larger than Mississippi,
We're dead last. Columbia.
you take the white students in So it's interesting, because if
top. our schools, we're among the
experiencing two different kinds So clearly, kids are
I made an appointment, right of education.
state superintendent and her after I got the data, with the
And my question was, "What are cabinet.
It's an embarrassment. you going to do about this?"
and this has been an With all of the resources,
general, for us to be dead last educais unconscionable.e in
The question is for me, when do these kids start to matter.
What also is interesting to me
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
Part of it for me is political know this bad news.
The other part is more curved. will.
matter, that they matter a lot. And you know, you lay those
figures next to the fact that we
it's unbelievable. are incarcerating at a rate that
I've ever encountered who was in And almost every youngster that
read. So we know something happens to
kids in those really early
grabbing hold of education. yeI met with the Dane Countye
probation folks.
profession were able to do the And I told them if people in my
guys would be out of work, job we're supposed to do, you
you any kids. And almost every kid who is in
jail has an education problem.
It seems to me that our legal structure is entrenching this
inequality and the Supreme Court
to integrate their schools. is lThe very school financen do
structures we have are
( inaudible ) enMy 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
done, at least we can go to the that if we courts.et anything
The courts have shifted, in case
And the court is not very anybodyfriendly.oticed.
In fact, I wrote a paper last year called, "When The Court Is
No Longer Your Friend," that
which the decisions now seem to really locome out.he way in
The new strategy for public school activists is around
funding equity. So instead of going at the
Supreme Court level, there are
at the way in which states are state by state efforts to look
them have in their charters. failing to provide, and many of
Constitution says nothing Becauabout education. U.S.
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
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
education. to provide adequate, basic
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,"
Plessy was better than a fake because I aBrown.that a real
( laughter )
the same schools, the same You know, if we really had
we'd take it. We don't have to go to school
with you, if you actually gave
supposed to have. Of course, that was tongue in
cheek.
the North Carolina Law Review, I actually got it published in
thought, "Let's think about though, becathis."e law people
( laughter )
then, is that we're getting But the thijudgments.s happening
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
any money. legislatures say they don't have
saying they're not putting in And thany more money.rs are
So you get judgments. You can't collect on those
judgments.
us to begin to think about is Pernot the courts, but thefor
legislatures. And so to the degree that we can
move state legislatures, we may have some opportunity.
Now often what will happen, if
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.
because the cost of public But it gets harder and harder,
The cost of living is going up. I don't know why we would think
it would stay low.
education begins to decline. And yet, the support for public
demographic shape of our nation. We have a really funny
people. People of my generation of baby
boomers, and then you have a
certainly don't have the same lamount of kids that we hade
coming through the system that
So how we begin to develop some we had 3sympathy.ears ago.
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.
society where the word public is We've gotten in a place in this
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
certain standard. relAnd if you had any hope of a
getting your children up out of poverty, you sent them to public
schools.
go away. Now, all of this is seeming to
transportation. Certainly, no one wants to live
in public housing.
doctor, so we don't have the And everybody wants their own
So the last little domino that public health.
now is public education. we're fighting to hold on right
that these are government So we can'tschools.ple tell us
We can't let people tell us that
Because some kids are doing quite well in public schools.
The question is how do we ensure
in public schools. that all of the children do well
I heard the comment that you Yeah?
schools are for educating made earcitizens.t public
They're not a farm team for corporate America.
But then at the same time, every
talking about that we don't have senator, every legislator, is
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.
very much about it, but what I'm thinking about, I don't know
Is there an appropriate role for Bill Gates had tried to do.
Good question. private sector businesses?
the private sector in supporting Is there an appropriate role for
I'd say yes. public education.
it's called the Milwaukee Round I went and Table. to I think
They weren't exactly my crowd.
But I made an argument that we always make these comparisons
to public and private education.
comparisons to make. And that those are the wrong
between public K-12 education and public higher education.
What makes the University of
place to go? Wisconsin still the most desired
No. It belongs to this entire state.
And it has a couple things in it
some of our worst urban schools. that I think are missing from
has is that it has wonderful And one of the things that it
What do I mean by co-curricular co-curriactivity.ivities.
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.
outside of the classroom that bind, not just the students, but
the community to the
It has multiple funding streams. institution.
kicking in less and less each Unfortunabiennium. state is
In fact, I now call us a
We're not a state school. But we have money from the
state.
We have money from private We have money from the feds.
So that makes us accountable to multiple constituencies.
Here's a place where private
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.
in doesn't turn out a worker for So even if the money you throw
out a physician or an attorney, you've now added another citizen
who is not someone you are
incarceration costs or public paying dole.n either
So it is about those companies
broader visions about what it anmeans to participate.ave
In other words, it can't have strings attached that you've got
to turn out 20% of your kids
for Kraft Foods. so that they can go work
partnership. It can't be that kind of
One of the basic assumptions Yes?
been that money helps, which I of this discussion so far has
But when you get down past the certainly agree with.
where I work, I'm a teacher, policies, on the ground level,
look like for educating an what would your ideal classroom
Okay, he started out by saying we have the assumption
that money helps, but wanting to
African American students would know what mlook like.assroom for
Let me address that first little
I love the statement that, aside.
for rich people..." ( laughter )s good
Think how much better it would be for poor people.
You know, the people all telling
never need money. meSo yeah, the money by itselfer
won't do it.
classrooms in which kids come in However, I'm talking about
stands before them is invested and know that that person who
That it matters to them that in them.
I've talked to a lot of kids. And you know, kids tell me
things like, "Well, you know, it
or don't do it. doeWhatever I do is okay."work
Kids shouldn't be thinking
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 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
They would walk into classrooms where teachers were deeply
invested in them. They would walk into classrooms
where they maintained some level
I was in a school in Kansas City.
And I talked to some middle school kids.
And you know, middle school kids
I refer to them as the people afrom another planet.
My first teaching job was seventh and eighth grade.
Whoo! But I said to the kids,
"Who's your favorite teacher?"
And I said, "What does she teach?"
And they said Social Studies. Well, that bowled me over
because I was a Social Studies
Studies teachers. tAnd I said, "Well, what is itl
about her that you like?" They said, "She speaks to us
every day.
she smiles at us. WheShe looks us in the eye.l,
She always says please or thank you when she asks you.
She always tells you..."
this is just civility. And I'm thinking, okay,
go to a teacher ed program You know, you don't have to
But what it was saying to me is that they don't get this on a
regular basis.
valued, and feel that there is a So to the degree that kids feel
them, you begin to see some mutudifferent things happennt in
in classrooms.
be surprised how disengaged many It sounds so simple, but you'd
don't feel like there's any sense of investment in them.
Now, I'm not being
There are kids with some severe family situations that you and I
can't even get our minds around.
who haven't eaten, haven't We've got kids coming to school
going to be living tomorrow. slept, don't know where they're
who are incarcerated. YoIt's like one thing afternts
another.
going and being nice is going to I'm not suggesting that just
But it does take this sort of long term investment that says
my job is to teach you
whatever it takes. and I'm going to figure out
I might make some big mistakes. But you have to know that I'm
doing what I do because I care
In fact, I understand that our about you.
If you don't leave here as a futures are connected.
have to take care of you in some productive citizen, then I still
You know, I tell my kids that all the time.
You know, I'm looking for you to
We have three older kids and we have a young daughter.
There's 17 years between our
I thought of her at the time as daumy insurance policy.rs.
( laughter )
like that. It ain't quite working out
It was a good idea. But the idea that, you know,
the kids don't evaporate when we
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.
those schools. We want them to benefit from
Yeah? I thought so, how are you doing?
When you look at the
year, there seems to be a higher enrollment in schools every
Latino backgrounds. That's, you can see that in the
urban centers, as well as in the
Wisconsin. rural areas of the state of
country. For that matter, throughout the
not ready for these children. AnThey're not ready to receivere
such a significant number of
that they've never seen before. And it continues to be a harsher
problem in the public school
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
And the school's seeming schools.
appropriate ways to meet their inability to respond in
I'm a person who likes what I call existence proofs.
In other words, I don't need
is so. 4,000 cases to tell me something
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.
So what was happening in Miami They did pretty well.
Arizona, California, and Dade that's not happening in
and every state of the nation? increasingly Illinois, Wisconsin
said we have no sense of Well, earlier in the talk, I
The United States has a long history.
starting in the mid to late hist1800s with the Germans.ion,
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
Because German is an important German.
a rich cultural stock." lanSo indeed, they put enoughrom
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,
the most part, they made the and they were middle class for
You've got to teach our kids very same argument.
much older than your culture. Come on, you know, this is rich,
important culture.
said, "You're not giving those And the non-Spanish speakers
Spanish." So is it the language or is
it the speaker. There's an interesting thing
that has happened.
wholly associated with poor Now SpanishLatinos.ome almost
So we've got to begin to
made a level of accommodation understafor language.ve always
Every major city in this nation has a French school.
I don't know where all these
I guess they're all going to French speakers are going.
( laughter ) Quebec.
to Louisiana. And Maybe three of usoing
going to Paris. Because we value French
as a language.
Spanish somewhere where it's now So we've placed a status of
And we've got to get people to seen as lower.
nation in which knowing more understand this is the only
You know, a kid comes to school with more than one language and
we think, oh, this is not a good
This is exactly the thing that thing.
We shouldn't be graduating any we want our kids.
languages. of our kids with less than two
not just about schools, it's So this push for bilingualism is
we want to be. tied to what kind of nation do
the rest of the world? How do we want to engage with
actually know how to do this. We have not made a commitment to
do it.
You addressed your letter to Yes?
States. And yet, you seem to imply that
you don't think that the federal
to do much about the problem. If you're asked to be the next
Secretary of Education. >> Oh, my goodness.
( laughter )
that's not going to happen, because I wouldn't make it
through the security clearance. ( laughter )
You haven't, you know,
I've got a file. I'm a child of the 1960s.
But I'll play this game ( lauwith you.
One of the things that has
to which we make children economic units by saying they're
entitled to a good school if
And what counts is a good thneighborhood is if they have.
good property.
And it behooves us as a nation These children are citizens.
the United States is entitled to say this isto.at a citizen of
I mean, one of the places that
constitution issue of leaving education in the 9th Amendment,
basically saying it's a function
But we have got to begin to see our kids as citizens, not
members of neighborhood X.
citizen? And what does it mean to be a
happen is we have to talk about what are the very minimum things
that all citizens are entitled
citizens in relation to their to as a ceducation. of being
One of the places I think we're stuck around NCLB, although I
don't know how long they'll have
enactment of that legislation, it, is that prior to the
schools that we couldn't defend. there were things happening in
That's why many poor communities We just really couldn't.
least they have to teach to the I worked in, test.e would say at
They didn't have to teach anything before.
At least that was their feeling.
Education has to be someone who has this broader citizen vision,
who can begin to talk with the
and commissioners about what the various state superintendents
various states. And the way in which those,
whatever those needs are, they
civic preparation. can't fall beneath some level of
means you do have to be able to Now, to me, read. preparation
You do have to be able to write.
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.
And I know I run into friction But prepared to go.
no, everybody shouldn't go to with colleacollege. think that
Well maybe they shouldn't, but
And we should not be leaving they ought to have the choice.
even make the choice because the kids in a place where they can't
they received doesn't prepare kind of highthem.ol education
You know, if you're prepared to go to college and you say you
want to be an auto mechanic,
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
engage with the larger civic what that civic, ability to
And I think we have to have that community means.
conversation, although it will conversation as a national
constitutional issues. devolve to states because of our
there. There was one more thing back
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
learning about slavery. And I'm wondering in learning a
way of teaching that without
So her question is about the further victimizing them.
might teach in ways that kids don't feel disempowered ande
angry and upset about it. It's like I just set her in the
audience, because I used to be
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
decided, you know what, we're movenot taking this anymore.ople
It's about social movement, as
So one of the questions, well as it's about individuals.
what I would ask students, when I taught U.S. history,
the debate, was what kind of that totally reframed
thought it was okay to capture society was Europe, that people
That takes us back to feudalism. people and enslave them.
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.
kings, and everybody else works They arefor them.obles and
That took that thinking to a
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
color of your skin. group You'd been defeated.ot the
In fact, your folks could come
of it. back with money and buy you out
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.
the things that are happening, So when we begin to look at all
an "American phenomenon." we It was an internationaly as
phenomenon. The world was involved.
When we decided to end the
just have implications slave trade in 1848, it didn't
If you've ever looked at for the U.S.
there's this long peninsula acalled Florida..,
Then you come around and
then you get Texas. yoOkay, there's somethingo,
attached to Texas.
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
called "Sectionalism." level has a section
the north and the south And it'sof the U.S.ng about
This is an international
You talk about globalism? There were slaves moving
throughout the Caribbean and the
And whether or not there was Latin American area.
slavery mattered to folks in going to be a maintenance of
So you have a much bigger, those areas, too.
kids about what was happening in international discussion with
There's a wonderful children's the world.
1492," by a number of authors. book called, "The World in
kids, look, this is what was And what it does is it tells
This is what was happening in ha1492 in Great Zimbabwe.pe.
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, 20 miles from the You know, likcoast. a CNN crawl,
( laughter )
about the way in which So our kids are very confused
So one of the things you've got to do is to help them understand
that slavery is a longstanding
Pick up the Bible. practice.
But slavery didn't decrease your There were slaves.
There was a particular form of humanity.
Americas that the world had not slavery tseen before.ce in the
And we have to ask ourselves
in the Americas that could make whathis an okay way to treat and
people. Thank you.
You've been wonderful. (
applause )