9UNP0125SD_Gloria Ladson Billings_WordPress

>> 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 § § 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 § § OH, LOUISIANA § § THEY'RE TRYING § § TO WASH US AWAY § § OH, LORD § § THEY'RE TRYING § § TO WASH US AWAY § § THEY'RE TRYING § § TO WASH US AWAY § § 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)