- It is my pleasure to introduce you to Ali Muldrow.
She is the Racial Justice Youth Organizer
at the Gay Straight Alliance for Safe Schools.
Her pronouns are 'she, her and hers'.
She has a very interesting resume.
She's a poet, a mama, a doula and an educator.
And we are so pleased to welcome her in her role
as facilitator for this panel.
Thank you so much.
(audience applauds)
- How's everybody doing?
(multiple indistinct responses)
Thank you, thank you for that response.
I'm going to go over kind of the ground rules
for what it means for us to be here together
and what that is going to kind of manifest
as and can look like.
And so, we want folks to be here
with an open heart and open mind,
to be ready to listen to one another
and ready to celebrate listening to one another.
We want folks to use 'I' statements
and to talk from their personal experiences,
not to generalize.
We want to share the air,
so there's going to be kind of a 'give and take'
in this conversation, in this dialogue.
And we hope folks are down for that.
We want to challenge behavior and respect people.
So, we don't want to blame folks for systemic issues.
We want to recognize, you know,
and separate folks from large-scale,
systematic problems that we've all absorbed.
We want to listen actively and,
and be real in the space and be here with one another.
And we want to lean into discomfort.
There are going to be things said
that are hard to understand,
that you have to go the extra mile in listening to,
that you have to really take into consideration and ponder.
And we ask you to have the audacity and courage to do that.
And I think that is it for ground rules.
Can we make some noise for, like, self-respect,
informing respect for one another?
(audience applauds)
I'm going to read off the questions we asked folks
to take into consideration when preparing
what they were going to talk about
and how they were going to address y'all tonight.
Those questions were one,
What does inequity look like in your work
as it pertains to young children, race and privilege?
Two, How do you and/or your organization
work to address inequity?
And three, Five to 10 years from now,
what do you want your work to mean,
and how do you imagine your work will have evolved
as we move towards equity?
So, keep those questions in mind.
And without further ado,
I would like to introduce our first panelist.
Gloria Ladson-Billings is the,
I'm sorry,
Kellner Family Distinguished Professor in Urban Education
in the Department of Curriculum and Instruction,
and is faculty-affiliated in the
Department of Education Policy Studies,
Educational Leadership and Policy Analysis and,
Afro-American Studies at the University
of Wisconsin-Madison.
She was the 2005-2006 president
of the American Educational Research Association.
Ladson-Billings' research
examines the...
pedagogical practices of teachers
who are successful with African-American students.
She also investigates critical race theory applications
and education, in addition to her scholarly activities.
Ladson-Billings has been an active member
of the broader community.
She is a member of the Board of Directors
of the Urban League of Greater Madison;
a member of the Vision Council
of the United Way of Dane County;
a member of the Board of Directors
of the Madison Children's Museum.
She formerly served as a member of the Board of Directors
of the Susan G. Komen for the Cure,
and remains an active advocate
for African-American women's health.
In 2007, Ladson-Billings was ordained
as a deacon in her church.
Only the second woman in the church's 104 year history.
Ladson-Billings is 48 year member
of the Alpha Kappa Alpha Sorority, Inc.,
and a member of the LINKS, Inc.
Please put your hands together for Gloria, y'all.
(audience applauds)
- Again, thank you, Ali, and thank you all for being here,
and thank you for that introduction.
In 1997, I published an article entitled,
"I Don't See Color, I Just See Children."
And I published it because most of my work
is really with older youngsters,
from middle school through high school.
But I wanted to write something that spoke
to the Early Childhood community.
And I guess the impetus for writing the article
was the fact that I had just gone through
early childhood experiences with my daughter.
And when I tell you, like,
I'm a bad Early Childhood educator,
I'll tell you that right now (laughter).
I don't understand why people are crying.
Why are you crying?
You know?
So, and it was a difficult experience for me
because I didn't know the rules of early childhood
in middle class affluent communities.
My daughter went to preschool in Palo Alto, California.
And I didn't know you're supposed to enroll them
when they are in utero.
(laughter)
So, I show up with a three-year old, saying,
like, "We're ready to come to school."
And they're like, "Well, when's the baby due?"
I'm like, "No, this one."
(laughter)
"Oh dear, you're, you're much too late!"
So the only way that I could get her into preschool
was to agree to be what was called a 'participating parent'
which meant one day a week I had to be there.
So I had to get them to swear that
I didn't have to do anything with her.
Because my whole point was to take her there,
so I could go somewhere else.
So they agreed that yes, you can, you know,
you can play with the other kids.
And I had a very, very interesting experience there
where there was one young child there
who we were playing together one day.
And he was a recent immigrant from Italy, Northern Italy.
And we were playing,
and he said to me as he looked across the room at,
to two black children that were in the preschool,
"Which one is yours?"
And it was interesting to me that the adults
in the room seemed uncomfortable
that he asked that question.
I thought it was a perfectly logical question.
There were three black people in that place.
(laughter)
I was one, and he wanted to know which one of those,
to me that was an observation a child would make.
And so I said, "Oh, the girl, Jessica.
"That's my daughter."
So that, that particular interaction kind of went okay.
But then a few days later,
the same youngster showed up with a beautiful sweater,
clearly a hand-made sweater.
And I admired it.
And he says, "Oh, my grandmother made this sweater.
"My grandmother in Italy, and she sent it to me.
"And she sent me one and she sent my sister one
"and my mom one and my dad one."
And I said, "Oh, Marco!
"I'm gonna have to come to your house
"so I can get one of these sweaters."
And he said, "Oh, you can't live at my house.
"There's no brown people at my house."
This time, in unison, the adults said,
"Marco!
"That's not nice."
And what I realized that what he was doing
was making an observation.
He wasn't making a judgement,
and he had not had what I call 'the social funding of race'.
In other words, race didn't mean anything to him.
But it was clear to me that by the time he was in, hmm,
second, third grade, he would have clear understandings
of the rules of race in our society.
Because he was gonna keep getting sanctioned
every time he made any observation
about difference.
The second thing that really kind of triggered
my thinking about this is that my daughter developed
a very close friendship when she was in kindergarten
with another immigrant child from China.
And they were extremely close,
because this family really didn't know very much
about the U.S., and so we were helping them
with things like driver's license
and getting the utilities turned on.
So when we moved to Madison the next year
they were shell-shocked,
because we were really their support.
As things would have it,
they moved to suburban Chicago a year later
because the father finished his post-doc.
So we got the kids together.
And so now they're about seven or eight years old,
and I overhear a conversation between the two of them.
And this little girl, and I'll call her 'Ming Lee',
said something about being yellow.
And my daughter said, "Wow!
"When we were in California,
"you said you were a white!"
And she said, "Yeah.
"I didn't know."
So one of the things that I was thinking about,
what has happened to her in the two years.
I had an experience with this little girl,
when she came into my house as a five-year-old
when asked for the, "Where's the white Barbie?"
And I went--
(laughter) I don't have a white Barbie.
(laughter)
And she said, as a five year old would say,
she said, "Why?"
So I said, "Well, Ming Lee,
"I just don't think a white Barbie would feel
"all that comfortable living here."
(laughter)
And she said, "Why?"
I said, "Well, because, you know, there's no other,
"other white dolls here, and she would like be the only
"white doll and just might not feel good for her."
"Why?"
And this went on, and I kept coming up with reasons
why the doll wouldn't be comfortable.
And then finally she said,
"Oh, there she is!
"There's the white Barbie."
Now my head is swirling like the Exorcist,
'cause who bought a white Barbie to my house, right?
(laughter)
But it turns out this is a black Barbie.
She is wearing a wedding dress.
So you see why I say the way the kids
are making observations that make sense to them.
And we are putting meaning in it.
So I want to kind of wrap up by saying that
We teach our kids about race
by how we respond to it.
When we pull away, when we don't let them go places,
when we say, 'Oh, well that neighborhood's not really nice',
or, they're all kinds of signals that we give kids
that do what I would call 'socially fund race'.
We make it have meaning.
So I think our wrap up question was,
'So in five to 10 years from now,
where will be as a result of,
of trying to do some work against this.'
I think if we don't get this right that our kids
are going to continue to suffer from the inequity
and inequality that we continue to feed.
I think, instead of things getting better,
and we always have this
narrative of progress in our society.
I think what will happen is that we will see
very separate and distinct communities.
We already see it as adults, but our children
will be participating in it in a,
in a way that I think will be extremely detrimental
to their well-being.
(audience applauds)
- I'm going to introduce Eva Schulte,
is a mother, an educator, a community organizer.
She is a white woman who has been involved
in racial justice work in different forms for most,
for more than a decade.
She is a member of 'Groundwork',
a community organization that uses education
and action to work for racial justice and equity
in Madison and Dane County.
She's also a co-founder of 'Families for Justice',
a multi-generational organization that engages
whole families in racial justice work.
As a mother to two children ages three and six,
she is passionate about thinking about
how to raise race-conscious children
and doing this work with others.
Her commitment to racial justice is an on-going journey
from the heart of building relationships and learning,
making mistakes and discovering courage.
She is grateful for the many people of color and white,
anti-racist activists who have modeled
how to do this work boldly
and with integrity and who continue to inspire her.
Make some noise, y'all.
(audience applauds)
- Great, thank you. Can y'all hear me?
Well, it is such an honor to be sitting up here
on this panel, and it's really an honor
to be sitting in front of a room full of people
who have come and care about the issues
that we're talking about today.
And I'm just going to tell a little bit of my story
and the work of 'Groundwork' and 'Families for Justice.'
'Groundwork' started in 2005,
really as a group of people,
of white folks who wanted to be engaged
in racial justice work.
And so, really listening to
people of color who are leaders in the community
who were saying,
"Okay, y'all need to go and work with your people.
"That's where you can really make the most impact."
And so 'Groundwork' formed to do self-education
to support people of color-led organizations
that were doing racial justice work
and to work with our people,
to work with other white folks in,
in education and action.
Now as some of us who are involved in 'Groundwork'
and who had gone through 'Groundwork' workshops and training
started having families, we really felt the need to have
a space where we could bring our whole families
into racial justice work and to figure out
what that would look like.
So you know, we really are, and it has been a journey.
It's like we're, we're learning all the time.
And we're making mistakes all the time.
And that's part of the process of moving forward.
So you know, we really focused on learning
how do we talk to our kids about race.
I think most of us don't have the experience
because we didn't grow up in a family
that talked about race.
And so, in our, in our first years
we were really getting together
and meeting monthly or quarterly and organizing activities,
age-appropriate activities,
to talk to our kids about fairness and unfairness and race.
And for me and my family, that, that was a fundamental,
formed a fundamental basis for
how I can talk to my kids now,
because it really provided us with the language
to talk about race.
And it made it normal that it's something our family does.
We talk about race,
and we talk about race with other families.
And, and the flip side to the, or the other part of that is,
it really helped build my confidence to speak up, you know,
the empowerment piece, that I have this community of,
of other families that I know that are my support group,
and I'm not alone trying to figure it out.
And together, we're trying to figure things out.
So these are really kind of the big,
the two, the two parts that 'Families for Justice'
works for is really trying to bring this into our families,
talking about race and talking about
fairness and unfairness.
But then also taking the next step and taking action.
Just one of, after Michael Brown
was killed and Ferguson was really taking
the national stage,
there was a rally down at Penn Park.
And so I probably as myself wouldn't have gone.
But as the families and 'Families for Justice' had said,
"Let's all go.
"Let's take our families, and we're meet there."
And that also forced me to have this conversation
with my then four or five year old about where we going,
and what were people going to be talking about,
and why were they talking about and why was it important.
And, yeah, I was like, how do I find the right words?
And how do I not make him be scared?
But it's important.
And I remember very vividly being on the playground
before the rally was starting,
and kids from the neighborhood playing on the playground.
And there was probably a five year old black boy
with a button that says 'Hands Up, Don't Shoot.'
And that was the moment where it really shifted
from going to my brain, like understanding things
in my head to understanding things in my heart.
When I realized, you know,
what are the conversations that that boy's family
is having in his home at this time?
And I can have just a little bit of courage to have
conversations in my family about race.
And I can have a little more courage to speak up
and to act up when it's, when it's needed.
So to kind of look at some of the questions,
"What does inequality look like,
"and how do we address it in 'Families for Justice?'
We start with a basic premise that racism
and inequality exists.
It's institutional. It's in all of our institutions.
It's pervasive, and it's persistent.
The U.S. has, you know,
hundreds of years' legacy of,
of racism, and it's, it's in all of our institutions.
So really our question is, as for those of us who are white,
as white folks doing this work, like, what's our role?
And what's our role with our young children?
And what's our role in our families?
And what's our role in our schools?
And I guess just to put our vision,
and we're imperfect in it,
is to be actively challenging racism every day.
So I think on, talking, looking at some
of our challenges and successes,
I think that some of the challenges that as parents,
as adults, like we have,
as white folks who are parents and adults,
we have so much discomfort about talking about race.
It's loaded with guilt and shame and fear about it.
Am I going to say the right thing?
Am I going to do the wrong thing?
And so that's why it's hard to have these conversations
with our kids.
But I, like personally, I have to remind myself every day
to think about race because I have the privilege not to.
I have the privilege not to think about it.
And so it's really important.
And I know that there's a lot of ways that,
when I don't see it.
And I'm not challenging the notion that white culture
is what's normal, and white culture,
and the white culture is setting the,
what's normal for our kids.
The way that in 'Families for Justice' we have seen success
in that within ourselves is that we're building a community.
And the community piece is core, is so key to that.
We're building relationships to educate ourselves.
We're building relationships to educate others.
And we're making mistakes along the way.
We make a lot of mistakes, you know?
But if we're willing to go there,
it's in a transformative process.
One of our other challenges
is that we're working with families and parents.
And we're all busy.
The couple of hours before I was here,
I was chasing after my three year old,
helping my six year old try to do a project,
getting dinner on the table.
And it's just, you know,
it feels like a success just to get out the door.
And I know that a lot of you can probably relate to that.
So, we've really tried to support each other
so that we can participate in the world in a way
that matters to us.
So in some of the ways we've done that
is to really think about, well,
how can we create family-friendly spaces in organizing?
If, you know, if we want to go to a demonstration,
like how can we bring our kids?
Or how can we offer childcare so that other folks can go?
And then the big piece that, you know,
is really looking at the challenges that, you know,
we're looking at institutional inequities and institutional racism.
And it's systemic. It's big.
It's bigger than any of us.
But, we know that institutions
are not going to change on their own.
They may be very well intentioned people within them,
but it takes healthy pressure
from people saying that something different
needs to be done.
So within 'Families for Justice,' it, we feel it's,
yes, it is important to be talking with our families.
It's also very important to take the next step
and put that into action.
So I think that as white parents
and white families,
we really want to have the power of our collective voice.
You know, be saying,
"Yes, we want our education system to work for everybody.
"You know, like this is important to us."
And to be really deeply listening
and working in partnership with people
of color so that we can hear what is most important,
hear what's most pressing.
And we invite, we really invite others
who want to be engaged in this work,
because it takes all of us.
Just in five to 10 years,
what do we hope this looks like?
We hope Madison looks different.
We hope that white folks are stepping up with courage.
We hope that there's real relationships
being built across color lines.
And that, that people of color are being heard
and are in visible leadership positions.
You know I think I really approach this work
as the long haul.
This is going to go on beyond my lifetime.
That's why it's important that,
for me, it's important that we're raising
the next generation in a,
differently than how I was raised.
But that really to think of like this
is a lifetime's journey.
It's a lifetime's journey, and we need each other,
and we need community.
And we need those really strong and deep relationships
with each other.
(audience applauds)
- I love that you talked about the long haul.
I love to tell students,
'Oppressive systems took thousands of years to create.'
So it's probably going to take us at least a couple months
to work on it, right?
Like we're going to need at least five to seven weeks.
Or maybe a little longer, and that's okay, too.
Thank you for that.
I'm going to introduce Kaleem Caire.
And I'm going to read his longer introduction.
Shorter introduction?
I'm going to say that Kaleem Caire is a dear friend of mine.
And if I had to summarize him,
I would talk about the amazing children that he has raised
and his really beautiful family
and how that gives me a lot of courage
in raising my own children.
When I met Kaleem, it was a field trip.
And his three children were taking this field trip
to Milwaukee to do poetry with me,
and they all look exactly like him.
So it was really, I was like, "Oh, my gosh!
"Why did it not occur to me that these children
"look exactly like this guy who's always on the news?"
(laughter)
And he was like, "Hey, how's it going?
"Can I have your number?
"I'm going to call you and make sure they get back on time."
And you know, his children are these wonderful, radiant,
innovative young people.
And I think that's quite an accomplishment to raise
a 17-year old black man to know how to play and to know
how to love himself and to be willing to go out there
on a limb for his friends.
So that's what I would, if I was going to write your bio,
that's what I'd say.
(laughter)
(crowd applauds)
- Yeah, after people read your bio so much
you get tired of hearing it.
(laughter)
Thank you, that was awesome.
So, I want to start out by just telling you before I start,
so you understand where I'm coming from
what my philosophy on leadership is.
And it's four things.
First, you have to be a knowledge leader
in whatever it is you take up.
So whereas in poetry,
she understands not just how to speak poetry,
I got to go closer?
Okay, sorry.
She understands not only that,
but she understands the history of the art,
the artistic ability, the people who've done this before.
She understands the range of that.
And therefore, she's considered credible in what she does.
So you have to be a knowledge leader.
You also have to be able to motivate people
and raise their consciousness.
And sometimes people do that.
But some leaders you think are rugged and rough and raw, right?
But they still raise your consciousness.
They can still motivate you to get up out your chair
and do something, even if it's to throw
something at them, right?
(laughter)
Integrity.
You have to operate with integrity all the time,
because that will undermine any social movement,
anything that you're trying to do.
If people see that you lack integrity, you can't lead them.
And then the fourth thing is
you have to be willing to go all out.
You have to be willing to put it all on the line
for whatever it is you believe in and whatever it is
you feel really called to do
to make sure that it works, right?
You can't stop short all the time.
And I just want to say that because a lot of people,
when we talk about where we are with inequity,
I often like to start with just a brief history,
and this is going to be real quick.
Black people were in some form of slavery
or servitude to this country.
We lived in some form of legalized discrimination
for 372 years,
19 generations.
We have really only been in this civil rights,
equity world for the last 50 years,
would be two generations.
So what I tell people is,
do you honestly think you could undo
19 generations of madness in two, right?
When white folks get upset or they get hurt or depressed,
they are more likely than black people
to go seek some psychological help.
They are.
I think all of us need to, but when we came out of slavery
out of those 19 generations and that, we had, what was it,
over 300, almost 300 years of slavery,
another 100 years of Jim Crow, and then I call it
an adjustment period of another 27 years
when we were fighting Civil Rights cases to retain the gains
that we made in trying to gain more ground,
all the way up to the last great case in 1991.
And some people will argue we're still fighting that battle
in higher education, right?
Trying to fight the roll-back.
There was no one waiting at the end of the line
when we get off the plantation
or we got out of Jim Crow that said,
"Hey, let me give you some psychological support."
Right? There was no; there was nothing.
So essentially, we walked into freedom with all the baggage
that we came with.
And we see that in our public schools still today, okay?
So I want to give you that understanding
so there's a history here that we're working through,
and we are trying to undo.
So I see myself as being a person
who's come along lately, right?
And I'm of the next generation, and I'm trying to undo
what was done to us in the past
and also help shape a future,
a destiny for us, a path for us that we can move beyond
where we are into the future,
but also make a contribution to society.
So when I look at equity,
that's when I'm moving people forward
who were held back for generations.
Now poverty is killing us.
Poverty is killing black people.
It is killing black bloodlines.
When you think of all of those generations of young people
who've come up through our country,
come across slavery, across the bridge of Jim Crow,
their families, very few of them,
realize some form of serious prosperity.
I tell white people all the time,
black people are really like two to three generations behind you.
And it was by design.
When people talk about affirmative action,
when white folks had affirmative action
wasn't nobody complaining, right?
And so white people could access housing bills.
They could access veteran's bills.
They could access all these things with the New Deal.
Everything was to help move white American forward.
A lot of those things black people couldn't access.
And even if were legally allowed to access it,
the state's discriminated against us so badly.
That's why when you saw the movie about Martin Luther King,
'Glory,' and they were in there just about voting,
I mean, basic things, people were always
trying to undermine us.
And so we now are in this situation that America
has created where we're dealing with this gross inequality
that black people didn't ask for, right?
And so when we start there and we look at
what's happening to our people,
there are three things will really undo
some of those things beyond the psychological trauma,
support that people need.
Education is key in this country.
Employment is key in this country.
And then, marriage rates or co-parenting
are key in this country.
The reason why so many African-Americans are poor,
people go right to education and employment.
Know when you look at it,
in this city 80% of our families are led by black females.
There's one income coming in that household, not two.
For white families, we're almost 65%.
Their numbers are diminishing, too.
65% of their families are two income families.
And then co-parenting, they still might have,
even though it might not be together,
you still have two parents that are contributing
to the income of that child.
So that child is not necessarily experiencing
the same level of trauma or deprivation
that a black child is experiencing.
So when we think about the inequity
and how it plays out in our community,
if we don't tackle educational inequity,
if we don't tackle employment inequity,
and, if we don't tackle the issue of even if
you're not going to get married,
you've got to parent that child together, right?
If we don't tackle those three things,
then we will continue to see these challenges take root.
So I tend to focus on this inequity issue
as an ecosystem model, that there are many, many things
that impact the way people move forward,
the way people live their lives.
And so, when you think about an ecosystem is
everything that you would come into contact with:
people, organizations, institutions, the environment,
how does it impact you in your life
and ability to move forward?
So when you think about black people here, I grew up here.
My family's been here since 1907.
They ain't that many white people in Madison
hat can claim that they've been here that long, right?
So, welcome to my hometown.
I'm not one of these brothers
that just crossed the boat from Chicago,
although my family came through Chicago in 1907.
Okay, so all my brothers and sisters from Chicago,
we just got here before y'all.
But when we look at what's going,
we look at what's happening to black people in this city,
we are some of the most disempowered people
in the United States.
We don't own anything hardly.
We have very few businesses;
we have very few successful businesses.
Property?
In 1980, 80% of black people were renting,
were renting property, either a home or apartment.
In 1990, 80% of black people
were renting a home or an apartment.
In 2000 and 2010, 80% of black people
were renting homes or apartments.
We're one of the few cities in America
of the wealth and prosperity that we have,
where you saw very little to no movement
for African-Americans at all up the social ladder.
And we're all in these upper little Midwestern states
where we're all supposed to be so egalitarian
and so open to differences and everything like that.
It is the worst place for black people to move forward.
So we're stuck in suspension right there, educationally.
You saw black people make a lot of momentum
from 1930s to 1970s.
And in around the late '70s or early '80s,
you started to see some of our results taper off.
So more of us were in numbers getting high school diplomas,
but we were in numbers in terms of
going to college and all that, we had a lot of kids going,
but the percentages that we saw going to college
and going into higher education?
White folks accelerated far faster than we did
in terms of going into higher education.
So the gap continued to widen there.
And then you started to see in the '80s
with the decline of the economy,
a lot of us falling out of going to college,
doing well in school.
So this last generation was the generation
that actually took steps backwards, not forwards.
And so, in this city, education,
we saw where 27% of black kids were failing to graduate
from high school in 1973 to where just, what,
was it 2010?
We had 50% of black kids graduating.
So in this prosperous city,
one of the most prosperous cities in America,
where even in a serious, what we call depression, right,
recession, our unemployment rate went up to 6%.
That's like perfect in some of these cities in a,
in a really good year, right?
So why is it that we don't move forward?
I'll tell you one reason why in this whole ecosystem model,
we talk too much in Madison.
We spend, in this enlightened city,
with this big university right behind us,
it's my alma mater,
but there are some of the most unenlightened
and ineffective people
when it comes to addressing this issue
right here in our city.
We love to sit down and talk about the problem.
We love to dissect it and disagree
with whatever solution comes to the table,
but we aren't good at putting things on the ground
that actually can fix stuff, right?
We're not good at operationalizing our ideas,
especially when it comes with the issue of race.
So what I do, you guys, this is just me,
I made a decision a long time ago.
I'm going to be an institution builder.
So I come at the issue of equity
where if the system is broken,
how do we put in place that can actually be a vehicle
that people can walk through to fix it.
So when I returned home in 2010, my primary objective,
I told the Urban League, was in two years,
four to five years, racial equity, I told this Board,
will be one of the top two issues in this community.
And it'll be one of the top two issues in this community,
because we're going to light this community up.
We got to get people to see
that this is a problem in this community,
not just white folks, but black people.
We've got to stop being okay with being in a second
and third class position.
We've got to lift up our chest, pull up our chin
and know that we're supposed to be here like everybody else.
So in order to do that, I'd act like that, right?
So I had to put down some crazy stuff.
And this charter school, which is something
I really wanted to get done, right?
And actually, I thought we were going to get it done
until Scott Walker stepped into office.
And I was like, 'Where the heck did this dude come from?'
(audience laughs)
And then he wanted to take away unions.
I mean, literally, I think Gloria was on the Board.
We saw we were in for a mess,
we just didn't really talk about it.
We were so, like, we're going to lose, but you know,
we're going to act like we're going to win.
(audience laughs)
And so, we, we went through this challenge.
But you guys, part of the issue of addressing this issue is,
we have to, you have to get a lot of people to see
that they can be a part of a movement.
And so my job coming back here was to get people to see
that this city could create its own way out.
That black people, if you just decide to do it,
and you're willing to go all out,
you're willing to operate with integrity,
motivate people but go all out,
that at the end of that tunnel,
you're going to get some results.
So what I'm seeing right now in Madison,
with a school system, we got a superintendent
right here who's pushing the envelope.
She has a license to push that envelope.
She has an expectation,
don't you think, to push that envelope.
Before it was just keep doing things the same way
and pretend that nothing's going wrong, right?
We had to shake that up.
Employment.
We pushed the issue of workplace diversity here big time
with employers behind the scenes.
Never calling them out publicly,
but always coming kind of leaving a subtle threat
that we might, right, if you guys don't do something.
But then when we'd see that they were making progress,
we would shout that out too.
So some of the diversity that we're seeing
in people taking in roles here uncharacteristic of roles
that white people would give us in this community, give us,
give those of us who actually earn it and are ready for it,
we're starting to see some doors open.
And so, the education and employment piece is critical.
But that piece about strengthening families,
what I'm doing now, you know, last (inaudible)
we said what we see in the next five to seven years?
What I'm doing now is trying to tackle,
how do we ensure that our children are successful
but by strengthening their families?
We have to make sure that strong families
will raise strong kids.
Happy families will raise happy children.
And so we've got to have a way to do that.
So we started a preschool called 'One City Early Learning.'
And our primary objective is to make sure our kids
are at the top of their class when they start kindergarten
and ready to change the world.
Unfortunately Gloria, the black kids in California,
where they're having water problems?
You ask those black kids, "How you gonna solve their problem?"
"I don't know."
Nobody's talking to them about that stuff.
Nobody's expecting them to be the innovators
that come up with the change to address that problem.
Nobody's expecting them to address the water shortages
that are going to drive most of the conflicts in the world
over the next 20 to 30 years.
And so we want our kids to be enlightened
and ready for that.
But we know we have to make sure
that their families are strong and moving forward.
So what we're doing is we're making sure that,
what, what do you need to get your kid in here?
And if you need a scholarship of some level or some help,
let's tie that to what your plan is, right?
Are you going to school? Are you getting a job?
Are you getting a job promotion?
What are you doing that's going to make you happy,
that's going to make you feel like you're moving forward?
Because if we can do that, if can help you with
that and help this child at the same time,
we're going to move both of you forward.
If we've got to call an employer and say,
"Hey, this person we know."
But Joe's on our board,
we got a kid he's on our capital committee.
We've got to connect a group of people, right?
Diane Ballweg's right here.
She's got, she's got connections; we know people.
But is there a way we can open a door?
Can we talk to someone?
Can we help these folks move forward?
That's what we're trying to do.
So again, this ecosystem model
is it takes a lot of different people,
a lot of different things to help move people forward.
And we're going to do it by now strengthening families.
So, get ready for that next movement, you guys.
Thank you.
(crowd applauds)
- I'd like to introduce you all to Nar.
Nar worked as a lead teacher
and program director for nine years.
Nar has a master's degree in Early Childhood Studies,
specializing in teaching adults
in the Early Childhood field.
A bachelor's degree in Language and Literacy,
Nar's interests and specialties include,
Diversity, Social Justice,
Equity, Dual-Language Learner Development,
Adult Learning and Development and Professionalism.
Nar currently works as a professional development counselor
at the Wisconsin Early Childhood Association
and as an independent consultant.
I'm gonna just remind you, like,
get intimate with that mic and stay intimate with that mic
'cause you really have to be up on it
for us all to be able to hear you.
Make some noise for Nar, y'all.
(crowd applauds)
- So thank you for having me here.
I am really glad to be on this panel,
and I wanted to mostly speak about my experience
as an Early Childhood teacher, as a program director
and also some other works that I do in consulting.
Some of the questions that we, we receive,
one of them was 'What does inequity look like in your work
'as it pertains to young children, race and privilege?'
And being in Early Childhood as a teacher,
what I have seen mostly are inequities that,
some of them happen at a personal level.
Generally, you'll see a group of children
not wanting to play with one child because,
"Oh, he's dirty."
Or you also have children not wanting to play
with a child because of their skin color, and so forth.
So, some of those are very personal.
And having been in that classroom,
I know those are things that hurt children.
And I also see inequities that are due to biases
a lot of the time when children of colors misbehave,
it's really blown out of proportion.
And sometimes those are a more institutionalized.
We really look at behavior when dominant
culture behavior is a norm:
the way we play; the way we talk to children;
the way we communicate with the parents;
how we set up those outreach event.
It's all about how the majority,
the dominant culture, wants it.
And when children of colors are a little louder
when the parents are not meeting those expectations,
we label 'em.
And also you know,
most of the time the bad child behavior
and the bad child label comes,
and it tends to follow them.
So I see those as really damaging to the social,
emotional development of the child
and to the well-being of the family.
And one of the questions that says,
'How do you address inequity?'
And I think I've been a teacher for so many years.
And what I really like that I've been doing
as a teacher and also as a consultant,
I try to really tell teachers
that this work starts with you.
You have to make sure that you reflect on your values.
What do you really believe
that children should all be doing?
Or how do you think you can create
a learning environment for children?
If you have strong,
strong values that are against this family's values,
you have to have some type of discussion
and comes to term with it.
You have to be in a place where you can
really be caring for that child.
So, always start with your values and know where you stand.
And I know once you get to do that,
then you can put in place some,
find the resources that you need.
Talk to the families.
Make sure you bring in the families,
because this work also start with families.
Because I see most of the time
when we have issues in our programs,
we bring in the expert without knowing that
these are the families.
Your environment is only equitable
if the families think it is equitable.
So you have to make sure you bring 'em to the table;
you have to make sure you communicate with them.
But more importantly, you have to make sure
all those knowledge that you learn from your intake,
from being with the families,
you have to make sure you're putting those
into practice in your classroom.
And I always tell teachers to start with creating
a couple of two, three essential questions that you can be,
that are by nature, really overreaching
that you can post in your classroom.
Make sure that your values, what you live for,
make sure you talk to parents about those.
And also talk to children about it, because I always hear,
'Hey what is the developmentally appropriate way
'to talk to children about these issues
'because these are really challenging?'
And I know children understand fairness.
And they understand what's right and what's wrong.
So you can always start there
and help them understand what those means.
And also, my third question was,
'What do you notice, where do you notice sex
'is in your work towards equity?'
And I think I do a lot of training
with early childhood providers.
And I hear on and on again this feeling
that we really need to do more.
We are realizing everybody is equal.
'We love all children' does not really work.
We need to move forward.
And we're also knowing that all these diversity training
that we're doing, if you go to an Early Childhood program,
most of the time teachers have five, 10 hours
of diversity training.
But the diversity training is generally just,
it's posting pictures.
It's having a multicultural night.
It's, it's really, really basic.
And I encourage teachers to go deep,
to really kind of think of cultural diversity
the way it was intended to be.
It is about equity and social justice and making sure
your learning environment is equitable for all.
So I do a lot of that.
And so I'm really hearing a desire for change.
And this is really exciting
because I feel there's room to grow.
But also, it's nerve-racking
because I'm hoping we're not just
going to talk about and then fall back to our old ways.
So this is really exciting.
Hopefully we're going to be moving forward with this.
My, one of the questions that I had was also,
'What continues to pose a challenge for your work?'
And I think I touch on a little,
I touched on it a little bit.
It's that oversimplification of the cultural model
that I see that's really just limited on displays,
not digging deeper.
And I also see a lot of equity literacy.
Most of the time teachers want to do this work,
but they don't really have the language.
They don't know what's developmentally
appropriate for children.
So I'm hoping this is something
that we can really discuss as a community,
something we can address and make sure teachers have
the support they need.
Because when you go to an Early Childhood program,
you know teachers are very busy.
Program directors are very busy,
but how do we make sure we're really making this one
of our core values and one of a mission
to really accomplish.
How we doing on time?
Okay, great.
And I also see one of the things also
that I see that's a challenge is a lack of safe spaces
for teachers to engage in these discussions.
I think that could be really helpful if we had teachers
and families come together in a non-judgmental,
a room, a non-judgment, in coming with open hearts
and open mind and knowing that this is really difficult.
We need to talk about it,
and it is the future of our children.
And we, it's that important.
So I'm hoping for more safe spaces to really do that.
'Five to 10 years, what do you want your work to have meant?
And how do you imagine this work will evolve?'
I think, in Madison we have so many different agencies
that are working for social justice.
What I would like personally to see them
is to work together.
Because I think of equity,
for me when you're doing equity work,
you can't pick and choose.
You can't in your classroom,
and this I've learned from years in the classroom.
You can't really plan for this African-American child
and not plan for children
who live in poverty.
You can't really plan for an African, an immigrant children
without planning for a gay/lesbian children because you,
children's identities really intersect.
You can have a child that come from the gay/lesbian family,
that's immigrant, and so forth.
So we have to make sure we're really syncing our efforts
in equity and making sure we're working
for equity for all children.
And we cannot just focus on the environment
while other children are lacking the food they need
while some children are feeling less than
they should be feeling.
So I would really like us to kind of sync our organizations
and work together for the sake of children.
And I would definitely like to see the parents
being more involved.
Most of the time, parents are the last ones
that we ask for opinions,
that they're the ones that we really kind of tell
what to do instead of asking them what do they need from us.
So I want us to involve parents in making sure
that they're being heard of.
Because I think a lot of this work, too,
with my experience, parents are coming from a background
where they haven't been
and welcome when they have been discriminated,
where they have been subjected to biases.
So they're coming with all their baggage
and having to deal with that
and having to deal with what's going on with children.
So I think they can be a resource for,
for us early educators.
I think that's it from me.
(audience applauds)
- Thank you so much.
I really appreciate that you brought intersectionality
into the space and talked about students' gender identities
and orientation and how that impacts students.
On one of the moments in which I realized success
in my own work in teaching was when I was bring a speaker
who was a transgender woman into our classroom.
And she was very nervous. She said, "Oh, man.
"I had a rough time in high school.
"Coming into a high school classroom
makes me so uncomfortable!"
And she entered our classroom,
and this is a moment that stands out
because Kaleem's here and one of his students was there
and immediately complimented her on her attire.
And that was a moment that defines success for me.
Our students' ability to see people as people,
to celebrate people as people.
So thank you for bringing that into this conversation.
I'm going to introduce our last panelist,
Dr. Jennifer Cheatham, is the superintendent
of the Madison Metropolitan School District.
Jennifer's focus is on systematic improvement
in urban school districts.
Her expertise lies in developing instructional alignment
and coherence at every level of a school system,
aimed at achieving break-through results
in student learning.
Most recently, Jennifer was the Chief of Instruction
for Chicago Public Schools.
In that role she led the central office education team
in its efforts to support networks and schools
on instructional improvement.
She brought to this role a depth of experience
in school system reform.
She's worked as Chief Area Officer
for Chicago Public Schools,
as Executive Director of Curriculum and Instruction
for San Diego City Schools,
and a coach and professional developer
for Bay Area School Reform Collaboration.
Before joining BASRC,
she led a multi-year initiative
aimed at improving academic literacy
for middle and high school students.
She began her career as an eighth great English teacher.
Make some noise for Jen, y'all.
- Thank you.
(audience applauds)
All right, can you hear me okay?
All right, it's great to be here,
and it's a real honor and privilege
and I've already learned so much
from my colleagues up here on the panel.
Gloria started with the micro, some really good examples.
Kaleem brought it out to the macro,
and I wanted to try to talk about operationalization
because that's what I'm all about as a superintendent.
I'm not an early childhood expert,
I'm just going to let you know.
But I do have a 3-1/2 year old son who goes to Preschool of the Arts,
and he's teaching me a lot these days
about Early Childhood Education.
I'm starting my third year as the Superintendent,
and I've got to tell you I am bringing everything I've got,
everything to bear when it comes to leading
for equity in this role,
using, pulling on my 20 plus years of experience
as an educator and a leader.
And that is because of what Kaleem referenced.
Madison, I knew we had challenges in Madison.
That's what drew me to this community.
But I don't think I quite understood
the challenges that we face.
We all know, I mean, we're always ranked in the,
the, you know, top tier of places to live in America,
places to raise a family,
but we face the largest racial disparities in the nation.
I thought I'd talk to you a little bit about what I,
how I think about leading for equity,
teaching and leading for equity
with a focus on young children.
I want to talk about the strategies
that I think are most critical.
I'll touch on some of the successes
and challenges along the way.
And, I'll touch on what I hope it will all have meant.
I think that you can't talk about inequity
without actually understanding what equity means.
I was actually just at a forum last week,
and the title was Everybody's Talking About Equity,
but Nobody Knows What it Means.
And I think you can't talk about equity
unless you actually know what excellence
is all about, right?
Equity towards what? Towards what goal?
So we've actually spent
some significant time in our district,
really over the past year, beginning to define for us
what excellence means for every child.
We went through a visioning process.
I actually gave it to Brianna to put out on the back table
in case anybody wants it on your way out.
We went through his process to define,
what do we really want for the children of Madison?
What do we think a diploma ought to
signify in our school district?
And I mean, we talked to over 2,500 family members,
teachers, community members, students,
and what they told us is that mastery
of content matters, for sure.
Gotta know that our kids can read, that they can write,
that they communicate well, but it's more than that.
We want students to be culturally competent.
We want them to have deep interpersonal skills.
We want them to have confidence.
We want them to be connected to their communities.
We want them to be creative,
to understand how to stay healthy.
You get the ideas, idea of, you know,
a well-rounded child who's really ready
to engage fully in the world around them.
So that's important. What is the universal goal?
And with that, you can then devise a strategy
that's equitable, that helps you work with the students,
the families, the teachers that are situated in a way
that makes it difficult for them to reach that high bar.
We don't do children any service
when we lower the bar for them.
The effect, the poor, you know,
'Whoa is me, poor, little, poor little poor child.'
That does no one any service.
And it also doesn't do our students
any service or our families when we raise the bar,
but we're not giving them the support to reach it.
So I think it's got to start there.
And I think I've learned in the last year,
in particular, in Madison,
it's become even more poignant for me,
that without the clear universal goal,
when you institute a strategy that's truly based on equity
that there will be people in our community,
usually the ones who have been served well in the past,
that feel that the equitable strategy is about taking away.
It's about loss.
And that's when you get people really
pushing back on your strategy.
So it's got to start with a clear,
universal goal that's good for every single child.
I want to talk a little bit about strategy.
It is just not sexy, right?
I mean, there is no, it's just not.
A former boss of mine and a mentor,
Carl Cohn who ran the Long Beach School District
for 10 years calls it the, what does it he call it?
Oh my gosh, what is wrong with me?
He calls it the hard slog
of school improvement, or something like that, right?
It's just, it's like,
sometimes it's like walking through mud.
And that's just it.
That's just the work.
There are three things that I would highlight
that I've learned over time,
and I think we're using in Madison to make
an equitable strategy real.
And the first is
that we have to institutionalize ways
of working that are highly disciplined,
that provide spaces for our teachers,
our leaders and our principals,
our central office leaders, our board,
to make more precise decisions
that are based on real root causes.
This disciplined way of working is absent
in far too many school districts,
at least the ones that I've experienced.
I think that's incredibly important,
knowing what your goals are,
knowing what your equitable goals are,
devising a strategy to reach those goals,
implementing it well; monitoring both implementation
and outcomes along the way.
It's very technical work, but you can't make improvement
without it, not sustainable improvement.
The second thing I want to highlight is for equity
to be real in a school district, you actually need to know
what good teaching looks like.
And we love to work on the fringes
in education, right?
All the kinds of programs around the classroom.
It was in a thing this summer,
a conference with education leaders from across the country,
and we were talking about teaching,
teaching that's culturally responsive,
that's linguistically responsive.
And this group of people, some of the highest paid educators
in America could not agree on what they were looking at.
Was it good? Was it not so good?
I mean, very different points of view on instruction.
And I think that's incredibly important.
So we're working on, with Gloria's help and others,
defining what great teaching looks like
in our school district and aligning all of our support
for incoming educators and long-term educators
to that vision and understanding.
The third thing that I would highlight
is the work of Central Office.
In most places a Central Office is just a bureaucracy
that makes teachers do things
that they don't really want to do or believe in.
That is not the way that I see it.
The Central Office has to be a place
that's creating the tools and resources that
schools need to do their best work.
But it, most importantly, has to be the place
where institutional barriers are identified and torn down.
The Central Office should not exist,
if they're not actively looking for those barriers every day
and figuring out a way to resolve them.
In Madison now, you see that happening
in a whole variety of places,
on the curriculum and instruction front;
policies and practices related to serving
our English language learners better,
our students with disabilities better,
our discipline practices which I'm sure some of you
have probably heard something about,
moving from a punitive approach to one
that's truly restorative and values every child
and does everything we can to keep them
in the classroom community;
to our hiring practices, you name it.
And in all of those instances,
there are institutional barriers
in the way of our district success
and our ability to serve kids well.
And undergirding all of these
key elements of systemic strategy, equitable strategy,
is the need for an explicit discussion about race.
You can do all the technical work,
but if you're not willing to talk honestly
and openly about race,
this is not going to work.
And you can't just talk about race
without actually doing something simultaneously.
It's got to be both of those things in conjunction,
because where things like implicit bias become real
are in the places where people
make decisions about children, right?
It's in the discussion about what intervention
a child is going to receive.
It's in the discussion about what unit of instruction
we're teaching next month.
That's where it raises its head.
And therefore, we gotta have that discussion.
In Madison what I'm learning, I'm trying it again.
I'm trying to do it better this time.
And I'm learning that we have to start by
building a deeper trust and understanding of one another
as human beings, honoring everyone's lived experience,
everyone's lived experience, and what,
and how that affects the kinds of decisions
that they're making and why, right, without judgement.
And so we're spending some time doing that right now,
just building a deeper trust and
understanding of one another.
So that's when we have to have the difficult discussion.
We've got a bank of good will built up that will allow us
to get through it and not shut down in the process.
I want to say a little bit more
before I wrap things up on--
If that's what work on equity looks like,
what does it mean to have inequity?
I have been really intrigued by this work
that Yvette Jackson has been doing.
She wrote this book called "Pedagogy of Confidence."
I don't know if any of you are familiar with it,
but she talks a lot about the importance of talking
about the promise of children;
about helping students identify their strengths;
pushing students to the frontier of their intelligence.
And that it actually,
when we're building on assets as opposed to deficits,
it actually changes the way a child's brain works.
It builds neuroinhibitors
when we talk in a deficit view,
and it creates neurotransmitters, right?
More connection in a child's brain
when we're building on assets.
So I think that's really important,
especially for our youngest children.
I can't tell you how hard it is to hear people
talk about our kindergarteners,
our four-year-olds as if they've already walked in the door
with, I don't know, with gaps in learning.
I mean, it's heart-breaking to me.
They're four years old!
They're kindergarteners;
can we look for the child's strength and build on it?
The last thing I'll say before I wrap it up
is just a little bit about what I'm learning as a leader.
I'm learning a lot about pace;
about what it means to balance urgency
with sustainable change.
I think it's really hard,
and it means that I have to
communicate progress a lot constantly.
Without communicating progress a lot, I think people,
yeah, they start to make things up.
They're not sure if you're doing anything.
So it's really important.
I've learned a lot about productive struggle
and the capability, my capability,
of engaging in productive struggle in public,
on the front of the newspaper.
And I'm getting okay with it.
I don't love it, but we're a public institution,
and if we're going to do the right thing for all children,
we're going to struggle.
We're going to try things.
We're going to make some calculated risks.
We're going to make mistakes.
We're going to learn from them, and we're going to forge ahead.
But I'm learning about that.
I'm also learning that this is inherently emotional work.
I read an article recently about
how to lead through emotional work,
and the example was working with cancer patients
and how important it is to preview what's going to be hard,
to constantly update along the way.
And it really struck a chord with me.
I thought, "That's what this feels like!"
It's inherently emotional work.
And yeah, it's our children, right?
It's about our children.
And then lastly, why I have hope.
I want to say a little bit about that.
Last year when Tony Robinson was shot
and killed and we had over a thousand
of our children hit the streets, I was very, very moved
and proud of them as I would hope you were, too.
I get emotional every time I talk about it;
I'm so sorry, because the image pops into my head
and the feeling of that moment in time.
But, as a school district, we really struggled.
Could our mostly white teacher workforce engage
in discussions with children in a real time about
what was happening in our community?
And we had to take a risk.
And the risk was they have to.
We're going to have to figure out a way to open up
this discussion when a child needs it.
And assuming that all children needed it.
And it was powerful for me.
I learned something about what our teachers
are capable of when given guidance and the opportunity
to support all children in real life.
And I learned a lot about children.
At Preschool of the Arts, they always talk about
how children are capable.
And that's what gives me hope.
And that's what I hope this work will lead to
that we all get that children are capable.
So I'll end there.
Thank you.
(applause)
- Thanks so much, Jen.
I want everybody to just close your eyes for a moment.
I want you to imagine Harriet Tubman,
and I want you to imagine her in a swamp.
And I want you to imagine how high
the stakes are for freedom.
And then I want you to imagine how her feet feel.
I told a friend of mine a few weeks ago, I lost a student,
and I had never lost a student before.
And I said, I feel like I'm at war with the world.
And I feel like I'm really tired of fighting the same fight.
And he said, "Join the ranks of everybody
"you've ever admired."
So I want you to take that into consideration
when you talk about like the struggle of this work
and what it means and how the stakes are.
That you are dedicating yourself to something
that you're giving yourself to something,
that you're working for something that's worthwhile.
And you are joining the ranks of everyone
you've ever admired the second you get really tired.
(applause)