Hi everyone. Welcome to the book cafe. We are an independent bookstore about to celebrate our second years. We are also celebrating tonight, the second time weve been so fortunate to have bill here at our store and both my sister and i are both educators or former educators before we open the bookstore so this is especially, all the gratitude to have you here talking about this because this is important. I see a couple people i know who are teachers right here and im glad to hear from allstar by introducing crystal. She is an associate professor in chicago. By day she has leaders leadership preparation to teach leadership administrators to recognize the school to prison pipeline. Bill is a retired distinguished professor of education at the university of illinois in chicago. Hes the author of two memoir, fugitive days, a public enemy and recently. [inaudible] hes edited and written many books on education theory, policy, practice and he used his voice as an advocate for educational reform across the u. S. As a former Chicago PublicSchool Teacher im especially thankful for all he does and honored to have him here with us. Without further ado, bill and crystal. [applause] and i thank you so much. Crystal will begin before she, i want to shout out to the bookstore and point out some of. [inaudible] the public is being erased from what we do and talk about so what public spaces are disappearing in the public is being diminished, insulted, pushed away, place like this is particularly precious. I say all that to say an institution like this is not guaranteed him of these folks have built it up miraculously in the last little while and its beautiful home for lots of us. Its a place we can come together and have a public conversation authentically. I say all that to say you must buy a book before you leave. It doesnt have to be our book come about by substitute or by fire in theory and crystal assignment. [applause] it really is a seriously this public space alive because without it we would all be diminished. Crystal. Let me continue with gratitude, shout out to all of you for coming tonight. We are watching the weather happening we know its coming, but instead of hanging out at home in a nice warm space you decided to hang out with us. We appreciate you being here. Were excited to talk about this book with you. Really we mean talk with you. We will say a little bit about the thinking behind the book and we want you to talk to us with your questions and the wisdom you bring into the room. Thanks so much for the introduction. Im crystal. I teach on the far south side of the city im in a program of educational leadership, my students are principles and many of the things we wrote about in this book are frustrations i hear from my students, frustrations they hear from their teachers, frustrations that we hear from folks in our own community of activists and other folks. Perhaps well talk about some of the individual things that we are bringing to this work. One thing im bringing or one place that im coming from is that an author outside of this book, the one thing we didnt mention is that i wrote a book a few years ago called being bad, my baby brother and the school to prison pipeline and it really helped make sense of this metaphor with this concept, this idea that there is a pathway from middle school to high school and high school to college and college to gainful employment thats there for some folks, particularly vulnerable people, folks of color, folks of poverty, there is a definite path and i wrote this book to try to make sense of that. Part of what came from the writing of this book is some clear frustrations around the ways in which we ought to think about better supporting young people in schools and, at the end of this book, i think a lot and write a lot about the concept of love, justice and joy and attention not because when we sat down to write this book, we used it as a jumping off point, this love, justice and joy in education we honored the fact that we are the only folks in the fugitive entry and field of education thinking about classrooms as spaces of liberation and love joyful admits that people say if you cant do, teach. Later rich came into the fold, im just imagining his spirit a here with us on the panel. He came into the fold later on that we began our conversations by saying why are National Conversations about what we do as educators and Public Education and the unions that support them, et cetera, why are they organized or used as a jumping off point this concept of love and justice and joy. Instead we hear the exact opposite that educators cant, educators wont educators probably shouldnt only sat down together and try to figure out what is that about. Why are so many folks telling stories about us. Many people who havent even done what we do, a lot of these folks have so much to say about us and are trapped and how can we push back, how can we intervene in this conversation about our field in a meaningful way, in a way that will flip the narrative about what it means to be a public educator where we cannot only talk about what we are against but talk about what we are for and provide an alternative and a set of tools and resources for people who do what we do so when we hear something said thats completely untrue we have some researchbased ideas about how to respond. Thoughts to pick up for crystal was just now, its really been a great journey and a great honor for me to work with crystal in the book that you mentioned, being bad is like the autobiography of her own family were she cracks a family that is hardworking, inspiring, workingclass and the daughter, crystal goes out to get a phd and her baby brother goes on to state prison for a long time and how did that happen and what were the pathways that made that happen. That book which is really an external ibook was an attempt to intervene in the conversation about what a school for and what does it mean to black and brown kids in a place like chicago. The other person im honored to be with is my brother rick who is at berkeley right now but he was a lifelong and legendary teacher at Berkeley High school and then retired and was bored so he went and got phd. I was old when i got mine but he was 67 or 68. At shout out one of his books which is a book called an mtc in class on the subtitle Something Like how teachers cope with students die and its about a comment, common phenomenon of kids dying either in violence or suicide or car accident and it was provoked by a very personal experience he had. These two colleagues and i sat down and said what is the National Narrative about schools and what we want to say. You see from the title, you cant fire the bad ones, its part of the National Narrative. Anytime a politician gets a microphone, the first thing he or she says is we need to get the lazy, incompetent teachers out of the classroom. I feel myself nodding. I mean what are we gonna do leave the lazy ones there . If we get to microphone first we would say every kid in the Public School deserves a caring, compassionate, intellectually interesting, curious, well rested and well paid teacher in the classroom. We win that argument. The question we ask ourselves is one of the arguments theyve been pushing for three to meant for decades with the big megaphone and both Political Parties and the consent of the media from the New York Times to npr to the new yorker. What is that narrative and how we want to interrupt it. The titles of chapters are the titles of the myths. Good teaching is colorblind. Standardized test improve achievement and on and on. We try to tease out what we think are noisy things being said about teaching and about education and then we have a reality check. What is that noise . It sound like an earthquake. Is it a train . Thats a train going to the back so, ill just give you one example. Unions are destructive to children. Teachers unions destroy childrens learning so we laid out we always lay out the myths first and we say this is donald trump saying at this is betsy devos, this is already duncan, its both Political Parties. This is bill gates saying it. Then we say reality check especially of our teachers unions destroying kids learning, thats an easy hypothesis to test. Look at the states that dont allow teachers to unionize. How are they doing on the standardized test. Look at the ones that are overwhelmingly unionize. In canada, every teacher is in a union and they do better on those International Tests which we are hugely skeptical of but thats the preferred metric of the corporate reformers. So we set out to do these myths in the last now will say by way of opening is that the other motivation was that we started this article when already duncan was secretary of education. He was ceo of Chicago Public schools and a liberal but they did a puffed piece in the new yorker and begins by saying in the National Conversation about educational reform there are two camps. One is the revolutionaries and that the people want charters, vouchers and end of teachers use and so on. Then theres the liberal traditionalists who love the teachers unions and loves the college of education that they are only looked at each other and we said were not in either camp. Where are we so thats kind of what we said lets set out and set the record straight. We dont want to defend the skit status quo. Its indefensible but we dont say therefore the solution is some kind of fascist dream. Theres another way and thats what we try to fight for. Lets have a conversation as crystal suggested, but you have to get up, thats a problem because we are being. Films. You have to go to the microphone. Or you could take this mike from no gummy can take this microphone. Sorry. Thank you so much. My name is lawrence, im a middle School Teacher and i was wondering, i havent read your book yet but i want to and i was wondering is a middle School Teacher to have any suggestions for ways i can impact my students in my own classroom with the ideas you are putting forward in the book . Is is appropriate to teach middle schoolers and if so, how and help my friend meant for them what subject matter. Math and science to. Short answer, yes. Im thinking immediately of the myths we debunk in the book that focuses on teachers ability to teach beyond the text and to teach about special issues and teach about issues of justice and what that means for educators so what we know from experience and also from being aware and alert in the world that often times moving beyond traditional measures of will you around as you oftentimes labeled a troublemaker or is this something activists and so they sat on and support people like you i encourage for civil dialogue this is discourse, i have the courage to do that. The has to be the jumping off point we can set up as adults and young people tell us, we would learn a lot and use by young people are already embedded in their family mother communities is off on those in the classroom to tell us is i using the isolation using a in the city the noise thats making a gazillion dollars, they are using the fact that there is this distinction between backend cocaine and how much time youll get is mathematical and difficult concepts. We have colleagues who are part of this teachers for social justice. We get together for an order to share lesson plans, to give community and support each others because you cant often do this stuff alone. I guess im saying is one, it can be done and im so excited and delighted that you want to talk not just about this in the kinds of things that are relevant to young people in different ways and ways that are not traditional in the Teacher Education program. We dont really get training about how to have courageous conversations about race around wife matter which incidentally, we are here is an educators bookstore and at the end of life lives matter at school, we devoted ashley to talk about issues that life lives matter will is to school. So the miss in the book will help you think about that, were happy to help you think about that, but it is with the proper resources. Says so right that theres this idea about wisdom in the room. One thing thats not honored in most schools is how you unlock the wisdom in the room for that is in science that can be done is worth and work on the fantasies such as teachers go into teaching for all the right reasons and finds himself in an institution that undermines a lot of those reasons. Our middle son is a lifer in the Public Schools in the bay area and he is 14 years a middle school math and Science Teacher and he teaches in one of those most buildings in the parking lot of an underprivileged school. Once you walk in the door, place comes to life. One of the things he knows is that you create an environment for learning in the environment tells you what to do. I was thinking that as we came in here because i noticed none of you came in and sat in these chairs. Why not. Theres no signs you can couldnt but the environment told you what to do. Interestingly the first people who got here sat in the second row. They want to be too close. The lake owners had to sit up front. The environment tells you what to do. So when folks walk into your room, what does the environment, not you, not the lesson what does the environment tell you to do. In our sons room, one of the things youll notice is that our animals and plants going on. The other thing you noticed is theres no teachers desk, theres no center that belongs to him. He has his stuff in a locker area and he is amidst the group. Then youll notice there are six chairs configured at each table and what he does, and that says you six are cooperating or cheating, depending on how you look at it and he says i many lesson and when he says to the kids is i want to question from any of you until the six of you have the same question so hes incentivizing cooperation, or cheating, depending on your perspective but i think thats an example of something you can do that is both helpful in terms of what youre saying and also helpful to the kids because your values to them, your teaching values are on display through little gestures like that. So often we say what we want for kids and i we create an environment that absolutely undermines it. We want kids to read and they go into an illiterate environment. That can be changed. We have the power to change it. Attention to those things matter. As can pick up on one other thing you said which is that were just ending this week on black lives matter. I was talking to some folks last week and we were talking about what commitments you bring to the classroom. Commitments like seeing each student as a threedimensional human being, each student as a person of value and you have to start there is a commitment. You cant realize i commitment every moment of every day but that doesnt mean you abandon it. You try harder tomorrow. I said so you are into that, yes and you want to tell the kids the truth, right, absolutely. I said would you tell them, since youre all in Chicago Public schools that Chicago Public schools hate black schools. Would you tell them that. Everybody was like what, thats terrible. Except i have evidence that its true. Have evidence of around School Closings and School Resources and even though we want to do and dont want to be harsh and mean and negative, somehow our in it tells students this is not a place to be trusted. I am saying that we need to think harder about what it means to support our children in a place like Chicago Public. There are more brave people. Come on. Sherry. Hello. First, i want to thank you very much for writing the book. As i tried to rise up from my postelection funk or whatever you want to call, i made a commitment to myself that i have to engage with the broader circle of people for the night before the election mike cousin said you live in your little bubble with your groovy friends and i dont think you see what can happen. I said well you lost it because you now live in central florida, and he was right and i was wrong. I have tried. So now i try to engage the people who i do believe sincerely want to hear my opinion. So theyll say things like you know sherry you cant just throw money at the problem and i said well but you can, to a large extent because hey, you send your kids to the British School and they throw out boatloads of money there and that seems to work out well for your kids all. Some say sherry, be honest, your kids really try. I said i really know where to go with that. So thank you for providing the book and helping me to come up with some more useful and constructive ways to engage with people who may see things very differently than i do. Then, this is a halfbaked thought that im talking to a lot of my teachers, friends about, but it seems like what i see happening is there are these like monolithic semi neighborhood schools, i think most people here are from chicago so lakeview, schools that are not to go down, and then theres this other category, and i find this horrifying performer, there still neighborhood schools but they have barely any students going to them, theyre just a hot mess and i think the larger plan is to just wipe all those schools off the face of the map so those kids will wind up in maybe worse schools and suburbs that are sort of dying i cant even support and active fire department. Its just blowing my mind what i see happening. After 20 years in Chicago Public. I dont know if other people see this as well. Then theres this faux option of the charters and i have, for my dissertation i would say the fortune of walking distance from three schools and it is mortifying what you see. Every afternoon my neighborhood is deluged with Noble Network kids who are lovely kids and then i go to get my fancy coffee because i live here and the bury stuff, one third of them are former Noble Network students who started college because it pushed to do that and racked up big Student Loans and were illequipped for a multitude of reasons, dont even get me started on the Noble Network, and thats were rat. As i will people see that weve got some dying neighborhood schools so anyway, i think those things make the bigger point. There so many things youve raised that are worth mentioning and a lot of it we try to talk about the book. I think its important to make a distinction between systems of this so called Corporate School reform that are undermining Public Education and the people who are involved in it. You said the kids are lovely, for example in the teachers, the kids were going to teach for america are by and large terrific people. Maybe some of you went into that. And yet, the system itself is problematic in a thousand ways. When i look at Charter Schools and the mass abandonment of Public Education, im sympathetic to the parents and i dont think. [inaudible] a wonderful scholar just wrote a book called Cutting School and the theme of the book is kind of the fateful collision of black parental aspirations which go back hundreds of years and corporate greed, and that kind of fateful coming together is a problem, but a couple thoughts. What is think one of the things we keep coming back to in this book is that what the most privileged and powerful people have for their kids, we should want for all the kids in the Public Schools. So Charter Schools is just an interesting example. Why are there no Charter Schools in my neck out for lake forest. And where you experiment to mike. And then i mention this thing about your kids even try. The idea underlying this idea that what kids need are great, if black people didnt have grip we wouldnt be here. Grid is all we have. We need a lot more help and resources. Theres a lot of mythology built into all of these common assumptions. One of the things we do again and again is a one of the privilege have for their kids. Thats another place to look for your middle school teaching. What are they have that we dont have. Whenever Chicago Public schools to something that drives me nuts, i go to the lab school and ask what they do because thats where many of the privilege parents send their kids. When chicago band the novel persepolis, someone complained because on 116 little boys peeing in the street and his and everyone knows you dont want the Chicago Public schools seeing that. I went to a lab school and they have 11 copies. We showed cartoon based on the book every year seven. To read the book. Its required reading so kids of privilege get one more opportunity for real art and real literature in the kids just across town get one more hour of drill and kill. This is unfair. That is a tiny example we can take it anywhere you want. When Chicago PublicSchool Teachers are judged by law on their performance, 30 based on the kids standardized test for force, go to lab. What do they do. I wont tell you the whole story except to say that its quite complicated what they do and they build a culture inducting new teachers into what is basically a culture that asked the question what is good teaching, how can teaching be improved and that dominates the scene. After i talk to these folks i said how much do student test scores count in terms of teacher evaluation and the responses what are they have to do with good teaching. Okay. Thats good enough for the children of privilege and the teachers were fortunate enough to work in those places. What about the rest of us. Thats the kind of thing i think you bring to my mind. You brought up so much. There is so much there, much of which weve touched on but i think what you brought up connected to the previous question which is this feeling of being constrained from building the real work, from really thinking about what it means to actually do the teaching and collaboration, they have great ideas and they might be smaller than us in this distinction between what the privilege task and our efforts on our narratives around what privilege kids deserve and what less privilege kids deserve. The example of noble is a great place to start. Theres a piece in the book where we talk about discipline and how we may want to teach and develop relationships and collaborate theres lots of people who tell us we need to be disciplinarians that the primary purpose of our work ought to be to monitor and focus on surveillance and make sure we maintain control as if we dont have control of these crazy kids what will it mean for the kids in dire need of discipline and me and my evaluation and our school. Theres a whole risk or we think about that. Noble, by the way, gets under my skin for many of the same reasons you are ready mentioned but also in relationship to discipline because they make a lot of money off discipline. I promise not to turn this into a disk noble or any other charter space i think its important to note, in relationship to this book and the whole section we have about this constant message that we need on order and make sure when someone walks into this classroom that its very clear we are in a period this Network Makes like 250,000 annually from student discipline files. Their fines and fees are connected in. There connected and schools are generally located, for the most part in neighborhoods or communities intended to serve folks of color and poverty. If you are in seventh grade, for example and youve racked up a ton of these finds, five dollars for button unbuttoned on your shirt, five dollars for carrying a bag of chips and you wrapped up these finds and you can pay them at the seventh grade year, then guess what, youre not an eighth grader at the end your year. The cap, to really drill in on this role of discipline and then our role as Security Guards and offices of the law is really a problematic thing that keeps us from developing the imagination encouraged and what youre talking about and asking about. I think you need to be alive to that. Im trying to spread the word here, one practice. You have to stand to the microphone. One practice at all 18 Noble Network campuses have that i find particularly, theres no english words, its horrifying but beyond that. They escort all the young people to the restroom and they have some euphemism for Security Guard like helper, to the washroom, always, no exception. They wait outside the restroom until youre done and sometimes if youre in there too long they bang on the door and say hurry up, you need to get back to class and i think that needs to be spread more widely because when i share that with people in the neighborhood there like really, i didnt know they did that. Circuits back to crystals. The theme of her last book which is love, joy and justice. We can create spaces for all young people that are based on love, joy and justice. Based on what you just said i would hold up two other books with looking at. Some of you have read in the last year between the world and me for his marvelous memoir, the beautiful struggle where his new book we were in power. If you havent read his books, you must read him but one of the themes that comes through in his themes are poor workingclass africanamerican kid growing up in baltimore and again and again he says i was a curious boy but the school didnt want a curious boy. They wanted obedience, compliance and conformity. They didnt want my curiosity. He said i went outside to find it. Hes a College Dropout because he couldnt be the curious person he wanted to be pretty says again and again the classroom wasnt where wanted to be. I wanted to be in the library because thats right could be curious. Thats worth remembering. I feel like your story about your brother is so much about that, a kid with energy, a kid with initiative, a kid with a certain amount of courage, but none of that was wanted before he was in school. Second, just point out to you although dont get it, its called the education of kiva mosque with. Hes a legend in new york. She is one of these major Charter Network people but if you havent read it, its an absolute contradiction. Her trademark as a School Reformer, Corporate School reformer and as a fighter for Charter Schools is to be a nonconformist but i dont follow the rules. Im actually going to go against everything and yet every other page she said in order to be my schools yet to follow the rules. You must be obedient before anything else. So here she is a living example of disobedience when it serves her purposes but when it doesnt then everybody has to be obedient. I think that the telling, it gets back to the same thing were talking about earlier, the people who are selling this School Reform agenda is rests on three legs, one leg is destroy any collective voice of the teachers. Whether you like the Current Union situation or not, the collective voice of teachers is necessary. But they want no collective voice of teachers, reduce education to a single metric, how you did on standardized tests. Nobody is pushing the agenda would allow that lyon their own children and 30 take the public space and privatize it. So thats based on an idea is that education is a product like a laptop or refrigerator to be sold at the marketplace, not a human right. We have to get very loud those of us who are teachers and advocates for Public Education and say education is a human right and a democratic principle. There must be a Decent School to go to in the neighborhood, not something you have to juggle to get to or pay for that right there within walking distance of fully resourced forwardlooking, good curriculum right here and we have to fight that. Not just any school, im just reminded, has anybody seen the spoken word piece that was turned into a video that puts education on trial. That is great. If you havent seen it, google it. I think its called education on trial this guy in a courtroom who is using the spoken word piece to show that if you look at a phone from ten years ago and you allow any of your phones youll see a big difference. If you look at a picture of a car hundred years ago and you look at cars on the street, theres difference but if you look at the classroom from hundred years ago and you going to many of the classrooms that are assessable to children today, they will look the same. The video really talks about the ways in which curiosity gets smothered because of the conditions of the classroom. We arent supported to change. Exactly so you got to go home and google, dont google it now. Shes googling it. Im just kidding. Google education on trial. The other one is nice white lady. Its brilliant. Its a video from mad tv. It opens with the camera zooming over an urban landscape and the voiceover said the american urban high school is nowhere more dangerous than the camera moves into a classroom and you see black and asian students sharpening their knives, and it says out of control kids, parents who dont give a damn, what could possibly help them in the door creeps open and a lady peeks in and says im amy little, im here to help you and the kids growl at her and the one girl with maximum attitude says what the hell do you know about me and she reads her riot act and amy little is taken back and she says write that down into their all winning Pulitzer Prizes and putting their weapons away and everything works out beautifully in their jitterbug in the hallway and the voiceover says if you want to save the schools you dont need more resources or better curriculum or better building, all you need is a group of nice white ladies and effectively capture every video, every movie youve ever seen about education in urban schools, nothing so those are two pieces of homework. Education on trial and nice white lady. You were talking about discipline when i used to work on the south side in the chicago high school, i stopped using the School System because it didnt matter if you set fire to the library for you throughout the back down the hall, the punishment was the same which was suspension for a day or two days three days and so for kids who wrote relying on food for the free lunch or Breakfast Program and just somewhere to be during the day, it was removing them from the classroom. Although we said this is clearly not the right punishment for kid who threw a bookbag, maybe for the kid who committed arson but thats another problem, but i was shocked to hear that. Ive been on the game for little bit, but my expense was to make it my own Discipline Program and make it about learning otherwise there was no way, i would never see have my kids. Through a question i was gonna come appear for is have you read piece going society . I feel like theres this, i keep hearing from parents who come in here with this expectation that the kid should be at a certain level of reading, and this is the problem i had of high School Teachers, they clearly had students were way far behind in the reading level at age 16 there were maybe third or fourth grade i kept thinking about this idea that we think its a given right to move to a different grade because where youre old older, like the earth has gone around the sun and therefore i should be in the next grade even though im not meeting those standards and i dont know if theres a way in which, if you talk about this, that combo of yes they need to meet certain standards but how do we d school our way of thinking and that. Give a question or comment. So even though Chicago Public schools have set on paper since 2006 there interested in Restorative Justice, the idea that rather than focusing on punishment representative retribution, there has been very little support by way of professional development or even reputation, encouragement, buyin for those thinking we should get behind this Restorative Justice because it may yield some different results. That is a huge problem, but also suspensions remind me, and what you mentioned that immediately whatever the harm is that we have the same kind of response, we have been encouraged, conditioned, condition partly because of this International Dialogue or National Dialogue around teachers as disciplinarians to be creative around discipline. Ssuspension and expulsion has been around for a long time but now we have fines and grade retention and counselor transfers. Sure, you should go to the job corps. So, have you thought of lincolns challenge, its two hours away. Its perfect for you. We use ability tracking, special education categories. Thats something that could potentially be a powerful mechanism of making sure folks who are traditionally underserved get what they need but instead at the dumping round for black and brown people. Let me interrupt. Everything youre saying this stuff your brother experience. Every one of those things. Its when we get to the Corporal Punishment because in illinois its illegal but in 19 other states its not. We also arrest young people. So a fight in the laboratory school, certainly is not going to end up in an arrest but in lots of other schools, the schools we work in, the schools we support in a variety of ways, certainly that is the answer. We even have booking stations in our school to make them faster, easier, more efficient. The fact is we have been supported, nurtured to be creative about punishment and discipline and we ought to be rethinking, reimagining what could be possible when we focus on Relationship Building and believing that young people are beautiful and loving young people, it would be amazing to imagine what classrooms can look like. Before you do, there is this beautiful educator writer here in the city who some people believe. [inaudible] i believe he is brilliant and smart and loved by people and really just has some smart ideas. He said you cannot teach a child you dont love, you cannot teach this child you cannot respect. Simple. These three fundamental pillars of what it takes to create a productive learning environment. None of that says discipline kids in ways we just described. I think theres something to be said for your comment and observation around the lack of support we have to think differently about education. Another piece related to your comment is the growth of prisonlike conditions in educational spaces, much like we did with the phone and car example, we could do the same thing with schools. I asked each of you to think for a moment about what comes to mind when you think of prison, lets do that. What comes to mind . Bars, escorts to the restrooms, silence, no windows, straight lines, uniform, ids, police officers, police infrastructure, one of those things call metal detectors, all these things that we mentioned our present, are the defining features of many of our schools. So we have police officers, we have helpers or School Resource officers that we give them fancy names to say we have Police Prisons in our school we rely on these folks to deal with minor situations that should just result in a conversation and a question about whats happening in our relationship that enables that in my classroom. So, that hits me on my core and i think its something we pick up in the book. I think this thing about you cant teach a child you dont love, but you have to make that concrete. We always say all kids can learn and then you ask, when did they stop being able to learn because this distinction between i can love the kids that hate their parents, thats a myth two. Thats ridiculous. You have to know people and recognize people. Part of justice is recognition. I really appreciate that. I think language matters so rebeccas point, we use language in this Corporate School reform for High Expectations the bed turned out to mean exclusion from school. From school improvement. It turns out to mean closing schools and this is a perversion of language. I think what youre hitting on his central and critical to what we need to think about. Let me add one other dimension. Ill ask you this question. Every third grade teacher in Chicago Public schools is angry at home . Theyre angry at what group of people. Think about it . Every second grade teacher. And the reason the matter every second grade teacher is because the kids are ready for third grade and every high School Teacher is matter every elementary School Teacher and we can tell you that every College Professor is pissed off at all yall because the kids are not ready for college. You know this, at chicago state i was teaching at the elite college in maine, those kids not ready for college. Some of them can write beautifully and some of them cant write have to get them in on to get them to understand grammar. So how are they at the salida school. The reason is, to be a normal 5yearold is vast. To be a normal 5yearold, there are five yearolds who are reading whole books and there are five yearolds were peeing in their pants. There are five yearolds were reading books while peeing in the pants. So this idea that somehow there such a thing as the second grade level is in itself idiotic and leads to a social madness will participate in. The reality is you get the kids get. They come at you variously. Veteran College High School and everywhere. Your job is, this is the intellectual demand of teaching, to see them as threedimensional as who they are and to find a way to connect, have a curriculum in the space. Your space, our space thats big enough and wide enough that everyone can find something familiar, everyone can find something to stretch too, every everyone can find acceptance and critique. You have to do both and it is mind wrecking and soul crushing sometimes but it is the work and thats what makes it both phenomenally interesting and excruciatingly difficult. My advice again to you as middle School Teacher but to all of us is that we have to get in the habit, we have to get a dialect going in our lives we criticize ourselves at the end of every day because we actually could have done better. We could have lived up to our commitments better, and then we forgive ourselves the next morning because we are real people and were going to work and its as real as it gets we have to make those relationships and those connections but we want to be guided by joy, justice and love, and a for not rock the track before we begin. My name is alex. We both have fulltime jobs, we will have the privilege of teaching art and history respectively, as adjunct. It seems like universities coming here mormor called the plight of the adjunct so you here mormor about these adjuncts, we just do it on the side for fun, more or less, but. Its nice to be paid zachary s but anyway you hear how you have to attach together these jobs, you dont have the fulltime, tenuretrack position so i guess id be interested in hearing as a current academic with someone with the vast amount of six periods in that area, whats your perspective . Would you see that going . Thinking of wisdom in the room and having students teach us, im thinking about one of my students who is working on a piece about adjunct faculty. Shes writing a piece about what it means to be a professor, to have the label professor and the credentials to be, to profess and to also have to walk into the Public Aid Office and fear that you see a student or colleague who believes you have this prestige and access to institutional benefits and yet youre hiding in the back because youre really hopeful nobody here that doctor soandso is being called to the front of the line. Its a fascinating piece that focuses specifically on the theme of female adjuncts who are grossly underrepresented in the academic arena and its trying to help them provide a space to document these experiences of what thats like. what we have been talking about mostly. Institutions for quite some time have been really seduced by this Business Model and education. And that also means we are not paying attention to the working conditions and one thing that i love is that the learning conditions and no good working conditions are good teaching conditions and the teaching conditions and learning conditions, so. It still requires folks to have the teaching load is still expected to ride on the side and dont have the resources to do that. Its uncommonly misunderstood and something we should worry about. We should note the larger point that is underneath all of this is the idea that education is a product of a. Just to get access to the learning absurdity and it undermines the notion of a free people. I am forgetting where he goes in Eastern Europe and he says its free and the kids are all going there for free and he runs into a couple of kids drop out of the university of colorado and couldnt afford it and they are over in this country getting a Free Education and says to one of the local kids dont you think at least they should pay and she looks at them as 20 or 21yearsold. I was on the Faculty Senate we are going to put everybody on furlough and you have to explain it to your units if we take 2 off it isnt going to make a difference of me making my mortgage, so we should think about what it means to furlough the staff. Theyve done it since he was about five where they will read a whole group of books together and an author together so they decided that they would read the complete dickens. So this literary partner decided to read it and they tell us mom and i are going to read the complete dickens. Hes an adjunct in new york. The. There is some cause for hope. There is a burgeoning consensus around it being a negative thing and it kind of critique of Charter Schools. Maybe if you think of kind of the Success Stories or novels that we can kind of used to thinking of like where to go into what is necessarandwhat ist trouble we need to be making. There is more cause for hope the greatest cause for hope is in my view. Not only have they not one but there has been pushed back but its only growing. They dont have teachers of the students were the parents. So they are flipping backwards and mostly wha mostly good as is they have not made a moral argument with the destruction of Public Education. I look around and look at things like. Theres a lot of reason to hope for. The argument for Public Education is an argument but needs to be made and can be made and you can win people over again and again by framing the issue properly, and i think that again is an attempt at intervention. Optimists think they know what is going to happen and i have no idea but i choose to be hopeful because that gives the energy to fight back. Right there at the horizon is a little bit hazy. My answer is that its good for walking and keeps us on the right path. The issues that we address in the book i dont have a whole lot of state and politicians to do the work. Instead i am encouraged by this and us. I am encouraged by the uptick and straight out activism. Its also Economic Policy which is related to the world. I am encouraged by the city of chicago and those who came to sell up and strained themselves across Lakeshore Drive wearing these beautiful berets inspired by beyonce and say rather than spending a whole lot of money on the draft town this. They set up their own version of the utopian world. Some people may say tha that its impossible and we will always have business but im sure somebody says we will always have to wake up and say we have other options and we are going to pursue those actively. We have the money to do our jobs and we are going to do that but also show people what we are trying to build into a parking lot and we are going to create our own encampments to show the things we really need and that these things can provide to us and young people if only we have the courage to imagine it and find some way to practice it even experimentally if it is something that only lasts this summer for 41 days but the idea that we can rethink what Schools Look Like and who does the teaching and rethink the kind of resources that you think we need and we can take care of our own. I think that gives me and us hope. That i that is a good note to end on. Thank you all for coming. [applause] anything you like thinks so much for coming and for putting up with us. Appreciate it. [applause] is robert maxwel