Looking back at me even when i was reading back at the reaction for kids in the 70s when they started buzzing, a lot of the kids would say you know, i like it at the school and they didnt think about it and it was the same way for me. As i got older i started to sort of think about not only going to school and being surrounded by poverty that i didnt see in my neighborhood in the suburbs that is definitely eyeopening but at the same time the schools that i attended, there was tracking so you had the regular Program Honors and then you had the advanced program and those were cut very closely of a long race and class lines. So as a kid to absorb that and you start to think about it. I remember being in high school and one of the only classes i took where i was actually mixed between the tracks was the global studies course i think and there was an africanamerican student in the classes said she tried to test and to the advancement at one point and she couldnt get in. She was obviously very intelligent and well spoken woman and that stuck with me. I still remember that in the tenth grade thinking about these tracks and i think reflecting on that, you have to segregation but at the same time within the schools you still had desegregation and you are sending a message to kids when you have classes full of kids that are supposed to be the smart kids and classes full of black kids who are not supposed to be the smart kids. Myself that a lot of my classmates, that hits home and it makes you think about how this has worked out. I have always been really interested in this idea of how do we do diversity well . Host now the dominant narrative in American Life and particularly legal and educational history over the past 50 years or 60 years now has been the brown decision, this idea that if we could desegregate and if we could force the hand of schools and policymakers that we could have greater education and not just equality but equity. Obviously your book pushes against that narrative somewhat. But the brown versus board is brought up in your book this entire time. Talk about what brown has meant for educational equality and access in the country so far . Guest is a hard question because i think we hold up around as this amazing feat that we accomplished, that we roll back segregation and then we look at what happened afterwards and we see how incredibly difficult it was, divisive in some ways but ill see you have incremental progress after that, that was very frustrating to people and so is seen as a great victory but i think also its important doing this research to really look back and see what we didnt accomplish yet. And so when i was looking at desegregation and how it was finally implemented 20 years later after brown actually was handed down, we started busing but the way these programs are set up, still maintained White Privilege in a lot of ways and class privilege so that poor kids in black kids had to be tossed and part of that was logistics but part of it was making it the status quo. So i think the brown decision, its a difficult decision and also one of the most interesting books i have ever read in what brown v. Board of education should have said. Academics looking at if the justices had done it differently how it might change things and its really interesting. He probably wouldnt have had the unanimous decision which was very very important but it is really looking at some of the counterfactual and thinking about what a victory it was but also what it did not accomplish. Host is it difficult to write a book that pushes back against such a celebrated Public Policy . There really was considered one of the greatest victories of the 20 century for america. In highlighting the story of people pushing back . Guest oh yes. If this is not the book that i expected to write. I went into it thinking that you know, in louisville especially that integration was a good thing and it did, it brought people together. It made me think differently about the world that i might have otherwise and a lot of my classmates i think in the same way and i think you know one of the points i make often in the book is that during the heyday of desegregation in busing in the 70s and 80s, you actually saw the black and white achievement gap is shrinking faster than it ever had before so that was a big deal. There were so many accomplishments. Host do you think i mean the gap was so huge in this 60s so getting the consistent teachers may have shrunk the gap and more likely the actual desegregation process was incident. Guest i think its really hard to separate that out. When you talk to people who research how this integration affect kids, its kind of hard to say. Is it because kids are learning from each other or is it because if you are a black child in a classroom with the majority white middleclass, he might have more resources at that school than he would otherwise have. One of the people in the book whose favorite thing was that is why he supported desegregation of the time. So yeah i think its a difficult complicated question and there were also a lot of other things going on at the time when the achievement gap is closing. It wasnt just desegregation i dont think that yeah, i want to make it clear that i think it was a very important thing to do. But i did i was surprised that i ended up writing this book that was looking at what went on. Host you open up the book in and the first mention of us about these letters and i found it compelling that you start tell the story of a girl who dreamed of going to Central High School and dreamed of it all 15 years of her life. What she was a essentially told she couldnt go saying the school couldnt have more than 14 africanamericans and as a result she was being put on a wait list that might derail her dream of getting a good education and becoming a lawyer. That kind of story was compelling and jarring. How much that came up in your research . Are these telling cases or is this just a narrative of the people . Guest yeah i think those stories were what made it really interesting and how people felt about Central High School. Had i seen part of it was she wanted to be a lawyer. No wonder the no other school had a law program but it was also very emotional familial connection. Her dad had gone there and her mom had gone there and you know it was the black school for decades and decades. So people had a very emotional connection to it, and sought is a very good school and it was a very good school at the time in the 80s. Eventually they put in and advance program so you have the elite of the black Community Going to that school. You know, the people that i talk to in the book, there were two things always going on, this concern about educational quality but also about our school and this is our community and its very important that we have some say over our school. Host as people got those letters, and how many letters in the book that people got sent that the engineering of the 1950s was producing outcomes that may have been unintended but nonetheless harmful. How soon did people in the town realize they probably need to make some sort of adjustment . Guest there was a lot of that. They desegregation was negotiated over the years. There were lots of fights and there was this ongoing constant conflict in some ways and so but for activists, profile activists who are really behind this fight and they had gone to predesegregation and felt very connected to the school. They have been watching this and they were very concerned that desegregation was going to close central. They had seen the writing on the wall because so many other black schools have been closed as a result. Host why were they closing as opposed to shifting demographically . Guest you know it happened a lot. It happened all over the south and elsewhere, where, to make busing work, you had more schools then you need it because you split the population. So there is an interesting story in north carolina. There are these two schools, a black high school and a White High School and and when they have to desegregate they close the black school and part of that i think, in louisville they were trying to convince people, white parents not to flee to the suburbs and the private schools and to do that they had to convince them to keep their kids in the Public Schools and in their thinking, think part of it was that they are not going to want to send their kids downtown. And a lot of the schools had been underresourced for the most part. I think in their mind it made sense to close them because well we havent been doing a lot of of putting resources in him for a long time so we mice will shut them down. It was partly just to make it work. I think it was logistical but also there was some, how do we maintain, how do we keep the white middleclass happy . Host they were less concerned with the white middleclass and that mightve been totally okay with them. Part of it was the tradition of the school itself. Guest absolutely. It was the tradition of black empowerment i think and that we built the school ourselves, that we did this largely without a lot of help from the school district, without a lot of resources and we have to fight for every penny. So i think a lot of the people that i talked to saw the way that busing happened or just the attitude of desegregation as saying that black people basically failed in doing education in their community and they need this help. They need to have their kids sit next to a white kid. I heard that lots so i think there was a sense go. Host from the communities or from the outside critics . Guest i heard that from the activists. We shouldnt have to set a black child next to a white child for them to learn. And i think an understandable frustration there that our culture and our community is not being recognized as good as and so i think that was one of the problems with the way desegregation was thought of in the way it was implemented. There was sunday, we are going to share resources. It was day we are kind of healthy kind of thing. Host is there any danger that approach because it seems to me that could return us back to the 1954 mindset of saying you know, we are going to hold on to the Failing School, pre 1964 ,com,com ma hold the Failing School so we have our own stuff so we have our own nationalist kind of posture irrespective of what the outcome is for the kids. Guest yeah, grief. I told the stories of people whose stories havent been told in their prospectus havent been out there. I agree. I think its a really difficult question to say you know, its a question we are dealing with now do you close the school down because its failing or because it doesnt have enough students, because the test scores are low, or do we try and keep it together even though those things are happening for the sake of the community . And i think its a really difficult balance and i dont have the answer. Host none of us do, right . One of the virtues of the book is it was amazingly written and you chronicled this perspective. You highlight this perspective but you also help us track how activists engage in the pushback oftentimes i think these victories are celebrated and people get a sense of the foot trend. Talk to me a little bit about that. These activists who ultimately pushed to advance the legal argument that really shifted the tides of the entire country, not just how did they do it . Guest well, really a bunch of interesting and eclectic people. They came at it from different, very different places although a lot of them had been friends. One of them was this very gregarious football coach and he just had this attitude. He had been a gadfly and written editorials constantly in the newspaper. They were at the edges in activism and new what they were doing when it came to do in community activism. Another had been really part of the black nationalist movement in the 70s and was involved in that and so they had grown up from that. They were of the Civil Rights Movement in some ways and at that time period but also sort of on the outside and critiquing it by learning from it. So they knew what they were doing. She was just a wonderful lady and she got very involved in protesting the first iraq war in the 90s. She was very involved and that is how she sort of got pulled id to save the school she had gone to. So you knew they know what they were doing. They were also very alone i think. They were a minority in their community in a lot of ways. I mean it was an anachronism to be africanamerican activists fighting against which is interesting in which is why read a book about them. Host i can imagine how activists would have an argument and maybe how do you is a black person in a black community convince black people that you know its the best way to make schools better. Guest the thing is there werent they were behind this First Federal case and they didnt end up going up to the Supreme Court because they thought they had won their fight which was Central High School and that was what they cared about. Some white parents took it on but it turns out that in a lot of places you had fights where you had the naacp on one side fighting to maintain decent grip grip desegregation programs or expand them and then he would have a black School Board Member or an urban league person or a group of black terence on the other side saying you know what . Lets get rid of this program. We want our Neighborhood Schools that. So really, they were lonely but they were necessarily completely alone. Host almost like powerbrokers. And i guess i wonder, and maybe you can answer this. I also wonder they think it makes policy sense or because they have been ideological commitment to this approach that desegregation works . Its its own thing in its own virtue or the tradition . That naacp in many ways makes its on brown v. Board. Did you get a sense from the people, were they resentful of the black organizations . Guest in some ways its interesting. I think that it became, you didnt have a huge uprising when they were praying in this case, you didnt have a lot of black leaders in the community. You definitely have a significant you know, some of the leaders, you didnt have a big uprising against them. I think they were people in the community who said yeah, this hasnt really gone our way. But i mean it is an interesting question and i dont know. Host again, i dont think there is an answer. I often wonder and after reading your book, ive been more compelled to question the reasons why these organizations like the naacp is not on a National Level certain glee the local level has solved this symbolic but doesnt play out on the ground for the people who are supposed to be helped. Guest i think in some ways i think there is a need for our schools to be more diverse than they are. Maybe not an academic need but i do think that there is this idea that if our kids are educated together that maybe your country will be less divided than it is politically, economically and maybe we will understand one another better and that kind of thing. So i think there is a reason for it, not just attrition all aspects. Host and the resource question. Guest yeah, how do you you get money to poor minority neighborhoods . One really fast way to do that is [inaudible] is horrible, yeah. But i think that is what they are trying to do now. To say okay now desegregation, its mostly over in most places so how do we deal with that . How do we deal with the fact that in most cities and urban areas, its not even a possibility. Its not even feasible anymore. Host is their popular opinion based on this sort of legal term we have seen now . Guest legally, its very hard. I write about the School Choice movement and i really think that is got into the consciousness of the American Public and people really feel like they deserve the right to have a choice of schools. So i think turning around and saying okay, lets implement this Busing Program and you have to send your kids here, dont know if its politically feasible that way and its a controlled choice. Its a Choice Program but the choices are managed. So i think that has just in terms of where people live i think. You have had cities and some schools are becoming in the suburbs are becoming more diverse and in the inner cities you have the white middleclass moving back in in washington d. C. And new york so there are some opportunities. But i dont think forced busing, its not going to be at. Host im glad you mentioned that. Its sort of the demographic landscape that is shifted so much that it almost makes no sense to even sort of relied on that policy movements of the 50s and 60s. Using new york city is an example, brooklyn or harlem even in the 90s. So i mean, i guess part of what i wonder is im still interested in the parents before we change gears. The parents taking account of those shifts, the policy shifts in the demographic shifts and they are making demands in louisville, are they making demands for new approaches to education reform . Are they kind of locked into a historical moment as well . Guest i think whenever you talk to parents [inaudible] i hear people talk about Parent Involvement in schools and parents are really focused on the kids in whats going to happen to them and getting them into the very best schools that they possibly can. Some parents have more savvy than others and bickering out which school that isnt some people value Different Things about schools. You know being close to my house may be very important or the teachers are nice to me and care about my kid, that kind of thing. I think parents weigh Different Things but i think you know, then all of the people i talk te motivation. They werent thinking about oh, i mean even crystal meredith who took her kids to the Supreme Court. Her motivation was, she wanted her son to get into the school that she wanted him to go to so it wasnt, want to tear the system down. I dont think that is how she started out and i think for the most part we werent really thinking big picture. We were thinking very small picture. My 5yearold. Host but it becomes a big picture right . Guest i think thats whats so difficult about schools reform. You have these clashes so its really hard to think about the larger, the good of the Larger Society when its your child and i think thank you note in my personal case, my parents sent me down to the school. My mother had spent time in the school where i went to Elementary School before busing. She was familiar with the school and she did not she was a social worker. It was a rough school. It was high poverty area and so, when she was sending me to that school, i imagine it must have been difficult but at the same time, they had really i guess worked on the school to make it palatable for middleclass families. They had these advance progrants and that is what made it okay i think for my classmates and i to go there. I only have to go there for two years and i stayed for four, because it was a good program. So i think our parents can say we are taking part in busing and at the same time it was also really get program. Host then the program sorted died. Guest i mean, my Elementary School was an excellent Elementary School. Host the program is still solid but guest louisville, i mean there are not very Many School Districts around the country. I wrote about the school that looked at districts that are so using desegregation but louisville is still doing supportive of desegregation. They have had to fiddle with it because of the Supreme Court decision so there are you have income and parental education is another factor and raise. Host in louisville in particular . Guest absolutely. I think this is what got the lawyer involved in the case, got so angry when nature of the new plan because the church to areas of the city that they were going to draw from and the black areas of the city in the white areas of the city so it was very clear. And i think part of the frustration was that, was that in part of the frustration with the program was that you had busing going on in you that integration going on between poorer black black students and uppermiddleclass white students but then you also had black students living in somewhat metal working class neighborhoods being sent to very poor white neighborhoods which is something in louisville and kentucky is maybe more of a factor. You have the population of low income, working class whites, very Large Population so you have the mixing that you have very high poverty schools. So it was perfectly integrated racially but every kid in the school was poor. Host which creates its own problems. Guest i think its important for those kids to know one another but it doesnt necessarily solve the resource problem. Host which speaks to other broader issues that we need to take seriously, reform and critic were. I want to talk about all of that stuff but we will take a quick break. Guest okay. Host lets talk about desegregation and ultimately the parents framed it as a policy that failed. Talk to me about the reasons why guest the main reason i think they were so frustrated is the way it was implemented and it ended up undermining in some ways with the black people wanted for their schools. So you had hundreds of thousands of black teachers fired when busing was implemented and that was obviously not what people were looking for when they were fighting for this, for the desegregation of schools. And again like i said earlier that was to make way for you now bringing white kids in black kids together and not scaring quite terrence away from the school. Host i want to unpack this a little. Your argument is that black teachers were fined for black kids but why parents dont want want they would be scared away by a black teacher. Guest i think that was the thinking at the time and also i think you had a merger that happened and the county system merged. It was a fairly rare situation but you had school closures, but i do think that was part of the thinking. Also there were situations in louisville that i write about where the school a white school was going to be closed. They kept that School Intact even though enrollment was an issue and so on. Those kids would have had clout and Political Savvy and that had something to do with it. And yeah you had black the post fired and administrators. There is this fallout that people i dont think anticipated. Host i was reading the book and i kept thinking, how did people not for c. This . There were a fine and ember of resources and there were more teachers than you need. Obviously there was an expectation of fairness and you have the seniority system and the teachers was seniority would be the first fired. In the 50s and 60s was this not foreseeable . Was this naivete . Guest i think at least for the lawyers, my understanding was it just needed to happen. We just needed to get rid of this dual system of education because it was so much more there than having these two systems where you had different salary scales for black and white teachers which case before desegregation, where you had i mean you couldnt have integration between faculty and you had secondhand books. You had to get rid of that. So i have no idea if people foresaw it. I would imagine we actually had in the south, i think you had some ambivalence about this because i do think that some black people saw that this is potentially going to hurt my school or im going to lose my job if we have to integrate with the white schools because they are not going to want me teaching their kids. There was an interesting polls that were done and they are not very reliable but they are interesting in that they show right after browns v. Board, the black southerners. I do think some people saw it and i do think it was an important i mean getting rid of the segregated schools were at risk, i dont know if. That yeah, you know it has fallout and i think it could have been anticipated but in mobile there were reports that were done and you had several have several rights activists actively tracking this and saying look, look at how many black teachers we had and how many we have now and how many of these to have. So people were pointing it out at the time. Host the subtext of your book and maybe im reading too much into it. Please tell me if i am, is that lack policy groups and black at the goosy groups are constantly chasing symbolic moves at the expense of real policy moves. It seems to me this was foreseeable. It seems to me that all the signs were there. The end of legal segregation was such a symbolic victory, maybe not just for black people but for america. Around v. Board is such an extraordinarily symbolic thing that all these other sort of residual effects really the Collateral Damage was done because as you said they werent working. In the legal segregation of schools. Would that be a fair analysis . s. Guest i mean, its hard for me to say. I think every time you are looking at these issues, there is feasibility versus theres the dream of what could be and then there is like what is practical and what can we do and what is politically possible and what was politically possible in the 50s, it obviously brown v. Board had a lot of ripple effects that i think were a big deal and were very important. So you know, i dont know if the calculations were made and they said you know we are not going to get everything we want but at least its a specific symbolic victory. You know i think weighing the differences, i think it was still an important victory. Im not going to say it wasnt. Although in the books host not that it was important. Guest it didnt work like it was supposed to work i think is what happened. I think there was this dream that this was going to open up the doors for black children and white children to be educated together and they would finally share resources and there was limited progress but still today, you can look at the resources that minority schools have and compare them to the suburbs and you see these disparities. Host there is another piece to this though. Parter was the collateral effects of in terms of teachers, Human Capital and those sorts of things but there was also the community effect. In your book you talk about how people were pushing back not just because teachers were firee programs were lost, but that communities were broken. Guest i think that was one of the big issues that people talked about is your Neighborhood School and i dont have an experience of a Neighborhood School so i dont really get that. As i didnt go to my Neighborhood School, so i loved my Elementary School but that was so very important to people. Host within that logic and within that perspective what is the Community School offer the community . Guest especially looking back at the history of southern black education, there is this deeper pride in a lot of the schools that were built because it started out that these were you now, black education in the the south started out in peoples homes and churches, and so it wasnt something that White Society said heres your school. The black community developed in a lot of ways and they got help in a lot of cases, but there was a lot of pride in that i think so this was more than just you know the school down the street where i send my child and its convenient to my house and all of her neighbors if they are and they can hang out and say we built this, its our pride of our community. Host symbolic. The symbolic is trumping the practical. Guest yeah but i think symbolic matters. I think that it matters to people. Its about your identity and who you are and you know there is this tension that i look a lot at in the book. People are grappling with in am i american rmi africanamerican and how do you deal with success in the Larger Society and still maintaining my history and identity . That is really what is at the heart of what a lot of people were grappling with the least the activists who got involved with this, is how much of that identity and culture do i have to give up in order to succeed in the Larger Society . I think there is symbolism there but there are also these deeper questions that i think are really important. Host if i am interpreting your book correctly, the Community Identity is to have the kind of stable somewhat dense Even Community of people that included middle class people and workingclass people. Not the rich but the upper middle class along with the sort of lou koller class all in the same neighborhood. That is not exclusive to your book. Its part of how the black community was you had a chance to leave the neighborhood stu. Guest my previous book when i was looking at and i was looking at suburbanization and its interesting the rate the numbers are smaller as there are fewer people. The people are running out of the inner city. Host nobody wants to live there. Thats the argument. If there is food and security and if there is Public Housing housing black people dont want to live there either so they leave the first chance they get. The argument is that is why we have to stay and rebuild and the best and the brightest in the most educated and best resource on most responsible, if they all leave, the neighborhood falls in the same think the School Choice argument. The Charter School or the private school or the homeschool. So once again your book make so persuasive argument that whether you intended to or not, we are taking the best people and letting them go to schools elsewhere. Guest yes, i am a journalist so i maurice careful but i do think there was this very detrimental fallout and the answer is not to have lifted segregation laws and jim crow. Obviously that is not the answer. I think there were though federal policies that made it good for people to move out of the city and into the suburbs and the vibrant city neighbor that used to exist. So it wasnt just individual choices saying hey lets all move to the suburbs all of a sudden. This is federal policy choices and local policy choices to make this easy for the people who have the money to to get out to get out. So you know i think there were issues but it wasnt just a segregation. I think there were a lot of other things that went on to facilitate what went wrong. Justice desegregation didnt fix the achievement gap that helped probably but also it didnt cause all these problems. But it was one of the factors. Host i think your book really spotlights the complexity and a real masterful way. Talk to me about the Supreme Court because that becomes a pivotal moment. You mentioned while this is rooted in activism, black mayors mayors and Central High School ultimately the Supreme Court changes the complexion of the nation so it really and segregation. Guest if god out of their hands. They couldnt find anybody to be their lawyer in the first place and they found this guy teddy gordon, who was a really interesting guy. He was very enthusiastic and saw this is a great opportunity and was really compelled by their story. But it really then was taken up by white parents who sort of wanted to send their kids to school but they couldnt. They took it onto the Supreme Court and it was a big deal in some ways and i think its sort of was also just kind of of the book into something that was already happening. Even when that decision came down, most School Districts in the nation werent doing busing anymore so in some ways it was an official and thats something that had already been leaning in a lot of ways. Host but it did allow for a conversation about the role that race plays in Public Policy i mean that Still Matters now. We have affirmative action debates where we are still wrestling with this question. The Supreme Court essentially made it, codified its sort of trend towards saying that race cant be the only factor. It can be a factor but not the only factor. So what are the other factors that can now play into it based on the Supreme Court . Guest they are using proxies because you can look at race and the Poverty Level and they tend to coincide. Utt, the big idea now is that we should be looking at socioeconomic status and really using that as a basis of schools at the k12 level and this is a Big Conversation on higher ed as well rather than affirmative action, which tends do you know opponents say it gleans the best and the brightest. We should be using class instead because there are so few poor students attending universities. Host [inaudible] guest oh yeah and i think that was the complain all along. One of the big complaint all along was that he still had high poverty schools. But, i mean i think theres a compelling case. The people who say that race Still Matters say that yes, income can capture and can be a proxy for you know making sure we also have racial diversity but racial Diversity Matters to people with different experiences for its own sake. I mean it matters and this is the experience of grace its more than just about income so, for black americans, the wealth gap is much harder to measure but you may have differentiations in income for example. But wealth is a different matter. Was there a vision within the community that neared the argument to say we need to value diversity thats there is something good in a school for blacks and latinos the argument that just because theyre white. Guest it is Interesting Data to families that i focused on for jacqueline and to become of the of mom and the daughter had different opinions about this. And jacalyns case she had a horrible experience in the 70s for the white working class. Kids spitting at her and they have good really nervous about sending her kids they had a good experience this is important to my kids had opportunities they would not have had if they had gone to School Across the street that despite the saying is a struggling school. So when we talk about it, and these opportunities were important. They met people to have these networks and experiences i could add have done that for them. But her daughter feels differently and she had a good experience and went to school near my neighborhood. She had good experiences but felt the racial quotas were inherently wrong and it didnt matter she shared go have that same experience down the street from her house. Host is there a policy maker that would disagree. Both sides we want all schools to be equal. That is where i want to push you. Your book offers a critique and talking about oversimplified analysis. Talking about what it does work you are going to have a strong response. One response and one reviews said they interpreted the book too much government is bad and intervention is the problem. Guest really . That is interesting. [laughter] host it is reasonable to interpret that way maybe even a libertarian. This is what happens when government tinkers with engineering. They tried to make us equal in the end up hurting the people this is what happens when government gets in the way. [laughter] but the issue with that is who is running government and for whose benefit . But decisions are made for the most part with a constituency in mind and keeping them happy. There is just this try to keep the black civil rights happy to a and there is that contingent very intensely all these years so for what works i listen to people talk about and i have an answer i spend a lot of time in really good schools that seem to be working and there is always something that is problematic why it is working so well. It is a hard question to answer and to except School Choice and diversities of this is something that Charter Schools became interested in here in new york city for example, but elsewhere in were lives theyre starting Charter Schools to create diversity. You would think everyone would say desegregation and School Choice it is voluntary but there is huge controversy. Part of it is it is the antiCharter School argument work on the schools that we have verses opening a new school that will take those students youre doing well. To think those of be taken off the top the been the traditional Public Schools what is left. That is the main issue but in one instance one school in atlanta a planned community where not only was the school it was becoming more diverse but had created a school in the mixed in calm community that they had to tear down the projects before hand and the people did not get to stay and benefit. Often of z dislocation. A person could read this as consequences of tinkering. I could say we rejected that argument but another argument this is my reid a School Choice in the most liberal sens possible to let as many options as possible vouchers, go wherever theyve got to get access, increase funding for home school options, the Charter School movement should expand to become privatized its. With be fair to interpret why we need more School Choice . Guest i dont think so. Choice is not a bad thing kids benefit from different learning environments and if parents know best bet theres the issue of equity if we care about equity and providing a good option for every child there are kids out there who dont have the ability to navigate the choices he found that as an example in high school there are hundreds of traces you can go to but the large comprehensive high school of lot has struggled because they tend to get the kids who dont have an active choice. There are problems that come with it that need to be dealt with and thought about to sink this worked and this did not. And there are other reform ideas. Says to avoid repeating the same mistakes. Maybe my next book. [laughter] faq for coming