we'll go ahead and start our next panel so that we can keep on time and be as efficient as we can. welcome to the second panel of the day. this panel is entitled "where are we now, a conversation on educational opportunity and integration." our panelist today will be girouard robinson, a resident scholar at the institution, the virginia secretary of education and the president of the black alliance for educational options. girard has a long history in education. dr. greg forcester is the director of the oikonia network at trinity international university, a senior fellow at ed choice and currently at the freedman foundation for educational choice. he is the author of six books and co-author of additional three books and his ph.d. at yale. michas is the founder and ceo recently given p up the approva to open up a charter. she served as the ceo of the network charter school fund and the senior adviser at new leaders for new skeels achools started as a special ed teacher as well. so the goal of this panel is simple. the stories you heard in the last panel and the discuss you heard, we want to discuss and review the data as it relates to education, educational opportunity and integration since the brown v. board decision, where are we? what are the issues we have to deal with? our panel will start off with this. ju we will have some additional comments and directed questions and you, the audience will fire some good questions like johnny did last time. without further ado, girard, please. >> first of all, let me change the center for advancing opportunity and extending to me an opportunity to talk about a subject that i think is vitally important. advancing opportunity. let's put this in context. 63 years ago, brown v board of education was decided by the supreme court. now, fast forward. rock bert m robert mentioned i was secretary of education in virginia and commissioner in florida. 50 years ago, it would have been impossible for me as a black man to souf erve as a state leader i either of the two states. it was the work of brown and the ncaap that made this possible. our students were in segregated schools. they learned. many came out very literate. they went to college. there were a lot of resource challenges. fast-forward today. we have more african-american students and otherwise who are graduating from high school. many more african-americans that are going to college, whether they are hbcus or nonhbcus. we have made tremendous advancement. one of the things i believe chokes an honest conversation about progress is an overreliance on the conversation about segregation. you say we have racially identifiable schools. i am under no pretense that government policy at the federal and local level and redrawing lines and deciding zip code, i get it. to say in 2017, my oldest daughter, who went to public schools, in her generation, went to a segregated school. we are saying 63 years worth of progress never happened. that's simply untrue. we have racially identifiable schools that have a number of challenge filled with poverty. poverty is not a proxy for destiny. we know too many poor people in cities that are doing well. we also know people that have challenges. when we are talking about what brown had a chance to do, it shifted how in the type of schools we could attend. we've got another thing about brown is the advancement of cell phones. it has been a different conversation. what we have today are racially identifiable schools. we have a new set that fall into the public school option model and greg will talk more about that. last year, we had two members of congress, john conyers from michigan and we had bobby scott from virginia commissioned a study. it was released may 17th, 2016. it identified that we had a number of schools, nearly 3/4 of the schools that african-americans attend are either predominantly african-american or student of color or predominantly free reduced priced lunch and predominantly underresourced. those challenges that still exist. one part of the report that we didn't sfendpend a lot of time the number of majority or minority, a number are nonwhite now. there are majority/minority schools that won blue ribbons or in fact won gold medals because of their academic achievement. high schools that are predominantly low income that are doing well academically. what we need to do is to look at the schools that exist. what are they doing is it resources? educators? family involvement? is it the curriculum? is it expectations? all the things we knew 50 years ago make sense? but we know how to make sure it makes sense across the board. to say that we have schools that are segregated and not doing well simply isn't true. that isn't left the government off the bull for being responsible for investing the resources. when we talk about resources, it's not just revenues. where's the money going? you know, we've gotten in washington, d.c., we hear a number of numbers. it could be 22,000. had a chance to work with d.c. public schools in the late 1990s for dr. arlene ackerman. and we spent a lot of money. and we did not crack a 50% high school graduation rate. wasn't because of money. we had money in place. but there were some other challenges. there was also a rise of special education. if there's something we know more about today 63 years later about brown are the number of special education students we have and special needs students. we have different names for them back in 1954. they weren't ualways kind names. we've got to find ways to work. for me as i close, 63 years from brown, we don't have segregated schools. number two, we have majority minority poor schools that are showing success and we need to figure out what are they doing and actually have that go across the board. third, we have school systems run by african-americans, hispanics, and number of teachers. we are now in positions of power. in ways that we were color codewise back in 1954 but today we actually manage multimillion-dollar school budgets and we have state superintendents in chiefs who are in positions of power. for me i'm excited to be in washington, d.c. having this conversation because 63 years ago many of you in this room including some of the poor whites would not have been in this room if it were not for brown v. board of education. for me we're all brown's great grandchildren and i'm glad to be part of the conversation. >> well said. >> thank you. i've been asked to speak about what the research shows on school choice and ethnic segregation. i'm sure you all heard about the economist who fell down the well. and people -- he falls down the well and people say are you all right? just assume i have a ladder. it's an old joke but a good one because it describes how a lot of economic studies are done and other social studies are done as well. one of the challenges in my field is a lot that are published looking at ethnic segregation don't look at data. they don't look at what has happened in the real world. instead they take the author's assumptions about what they think should happen and build a mathematical model and present it as if it were data. i go through and look at data from the real world. to accomplish a regularly updated review of the research on school choice. and one of the things that we track and publish updates on is the research on ethnic segregation. there have been ten to look at how choice programs intersect with ethnic segregation and measure what happens in the programs. nine studies have a positive finding that school choice has some sort of beneficial effect. and the tenth study finds it makes no visible difference. seven of these ten studies, what they do is take a snapshot of the ethnic composition of the public schools. and the composition of the private schools where -- that are participating in the program. and what they ask is which is more segregated. the public schools that students are able to leave or the private schools they're transferring into. and what all seven of those find is that the private schools are less segregated. while that's a snapshot, it does tell us that the school choice programs are moving students from more segregated schools into less segregated schools. the other three studies are able to track individual students as they move from school to school. so instead of looking at the school systems, we're actually following individual students. and that's a better method. we don't often get to do that. we just don't have the data. so there'd been one study like that in milwaukee and two in louisiana. the study in milwaukee is the one that found no visible difference. there are a couple of theories about why that is. one is the study didn't get going until 15 years after the program started. so it's possible the program had some effect on ethnic segregation but then it reached an equilibrium. another plausible explanation is milwaukee is just a really, really segregated city. it's more segregated even than the average american city of that size. and so the students may simply be moving from overwhelmingly black public schools to overwhelmingly black private schools that are created to serve that population. without better data we can't really know. at least we can know it's not doing any harm. the transfers of students are not increasing segregation. the two studies in louisiana found that the program includes ethnic segregation. one found that there was a small increase in segregation in the private schools participating as a result of the transfers, but a much larger decrease in segregation in the public schools that the students are transferring out of. so on net it was a dramatic difference. the other study found no change in private schools. and the same or very similar large positive effect in public schools. now, these results are counterintuitive to many people. our culture has sort of conditioned us to think that private schools are much more ethnically segregated than public schools. but actually, not only the data in school choice programs but on schools don't bear that out. and school choice programs are often describe d as something that will increase it. i think it's important to understand. i think the main reason is because in the public system, students are assigned what schools they're going to based on where they live. american neighborhoods are residentially very segregated. that's a combination of ethnic discrimination in the housing market. and people self-selecting because they want to live near other people who look like them. and there's actually a feedback where those feed off each other. i encountered that myself. one time my wife and i moved to a new city and caught our real estate agent red handed filtering the results showing us only ethnic composition they assumed we would want. boy, was he terrified when he realized he was caught because that's very, very illegal. i don't think his motivation was to be concerned about the ethnic parity of the vp ethnic in that neighborhood. i think he is motivated to make the quickest sale he can. he wants to show us as few houses we're not going to be interested in. and he made assumptions about what we would want. and actually we were frustrated. we couldn't find a house we wanted. as soon as we took that filter off, we found a beautiful house that met our needs at the price we wanted and we bought it and lived there for several years. it was an enriching experience. sometimes my friends pooh-pooh it. say let me tell you a story. so we can debate how widespread this is. but we can't debate whether it happens. we have eyewitness accounts. so i think as long as people are sent to schools based on where they live, it's going to be extremely difficult to overcome ethnic segregation in schools. private school choice was not designed for the purpose of designing segregation. but because it disconnects where you live from where you go to school, it does seem to have the effect of reducing ethnic segregation in schools. i support it for a lot of reasons but one reason i support school choice is because i think it should be a goal of our system to reduce ethnic isolation without being nationalistic we're positioned to be on cuttings edge of the new kind of human community. where communities are not ethnically exclusive. that's historically new. it's not something you find when you look back at history. where communities are not ethic any bounded. you kcan't get in because of that. it's a great thing for school choice to be doing. >> well, i've got to respond to that. let me start by saying thank you for inviting me to this wonderful conversation. as i was thinking about this panel, i just reflected on my own personal trajectory on how i even got here. i have an identical twin sister we grew up in new jersey. neither of our parents went to college and we both failed kindergarten. yes. we both failed kindergarten. apparently we colored outside the lines or didn't follow direction. i share that story because we were in a majority white community. my parents were -- just moved out of philadelphia and they wanted a better school option for us. when we failed kindergarten, my mother took us out of public school and put us into private school. honestly, i think that has made all the difference for us. and so it was why i'm a huge, huge proponent of parental choice. i really genuinely believe that every parent should be able to choose what school or what environment and take away even the construction of school. how do you best meet the needs of each individual child? fast forward, as was previously mentioned, i was the ceo of the newark charter school fund where i'm a new jersey girl, born and raised, and was excited to be back in newark. and now as i've moved back to washington, d.c., where my husband is a sixth generation washingtonian. the way i come at this is really believing that all politics are local. whether it is the local city, local state, the data or narrative, it really comes down to what's happening locally. about two years ago i went out to silicon valley with all of the entrepreneurs. they do things differently out there. the ceo of thumb tack said i hear this debate about k12, about college, but this is the reality. if we are not preparing every single one of our students for their academic life, economic life and their life to be citizens in this global world then we are not doing our job. as i think about the purpose where we are now, my mission is to make sure every children can have a well rounded life. when i hear data around majority minority communities, look. newark, new jersey, is 100% minority and almost 100% eligible for reduced lunch. i'm opening a school in ward seven in d.c. which is almost 100% african-american. so if we want to talk about data in terms of -- if more fluent and white parents want to come to southeast d.c., great. but i don't think they're coming until the schools and the neighborhoods are safe. and are providing high quality innovative options. until that happens, i think this is a false debate around, you know, is it majority minority, is it segregated. then again to be in two cities, newark new jersey and in washington, d.c. where we have a thriving traditional public school sector as well as a thriving charter sector. again, my perspective is that those are false debates we shouldn't be choosing between charter or district. they don't care if we have a charter name on it or traditional public school. that's what we heard from the last panel. the other data point that i want to just really reflect on is in the last panel, talked about being in the second wave of students. she described her experience as being invisible. i thought that's exactly how the 1.2 million students dropping out of schools today feel. invisible. so the answer isn't more money or more schools. it is how do we meet the individual needs of every single student today. because the digital economy, the world is moving fast. we just heard cell phones go off. our students are dijal natives and we've got to prepare them to go into the digital economy of the future. that's why i'm excited to launch a school focused on computer science. i think that's a skill that every one of us should have in order to be prepared for the digital economy. >> can i enroll? >> absolutely. can you teach it, that's the question. >> good point. so thank you very much. i appreciate those responses. we're going to do a bit of directed questions here. we want you to get engaged. so i'm going to ask a question that follows up on yours. you said that you were from a district 100%. in a school choice system, if you were meeting the needs of every child, is it okay to have a school that is 100% racially isolated or minority. is that okay? >> to me that's the wrong question. how do we meet the needs of individual students? and when we look at the portfolio of schools are they all the same model or do we give students real choices. i met an author saying there is no average student. there is no one size fits all. and the more we treat individual students as an average, we're going to do one of two things. one, we're going to miss their talents. two, we're going to bore them to death. for me when we look at their schools, we need to look another school day and school year. maybe school is not a place to go to. maybe school is an online activity. but i think it's the wrong question to be thinking about today. >> okay. this is for every one of you. the next question is thinking about that, what is the role of government in this conversation? is there a situation -- there are a lot of friends of mine, i think friends of yours, who argue that the system is doing what it's intended to do which was including or -- this is for each of you. >> i want to goo back to your first question and then the second. the question is it okay? depends on who you ask and what's the political agenda. if you ask gary orfield, he would say absolutely not. if you ask richard callenberg, then i say what about banneker public high school here in washington, d.c. a racially identifiable school. a number of them are doing very well, going to the military, starting businesses, and have jobs. what about drew magnate school in los angeles predominantly black and hispanic. it's a school of choice. but there are racially identifiable schools that are doing well. depends on who you ask. the question for me isn't segregation, today, tomorrow, forever. it is education today, tomorrow, and forever. that is what matters to me. in terms of the role of government, what it can play is a small key partner. so if you have a group of community members who say we want to have an integrated system, let it happen. she worked in cambridge, massachusetts. they have a controlled choice program. people decided i'm going to move to cambridge. i'm going to participate in the program to make it happen. the second oldest voluntary integration program in the country is the metco program. founded by black parents in 1966 who got tired of boston public schools not doing anything for them. so they created project exodus which made the metro program. so saying we're going to give you academic resources, financial resources, and even work with the law to make it happen. people want to get involved but i think more necessary the government should have a heavy hand when there's discrimination going on. but it can play both discrimination as well as intervention as well as innovation. >> well, i think to your question about whether the system is designed to perpetuate segregation, here's an experiment you can do on your own to confirm this. on google images, bring up a map of manhattan by ethnicity. and then bring up a map of the school districts in manhattan. and just put those on your monitor next to each other. and look at how the school district lines do little loops and stuff in order to make sure the districts stay tracked with ethnic composition of neighborhoods. partly that's a legacy of history. partly it's an ongoing continuing problem of people who don't want their kids mixing with certain other kids. and we have to confront that. on the other happened, i think school choice is itself something government can do to address the problem that it's a false dichotomy to say do we want a government solution or do we want school choice. school choice is public policy and it involves taking public funds and devoting it to educati education. that's why some people on the libertarian end are against school choice. they don't like the government is going to do this. but i'm all for it. as to your other question regarding is it okay, i think is it okay is probably not the right way to frame it. but i think policy is about tradeoffs. it's not a question of do we want literacy or citizenship education. obviously we want both. but the question is how do we prioritize those? there are people for whom literacy and numeracy has taken on a high priority that things like arts or literature or citizenship location drop off because it's out of whack. so i think the interesting question is should school desegregation be a priority or should we simply pursue good education and be indifferent to the demographic composition of the student body. and so i wouldn't want to say well let's sacrifice other priorities to desegregation and let's not care whether students learn to read or write. or anything else because everything should be sacrificed into desegregation, the only thing we care about. but that having been said while i respect people who they say we just want good education and don't care about the demographics. i actually think one of the things we should want for our school system is for our children to form a common bond with people who are not like them. and i think that doesn't have to be limited to government schools either. i think private schools do that just as well if not better. it's a whole research question we could talk about. but i think part of the function of the school system should be to create a common bond among people who are not like one another and that can be challenging. but that's just a reason why it should be a goal of our education system. >> can you quickly follow up? why don't you quickly give, greg, go into that research. just very quickly. >> sure. well, there have been a number of studies on tolerance of the rights of others. this is a metric in the education studies that has gone back decades where the instrument they use is they ask a student to identify your most disliked group. and people will name everything from, you know, republicans or democrats, they'll say pro-lifers or pro-choicers. they'll say evangelical christians or atheists. should people in that group be allowed to vote? have a book in the public library that's sympathetic to their view? you go on for about a dozen questions. and fairly consistently what we find is that private school students score a little better on those measurements than public school students. i don't want to blow that out of proportion. it's a moderate difference, but private schools do seem to do a better job of teaching students to tolerate the rights of others. >> narrative matters a lot to the conversation about desegregation. you take the term ethnicity, that terms is yubiquitous. today we say ethnicity, we often mean non-black. even though 10% of the people who consider themselves black are not african-americans. they're from countries where they speak more than one language. often ethnicity meant if you speak another language other than english. the italians were ethnics at one time. the irish were ethnic at one time. it's interesting because the largest ethnic group would not be hispanics in the united states but people of german descent. when we unpack what it means to be an ethnic group, even the term black is interesting. it's much more encompassing. some of them choose not to put their kids in segregated schools. but also we never say the white schools are segregated. and brown. it was the black schools were burdened. we don't say the white schools are. and what do we say about thomas jefferson public high school where the majority of the schools are asian. is that a segregated school? >> well, just really quick. you know, the idea, though, i think back then was about resources. right? and so in the black communities you'd have dilapidated buildings, no books, or old books. and fast forward today we have beautiful buildings and all the books but the kids can't read the books. right? so i think it's important to obviously put it in the context of what it actually means. and right now to me i think education is the civil rights for our generation. we must make sure that every student has access to this quality and that we are meeting the individual needs of students. i am going to say that over and over again because i genuinely believe that our students have expertise and brilliance in different areas. and right now we treat brilliance as just one thing. a single test score. >> i couldn't agree with you more on that one. last question before we go to the audience. probably the wrong one to end on, but i'm going to try it anyway. this is a challenging environment politically right now. how do we break through the barrier of nonpartisanship around this issue? or should it be how can we do this in a more effective way? how can we have this discussion in a nonpartisan or bipartisan way? so we can break down the ideology on the sides and see what everyone's interests might be. >> so i'm list interested in nonpartisanship because that's going to be tough to have. i'm more willing to accept what i call coalitions of convenience. that's just find an area we can coalesce around, make it convenient, and work from there. >> this is why i'm actually starting a school. because i was honestly tired of the intellectual debate that was happening before this past november to what's happening now. because as i said, you know, there are students literally in school who are checked out, dropping out, who need all of us to be doing everything we can every single day to help move them forward. and the intellectual debate is what's stopping them. that being said, i think as my mentor taught me well which is finding this common strip of unity, how do we find ways to work together to move this forward so that -- and again, i think of all politics being local. i think the national debate can get for me exhausted and nauseating. and so if you're going down to the local whether it's d.c. or it's in newark, really getting involved in that local conversation around finding this common strip of unity i think is the only way to do it. >> i think a lot of the way we accomplish that is by using new language. because language comes with a lot of baggage. and it's you can't always unpack the baggage and explain it. i think the school choice movement is over-invested in terms like market and competition. and enlightened self-interest. i'm just going to throw that out there. i don't think that we need to unsay anything we've said. i don't think anything is wrong per se. but we haven't stopped and said when we say that, what we mean is this. and the language is heard differently by people who have a language world where those have a different connotation. finding new words to describe things will help the coalition of convenience. i also think it's incumbent on us to distance ourselves from anything that's going to taint the school choice cause with moral scandal. in the real world you do have to work with policy makers and policy makers are who they are. and, you know, particularly here in america we have a long tradition of nonrevering our rulers too much and being realistic about the level of virtue in public office. but that being said, it's incumbent on us to prioritize coalitions across ideological boundaries, coalitions across ethnic boundaries, coalitions across party affiliation. and if we prioritize that, what we're going to find is it's going to require us to say some uncomfortable things. but if we are willing to do that, i think that's necessary if school choice is going to be the future of american education and not just another policy fad here today and gone tomorrow because somebody got elected. >> thank you very much. so wipt to have lots of questions. please open it up to the audience. please ask a question. and let's go from there, please. start, ma'am. >> good afternoon. thank you very much for your comments. my name is pat tyson. i have three questions that i will ask real quickly. number one, you talked about the districts in manhattan. when i look at the districts in washington, d.c., and birmingham in north carolina, i see the same thing. has anything been done to look at economic segregation? that's my first question. second question is what will the impact of the gardendale, alabama, u.s. district court's decision have on public schools? third question, finally, is in light of trump's budget and assuming -- and that's a big assumption because they have said that it is on dead on arrival -- but assuming that it passes, what will the impact of that budget have on public education? and the goals of public education. >> i can answer the first question. >> go ahead. >> i'm not a lawyer or a budget analyst so i'm going to plead i don't have the expertise on the other two. but economic segregation is sometimes studied. it is not as frequently studied as ath lick s as ethnic segregation. if you look at the most recent report, there are several other studies as well. again, it's not so widely studied. when there are fewer studies, it's harder to generalize. the easier it is to generalize the findings. certainly american schools are heavily segregated by economic factors. that's fairly obvious. >> i was going to say all politics are local. so you have to look at the state and local budget. however i am deeply concern about the budget although it supports me who is starting a new charter school. but also impacting our families and the services they receive. so i think we have to continue to advocate. but this is where locally the local organizations that have been doing this work for years, i think we've got to rally together and leverage all the resources that we have to make sure that our families still get those services. >> i think we'll try to get to number two. gardendale. does anyone know about that? [ inaudible ] >> -- to allow gardendale to go with jefferson county educational system and basically set up a segregated school system. >> yeah. and so i know enough about that not to get into the nuances because i can't speak to exactly what happened. but it's part of a longer tradition of suburban communities connected to urban areas. i hate to use the word seceding for the sake of -- we see it in atlanta. with some of the counties there. there's a bigger part going in there too. but we should also -- yeah. it's a big issue. >> clearly it merits more knowledge from our side. >> so my name is jennifer mizrahi from respectability and the name of your organization is advancing opportunity. and when i hear the term advancing opportunity, i think of education as the means to an end. the end to which is the ability to get a job, keep a job, and advance in a job. and the ability for an individual to be part of a community that is a nothing about us without us community where every kind of person has a seat at the table in our democracy. so i want to ask you about children of color with disabilities who are, you know, really, really impacted by some of these decisions to see what kind of data that you are seeing. the best private schools in washington will not accept children with significant disabilities and the charter schools around the country in many cases are not responsive to the needs of children with more involved disabilities. many who may have the strongest talents and abilities of any of the youth in america. so what are your ideas about advancing opportunity for children of color with disabilities? >> i have done several studies on school choice with children of disabilities. and while it is true that school choice, if you use school choice, you are no longer part of the legal system that allows you to sue your school for services. in fact -- received better services and also better conditions like they are not bullied or attacked at school as often. that's one of the most dramatic differences. the concerns that have been raised about students with disabilities not being able to find slots in private schools don't seem to have ma materialized. i'm not aware of cases where people have come forward and said we can't find a school. given the large number of options served, large populations of students with special needs it doesn't seem to have materialized in the actual programs. >> before you go -- >> i can show you evidence of that and would be happy to discuss offline. >> before we go on, a data point. of the 61 programs of for private school choice and many charter schools but of the private school choice side, almost half of them are serving special needs kids. so there has been a dramatic growth in the number of private scholarship programs out there or publicly funded private scholarship programs. >> i started my career off as a special education teacher, so as i'm starting this school, all my work has been led by a simple motto which is good teaching is good teaching. that means particularly for student who is have disabilities. that being said, i recently joined the board for charter schools and special education. a real goal to make sure that we are advocating on two fronts. when it comes to special education, the majority of their time is focused on compliance. and not actually services. and so i think to the extent that we can really make sure that our schools are given the tools, the resources, and training to shift away from compliance and shift to programs. programs that allow for more personalization, then i think we'll be able to move the ball forward. but right now many schools are inundated with lawsuits and some of them well deserving and some not. but the idea that a school leader has got to spend more time dealing with lawyers and compliance versus how do we meet the needs of our students, i think that's the reality of why students with disabilities are not being represented well. >> i appreciate. >> hello. my name is gregory clay. my question simply is what do y'all think of betsy devos? >> so i've known betsy devos for ten years. i worked with her before she was a public figure and the commitment she made to supporting politicians both democrats and republicans in the local and state arena to make a difference. i know that her heart is committed to helping all kids. i know for a fact that she shows the federal law. i know she wants to make sure that we read the plot. most of the conversation has been about school choice so i get it. people hear vouchers and charters, there will be a point whin there's more talk of public schools. but her intention is not to destroy public education. >> well, i don't know her but i know there are no permanent friends or permanent interests. we have got to find a way to work with whoever is in charge or has the microphone or having the resources. because our students require it. >> if the decent people refuse to serve in public office, that leaves the indecent people. i don't want to attack somebody for taking a position. >> thank you. yes, ma'am? >> hello. i'm a reporting intern for diverse education and a student at hampton university. my question today is, what impact does the extent to which schools are segregated or desegregated today have to do with college enrollment, persistence, and completion? >> well, most of my research is on k-12 education. i'm hesitant to say too much in a field that i know less about. but i have looked at college entrants. and the college entrance rate today tracks pretty closely to graduation from high school with certain course requirements. so we heard this morning if you want your child to go to college, you need to start taking algebra in eighth grade and you need to do this and need to do this. the u.s. department of education keeps fairly good data from a really good sample of high school students looking at what courses they've taken. and it allows us to ask how many students graduate with the courses that they would need to go to college and then we could compare that to how many new freshmen enter college. and they'll track that closely. and i will admit i have not broken that down by ethnicity. that's harder to do. college entrance data by ethnicity are harder to break down and there are specialist in that field, and i don't happen to be one of them. >> we want more african american students to go to high performing schools and also to qualify for psychotherapies. one thing we need to do a better job of is preparing more african-american students to become national merit and national achievement scholars. a lot of that requires you to take the pre-s.a.t. which we don't talk about until after the fact. so that's part one. part two, regardless of race too many students are entering college and enrolling immediately in non-college-bearing remedial courses. so they're spending one, two, three, four semesters enrolled in courses that do not count technically toward graduation. but i thought we just spent millions of dollars investing in you. we gave you a high school diploma and we said you're college and career ready. this is why we partner with places like achieve. we need challenges. we can backward map today and figure out what s.a.t. score, a.c.t. score, temp score, pearl score, or other that you need to be successful. while it will not guarantee whether or not you will graduate, it will minimize the probability of going into remediation. we need to have a conversation about that. >> there is one here about the scholarship program here. children in the program tend to graduate at higher rates than their peers. and they tend to enter college at slightly higher rates. so that's actually an important note to know from a d.c. scholarship program which overwhelmingly served children of color. good question. >> nice to see somebody from hampton. >> hi. naomi shelton with uncf. wanted to ask to your point earlier about having coalescing around convenient points. if we take out all the nuance language, if we take out all those other things, i know if i go to an event they're going to ask me what are my food allergies so you know the difference in what people are coming to the table needing and wanting. if you don't want to have people coalesce around the things of convenience, what are the points that people should be having conversation around? >> well, one goes to a fundamental question of whether we should give public money to religious schools. thomas jefferson's famous wall of separation. i've got a lot of friends who say we like vouchers in milwaukee in the early years because it only went to private nonsectarian schools. but once they add the religious schools, separates the church and state. the constitution itself says that nowhere in the constitution. we know e the phrase comes from a letter to jefferson son wrote in connecticut. so we've got to be clear, are you for public money going to religious schools. if so, here is your coalition. if it is only independent, here is another. another question is should it go to schools that have had a history of segregation. now this gets interesting because after the brown decision of 1954 to '56, they were saying there's no way in hell we're going to let these other people come to school. so in 1956, 101 members of congress signed that the elected court can't tell us what to do. and the southern private school movement as we know it today had many of its roots in what i call fear-based freedom of choice. some of those schools are still involved today. so if you're saying, you know what? we've prayed, cried, forgiven. yes, i'm part of that coalition. there are others that say i still believe it's segregated heart and mind aide today. those would be too. i say we have to start from the beginning. >> i would add sometimes it's us people on the panels or policy who are framing that question. and we should take it to the students and families that we want to serve. when i sat down with my students, i said, you know, design the middle school of the future. like, what is most important to you? and that is actually inspired one of our core beliefs which is for every student and adult to feel known, love, and respected. they want to make sure they're getting a high quality education. they don't want to be talked down to. they don't want to be saved. they merely want to be respected. and so for me i think it's about getting as someone else referred, brian stevenson talks about for just mercy, getting proxima proximate. in order to partner with the communities and families we serve, we're going to have ask them the question around what is the best solution. >> you have to ask the question do you believe all parents should have options or only some. this is a huge issue. right now the system is set up that parents with money can have all the options they want. and parents without money can't. so you can say let's only give money to low income families to equalize it or give it to everyone and get rid of the entire system of the zones. that's a very different coalition than them giving it to some. thank you so much. great question. >> hi. my name is cynthia overton. ives i was wondering if you keep speak more to the role of industries as it comes to educating students of color. i'm interesting in terms of how they can make a positive and sustainable change and difference or how they have and then what are some of the things we need to really be concerned about when we think about industry and education. >> so you have local chamber of commerce members who adopt a school system. this happened back in atlanta when i lived in the city. d.c.'s for the most part the last 25 years, had a number of corporate people who were involved. some also have principal for the day program. the number of executives who have done that for one day and decided huh, i didn't realize principals had it this hard. let me see what i can do. in the private school sector, i am on a board called gold scholarship. british petroleum partnered with us, to get more african americans and others into stem subjects. so bp and us partner together. this is a great time for all the money we pay in buying products and attactax breaks that corpors receive for their work, we should have them become more involved, not dictating but what i call a bp partner. >> one of the reasons we are launching the academy, the data says there is 1.2 million high paying jobs in computer science. and we have a huge talent supply in southwest d.c. or other communities across the country. so we want to close that gap. what typically happens is say, okay. we're going to compare our students to we are going to prepare our go until there's jobs. but then we don't talk to the industry. we don't talk to the heads of hr. we don't even talk to colleges and universities around what's the continuum so starting at elementary or in middle school, how do we help our students navigate from, you know, k-12 to college to career is something that just does not happen now. and i think it's a missed opportunity. we've got to help students navigate this world to get to each step. and so again, it goes town to for me making the connects to industry, college, and k-12. >> if i could make quick three points to that. one more. one interesting example in indianapolis is where we have business leaders part of our chamber of commerce. they're bridging the gap between what these folks say they need and what these folks are providing. and so they're actually trying to align it much better. the other example i'd say is providence crystal ray. i'm not sure if you've seen these schools. this is an amazing model of schools. the families all low income. only serving low income families. every friday, they go to work in a business. and the business supports the school. and by the end of the four years, almost all of them get jobs at the business they intern in. it's an amazing model and it works really well. so more in the first thing. thank you for your question. >> john wolfe from university of maryland. i have two questions. one for -- for college as well as the world of work? because in this technological age we not only need the ee, the cs, all of those college educated people, but there was something on the news just this past weekend about a turbine building company where they send students to technical college. will you also be focused on that? or will it be part of the program? >> sure. so it's unapologetic college prep. that is simply because 76% of the jobs require some college or some post secondary education to say whether you're college prep or not, i think that again is a false choice to me. however, i do think that in our school, we will provide students access to internships and experiences so they can be exposed to all of their opportunities. but also have a real skill coming out of -- they have a real skill that can help them earn resources. i'm working with a group of ninth graders who have computer science offering at leadership academy. on this side they're -- to the academic opportunities we want to provide our students. >> and one place where i may disagree with my friend on this one is i think we focus too much on telling kids they have to go to college. >> that's my point. >> it's either yale or jail to use some words used awhile back. i would like to change the narrative and say our children are career and college ready. it's not only four year, it could be credential. >> because it does speak to the issue of parental choice. my mother and father say i have to go to school. the state says i have to go to school until 12th grade. what happens to my choice? and nobody's spoken to that issue, really. >> your choice of you? >> as a student. >> you can emancipate in certain states at certain ages. >> that's true. that's true. but does the system provide for that in a pervasive way? >> no. >> not yet. >> okay. and that's a complicating factor. >> fair. >> but my second question is to dr. forster. can you direct us to any sources that deal with the analysis of this spectrum of day that that's a various analysis that controls for the varieties to which you have eluded. and expect and provide us with a clear view. such as the ethnicity thing you did with manhattan. are there other studies like that because i think for those of us who are out in the field, we need a clearer picture. we don't need one slanted one way or another. we need to be able to see them in an array and draw from them those inferences that lead us to making the right policy decisions. >> so you're asking me to advertise my work? i would love to do that. if you're -- the studies on how school choice programs intersect with segregation are overviewed in a report we published called a win/win solution. if you google my name and w win/win solution, you'll see that there. the other thing with manhattan district lines, you call it up and you can eyeball it. i'm actually looking at whether it will be possible to do some sort of statistical analysis on the way boundary lines go around ethnic neighborhoods. it's tough and i'm not promi promising. >> i'm not sure help would be involved. we'll see what i can come up with. >> there's a guy named -- he's from d.c. his name is tom stewart. he works with a gentleman named patrick wolf from the university of arkansas. they published a book about choice families in d.c. it was called the school choice journey. tom was important because he went to d.c. public schools. graduates and -- and so we came back to get involved with his work. i'd look at that book. >> i have another study i'm going to have to take care of here. >> good afternoon. my name is dolores rayes. i have a consulting company called the yellow group and associates. my specialty is department of defense as it were in consulting. subsequently, things are changing here in washington in terms of where money is going. to have ships builting with more planes, et cetera, to be built in the military. so subsequently there are so many job opportunities for people in the trades. for example, if you're in the shipbuilding industry, need a lot of people in welding and electricians, et cetera, et cetera. so what are we doing for children who want to be in the trades? what things are the school systems doing to put them in a direction, what are you doing to help huntington who is the largest shipbuilding entity in the country who need all of these people. they need them now and tomorrow. so we need your help. we need to find out what are you doing in the education system to prepare them for other type of work other than going to a university but in the trades. thank you. >> in norfolk, virginia, they have a program for those who want to go to their student there. had a chance to go to their graduation. at times making more than our teachers make. they had two years of grad school. that's one program in place in virginia that's having a good impact. and there are others. >> the answer again would be not enough. two quick stories. one, i was just with an administerer of a public school. and they called it shop. they went back and called it shop again. so i don't know what that tells you but not good. there's a charter school we work with in gary, indiana, that is graduating kids from high school with a certificate and diploma in the workforce at the same time. so there are some models out there. >> we now had several questions on how do we connect education better to the jobs that people are going out to after getting education. we have inherited in the last generation particularly an education reform movement that's very focused on academic achievement oriented mostly towards college. and even when it's not specifically college, it's very abstract. it's sort of we want high standards but the high standards are not necessarily contextualized to anything. i think part of what that springs from coming back to the topic that brings us together today is that in previous generations, educational systems that connected better to vocation were delegitimatized because they were being used to discriminate against ethnic minorities. you had a vocational track and an academic track. and the academic track was for the lighter skinned people. and this was completely a confidence game. the vocational track did nothing to give you reading and writing and a well balanced education and good citizenship and arts and literature and the other things that all people -- i mean, you may not be going to college but everybody needs a well rounded education. that includes more than just how to do a job. so one thing i'm hopeful about is that as educational options increase, there'll be more opportunity to build more contextualized education that isn't beholden to some, you know, distant bureaucracy that's going to have another agenda. under the control of parents it's going to be much more directed to practical outcomes. >> thank you very much. >> hi. greg, i'm glad you raised that. that was going to be my point and question. we have to be careful not to say "or." and remember that we don't just want in the spirit of advancing opportunity, robust system, vocational education is part of it. the very people that make those decisions, if you say today that you want career and technical education are the people who are not qualified for their job to begin with. and so i think there's a cautionary tale here. all of our students no matter what color they are should be encouraged to aspire to a higher education. and gerard, the career and college ready piece, i guess my question for all of you is this. how much do we really believe that those career ready standards are actually truly about exceptional education? or have we given the wonderful business community who i think we absolutely need the opportunity simply to place jobs? where do we make those distinctions so that we don't suddenly have this conversation ten years from now where we're having another yet school systems, charters, it doesn't matter and we just basically stockpiled a bunch of jobs and said those kids should go there. i got news for you. i didn't say any of my kids, you should go to a career. now i do sometimes. but i didn't then. there was no question they were going to college. i suspect for virginia and other people, there's no question they want them to go to college. let's not let them off the hook. how do we square that college versus career, that potential for lower standards with an important point made which is there's jobs out there that we can't fill? >> let me start with the first example. my son who has special needs wants to be a firefighter. which is a great ultimate well paying job over time. but there was no way in god's green earth he wasn't going to get a four-year degree before he became a firefighter. right? so my plan was to get him into the school of public safety which he's there and he's doing that. just so he has greater options at the end of it. that's the way i looked at college for my son there. greater options so that at the end of it he could do the firefighting degree which is a year and then could have something else to fall back on. >> so i agree with you. some businesses come to the table just to fill jobs. i get it. some of them have moved the needle more than others. i think virginia and florida, their business councils i think have done exceptional work. i use career because i'm open for another word. if we want to change it, that's fine. 50% of the jobs that will exist 15 years from now don't exist today. and the concept of what work means is going to be radically different. i'm open to change career. i just don't want to lead with college. >> the word career comes from the french word that means running in circles. but how much that resonates with you, i think we can tell from the reaction in the room. i think we have a false choice that we're presented with in the presented in the current form of the education reform movement. a false choice between academic excellence and pragmatic useful education. and the people who want academic excellence are phobic of anything that sounds pragmatic because that's an excuse not to teach people. the pragmatic people are phobic of academics because that's disconnected from the real world and you won't use it. part of what drives the false divide is standardization. we need to have standards. if we're going to have centralized standards for measuring a good education, they have to be either reduced to test scores or reduced today 21st century skills or some other list we can write up. the closer we keep education to parents and to local community, the more we can define what is a good education in a way that combines academic excellence and pragmatic usefulness. remembering that pragmatic usefulness is not the same as learning the particular skill of a particular job opening that a particular employer wants you to have. >> as long as local is not parochial. meaning going to be involved in the global, but i'm fine with that. >> the only thing i would add, i referenced early todd rose's end of average. he talks about the airplane -- the cockpits in 1950 where they were all one size. the punch line is this, the idea of an adjustable car seat. so all i'm saying is every student has to have the adjustable seat to get them where they want to go. college and/or career. if you talk to any student today, they do not want to be told which career path to go to. and i think this is the broader point is that, you know, my parents just said go to college. they were -- i was first generation college so they didn't care where i went, they just said go. i think our students today have more access to information through technology, they have more big ideas about what they want to achieve. so our job is to give them the adjustable car seat to get there. >> awesome. we're going to give johnny taylor the last question. >> the only reason i'm last is because this is a question my staff wouldn't step up to ask. and i promised i'd ask it if it wasn't asked earlier. here is the question. we romanticize and rewrite history often. i don't know if this is true or not. but the question is, we talk about the good old days and how wonderful it was in segregated black america. in fact, in our earlier panel they said it was so great then. is there research that tells us that is true? we talk about it a lot. and people say it was so great, is there any objective data out there that says we really were performing -- when i say segregated i'm speaking specifically african-american community for purposes of looking back to 1954. i don't know. >> we do have some measurements but they're imperfect. the best measurement that we have going back that far and it actually goes a lot further back is high school graduation. high school graduation is about 2% at the turn of the century and rises steadily over the course of the 20th century until it reaches high 70s, 77 or 78 in the '70s. it's been plateaued since then. from the 50s to the 70s we were continuing the progress we had been making for some time on high school graduation. high school graduation is easy to measure. it's great. we researchers love it. diplomas, we know how many we gave out. the data are solid. after that it becomes much murkier. the high standardized testing only goes to the 70s. from the '70s it's fairly flat for 12th graders. there's fluctuations at 4th and 8th grade but i think those are less important. if you have it go up in 4th grade but by the time they get to 12th grade the rise has disappeared. i'm not sure what you accomplished. i look at 12th grade test sores, that's a typical practice. 12th great test scores from the '70s on reading and math are flat. they're really flat over that period. the other measurement we have that can go back to the '50s is s.a.t. we have the s.a.t. back to the '50s. there's a fairly significant increase in s.a.t. scores in the '50s and it plateaued in the '60s and then it's flat from there. but the s.a.t. is extremely controversial to use as a measurement of academic success and it's generally not used because it's too controversial. >> my father was born in 1913. he saw real segregation in charleston, west virginia. i know you would never say this. i would never romanticize what it was like on that other side of the fence. to get to that point since we're in d.c. take a look at the history of dunbar high school in this city. founded in the late 19th century. the number of people they produced who became cabinet level secretaries, principals, dentists, doctor, who went to the ivy league schools at rates some white schools weren't. it was arguably the first black public high school in the country, that's questionable. for the sake of argument, let's say that's true. take a look at what they were doing in the 1890s. thomas sowell, retired from stanford, wrote from ivy leagues to nba. what happened before broup and after brown. he has a view about brown being radically different. but there was a time in this city where an all black school and a number of those people were not our kind of people. they were what we call regular folk who did extraordinarily things in a public school in this city. [ inaudible question ] >> that's it. last couple of years it's come out. i wish they'd take a look at that. very interesting reading. >> these are great questions, thank you very much. from the same event, a keynote speech by steve perry, founder of capital preparatory schools. he talked about public education, charter schools and school choice. this is 50 minutes.