42. Despite the Best Intentions, with Dr. Amanda Lewis

Hi, Waowitos and neighbors. It's my great pleasure today to bring you this conversation with Dr. Amanda Lewis. A distinguished professor of black studies and sociology at the University of Illinois Chicago, she is the co-author with Brown University's John Diamond of a book called "Despite the Best Intentions, How Racial and Equality Thrives in Good Schools." The first edition was published in 2015, using data that the authors had begun collecting five or six years prior. The second edition just came out this year. And as I think I say in the conversation here, I worked on that book in the production stage. I made the index for it, I think I did the final proofreading pass before publication as well. I'm bringing you this episode for a number of reasons. Most immediately, this book is one of the ones that I set out to read together with any community members who wanted to. Our little book group has met once so far to talk about many teodoroes, the prophets of distrust. What the best intentions is next on our list, I've just been delinquent in getting a date for that set. But also, Dr. Lewis is coming to Wawatose to give a talk in like a week hosted at Underwood Elementary School. Specifically, it's at 6.30pm Monday, October 20th at Underwood if anyone would care to come. It's free and open to the public. I'll be facilitating, which basically means handling the Q&A after the talk. If you've got questions for Dr. Lewis, send them to my email linked in the show notes and I can include them in that session. But most importantly, I'm bringing you this episode because the book is addressing a critical issue for us in our district and in districts across the United States. As we all know, kind of intuitively, and as Vlad Kogan reminded us when he came on this podcast to talk about his book, the way schools are funded via property taxes and erasially and economically stratified housing market tends to produce educational inequality. It is not hard to understand how wealthier and more homogeneously white school districts produce better educational achievement numbers than more homogeneously black or brown school districts with smaller resource bases. What is harder to understand and what these scholars really dig into is how and why those educational disparities persist when kids from very different backgrounds are all educated in the same school buildings in the same school districts. When property valuations and per pupil funding are the same and when even the staffs and administrations are the same, why are outcomes and educational experiences still so different? Even in cases where, as in the book's title, everybody involved in the school system is vocally committed to making sure that doesn't happen. I say it's a critical issue for us in our district and I want to say what I mean by that. I realize this is a long introduction, bear with me. First of all, we are a district that has become much less racially homogenous, much less uniformly white than we were 30 years ago. In the early 1990s, UW-Madison Emeritus Professor John Whitty found that we, like the other 23 urban districts, ringing MPS, had a community population that was about 95 percent white. By 2006, roughly 80 percent of Walletosa students were white. The district's annual report, which showed up in my mailbox literally yesterday, shows that 59 percent of our current students are white. That is change over time in our student body. Since I've been paying closer attention to the discourse around the Walletosa schools in the last few years, I've heard this constant refrain about the declining educational quality of our schools. But when I dig into the data, that is not exactly the picture that I get that our schools are worse at educating students now than they were a generation ago. That just does not seem to be true. I think the actual problem, though, and the one we ought to be focusing on, is that our schools are basically not any better than they were a generation ago. What's the difference between worrying about declining quality and worrying about flat performance and why is one the real problem rather than the other? Well, let me start with the data. Let me talk average composite ACT scores, the data from last year having recently been made available. I'm using ACT scores because it's the high school level test that all students take for accountability purposes, and it's the one given closest to graduation. So it is the one best able to measure the cumulative effect of going through our system. If we're trying to make a claim about how well the schools do top to bottom, you want to see where kids wind up at the end. It's not a perfect measure of school effects. It's just the best estimator that we have. Here's what those figures say. The Tosa schools have never been better than they are right now at producing academic outcomes for students. Of the students in question are white. It's marginally better now than it was in the past, but it is still better. That is a fact. The average composite ACT score of white students at East is 23.8, at West it's 22.9. That is as good as it's been since every student started taking the ACT for accountability purposes in the NCLB era. Before that time, students would only take the ACT if they intended to apply to a four-year school, basically, so the tested populations are different and you can't make valid comparisons. I'm starting with this fact because the people I most often hear expressing a concern about the declining quality of our schools are people like me, which is to say white wawatosans, parents of current white students, or parents of alumni, and maybe grandparents of current white students. So if people like me, with kids like mine, are worried about the quality of the education toses offering their kids, those worries are not well-founded. I should also note, however, that there's been no meaningful score decline in any other group either, which is just to say that declining educational quality does not seem to be happening in our district at all for anyone. That's why it, declining quality, is not the real problem. The real problem is that those ACT scores aren't higher, and they haven't gotten any higher over the years for anyone. That's a real problem for two reasons. First, the ACT scores that I just cited, ought to be higher, and showing growth for all my qualms about reducing teaching to a science when it is irreducibly also an art. Education research really has generated useful evidence about effective practices organizational strategies and that sort of thing, research that basically wasn't available or widely disseminated before the dawn of the 21st century. A whole variety of federal and state policies, market competition, and so on, has pushed schools to adopt those strategies, those effective practices over the past 20 years, so why haven't we seen more growth? The second reason is that average ACT scores for other groups are much worse, and also not growing. It's one thing for our schools to simply maintain the relatively high level of educational quality that certain students experience, but it is quite another thing for our schools also to simply maintain and not improve the intolerably low level of educational quality that other students apparently experience. Students with disabilities, English learners, and so on. For black students at East, for example, the average composite ACT score last year was 15.8. Like West, it's 15.3. Those are the same schools with the same faculties, the same administrators, and the same resources as the ones attended by the kids averaging 23.8 and 22.9 respectively. How can that be? Our student population, like our community population, is changing and our schools haven't been able to adequately adjust. To a certain extent, and in different ways at different times, school communities like ours have in fact actively resisted making adjustments. Sometimes it's been administrative burden gumming things up, a thing I always think about when I hear my neighbors speaking out at public comment about how hard it is to get services for their kids who have special needs, services that our schools are legally obligated to provide. Sometimes it's teachers. Sometimes, a lot of times, according to decades of educational research, its parents like me. The Tosa schools, just as they are right now, is for parents, the proverbial bird in the hand. Like, don't sell me on some snipe hunt for two in the bush. But let's be clear that that's also a major reason why our schools are not doing any better for any kids either than they have done historically. Every potential change in curriculum, in instructional practice, in grading or assessment, prompts in us parents, a little paroxysm of doubt. What if making things different will make things worse? Oftentimes, institutional inertia gets blamed for a lack of educational progress, but community anxiety about change is at least equally salient here. Dr. Lewis's book is basically about the kinds of headwinds that students and teachers and administrators encounter, in circumstances like ours, when everyone involved genuinely wants things to be different and yet every prospect of changing anything. anything seems to threaten a certain kind of loss, and how anxieties over a potential loss can overwhelm the possibilities for improvement from which everyone stands to benefit. And I really want to underscore that last part. Treating access to quality education as a distribution problem, this has been the history of education reform over the last half century, as a matter of who gets the so-called advanced curriculum or the best teachers or the nicest classrooms, tends to do two things. Of course, it leads to a kind of system gaming in which traditionally marginalized students still end up on the margins, but it also, in a negative sense, placates families who do have access to those curricula and those teachers. Having a sense of relative advantage is often enough of a reason not to risk any attempt at further improvement. We're once again talking in our community from what I hear about academic rigor. It's an important conversation to have. My hope is that as these conversations unfold, we're able to take seriously the possibility that we might need some new and higher notion of rigor than we have been using here. The temptation will be to say, well, that's not how I learned it, and this new proposal feels all kumbaya, and so it can't be a sufficiently high standard. But I want to say again, the way that things have been, including when you and I were in high school, has not been good enough, and we shouldn't put that experience on any kind of pedestal, no matter how well we have done for ourselves in the world. But most importantly, in order to think clearly about what a rigorous education would mean and would look like, we need to watch ourselves that we are not treating rigor as synonymous with exclusivity. Ask anyone who's looked at great inflation in the Ivy League recently. Access to an exclusive institution does not necessarily mean one is getting a rigorous education. We should be very careful as we look at proposed changes in our district, not to confuse those two things. If we think hard about what a rigorous education looks like, and if we are careful not to give too much credit to exclusivity alone, we can set our schools on the path of improvement for everyone, and we can find new ways as parents to help those schools achieve it. It was certainly as apparent that I found myself thinking with Dr. Lewis in this conversation. So see what you think, send me questions to ask, and again, come join us at Underwood 630 Monday October 20. Hey Amanda, it is great to see you today. Would you mind introducing yourself to all of my neighbors here? I'd love to. My name is Amanda Lewis. I'm a faculty member in Black Studies and Sociology here at the University of Illinois, Chicago. And I also have the honor these days of directing the Institute for Research on Race and Public Policy here. That's awesome. So let's take a big step back and start at the very beginning. When we're talking about, despite the best intentions, could you talk a little bit about how this project got started? I know you tell the story in the beginning of the book, but just how did this happen? Well, I could even go back a little further than we started the book. But John Diamond, who's my co-author and I, had been friends and colleagues through graduate school and were both newly minted PhDs and were a part of a group of folks trying to figure out how to navigate the academy and we would talk a lot. We all were doing work on race and school issues generally. I was finishing up my first book, Race and the School Yard. And then for a lot of different reasons, we ended up having a conversation with somebody who is an assistant principal at Riverview High School, what we have named Riverview High School. The district had had, this is one of the interesting things about language. So the district had had something that was called that we talked about for a long time as racial gaps in achievement, racial achievement gaps. It was part of a network of districts, the minority student achievement network. But they had been having these conversations for a long time, had not made much traction on it. And he was going to retire soon. And he said, can you come and help me make sense of this? And John, I had some conversations in my, in the work I had done in the past, I had always been very interested. You know, I was going to be a teacher. That was my plan. And I had a bunch of experiences while I was student teaching where I saw racial dynamics playing out in schools in ways that seemed really contrary to the values of the people who were involved. And at the time, when I actually decided to go to graduate school at my PhD, part of it was really wanting to understand what is getting in the way here. Like how are these people who say they want to do X, but seem to have this other thing happen? Like what's getting, how does race work? That it clouds people's processing and thinking and, you know, both at the interpersonal level but also in terms of organizationally. And even at the level, you know, obviously the love resources and other things. And in the first book, I was really interested in how that also shaped kids developing sense of themselves, their identities and, you know, thinking about, there's an, there's an idea we often talk about that raises a social construction. And I was really interested, well, what does that look like? How does that happen? How do kids come to understand themselves as black or white and what were the role of schools in that? So when John and I started talking about this project, it seemed like an opportunity to partner with the school, which I was very interested in to collaborate somewhat. And to really try to understand how in a place that seemed to have everything going forward, it was a, you know, liberal community, they have a lot of resources, why were there still achievement gaps? Why were there still what we would call achievement gaps then? And as we talk about in the book, you know, some of the early part also involved kind of he had wanted us to come in and talk to the low achieving black students and understand what was going on with them. Not because he saw anything was wrong with them. So it wasn't like he was like, he wanted to understand their experiences. And we said we would do that. But we also were going to bring our, you know, John had done a lot of work on parent engagement before that we both understood that to understand what's going on, you needed a much more holistic understanding and some comparisons like what, you know, of what was going on. So we said we would talk to them, but we also wanted to talk to other kids and their parents and to people in the school and that sort of thing. And that started us down this path that, you know, we ended up spending, I would say three or four years in and out. I never described the project as ethnographic. We certainly spent a lot of time at the school, but most of the, what we ended up doing was doing interviews, but doing them kind of iterably, meaning like having a set of conversations, trying to figure out what all that meant, then talking to another set, you know, there's a lot of kind of trying to build up over time. And there you go. So despite the best intentions ends up telling the story of this pseudonymously named high school river view, you're telling us, and you're telling the story of a set of experiences in this high school. Could you describe the high school that you were studying in terms of its composition, its dynamics to observe it and all that stuff? Yeah, absolutely. So one way to capture it is it was, you know, this very large, beautiful high school, beautiful grounds, lots of athletic fields, all the things. It's one of those, it's like the high school in this area. And it is about 45, it's not exactly half black and half white, it's slightly more white. It had a growing number of Latino students when we were there and a small number of Asian American students. When you were in the hallways and walking around the school, you had a sense of a very diverse place. And it was in a suburb that was known for its diversity, suburb of a major metro area. But one of the things that was true for both John and I early on and that really struck us was that when you walked in individual classrooms, that diversity just kind of disappeared. And I mean, this was one of our questions that were the things that we carried through the whole project in some ways. And it's both an education question, but it's a larger question about race and racism and how it works, which is how do you have some of the same patterns exist, you know, at the time in 2008, 2010? How do you have the same patterns that would have existed 55 years earlier, you know, like a whole when we think of it as a very different time, like you get the same kind of patterns in the school, but obviously a lot of the dynamics of how those get produced are different. So that was one of the things that kept coming up for us is because the school feels so internally segregated. The classrooms felt so internally, you know, what a lot of scholars talk about as a second generation segregation. It was not the same segregation that existed, you know, it wasn't a jury or any of that stuff, but it was palpable. And the question was, how all these well-meaning educators could come and go every day? All these adults, all these parents who had moved to the district because they wanted their kids to meet diverse spaces could come and go from this building every day and not get stopped in their tracks by this reality. So For us, it's this example of the way, and I know I'm answering more than you ask word in some ways, but it is this thing that I think is so important to understand about how racial dynamics work and that they produce patterns in equities and then explain them at the same time in ways that make them seem normal or natural, right? And so much of the work is interrupting that and making things that seem regular, kind of reframing them as a problem and trying to understand what is the problem here, what's going on, all stopped there. - Your book was so great for me to come upon. I did my own student teaching in 2004, 2005, in Denver East High School, which is roughly 40% white, 40% black, 20% Hispanic, roughly. And unlike most student teaching experiences, I actually had two cooperating teachers. Both of them were excellent. It's actually, now that I'm reflecting on it, drove most of my own sort of dissertation research and later on, both of them were excellent teachers. One was a white lady named Flo Wagner and one was a black lady named Warta Utsi. Ms. Wagner taught the accelerated ninth grade freshman English classes. Ms. Utsi taught the 11th and 12th grade regular African American literature courses. The dynamics that you're describing with second generation segregation as reflecting an internal differential experience just mapped on to not only that high school, but virtually every high school that I have ever worked in that has some modicum of racial diversity among its populations. Ms. Wagner's classes were, there were 35 kids in that class, three of them were black or Hispanic. There were no white kids in Ms. Utsi's classrooms. The teaching methods and styles were very sort of unique to them, but also extremely different. They were both excellent teachers and then whatever. The minute I got into graduate school, it was like the early Arnie Duncan era of like we need to understand what great teaching is and I'm like, this can't be a unitary or a unified thing. Like you're gonna get it wrong, don't you see that? And that was the, anyway. My point to come all the way back is the fact that there is a phenomenon that is named in the literature as second generation segregation is enough to indicate that it's a widespread that it is a regular feature of a scholarly study. This is not a thing that is unique to Riverview or anywhere else. And certainly if you've worked in schools ever in anyone's life, you will have seen this at one point or another. Go ahead. - No, I was gonna say, I mean it's one of the things that I think is so important for people and we talk about a little bit in the conclusion of the original book, but it's like, if you think about tracking or which is deeply connected to second generation segregation, and you once you learn the history of some of this stuff, then it's hard to see it as not like really alarming. But we often have such historical ninja about where these policies and practices come from that we just think, oh, you know, and I think because we also have these such meritocratic myths that we all think, you know, so we think, oh kids are in the classes they should be in based on what they know and their skills. And you know, we just like even understanding that, like you said, these practices are so regular and we're deliberately created at a certain historical moment to do some work that they're still doing. And so trying to understand that history, I think is part of the challenge of all this. - Absolutely. Coming back to your book, I wanna sort of skip through the first two chapters of the book though, that's the introduction. I mean, I wanna come back to the introduction as well, like I would love to focus in our conversation on the discipline chapter, the tracking chapter, and especially the parents chapter. I wonder if you could say, like not only talk about each of those individually, but talk about the construction of the book a little bit, not how it emerged from your research exactly, but why in this order as sort of like, why discipline first, why tracking, why parents? - Okay, so each chapter in addition to being focused on like discipline or tracking or parents, it also does some other work that we needed to do. So for instance, the discipline chapter allows us to introduce the idea of organizational routines. And which is a way that for us, you know, I didn't come into this like, I study schools and schools are organizations, but I didn't think of myself as an organizational scholar necessarily, but some of the research and theorizing about organizations became critically important for us to understand what was going on. So when I, you know, one of the things I always tell my students is to be, you know, that like any good scholarship just comes with, you just have to be curious. And I can say quite sincerely like, that was what shaped so much of our work was trying, like really being curious about what was going on. 'Cause I liked all these, you know, you go and you meet all these people and I really liked all of them. And yet, there was harm being done to young people. So it's like really trying to understand what, you know, is happening. And part of it also was that we were trying to frame discipline as not being separate from, but a really part of how students feel about whether they feel like a part of the school. So one of the things we were trying to show in that chapter or why it came first was that it was such a key part of students ending up feeling like second class citizens in some ways in the school. And we were also trying to frame, you know, people think of discipline and they think of those, the data points about suspension race or expulsion. And we were like, look, that's interesting, but most people don't get suspended. Most people do not get expelled. It's sort of the end point of a whole series of interactions, but kids on a daily basis experience discipline in one form or another. They experience adults trying to get them to abide by rules. They get a sense of adults reading them as breaking rules or not breaking rules. And what became clear to us is that that whole flow of whether or not young people understood seen as breaking the rules and then how they were processed through the disciplinary system. Both of those things were highly racialized. And so I think for us it also began to be a way to kind of lean into this idea about the fact that none of these processes were race neutral, that we needed to understand how race was shaping all of those different points of interaction. So that's I think in some ways why that chapter came first and why it was important for us to kind of situate that as being about kids don't do well in school if they don't have a sense of belonging, they don't have a sense of attachment to the school and they don't feel those things if they feel regularly targeted and surveilled by adults and framed as doing things might seem silly to adults. Like why does it matter if I'm telling you you need to change your shirt? Well it does matter if what I'm constantly be reminded of at school is that my identity matters and my identity matters because it leads you to think that I'm doing something I shouldn't be doing when somebody who looks different from me is getting treated totally differently. So that was like a regular reminder to young people about how their identities were playing a role and how adults perceived them. I would say also like if I'm thinking about the sequences of the chapters it was also the things that like how long it took us to figure things out. You know and you know the discipline chapter is more situated in the school. Parents come in in one group as we are thinking about how kids get processed through discipline. So you know it's like the parents matter but it is so, I mean this was one of the things that was so curious to me. I talked to this woman who is the principal of the school. She was real powerful, really amazing educator and she was saying to me there was a part of our conversation where she seemed almost powerless to the extent of which like white families would come in and one way or another tried to explain away their kids' behavior so that they wouldn't have to face any consequences. But it was like she couldn't do anything about it. Like she was at the mercy of this thing, you know. And those were the moments where like as a scholar you're just like what is going on here? You know and it's super interesting and those are the moments that you realize that we would spend hours and hours talking about. Like how do we peel that back in anyway? So that's, I mean I think that would be, you know, then the teacher, you know, the chapter about classroom assignment and tracking ends up being sort of about how we get these very disparate classrooms and again more about what we think is going on with tracking versus what's actually happening, how kids get assigned, parents play a huge role in that. Obviously and then the chapter on opportunity hoarding which we rewrote I would say at least five times because at one point it was two separate chapters because there was one about what the school was doing and then there was one about what parents were doing and then it became where they needed to be together. And so it was like trying to peel back the kind of interaction of those things. - Mm-hmm. Not even from a parent standpoint, not even from a former teacher standpoint, but it is from a scholar standpoint. The thing that I was marveling at in this book is that is how it came to take the structure that it did. How it is as, I mean for an academic book, how breezy of a read it is, what it's narrative arc is like and knowing a little bit about what the research process underneath that must have been in how much work it took. It's an impressive feat, period. I'm going to, I'm going to start, stop there. This was a pub, Riverview was a public school, is a public school. The, the, I mean, you brought up the, the principles, very powerful person who feels powerless in confrontations with parents, or when powerless to resist parents. I've read a lot of scholarship that's like this. I feel like the, the discipline chapter in your book in particular makes clear in contrast to some other books that are dealing with sort of racially inflected disciplinary disparities in school. It's not simply about an additional harshness that is imposed upon, you know, rationally marginalized students of one kind or another, but it is about a particular kind of racialized leniency that is not only sort of applied to white students by default, but is in fact advocated for by the parents of those students. That's a, that is an important finding. Yeah. And I, I will say like one of the big, you know, some of this is about all this hard work that John and I did, and we did work our butts off this whole time. But it's also about these like, like some of the moments realization in this process came from people in school. Like we, at some point in their talk about this young black teacher who gave this insight that I sat in my car, like after I had this conversation with her, I sat in my car for like half an hour, just like suddenly, like understanding a new all these things that we'd been saying, which is she said she'd become a teacher because of her own experiences in schools and wanting to be, you know, we know from all this research that having black teachers actually makes for in terms of black kids makes it so they get punished less often and do you know, there's all these important things about having a mirror in the classroom in these ways, right? But she said she had suddenly come to find herself because these white parents so often were coming in and advocating for their kids that she found herself sometimes in anticipation before the parents even did anything intervening on behalf of their kids just so she didn't have to deal with them. And so suddenly she was like, oh my gosh, I'm doing the exact opposite of what I thought I was coming here to do. And we saw that in so much of what parents, you know, so there was the actual impact of white and upper middle class parents and all this stuff they did in the schools and in classrooms and with principles and all these things. And then there was this other thing that came up of pair of school personnel anticipating that this was going to happen and therefore interacting. And you know, I think like the principal said at one point like she thought that they weren't doing white, you know, she thought that when white parents are trying to get their kids out of face and consequences, she didn't think it was helping their kids, you know, she didn't think it was a good idea. She agreed with and respected a lot of these other parents who were like, you did acts, you should face some consequences, right? But she also recognized that in other ways, you know, like maybe it wasn't helping their development, their character development, but it certainly mattered whether or not they had these things on their records and all this other stuff. So it was an interesting, it was interesting just to hear her thinking about it. One of the things that she said and I that I will never, you know, again, there were lots of moments that I'll never forget from these conversations. And one of them really was this moment where she said, you know, must be so weird for the students because, you know, like all these kids were in classes together all through elementary school and at least through the early part of middle school. And then suddenly they're not in class anymore. And as she put it, she even said, I can't, I'm even, you may have read more. Like what happened to all the dumb white kids? Yes, that was the quote. Yeah. Right. Right. We all know, like we see all the kids around us. We, you know, and like suddenly there, even those kids are in the honors classes. Like what that, you know, so there is something, I'm writing something else right now that has made me think about this issue of what one of my colleagues talks about is white habitus, which is, I think in a lot of ways, it's just like, it's that, it's that habitus for your listeners who I probably have not read a lot of boredom. But it's the notion. Yeah. Um, is this French theorist who came up with this idea about how class impacts us in the kind of deepest way? So impacts us beyond our conscious thinking about it, but really deeply shapes how we move through the world, those kind of expectations we have, how we function. And I have come to think about all the ways that, that whiteness does that too, that some of the things that people sometimes talk about as a kind of entitlement or they're certain, of course, these things are not universal, whatever. But that seemed to be part of what was going on sometimes in those, in those moments. Yeah. And I just want to geek out for a second. The, I, I don't think you need to have read Bordew in order to understand something like habitus. It's the same root of the word is like a nun's habit. It's basic Aristotelian second nature. It seems to me. I mean, it's fancier and distinct from that in a lot of ways. But in order to get at the phenomenon, the idea is that as we grow into things, there are things that we put on that become natural to us, like second skins of a certain kind. And those are racially inflected in our society as well. There's just, it comes a way that we do things and a tone of voice we speak in and all that kind of stuff. That is just, it's pre-rational is a, is that how I like to think about it. And you're right about that quote, by the way, I just want to slow down and emphasize that because I think it's important analytically in your book. It also tracks with my own experience. You're like here and we tackle two questions on page 117. The first is captured in principle, Daniel's quote from the opening of this chapter, "What happened to all the dumb white kids?" While the question may seem crass, at the same time she was speculating that black students themselves must wonder what happened to all the white kids they used to be in class with in elementary and middle school. Are all the white kids really smarter? They didn't use to be. Thus, rather than asking the often posed, why are so many black and Latino students in low-track classes, we instead seek to understand why so many white students are in high-track classes. It's an important, it's a crucially important question and I think that's such an important frame to take. I grew up in Madison, Wisconsin, where I did all of my secondary schooling. Van Heist, middle school, now Valma Hamilton, middle school, and then Madison West High School. Very racially integrated experience at Van Heist. I got slayed, I got most of my friends and folks living in my neighborhood went straight into geometry in high school. I went into algebra in 9th grade. I don't think my 8th grade teacher liked me very much. In either case, that class, for me in my high school career, was the last time that I had a significant number of black and Hispanic students in my class. The high school was about 40% black and Hispanic at the time. I was like, wait a second, and I will say also from a student's perspective, and again, any one of my listeners that has been in a school like that has gone through a school in their own experience, you don't have to have worked in a school that has had this experience. Think back on this. I had that teacher later on. He was a great teacher in general, but I've never been in part of a class that has been talked to like that outside of that experience of 9th grade algebra. It was a fascinating thing that I wasn't obviously processing at the time, but that I've also never forgotten. The way that like the students and the class were a burden or an inconvenience or exacerbating in a way that my junior year English teacher never saw all of us brilliant little flowers being later on. It was just eye-opening. I saw a lot of it when I was doing the research for a race in the school yard. There are these moments, and these are why these comparative experiences are so important. I was doing some of my research in a school that was like a Spanish immersion program, but it was a school that had a lot of middle-class families in the city. It was very well-run. It was one of the top schools in the city, etc. Then I was in a regular school, which was predominantly black and Latino. I had a few white students in the neighborhood. But there was a sub in the Spanish immersion school one day who referred to the kids in the class as "stupid" once. It was huge uproar. We are never using them again. It was this whole complete and it was totally inappropriate. But it was the kind of thing that happened on a daily basis at the other. It was just like, but it was only because I was in both schools at the time. That happened that I was like, what we expect, what kind of treatment, all that kind of stuff, the contrast people really don't see most of the time. Can we talk about how tracking works on a systemic and sort of a personal level within faculty type stuff? I'm not talking about as much student experience here or even parents trying to leverage things. What I'm really interested in digging down on is how schools establish these tracks. I'm particularly interested in how teachers experience their own sort of workloads and assignments in the context of those. Yeah, we talk about that as teacher tracking, right? That also happens. So, you know, and of course, these very quite a bit by school, so I'll just give a couple of generics. You may have some other examples that you want to throw in here. But generally, what happens is kids, when they're transitioning into high school, there's usually some combination of recommendations from eighth grade teachers, like you said, your eighth grade teacher now. Thank you very much. And test scores. And it used to be that these are things that were pretty fixed. That, you know, kids would get placed in different levels on a range of subjects. Some schools track only math in English, some track, all the subjects where I went to high school, all, everything was tracked except for social studies, at least until you got to the, you know, then some kids went to an AP and whatnot. But anyway, and at Riverview where we were, one of the ways they had kind of originally loosened up the track is there's been a lot of critique of tracking since, you know, at least the early 90s. And so school districts critiques for them being fixed critiques because you got tracked into high level math and you were tracked into high level everything. And of course, we know that's not how these things people's brains work necessarily. So one of the early changes that a lot of places made was to make it so that you could do different levels of during subjects or that the tracks weren't fixed in necessarily or that parents could have like some influence or whatever. I think what, what you're talking about related to Riverview that's kind of interesting is that, you know, there's been a lot of research about is that one of the things that happens with these tracks is it's not part of the reason why they are so insidious in terms of inequality and stuff is that even if we to concede it, which I'm not really willing to concede, I mean, there's actually a lot of research against it, but even if we assumed that kids were accurately tracked into the clouds of their skills, right, which is not what happens. But even if we assumed that that was true, that I was in the, you know, regular track and you're in the advanced track because my, you know, I, you know, my skills are not as high as yours and therefore, then we might assume if that's what the logic is, then the class I'm in should get more, right, there should be like you could imagine this being used as a way to kind of close that gap. All of research showed there was that famous book by Jeannie Oh, other folks, all that work basically showed that what tracking does is actually widen the gap. So that high track classes get the best teachers, the high skill teachers, they get the most instruction, they get, you know, et cetera, et cetera, so that these tracks just widen whatever skills gaps existed, just get bigger and bigger. So they exacerbate inequality, they exacerbate the differences along the way. They also, there are some interesting research that showed that teachers get tracked. So for, it's not like teachers get assigned multiple levels typically, but that they themselves get tracked. And so, and we saw that show up in lots of different ways. I mean, teachers, you know, one of the, the guy who actually originally brought us into the school, he talked about it, he talked to, what did he say? For the high track classes, what you see is bell to bell teaching, meaning those teachers who are like, they're not giving up a single minute of instruction time. They're like, we, I'm going to, you know, so they're really pushing the content the whole time. And other classrooms where there's a lot of chatter, you know, the teaching might stop five minutes or, you know, that the sense of needing to move things along was so different in that the actual disciplinary patterns in those classes was quite different. So the level of punitiveness, the level of whether or not kids get second chances, all that kind of stuff varied dramatically, you know, and partly out of this, you know, the idea that these kids in these high track classes were, they were really going places. And that they're serious students. So they might mess around a little bit, but it's not, you know, where's the other kids are like needed discipline, you know. So there's all that work, you know, that somebody needs to redo it. There was a lot of it in the 70s and 80s, a kind of about even how class shaped to these things. What schools were preparing kids for. But yeah, I mean, that is, it's the thing about teachers get tracked. That was that's something that you saw at review. I think that's again, a very common experience that any teacher, former teacher, will have experienced tradition like again, when in the during the Obama years, when we were like pushing high quality teachers, most of the research out there at the large level was identifying that like teacher turnover and the youngest least experienced teachers being assigned to majority minority classes was the big problem. When you come into the profession, you're going into a school that is very diverse or just like majority black, majority Hispanic, you are the one assigned to the hardest, the hardest in air quotes classes. The students who are lowest performing, who have the highest level of whatever the discipline records, whatever being what they are, there was certainly my experience coming into my first class. I had there were three tracks in the first school that I taught in. There was whatever. But there wasn't, there wasn't any sense that teachers who were considered the very best at what they do, being directed to teach the students who were the lowest performing. They, right, what you can see, like, is so crazy, right? I mean, it's so like, that's how we do it. But like, if the goal was to make sure that all kids are thriving, right, then you would think, okay, the people with the most experience should be helping these kids who clearly have not gotten a very good educational experience. They should help them catch up or like, you know, whatever, but that's not what we do. We just basically say, yeah. So anyway, that's a great. Well, let me turn to like this tracking research needs to be redone. There is, there has been over the last five, eight years, a new move to sort of detract, especially math and literacy courses. And that has met with a certain degree of anxiety and resistance from parents. Can you sort of talk about that phenomenon a little bit? Yeah, I think there's, I think there's a couple different aspects to it. So when, when parents hear detracting, there is, and the parents who resist this, or who have anxiety about it, often are concerned that their child is going to get held up, right? They have this visual that there are some kids who don't understand anything. So their kids who's ready to move, move quicker through the material or do what, you know, is going to be held back, right? And so that tends to be the objection. And, but the other part of the objection is that the ways our schools have been set up is that when you're in honors classes or AP classes, you get weighted grades, right? Which are like, so an A gets, you know, instead of four is four and a half or sometimes five points that that impacts your GPA. And of course, all this leads up to this ridiculous college admissions process. We have these days, which is hugely competitive, you know, the elite in most selective schools are more, you know, so all of this in some ways is about that. Right? It's all about that. It's another reason why interestingly, a lot of math professors and other folks are pushing back on the idea that everybody needs to take the calculus in high school. There's a lot of, there's a lot of scholarship that said that, that, you know, that got pushed. And the reason that gets pushed is that college admissions people want to see a rigorous curriculum, right? So, and you have to demonstrate rigor by partly like how many AP classes and things, right? So, so much of I think parents anxiety about that isn't even about what their child needs now or what their child, some of it might be about their experience or whatever they want them having the best teachers. And they know the best teachers, right? I mean, you talk to any parent and they're going to say, we know that 10th grade math, there's like eight teachers, and we know four of them are really good and four of them are, you know, so like one of the things that they always could guarantee by getting into these advanced classes is that their kid is going to get the better teachers, right? So, all of it is about all that comes out. So, I think there's lots of reasons that parents have anxiety about it. I think the other thing is that we know that there is some research that there's a very small percentage of kids who are truly gifted, like truly who really are a couple said steps ahead of all of us or whatever. And those kids do have like addressing those kids needs is the same with kids who have other kinds of learning. They're, you know, the idea of neurodivergence means is to across a long spec large spectrum and there might be some accommodations that those kids need. But I think that's a better frame for thinking about it than because the point is that most kids are not, every parent thinks they're own kids. Special. Well, I mean, my daughter is and they are. Yeah, I know. She's special to you. You know what I mean? But so much of this is this mantra that that parents have that every that their kid is every kid is special, you know, in some way. And so the detracting of math, and I think the other problem is if we wait till high school, the detract, it's too late. So much of this happened starting in elementary school. Yeah, I've seen districts where there are some testing that happened with kids when they're really little and then they're automatically already like I saw I knew a district I think we talked about in here that did some testing of first graders and then if they scored high on what was a predominantly you know a language based test and they would get put into gifted math you know there's all this weird stuff right and we know how much class matters especially for young kids about how much language exposure they have so it was like it just felt like one of these like it was a test of you know social class that we're then going to use to put a kid into advanced math that was going to feed them into this you know anyway so you know I think a lot of districts have started to detract math in middle school you know it's part of the algebra for all eight grade you know kind of thinking and I think the districts have recognized that to do that they often need to provide some additional support for kids who might whose skills might be behind a little bit but that that you know they've had a lot of success and I think the you know there's it's always going to be very political but the politics is not about I think for the most part math people are not making arguments yes that's right I mean the piece that you mentioned earlier about parental anxiety about college admissions that matters a lot I'll tell you that like in teaching graduate students or doctoral students most of whom are like working education professionals in a contemporary education reform course one of them I was talking about school privatization or something to this effect and one of them said something to me that I haven't managed to forget which is simply that like she's like all this sounds nicer like we can have these like policy solutions to this kind of thing but fundamentally if a parent knows there's a better option out there you can't ask them not to take it and that has it stuck with me because it is reframe the way that I think about parental anxiety this is working its way up to a question about opportunity hoarding in and the way that parents intervene in schools college admissions matters a great deal because we have structured our political economy such that a college degree is sort of a minimum criterion for admission into like a relatively economically secure middle class life and is like that ladder keeps getting pulled up higher and higher than it becomes well you got to get into pen or whatever and so we've seen admissions rates at the University of Pennsylvania dropped from like 21% in 1997 to like below 3% in recent years parents who are trying to do to are trying to secure like reasonably secure future for their kids are finding a narrow and narrower bridge to cross and especially you mentioned the comparative thing the idea that like detracting might happen here but not necessarily in the district next door means that our kids in general are going to be a significant dissident anyway I want to come back to the parental anxiety and opportunity hoarding how did that manifest at Riverview how do you see it playing out in so I was trying I had a woman who was a graduate student in a program I was working and asked me for some advice about her kid going to school and her kid was kindergarten and I said well you know I need to know a couple things I need to know I said the advice I'm going to give you is different than advice so I my daughter's African American so like when I think about you know as you know part of the part of the idea of the book is that not all good schools are good for all kids right so like thinking about who your kid is and but I also said I am I need to understand what your values are like I need to understand what's important to you and like I said you know and it kind of flippantly I said like I need to know like if you know if you're going to be like hardbroken if your kid doesn't go to Yale or whatever she was just like she said she said oh no she was like you know my husband and I both went to Penn I was like I was like okay I can't you know I got no advice but yeah so I want to say like I understand that part of the biggest challenge here is that parents are being asked to solve structural problems on an individual level and it's impossible like it's just impossible I mean I have my inclination but you know like with so much of this is to recognize the deep contradictions of the systems that we're living in and the pressures that puts on people it's part of the reason why and nobody likes it when I say this but why I often say to school leaders is that parents are not going to be forces for equity and it's that it's the school district the school leaders it's teachers jobs to make school sure that schools function equitably it's not parents jobs and parents for the most part aren't great partners in this for the reasons that you said now that's it's not doesn't mean parents can't be great partners and I and I love it when parents really lean into and I think it's important for all of us to really lean into that but in general too often what happens is exactly what you just described from what that student said which is that if I if there's a if there's a way to leverage things for my kid you know how could you expect me not to well in the in the culture that we live in in which it's like survival of the you know whatever but I just think you know I think we're seeing right now in our culture the kind of that mindset taken it's to its ultimate you know I I what does it mean to get back to a sense of education as a public good not as a private good not as something that we're just leveraging for our own advancement I think is a really important question for all of us as citizens in some ways and I think the idea that do we want schools that in many ways are designed to benefit you know a very few or that are designed you know because I think part of it also is like you know people are always horrified when you see that story of a parent who like encourages their kid you know what I mean or like you know whatever we were like you know we want to teach our kids the right values or whatever but then what does it mean actually then we have to live those values in some ways right so you know I I went to I with the school I went to Brown I did not have a great experience there and I didn't have a great experience there for a lot of different reasons because it was brown you know I don't just do so yeah exactly and we also forget these are research universities they're not meant to be you know they're not teaching it's to you know whatever we could talk a lot about that but you know one of the things that's interesting my husband who grew up you know I grew up very middle class my parents have been teach my parents I've educators in my family going back a long way and so but my husband grew up very working class and you know we've had these conversations about what it like he was pulled out of his middle school from the South Bronx kind of plucked into one of those programs that said dual-borns and that was really important to his trajectory in terms of going to college and whatever else but that wasn't necessary for me like I went to I went to a fine high school I went to you know all those kind of things and I think that's one of the things that we see a lot from the research is that for middle and especially for upper middle class but for middle class families like the need that the impact of an elite education is not it's not you know I always think of people like you know if you want your kid to be like an investment banker I'm not even sure those people do but if that's what you want you know if that's the trajectory then there's a reason why like you're not going to get a job working at McKenzie doing consulting you know unless you're coming but otherwise there's like so many great colleges that your kids gonna have a wonderful experience at you know but but you have to believe that you know what I mean and it's like that's the hard thing and I think a lot of schools now a lot of counselors a lot of places are trying to help parents understand that like the question is what's really the difference about going from going to Wisconsin Madison versus going to Wisconsin Whitewater in terms of of a kid's experience like you and I probably understand that they might get a better they're going to probably get a better experience in the classroom and Wisconsin Whitewater in some way right now they don't get the whole football experience you know what I mean they're not going to get some of that other stuff but that you know but but there is a way in which the credential itself has some value and that's of course what people are worried about I'm kind of you know I don't want to minimize that we are of the generation and again this is a challenge of a different side you know we're of a generation in which we our kids might not be better off than we are right that there is some downward you know there's some real downward mobility going on you know that's has everybody being competitive with one another when I just think you know there are different kinds of solutions we might think of that are much more collective and that are thinking about like what's the kind of society we want to live in where people are taken care of you know and we don't have to like get to kind of the huge levels of inequality we have right now this ends I'll just say very it's like strikingly similar to the conversation I was having with Jess Collarco last week ironically it's like yeah for all of those reasons let me I want to get at one other aspect of Riverside that I feel like is is resonant here where I am and that is the idea like the title of book is despite the best intentions and one of the ways that you talk about the the intentions being best is that people are moving to a community precisely for the diversity so I want I mean this is a maybe a provocative way to put it but like can you talk a little bit about what you found in terms of diversity considered as an amenity and how that plays out in schooling experiences both for like parents teachers and students yeah that is definitely for rock and white to put it I think there's ways to put it, there are lots of other communities nearby that did not have any diversity. So, you know, like if we wanted to think about parents, there are a lot of parents who made that choice, right? Who were very comfortable living in all white communities, and it is true, like in a multi-racial metropolis and a big, you know, metro area where there's lots of choices, families who choose to live in all white spaces are making a certain kind of choice. But you're absolutely right that often what happens in a place like Riverview is that parents do want their kids to have a certain kind of cosmopolitanism, one might say, or a certain, you know, they might believe that it's important in a, you know, in this world that people have a ability to engage and interact with lots of different kinds of people. But I would say many fewer of those folks than we would think actually have multi-racial friend networks, right? The adults, so they didn't even notice necessarily that their kids didn't either, right? And I think there's also the impact, it sounds like it's not probably unlike what you experience going where kids might have a lot more interaction when they're young or in elementary school, but then their networks get more and more homogenous as they get older. So there is what couple of sociologists talk about diversity, like happy talk, right? So there's this sense of commitment to diversity in the kind of shallowest possible way, but not really in the context of being a commitment to, like, deep, intentional diversity in the kind of biggest sense of the word, right? You know, I mean, it's sort of the way, John and I, not in the book that some girls sort of talk about, you know, the notion that the King talked about about desegregation versus intentional integration, and those are being very different things. So that, like, Putin's Carter and other people have talked about, like, you could describe a review as a desegregated space, sort of, right? We talked about the classrooms earlier, but it's not necessarily an integrated space, and to the extent that they've made intentional efforts to really make sure everybody feels a strong sense of ownership and inclusion and belonging, all those kinds of things, and that it operates in a way that meets every kid's needs. I mean, I think, you know, the leadership of your district, of any of these districts, if the question they're regularly asking themselves is, how do we help all kids to thrive? You end up making very different kinds of decisions, and having to make very different kinds of decisions, then these districts have historically done. I think that's exactly right. This book is in its second printing. There's a separate introduction or preface to the second edition. Can you talk a little bit about what the reception of the first edition was like, how the second edition takes a new position on the same research, and how the second edition has been received over the last year is what it's been out for? It's not even a year. It's just like five minutes of point. I know. So we got, in general, very positive reception for the first edition. I think lots of folks engaged with the book. I mean, there's lots of different ways that we could talk about that. I think John and I, you know, this is, I think part of what you're getting about. We did lots of engagement with districts and schools, and that's part what one of the new chapters is about is all the things we learned in that process of what folks having engaged with. We also have a new chapter and they're obviously about revisiting the school and, and try and understand what the school has done since. I think one of the things that's been really interesting for us is when we, when we published the book, you know, it was still during those Obama years, right? So a lot of when we, when we first published it, some of the reception we got was, you know, that race with them, we were kind of over it. Like, you know, we was like, we were bringing attention to something that maybe wasn't as important anymore. Like, we were overblowing the importance of it. You know, so I would say the biggest resistance we got was a kind of post-racialism. That was sort of big at the time. And then, of course, here to later, the first Trump administration happened and all that came with that. And, you know, I will say it was really interesting because suddenly all kinds of people who had felt pretty comfortable about the world were suddenly like, oh my gosh, this isn't the world we thought it was, and we really need to get involved in it for kinds of ways. And ironically, we saw a lot more people kind of organizing reading clubs around the book and thinking about what their role needed to be to combat opportunity hoarding and, you know, leaning in in different kinds of ways. I think, you know, one of the things that's probably less interesting and general, but, you know, it was important to John and I is that from the start of this whole project to where we are now, neither one of us really talks about racial achievement gaps or things that's really the most appropriate frame for thinking about these things. But I think we did not, we had thought a lot about when we were going to the first edition to the second of whether we should go back and revise all that out. And I, and we ended up landing on, we thought it was important to kind of recognize that arc. Like, when I often, when I talk to people about like language around racial categories or whether we, you know, white, all these kind of things, like, I think the best way to kind of recognize the kind of politics of it and the power dynamics is to like not try to get it right every time, but to recognize this constantly changing. And we need to talk about why we're doing the things we do. And I think that ends up being a much more useful conversation to people for people. But it was very interesting to us to, you know, and of course, we're in yet a new place again right now where I think all districts are fighting to even around curriculum stuff that was not a big deal then, but thinking about real fights about teaching accurate history. That was the, I mentioned the piece I have to write for any PC. So I've got like a Google alert for like Trump administration education policy. And this morning's was about, you know, hundreds of millions of dollars of grants going to civics and history, like certain civics and histories providers. It's a concern. I, you know, it does make the questions about what kind of good education is private or public, how that's going to play out and for what purpose significantly sharper. Yeah, we are about it time. So here's the question I really want to end on. Which school really is Riverview? That's a joke. I'm not really. I just always must be one of your favorites by this point. Thank you so much for being here and taking the time to talk and I'm looking forward to continuing things on October 20th. So thanks.