Episode 5 - Education

Before we begin this episode of "By Every Measure" talking about systemic racism and education, I want to share a personal story with you. When I was a second grade living in Charleston, South Carolina, I had an incident I guess you call it my first incident with racism that I remember. I was handing my paper in to the teacher as an older white lady and right when I handed the paper in to her, right under a breath I hear say the inward to me. And that stuck with me, I didn't even tell my parents to later in life, probably my college days, that I told them that. But it was kind of traumatic for me, and doing this podcast brought up that memory again. But thinking about that, I'm thinking about all the incidents that students and kids that look like me had to deal with in schools, gone beyond just being called the inward, being handcuffed by police, being expelled for minor incidents. That is also traumatic and that occurs across the country. And in this episode we're talking about systemic racism and education, not just outcomes or test scores, we're talking about bias among teachers. The school to prison pipeline, how black students are treated differently than white students when it comes to discipline, and we're also going to look at how schools are funded. All of this was studied more than 50 years ago in the Kernart Commission, which we have talked about in other episodes in this podcast. And I say segregation now, segregation tomorrow, and segregation forever. In the Kernart Commission, they recognized the disparity between black and white students in America, over 50 years ago. And they made several recommendations which alas were never followed. A little more than a decade before the Kernart Commission, there was Brown versus Board of Education. You probably learned about this in school, the 1954 US Supreme Court decision that rules segregation, unconstitutional, and inviolation of the 14th Amendment. It's easy to think that was years ago. I wasn't even born, right? But it wasn't really that long ago. Remember Ruby Bridges? She was a young black girl who became the face of school integration and had to be walked into school by federal marshals. Now she's only 66 years old, younger than my parents. But back then, she was in the national spotlight as a child dealing with hatred. This is what white Americans were saying about school integrations. "Segregation for both races is best. Segregation has and is working in the sound which contains two thirds." They were protests all over the country over passing programs meant to integrate schools into the 1970s, places like Boston. Here's some archive audio from WBZTV to give you a sense of how intense these protests were. "They were throwing eggs at the window and trying to hit people with them." And they were throwing them right. "Why would you do school that was throwing glass at black people's little kids?" So the audio you just heard was from the 1970s. But the issue of bias and prejudice in schools persists today. Black children are five times as likely as white children to attend schools that are highly segregated by race, and that is according to the Economic Policy Institute in a 2017 report. "Segregation is technically illegal. The truth is, it's still happening all over the country, including right here in Milwaukee and cities like it." That's where we'll start with Reggie Jackson. Why is it, if someone says, "Well, you're separate but equal to the problem, right? What does segregation really do to a black community and black students?" You're not a teacher for eight years and you're separate but you're certainly not going to be equal in any respects. They were building brand new schools on the South Side for white families and didn't build many at all on the North Side. It took a great deal of pressure. It took boycotts by students to put pressure on walking public schools to build those. But the most important impact that segregation policies have is that the way we fund schools is based on property taxes. So as we created these segregated all-white spaces in certain parts of Milwaukee and then in the suburban communities, what you find is that the property taxes because of the value of the homes increased. The wider the neighborhood got, the higher the property values got. The less wider neighborhood got, the lower the property values went. And so what you end up having is a very unbalanced system where our suburban school district's funding is significantly higher than within the city. That's why when you go to the suburbs, you'll see much nicer and newer. Our school facility is compared to the schools in black neighborhoods, which in Milwaukee is the central city, more tax base and more funding. And man, I'll tell you, when I go out to the suburbs, you don't go to schools. You go to campuses, right? You go to the campus of the schools and they're so different, so different than the schools in the city of Milwaukee. We have a lot of really old school buildings in Milwaukee. And you know, this is what I do to read that. If you go to a school that looks like really good and modern and has wonderful facilities, it makes you kind of feel good about yourself. Like, man, I'm going to get a really good education here. But then you go to one of the schools in Milwaukee that's maybe an old raggedy building where the air conditioner doesn't really work that well when it's hot. The heat doesn't work that well when it's cold. You know, the windows don't close properly. So there's a lot of cold air blowing into the building. You know, two of the schools that I worked at, those were major issues that they couldn't figure out how to fix the window. So we wouldn't be cold in the classroom. So we literally had to sit in the classroom with jacket. So it makes a big difference for the students as well as the staff and the parents recognize it too. That's why so many black parents, Hispanic parents are always trying to get their kids out to the suburban school districts. Let's talk about discipline. Like, a lot of studies about how black students, especially black girls, young women are disciplined unequally and basically this also kind of leads into the school, the prison pipeline. So talk to me about the, how discipline in schools is treated between the races. Yeah, yeah. They're huge disparities across the country in disciplinary outcomes for particularly between black and white students. Black here is much more likely to be suspended and expelled from schools than the white peers for participating in the same type of age appropriate behavior. But the other side is because of unconscious bias and even some conscious bias by white teachers because the majority of teachers in the country are white. Most of them are white females. When you have black students, particularly black boys, they're much more likely to be sent to the principal's office, written up, suspended, eventually expelled. There was an actual study about this in 2016 done by the U.S. Department of Education Office for Civil Rights that showed black boys were more than three times more likely to be suspended one or more times compared to white boys, basically 18% versus 5%. Black girls, on the other hand, the difference between how they're treated is that they are treated in a less nurturing way. There's a big study done called black girls interrupted several years ago. And what it showed was that there's this general assumption that black girls are older than what their age is, that they assume that they know more about sex than they do, that they're less in need of nurturing than their white peers. And so if people assume you're less in need of nurturing and emotional support, then they're going to be less likely to do that for you. So as you can see, these differences in discipline are well observed, studied, and analyzed. And bias starts early, as early as preschool. Yale University Child Study Center did a study on this back in 2016 and found even more proof of bias in education at a very early age. Here's how the study went. And these were young children, had them sit at a table and had some toys and things on the table and had them play. And he asked a group of educators, he used black and white educators, a little bit of everybody. And he said, "I want you to watch the video of these children. And I want you to look for signs that are precursors to their misbehaving." So look for those little signs that they're about to do something and not supposed to do, right? And so the teacher said and they watched this video. But what the teachers did know was number one that these young children were actually trained actors. They did nothing. There was no misbehavior at all in the videos. I mean, they were trained to do everything the right way. But what the other thing was, the surprising thing was that the computer screen the teachers were looking at, they actually had a device on it that tracked their eye movement. So it saw exactly where the eyes were looking. So you had a little black boy, a little black girl, a little white boy, and a little white girl. And when they looked through the data for all of these teachers, they found very consistently that a majority of the time the teacher's eyes were on that little black boy. So, and so it showed that bias that's there and it was, the bias was across every race of teachers that they tested. It wasn't just the white teachers that had this bias. The black teachers did as well. So these are things that are kind of built into our unconscious minds. We have different expectations for black kids than we do for white kids. So no matter what, if you're a black student, you're more likely to be disciplined at school. More often and more harshly. It is not just being called to the principal's office. Schools are calling the police. In fact, nationwide, black boys are again three times as likely to be arrested at school as their white male peers. And black girls are one and a half times as likely as white boys to be arrested. According to that same government study, there's a police presence in many black schools. Yeah, that's a big problem. Part of what the challenge is with schools calling police. So the reason that we have police in schools, people kind of forget this is that back in the early 90s, there were a multitude of school shootings around the country. Almost every several months, there was another like big school shooting. And this last, really through the late 90s, early 2000s, there were several high profile school shootings. Now, what's interesting about those school shootings that no one really talks about to read is that there were always white kids that were shooting up their schools. But you put metal detectors, what the black kids are and Hispanic kids are. No black kids are running into the school with a gun and having a list of kids they want to kill. So because of those school shootings, you know, there was this, oh, we got to do something, we got to protect the students, we got to protect the staff, we got to put police in the schools, we got to have zero tolerance policies. What is known as zero tolerance policies were developing the 90s after government passed a gun-free schools act back in 1994. The policy requires students to be expelled for bringing a gun to school. However, school started using the idea of broken window policies. A popular concept that if you crack down a minor violation, serious crimes would be prevented. And you start seeing students being expelled for minor incidents like smoking cigarettes, swearing, or even such a minor incident as cutting in line during lunch. Now you begin to have way more police contact. The students are having the police called on a pretty regular basis. You know, I even saw this in schools that I worked in, you know, police are called when students are misbehaving. Now instead of calling the parents and having the parents come up to the school and getting their kids straight, oh, we'll get a call of police. And, you know, we all know that the police are accustomed to dealing with adults. They're not accustomed to dealing with children. They don't understand, like many teachers, what normal behaviors for different age groups are. And they'll come and they'll put kids in handcuffs. And studies have shown that if you are expelled from school, if you are suspended multiple times in school, if you have any contact with the police while you're in school, you are much, much more likely to end up going to prison at a later time of your life. You know, multiple studies have shown that any police contact as a student, you're much more likely to go to prison. So as the guys being exposed to the criminal justice system at a very young age, black and brown students have contact with police, face stress, trauma and anxiety that creates mental health problems and hurts their educational performance. The school the prison pipeline starts way earlier than you might think. Reggie shares this story from Florida back in 2017. You might have seen it in the news where police were called on a very young black girl. The six year old black girl was, you know, she did some stuff in class. I guess she struck one of the teachers, but he was a six year old. So I mean, you can't cause a whole lot of harm when you're a six year old. But anyway, she struck one of the teachers and they call the police on this little girl, right? And so there's the police body cam video of this incident. So the police come into the school. Okay. She's going to come with us now. Okay. Stand up. Stand up. Okay. Come over here. Right. This little girl is in the office and, you know, the office has come in and they're talking to her and they literally make her stand up and they put the, you know, the plastic cuffs on her, you know. And they literally take this little girl out to the police car and put her in the police car and take her, you know, to the police station. And the whole time she's begging and pleading and crying. I don't know. She's begging and crying. I mean, this is a really difficult video to watch. It's so sad. But the worst part of the video is when they come back in, when the officers come, comes back in and he's talking to, you know, the administrators at the school and the people who call the cops and they're like, you know, what was that like really necessary in the officer. It's like, yeah, you know, and then he starts to brag about how many kids over the course of his life. He has arrested in schools. The youngest I've ever arrested was seven. Seven is the youngest. She's eight, isn't she? She's six. It's now she has broken the record. She broke her record. I mean, it's got going on and I was like, dude, really? And of course, he gets suspended from his job because he didn't follow the protocol. You're not allowed to arrest a student under the age of 12 without express permission from, you know, your superior is at the police station. So, you know, if the, if you're a sergeant or a lieutenant or whoever says, yeah, go ahead and arrest that six year old. You can do it. You can't do it without them telling you. Like Reggie said, that audio is tough to take. But beyond having police in schools, there's also another issue, something that generally isn't in the classroom. There's been a lot of studies and memes and stuff about you kind of brought up a little bit of having a teacher that looks like you're a black teacher, a brown teacher that students of that same race will do better in school, right? Like, like, there was a question, I see a lot of questions like, once the first time you had a black teacher, like, I didn't have a black teacher tell with the Howard University. So can you talk to me about the data and about that and why is the case of, of having a teacher of black teacher with black students is better for the black students? Well, yeah, I think it's about the culture. And when you are from the same culture as the students are, you are going to be automatically a culturally responsive teacher. You know, this is one of these things and education when you hear a lot of talk about culturally responsive engagement of students, right? And what that literally means is that white parents need to get to know a little bit more about the cultures of black kids and Hispanic kids and Asian American kids and Native American kids because they don't know enough about those cultures to communicate really well and interact with those students in a really, really positive way. Whereas if you are from that culture, you know, listen, you know, you know, from your personal experience, you know how to communicate better. And there is a level of respect. I've seen this myself. I've seen black kids be completely disrespectful to white teachers and then leave that class and go to the next class with a black teacher and be like the little angels in the classroom, right? So there is a dynamic of white teachers who are, they show their fear, right? And listen, kids are like little psychologists to read. They know who they can take advantage of. They recognize it, man. And if they can't take advantage of you, they will take advantage of you because that's what kids do, right? And so what you have is you have a majority of teachers are white, most of those are white females. So that's what you have. But in any college, it has a school of education and you go in at those classrooms where people are going to school to become teachers. And a lot of these, you know, young white women want to, you know, go to the school to become a teacher and they go to these, what they call urban schools, which I hate the term urban, which is just, you know, a code word for black or Latino school, right? They go into these schools and they come in with a white savior complex thinking they're going to save these little kids. They need somebody to save them. They don't. They just need somebody to teach them. And then as soon as the black kids disrespect them, they don't know how to handle it. They're like, oh, my goodness. I've seen, I've literally seen young white teachers leave classrooms in tears, crying like the first or second day of school. I had a teacher that I worked with to read at one of the schools I worked at. And this woman literally, you know, as we were having the meetings leading up to, you know, class of starting over the summer, those couple of weeks when we're doing profession development and stuff, you know, she was very outspoken about how, you know, I know I can work with these types of kids and, you know, blah, blah, blah. She's just going on and on about how she's going to be like super teacher, right? And, you know, I have all of the skills necessary to communicate and culturally responsive blah, blah, she's going on and on, like, you know, she's going to be the greatest, she's going to be teacher of the year, her first day in school, right? any more. the last a week, she quit after like four days. And you know why she quit? Because the kids saw through her right away. They were like, you were the fakes, such and such and so and so. And they were calling her all kinds of names because she was fake. And they realized she was fake and they called her out on it. And she didn't know how to handle it. So she quit literally four days into the school year. And you also have some black teachers that are just as bad as the white ones when it comes to, you know, being horrible to black kids and calling them out of their name and stuff like that. So it's very problematic. And I think when it comes to having teachers who look like you, you know, people complain well, why, you know, black people, so they need to have more teachers that look like the black kids and Hispanic parents are saying the same thing. But guess what? Why people don't have to say that? Because most of the teachers going to be, they're going to be white. So they don't have to complain that we need more white teachers. If you ever heard anybody say we need more white teachers in the school, you've never heard anybody say that, right? Because you just know that most teachers can be white. So if it was the other way around, if we went out to some suburban school district and 70% of the teachers were teachers of color, I can guarantee you some white parents will have some issues with that. Maybe up in arms like, well, I believe this. Yeah, all these black teachers and these Spanish speaking teachers and you know, there's something, I don't know if they're going to be as good, but you know, we can claim about it and there's something wrong. But white people, you know, they're all good. Coming up on the second part of by every measure, we're exploring solutions, including two programs that are actively working to increase representation in the classroom. The name Davis, Executive Director of Milwaukee, succeeds, joins us next as she shares her ideas on how to dismantle systemic racism and education. Radio Milwaukee is on a mission. And if you're here to discover new perspectives on music and Milwaukee, then you're on a mission too. Join today to support the programming you love. Visit radiumawalky.org and click the orange heart. And we're back on by every measure. In every episode, we're talking to local leaders who are working on solutions and each of the systems we have discussed on this podcast. And these solutions aren't just limited to Milwaukee. Some of them could be scaled to other cities across the country that face similar issues as Milwaukee. We hope that by talking about them in this podcast, we can get the word out across the country. Now I would like to introduce you to Dene Davis, who runs a nonprofit organization called Milwaukee, succeeds. It's focused on equity in K-12 education, specifically convening other entities to work better together to improve educational outcomes for students throughout their lives. It's part of the Greater Milwaukee Foundation and it is one of 70 communities who are part of a national network called strive together. Our space or universe is early childhood through young adults and because of the huge disparities that are based on race ethnicity and income, our primary center center focuses around racial equity. When Dene talks about students in Milwaukee, she often calls them her babies. It's such a human way to say it, to show that these kids in our city right now, they are our future, all of them. So I want to talk about, let's start off with discipline because I seem like it's ingrained from teachers, the principals, to policies, to to treat, especially youth of color differently when it comes to discipline issues. And I think that affects down-along graduation, college, careers, everything affects long term of their whole life. So to rick, you are bringing up something that's really near and dear to me in so far as, honestly, the examples go all the way back to kindergarten. I think the solution is two things. One is we don't need police practices to be a part of the solution in our schools, whether they are child care centers or K-12 elementary, middle, or high school. That is not what we need. What we need are social workers and psychologists and nurses and better programs that engage parents in partnership with how do we teach better development practices with our children and our babies. But the bottom line is we have to understand that they are babies and children and young people. We have to start there and not act as though they are adults because they're not. So I would say that one solution is we don't need to institute police practices as a means of addressing issues around that typically are represented in disciplinary and expulsion act. Let's go inside the schools. Another thing I've read in articles is about diverse teachers, representation matters in teachers that if a black student has a black teacher, they're likely to perform better, go to college, do all the things like be more successful. Yes. And let me just say yes and I'm going to tell you a little bit of a story. So as I mentioned, the role of Milwaukee succeeds. One of the programs that we brought to Milwaukee, very proud to something called Leading Man Fellows and the Leading Man Fellows Program basically was a cohort of 10 young men who are fresh out of high school. So between ages of 18 and 21, let's say, predominantly African American, some Latinx and they're trained in the summer and then they're placed as sort of parrots in early child care centers basically supporting the reading capability and literacy of three, four or five year olds. These young men, they didn't have teaching as on their radar in terms of what they want to do when they got grow up. They didn't have good impressions about teachers. They had way too many teachers who verbalized their displeasure with their jobs. In other words, they didn't really want to teach these kids and they didn't see anybody who looked like them in a classroom. They saw in their engagement with these babies such progress based on the responsiveness of a, these young men looking like them and b, because these men came from a place of love and nurturing and caring and these kids would be able to write their names. They'd be able to spell. They just were like sponges in their ability to read because of those two factors. Now I know that's an anecdotal experience, but I'll tell you it is absolutely truly reflective of why we need to support the teacher pipeline and growing black and brown. The name mentions another local organization that is laser focused on that city forward collective, which is working to create a pipeline to increase the number of black and brown teachers in Milwaukee, something that's clearly needed here and across the country. But even if we have better representation in the classroom, there are still many other problems that need to be solved with access. That takes us to our next topic, COVID-19 and how that ties back to education with e-learning and the digital divide. I've seen like, for example, in Oakland, Oakland public school decided to go big, right? Let's do 13 million dollars, give every kid, every single kid, computer, Wi-Fi and corporations got involved in the big way. Twitter CEO gave $12 million of their 13 million dollars goal. Is this what would we need corporations to step up in this area? Because at the end of the day, this benefits them. If you get parents digital literate, people with Wi-Fi, not just hotspots, you give people real computers and all that. That only helps the kids learn, but that also helps the workforce. Exactly. Right. I love your analogy. And I think that it can't be small. So Milwaukee's tendency is to small itself. So whatever the solution is, we'll just give you a chunk of what's needed and then wonder why it doesn't work. You know what I mean? So in this case, and I applaud the Milwaukee Public Schools Foundation, I know City for a collective is doing a similar fundraising effort for charter and choice schools, but who's not running into being part of the solution are the internet providers themselves. So whether it's Oakland or Chicago is another model where even Dane County, for that matter, where the providers are at the table and figuring out how to reduce the costs associated to a family's access to Wi-Fi, high-speed internet, without penalizing you because you didn't pay a bill. Which is, to my knowledge is in discussions, but the sense of urgency I'm not feeling on the part of spectrum in AT&T, for example, or charter. So I think that leadership in Milwaukee needs to insist that these providers be a part of the solution. Finally, I want to, as you know, I'm with the HBCU Howard University. You lucky person. My son, he would attend a state. The role at HBCU, like, feel like I got something that I probably wouldn't have ever got going to a P.W.I. predominantly white institution, like UW Madison or Georgia Tech, where I'm from Atlanta. If I had some of that experience at the K 12 level, from Howard, I might mean different, right? Even more wealth, more, whatever, right? You definitely could be more wealthy, but you wouldn't be more brilliant, because you're already a brilliant soul. Thanks. But yeah, like, I was thinking about that. Like, I've seen like, you know, uh, Amazon Jeff Bezos X, wife gave $40 million to Howard, all this stuff. The HBCU is one, because there's nothing in the Midwest. Do you think they have a role or should they have a role or should they get more funding to play a role in the K to 12 realm for black students or even the, um, Latino institutions as well? Yes, yes, yes, yes, and yes, what is gained, as you know, being an alum of Howard is that's where your foundation comes from. Your knowledge and belief and your support in, in a, in a, in a foundational way is born out of your HBCU experience. And every HBCU, uh, graduate that we all know, where is that probably somehow or know you know that you know what I mean when they tell you what the college is saying, Oh, I know that, you know what I mean? So I think that, um, that's the evidence of why that would be very helpful in our K 12 system in Milwaukee, what you just said. But again, we are probably going to be more successful if we figure out, grow our own type of pipelines, um, in the meantime. And whether grow our own means that they go to an HBCU to, uh, get their degrees and then come back here, we've got to do multiple facets until we change the reputation of this city to one in which black people are known to not only survive, but thrive to not be able to demonstrate that with enough people is just continue, is going to continue to impede our ability to change the racial, um, demographics within our K 12 system. So here's a recap of some of the solutions we talked about in this episode of by every measure. First, shutting the valve of the school to prison pipeline. One way to do that is reduce or eliminate the contact students have with police. Only call into place only when absolutely. I mean, absolutely necessary. Think bold in terms of closing the digital divide, get companies, corporations, and internet service providers at the table to remove the barriers to e-learning access for all students, especially now during this pandemic. This next one is very important. Fun organizations like City Ford Collective and the program to name mentioned, leading men fellows, both are actively involved in recruiting black and brown teachers and helping schools move toward better representation in the classroom. We'll provide more information about these efforts and our discussion guide for this episode. And finally, thinking big, these are big ideas which can't be attacked with patchwork action. Funding public schools in a way we do now based on property taxes has gotten us exactly to where we are today. We will close out with one more thought from Reggie that ties everything up and helps show why thinking bigger is long overdue. Imagine if we if we still built cars the way we built cars in 1920. What you want to drive a car that was built the same way they built cars in 1920 with no seat belts, right? We would never, we would never build cars in that same way again, right? But when it comes to education, we basically still teach in the same way we did 100 years ago, 150 years ago. The model has a change. Coming up on the next episode of By Every Measure, we're talking about the most precious resource anyone has. Their health. It's no surprise that black people face a much worse outlook when it comes to their health by lots of different metrics, preventable death, infant mortality, and higher rates of certain illnesses. But we also face bias in the healthcare system itself. These disparities are literally life and death. We'll break it down next time on By Every Measure. By Every Measure is hosted by Tareek Moody and Reggie Jackson, executive produced and edited by Nate Imig with additional production support from 889 program director Jordan Lee, marketing director Sarah McClanahan, marketing coordinator Aaron Bogada, web editor Evan Rattleski, audio producer Salam Fatayer, executive director Kevin Suker, content marketing manager Amalinda Burrach, community engagement manager Maddie Reardon, and imaging manager Kenny Perez, handcrafted sonic inspiration from the license lab and are sincerest thanks to our members for making all radio Milwaukee content possible. By Every Measure, an original podcast production of 889 Radio Milwaukee. [Music]