Got introduced to erica a few years ago through mutual friends and began asking what are you interested in s writing, what ae you studying, what is it like to be you basically thats usually how i start conversations and so i got introduced a little bit to her scholarly work. I was interested in bringing professor turner into talk to the state of wisconsin. The conversation was very engaging and relevant to the time a couple of years ago and relevant to today. For folks who really resonated to the content, to the scholarly question and your findings so i want to invite you to share the context of your book. Thanks for watching and thanks so much for being here i see colleagues and students and neighbor and friends that i am currentlyre a professor for the university where i teach courses on courses. I look at how the leaders have responded to increasing diversity and of this work has culminated in the book we are talking about today. The root of the project lies in the concern and why people refuse to believe in equity them to act in ways that support conviction. Perhaps this was an inevitable. I come from a family were education, civil rights and urban development were regular topics. I began thinking about equity and schooling when i was about 10yearsold like that middle child over there. I was assigned to attend a thought actor my mother attended only 30 years earlier but when she visited at this time she found it was highly packed with all the students in the class is located in the school basement. The district at that time was under a court order to desegregate schools and part ofd the order is they would reconstitute low performing schools and in particular one in the Mission District that had previously been underserved and what we would call now a culturally relevant curriculum. The school is wonderful but raised a new question why had it taken a lawsuit to achieve this. Why were there inequalities still allowed . These early questions resurfaced for me years later after i attended college and became a middle school teacher, traveled with a my husband and returned o attend graduate school. I started working with a professor studying decisionmaking in the Central District offices and ive been following discussions about expanding bilingual education in San Francisco with aal multiracl and ethnic population. I was interested in the motivations are and how the schools tried to serve but then wisconsin called and i started looking for a new project. Indeed like the multiracial San Francisco that i grew up in the districts across the country were becoming more diverse in gentrifying central cities and suburbs and wisconsin smaller cities including two cities i call. Local newspapers therede heraldd the news, markets of color and greater poverty. Now, the presence of people of color wasnt new in 2008 and in either of the cities. In wisconsin Indigenous People have been here in memorial but too many in leadership positions you need predominantly White Communities it felt. And i wanted to know more about how the district leaders were making sense of and responding to these new conditions. To find out i started studying. A working class traditionally manufactured base with a conservative orientation. They had been transitioning out by the conglomerates often and then some people were getting higher. Ei manufacturing jobs and others were being filtered in to the Food Processing but that was also the place that generated the politics. This was a district in a similarly sized relatively well resourced community. The reputation for those on thed volumes of equity and inclusion. It was to guarantee the nondiscrimination. Starting in 2008 i began interviewing people including 37 School Districts, Central Office administrators, School Board Membersro and the like. I also interviewed people across communities and attend about 100 to seven hours of meetings and i took a lot of notes. I ultimately could collected over 270 documents and analyzed them. What surprised me you would expect these different places what to do Different Things in response to a similar demographic change yet they basically come to a similar response. Leaders were basically adopting businesslike practices ass a means to respond to the increasing diversity and inequality in the system as a way to illustrate this lady i would like to share a scene i observedti in the manufacturingbased. He was about to give the last report of the evening. A School Board Member introduced him as a veteran of one trimesterha of edgar lemon tree. He had been principal for only a few months in fact hed only been a principal a few months. He said i am proud to be a new member. Im not alone. We have 18 new staff. High socioeconomic status, disadvantaged in the transient population. Here ate the end of the year theres 20 to 30 . Transparency is a term people in the district used to talk about transferring in and out of the school. It wasnt just the challenge but all about more challenges. He said his goal for the year was Getting Better at using data. We are starting to analyze our goals we are Getting Better at that. He noted that the data showing and called these the brutal facts. But he saw some hope in the data. He noted that the reading test scores for students identified as English Learners had been approved. They started in a whole but this year we are closing again and need to figure out what we are doing and how to bring this to the rest of the population. He applied for a supplemental grant to do this work. They stayed another hour, there were student accounts to hear, a budget strategy and expected a two r to 8 million deficit that was ninth worst in the country and a bill that would require the district to report to spendingrt over 25. When the meeting adjourned they cheerfully wished each other a happy h thanksgiving and pleased with what had just transpired they headed out. It was really mundane like another School Board Meeting happening. The principles had just recounted the enormous turnover. They hinted at the challenges includinge funding, unmet needs and the School Board Discussion was on budgets and greater control making it harder for them to do their work. Hearing the situation as i said madeed me disturbed, but they hd left feeling pretty good about things. I saw them they saw the meeting isty making progress. School Board Members were doing something kind of similar they were adopting performance monitoring approaches that sought to collect and monitor to address the challenges into the circumstances they were facing they were examining this renewed professional development that had it set on goldbased data. A teacher that hasnt done Something Like this at this point in time so they were adopting these type of strategies as well as international baccalaureate. And the liberal values they were doing something remarkably similar including evaluations of their strategic goals they were also planning to market their diversity. What was happening represents the broad phenomenon in School Districtss across the country inspiring and viewing these efforts as oddly new more effectivedi means of addressing the diversity in their school. I call this broader phenomenon andiv managerialism. It is a way of leading Public Institutions like taking its cue from business specifically corporate so you might think about previous iterations on a factory model. Its a business you can see how it became this attractive to People Public schooling but if they are in this iteration its corporate andrt entrepreneurial. Quantitative measurement of outcomes and decisionmaking as well as competition and marketing. These approaches are common but im going to argue that and others have pointed out these kind of approaches are. This is the common way people think about racism today. When we think about how most people think about racism they finance it at the views of a few extremist individuals rather than the widely social or economic or political system. Its mostly something that happened in the past and instead it is as the result of individuals or groups deficiency. So, while enduring this systemic racism is often minimize and people seem like they are not racist and i think the best example of this is donald trump. He is the least racist person alive. Even as he has significantly eroded of the safety of people of color, People Living in poverty, immigrants through his words and actions. Organizations will dog somethig similar though. They latch on to what others have called unofficial antiracism, notions likeps inclusion, diverse groups or eliminating achievement gaps framed as antiracism but do little or nothing to construct the systems of oppression. One moment, sorry. So they do not get at the roots of the problem in other words. Its kind of a little bit like some kind of happy talk. Given the different places and resources and political environments have fundamentally different approaches to racism and inequality they generally did not. Why was this . To find out. I traced two policies in each of these two districts, and they found that these kinds of approaches. The performance monitoring or the marketing and trying to attract new customers are merged as district leaders tried to navigate what were really increasingly untenable situations, especially if you had a Large Population of students of color or low income students. But they usually tried to do this without, confronting the existing inequalities in their systems and that route, actual educational inequalities that we sometimes call the achievement gap. So they faced a lot of different challenges. This included the changing demographics and growing inequality and remember that. So this was 2008. It was the Great Recession, right . So not only were many people out of jobs or financially precarious, but state governments were also really ailing. And part of their response to that was cut budgets within schools as. Well, but in addition to that, they were facing pressures from accountability systems. The one in place at that time was no child left behind and open School Choice policies, accountability systems they were doing is they would say, if youre not your test scores for each of the groups within your school system, and the more groups more diverse you are, the more groups you have each one has to be going up. And every year bar is raising. If three years your your schools are not achieving those targets they get increasingly serious sanctions, including eventually being turned or reconstituted. So this was one pressure, another one was open enrollment, which is a form of School Choice that we have in wisconsin. It gets less attention than vouchers or charters, but it operates very similarly. It makes market out of schools and essentially in wisconsin, if you can transport your child to different district, you can stay in your home, but you can send them out of state. What happened out of district. And when you do that money from the sending district gets transferred to the receiving district in wisconsin. We had kind of a safeguard on that. But that raised over every few years. So at the time of this, the whole safeguard was going to come off. And then as many students as wanted could go and lakeview, they had sorry, in fairview, they had tried to address this through a desegregation plan. But with the supreme decision, parents involved in community schools, they began to feel that that would be and so they could no longer rely upon that as a way to kind of staunch this concern about exit. So they wanted to deal with all of these challenges, but they wanted to do it without making people mad, and particularly so they were being asked to, do more with less under these conditions. They knew they had just, you know, originally kind of early 2000, mid 2000s. They tried to somewhat deeper changes to the schools. So they put into new training, put into new Training Programs for teachers and that kind of thing. But they soon found resistance from predominantly white privileged families or from their predominantly white teachers who were about those changes and and raised objections over time. The district leaders emerged, embraced instead, made these managerial approaches as solutions that appeared to help them achieve their equity equity games in these difficult but without upsetting teachers and and these families and they didnt want to upset them not because they thought that they were right fact they were very critical of them and they thought both groups were basically racist. But they also felt that their schools were had to respond because of the fiscal and Political Support that the schools relied upon from those. So in adopting these race managerial approaches, instead they began to try it. This is how they tried to navigate through this kind of muddy waters. And you see. District leaders viewed these approaches as a way to address inequity, garnering and maintaining support for Public Schools. But i want to ultimately suggest that they didnt either raise the voice of managerialism undermines equity, and it also public schooling. So let me speak to the racism first. First, you can think of these kinds of approaches using language of diversity or of reducing achievement gaps as ways to justify policies that perpetuate inequity. They leave the existing systems in place, but they also distract from other things that they could have been doing their time and resources, things that might have made a bigger difference in student lives. And perhaps most importantly, under this approach, racial comes to mean raising test scores. It comes to be understood as promoting diversity marketing, comes to be seen as promoting diversity or keeping Public Schools afloat rather than another approach. In other words, inequity is reframing as equity racism reframe, as antiracism, but theyre also undermining Public Schools. So i would argue that theyre doing this in a couple of ways. First, managerial policies follow a logic of efficiency and Customer Service rather than of Public Service or of equity. But they also, in moving to these concerns, reflect their own centering of the concerns and educational visions of their predominantly white and wealthier constituents teachers and the families and. Moreover, in undermining the racial equity, as i would say, they were doing, they also undermine the legitimacy of Public Schools, because as much as they are already systemically as in in ways that perpetuate inequality, they are also very much legitimate as places that should do just the opposite. That should be kind of how we think of addressing inequity in our systems. So to undermine that is also to undermine public schooling. A final story i think will help make this clear and this the way that these kinds of can undermine equity and democracy in schools. So a respected professional political actor in fairview, holyoke was known as an advocate for latino communities. I often saw him rushing into political and Community Meetings after work, still wearing a sport coat and tie or sweater vest for years. Julio, a fairview latina Advocacy Group he worked with, had been involved, along with many other parents, nonprofit leaders and local advocates, in getting the area School Districts, to Pay Attention to the growing student population in their midst. The latino students, many of whom but not all of whom were immigrants in particular, was involved with efforts to promote bilingual education for Spanish Speaking youth in fairview county, he recalled the years it had taken to get the first dual language immersion bilingual program approved in the district. Now, the situation was different, with increased demand for Foreign Language instruction from monolingual english, white families and a district desire to halt white flight. A School Board Decision to dual language immersion, bilingual programs to fairview schools came pretty easily, and julio said, unfortunately, you have heard it before, reflecting back on this earlier decision to expand the daily program, voice turned to my core. Oh my gosh, 50 of the students in the district are students of color. We have to stop the flight. He chuckled at this constant School District focus on white middle class families, but continued seriously. Theres always been a there oh, we dont want to really scare the Majority Community but the other side is he said. But we need to recognize that this new demographic of kids is entitled to a good education as anybody else. We have practices that can help them. Julio recognized fairview district leaders had hoped to use language immersion programs to attract and predominantly white middle class families to fairview. It was part their efforts to market the schools as a positive heavily diverse place. It his motivation. But he saw there were some Strategic Benefits to his cause. We actually leverage the voice of those who do a traditionally or have traditionally had a voice into giving us an opportunity to have a voice. It was unfortunate that it had to happen, he said that way. But the School Board Decision was made to expand a language immersion, not because we asked them, but because they asked him, julio said, emphasizing the influence of white families w