Few years ago, quite a few years ago, actually, through mutual and begin asking like, what are you interested writing . What are you studying . What is it like to be you . Basically thats thats usually how i start conversations and through that conversation i got introduced a little bit to her scholarly. I was really interested then bringing professor turner to a talk to the state of wisconsin. So i invited her to be in our Leadership Series through the state of wisconsin and the conversation was very engaging, very relevant to time a couple of years ago and to relevance to today. And also, folks really to the content, to the scholarly questions and to your findings. So i want to invite you to the space to a little bit about who you are and to share the context of your book. Thank you so much. Yes, please applaud. All right. Thanks much, ananda, and thank you, everyone, for being here. I see colleagues and former students and neighbors and friends and children that belong me. So its really fun to have of you here in one room. I as ananda mentioned im currently an associate professor in at the university of wisconsin, where i teach courses on education policy and, politics and my research over the last 15 years ive looked at how School District leaders have responded to increasing and inequality in their schools, and this work has culminated in the book that were talking about today, suddenly diverse. The root of this project was my dissertation at uc berkeley in my concern for Racial Equity in education in and a question about why people who profess to believe in equity then act in ways that undermine that purported conviction. Perhaps this wasnt available. I come from a black a chineseamerican family where education civil rights and urban development were regular topics in car rides and dinner time conversation. I began thinking about equity in schooling. When i was about ten years old. Just like that child over there and poised to enter school in the late 1980s in San Francisco. So i was assigned to attend a very sought after on the other side of town. It was a school my mother had attended 30 years earlier, but when visited at this time, found that it was highly tracked with all the black students in the lower track classes were located in the school basement. The other the district at that time was under a court order to desegregate schools and part that order was that they would reconstitute low performing schools and in particular one in the mission district, which is a predominant italy, mexican and Central American neighborhood, and that had previously been underserved and now was had a new kind of more highly skilled with a social Justice Mission and what we would call now a culturally relevant curriculum the school was wonderful, but it raised for me a new question why had it taken a lawsuit achieve this in this purportedly liberal place . Why were there that were still allowed to persist . These early questions for me years later, after i attended college, i became a middle school teacher, traveled with my husband and returned to the bay to attend graduate school. I started working with a professor who was studying Decision MakingCentral District offices, and id been following discussions, expanding bilingual education in San Francisco with a multiracial and multiethnic student population. I got really interested in what were the motivations around how the schools tried serve diverse student bodies. But then called in wisconsin. And i started looking for a new project. Indeed, like the multiracial multiethnic San Francisco that i grew up districts across the country becoming more diverse in gentrifying central cities, in diversifying suburbs and in wisconsin, smaller, including two cities that i call mill town and fairview. Thats not the real names. Local newspapers there heralded the news. More kids of color and greater poverty. Now the presence of people of color was not new in 2008, and either of these cities indeed, in wisconsin, indigenous have been here since time immemorial. But too many in leadership positions in these predominantly white and middle class communities. It felt suddenly diverse. And i wanted to know more about how School District leaders making sense, were making sense of and responding to these new conditions in their schools. Why were they responding in particular ways . To find out, i started studying fairview in milltown. Milltown was a working traditionally manufacturing based wisconsin city with a conservative political orientation and anti immigrant politics. So when i went to milltown, for example, they had been kind of transitioning out of, well, paying manufacturing jobs that were being bought. Those corporations are being bought up by global conglomerates, often do unionize. And then some people were getting higher paid manufacturing jobs and others were being filtered into newly. Do unionized Food Processing work, which was very dangerous and also was part of what brought immigrant. Then they recruited immigrant labor for that. But that was also a place then that generated an antiimmigrant politics. So they had anti de labor in laws and english only ordinances in the area. This was a district of about 20,000 students in fairview in contrast, it was a similarly sized but a relatively wellresourced community with more middle Class Population and a reputation for liberal politics, espousing values of equity and inclusion. So, for example, that ordinance at city had an ordinance since the 1960s that that was to guarantee a nondiscrimination City Services along lines of race class, gender, etc. Starting in 2008, i began interviewing people in fairview in milltown including 37 School District superette assistant superintendent, Central Office administrators, School Board Members and the like. I also interviewed from across communities, including civic leaders, leaders of color and some school sites that i attended, about 107 hours, probably a little bit more of meetings, mainly School Meetings, but also Public Meetings and meetings within these Central Offices of these school systems. I took a lot of notes. I ultimately collected over 270 documents, and later i analyzed those as well. And that was things like newspaper reports, local community reports, blog posts that were being generated in these places at the time. What i learned actually really surprised youd expect these two different places would do Different Things in response to a demographic change. Yet they basically both come to a similar response. So in leaders in both districts were basically adopting business like practices as a means to respond their increasing racial and Ethnic Diversity and increasing inequality in their systems as a way to illustrate this idea, id like to share you a scene that i observed in milltown the more working class traditionally manufacturing and conservative School District. So i read from the book a little bit. It was about 8 p. M. In milltown just a few days before thanksgiving 2009 and retains was about to give the last principals report of the evening a School Board Member introduced him as a veteran of one trimester of edgar elementary, which had been a principal at the school for only a few months. In fact, hed only been a principal for a few months. The School Board Members seemed eager to hear how things were going rich, said im proud to be a new member of edgar elementary. I am not alone. Challenges. We have eight new staff at edgar high socioeconomic status disadvantage, and we have a transient population. Harriet, the board president him about this transients, he responded. We probably average 2 to 3 students a week at the end of the year. There are probably 20 to 30 turnover transients or transient. C were the terms people in the district used to talk about midyear student transfer in and out of the schools, often due to housing instability, racism, poverty, precarity at its roots. It wasnt just principal hayness challenge. All three principals that evening presented to the school board about similar challenges. But richard lee said that his goal for the year was Getting Better at using data. We have have clear learning targets. Thats my passion as we are starting to analyze our goals, we are Getting Better at that, he noted. Data showing numbers of students in special education. He called these the brutal facts, but he saw some hope in that data. Rich noted that reading test scores for latino students and students identified as English Learners had been improving each year. They already started in a hole, but each year we are closing a gap. Now we need to figure out what were doing and how to bring this to the rest of our populations. Rich explained that he had applied for a supplemental grant to do this work. The board stayed another. There were a Student Council report to hear a budget strategy to address expected 2 to 8 million deficit. A report that Wisconsin School finance was ninth worst in the country a bill that would require School Districts to report all spending over 25. When the meeting adjourned, the School Board Members cheerfully wished each other a happy thanksgiving and pleased with what had just transpired they headed out into the night. So what had just happened i mean, my mind was like exploding at this moment, but it was also really mundane. It was just like another School Meeting that was happening. Well, the principals then had just recounted serious poverty and enormous turnover in their or this transient city, as they called it, of predominantly low income of color in their schools. They hinted at a bevy of challenges, including funding teacher turnover, unmet needs and the School Board Discussion at the end the night spoke to large and ongoing deficits State Government that was attempting to exert greater control over the school systems, making it harder for them to do their work. Hearing the situation as said for rich made me disturbed, but they had left feeling at seemed pretty good about things i saw them. They saw the meeting making progress against educational inequity. They many people there and elsewhere. What was happening as eliminating the achievement gaps all over middletown School Board Members were doing something kind of similar to i just kind of described they were adopting performance monitoring that sought to collect and and report academic performance data as a way to address the challenges and the circumstances they were facing. They were examining this through new professional development, that kind of rated teachers or had them set goals based on standardized data and were looking at their School Based Data as groups kind of in the schools and this is just really common at a teacher that hasnt done Something Like this this point in time. So they were adopting these kinds of strategies as well as ones like marketing diversity and developing schools Like International baccalaureate to meet new customer demand. But it wasnt just milltown, fairview. Well, it it that will its a relatively well resourced community with the middle Class Population and the liberal values. They were doing something remarkably similar, including evaluations of their strategic goals district and district programs, reports of the state of the district and all sorts of new assessments. There were also planning to market their diversity. What was happening in fairview, in milltown represents a broader phenomenon thats happening in School Districts across the country, inspiring these business inspired means of operating schools and viewing these efforts as i think, oddly new, more effective means of addressing racial diversity and inequality in their schools i call this broader phenomenon race evasive managerialism, race evasive, managerial m is a way of leading Public Institutions like Public Schools that takes its cue from business, specifically corporate and entrepreneurial Business Models. So you might think about previous iterations of schools being modeled on a factory model, right . Its a business so you can see how business becomes attractive to people in schooling. But in this this case or in this kind of iteration in its corporate and entrepreneurial of business in particular. So things like generic management skills, quantitative measurement of outcomes for Decision Making as well as and marketing as means for guiding organizations. And these approaches, again, are common across across different districts, not just these two, but then i argue that and others have pointed out that these kinds of approaches, when they do not address fact, that they exist within and already an Unequal Society or not explicitly designed to address that those approaches can allow existing to persist. And it may amplify them. This is consistent with the common ways people. Think about racism today. Sometimes called what people have called as colorblind racism. So when we think about how most people think about racism today, they define it as the aberrant views of a few extreme individuals rather than as a widely embedded social or economic or political system. They think of racism as mostly something that happened in the past and instead racial inequality is posited as a result of or the of racial inequality are positive as a result of individuals or groups deficiencies. So while enduring systemic racism is often minimized, people become invested in seeming theyre not racist. And i think the best example this is donald trump. Donald trump has notably said that he is the least racist person alive, even as he has significantly eroded the rights and safety of people of color, disabled people, People Living in poverty, immigrants through his words and actions, organizations and individuals do something similar, though they latch on what others have called official antifa racism, notions like inclusion, diverse groups, or eliminating achievement gaps that are framed as antiracism but do little to nothing to challenge or deconstruct existing systems of oppression. Giving their get so okay moment sorry. So they dont they dont. They do not get at the roots of the problem in other words. Right. Its kind of a little bit like sometimes people call happy talk given these two different places, theyre different resources, theyre different political environments. You might expect that mill town and fairview would 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 lon