Until it gets into our heads. Thank you. So with that, we will wrap up the panel. And thank you to all of our panelists for being here today. [ applause ] so well go ahead and start our next panel. So that we can keep on time. Be as efficient as we can. Welcome to the second panel of the day. This panel is entitled where are we now. A conversation on Educational Opportunity and integration. Our panelest today will be gerard robinson. He has been in the education commissioner of florida. The virginia secretary of education. So gerard has a long history in education. Dr. Greg fors ter is the director of Trinity International university. He is a senior fellow at ed choice and is at the Freedman Foundation for educational choice. And he received his ph. D. With distinction at yale university. Mashea ashton is, just recently given its approval to open up a charter in 2018 in washington, d. C. She served as the ceo of the Network Charter school fund. The Senior Adviser for Charter School policy and director at Charter Schools. And she started as a special ed teacher as well. So the goal of this panel is simple. The stories you heard in the last panel and the discussions you heard in the last panel, we want to discuss and review the data as it related to education, Educational Opportunity and integration since the brown v. Board decision. What are the issues we have to deal with. So our panel will start off like this, gerard will give ten minutes of comments greg will give ten minutes and mashea will respond and give additional comments. And then you the audience will fire good questions. First of all, let me thangt senator for advancing opportunity for extending for me an opportunity to talk about a subject that i think is vitally important. Advancing opportunity, lets put this in context, 63 years ago brown v. Board of education was decided by the supreme court. Now robert mentioned that i was secretary of education in virginia and commissioner in florida. 50 years ago it would have been impossible for me as blake man to serve as a state leader to serve in those states. 50 years ago a number of our students were performing well in what they called segregated schools. They learned, many of them came out literate and went to college. Fast forward today, we have more students African American and otherwise who are graduating from high school. Many going to college. And we have made tremendous advancement. One of the things that i believe chokes an honest conversation about progress is the overreliance on the term segregation. And here is why i say. That we say today that we have segregated schools. I say that what we have are racially identifiable skoolgs. Now i am under no pretense that government policy at the federal level or local levels with the redrawing of lines and zip codes to say they are going to live. We are saying that 63 years worth of progress never happened and that is simply untrue. We have racially identifiable schools that have a number of challenges filled with poverty. We know too many poor people in cities today who are doing well. We know people who have challenges. When we are talking about what brown had a chance to do, it shifted how in the types of schools we could attend. We have got a number of another thing about brown is the advancement of cell phones. We didnt have that a couple of years ago. So a different conversation. But what we have to do are racially identifiable skoolchoo that have a host of challenges and successes. Last year we had two members of Congress Michigan and from Virginia Commission to study. It was released may 2016 and identified that we had a number of schools, nearly threefourths of schools that are either predominantly African American or student of color. Predominantly low one of the things the report didnt spend a lot of time on is the majority for sake of argument, the majority minority schools that won blue ribbons or gold medals because of their academic achievement. They are high schools that are low income, that are doing well academically. What we need to do is to look at the schools that exist. What are they doing differently . Is it resource, educators, Family Involvement . Is it curriculum, or expectations. All of the things we knew made sense but empirically we know it makes sense across the board. To say we have schools that are segregated and are not doing well is simply not true. That is not to let the government off the bowl to be responsible for investing the resources. It is just not revenue, but questions about expenses. Where is the money going. In washington, d. C. You hear a number of numbers. I had a chance to work for d. C. Public schools in the lane 19 nineties and we spent a lot of money. And we did not crack 50 High School Graduation rate. It wasnt because of money. About there were other challenges. Also a rise to special education. If there is something we know more about today 63 years later about brown are the number of special education students we have and special needs students. We had different names for them back in 1954. Not always kind names. We have got to find ways to work. As i close, 63 years from brown, we dont have segregated schools, we have racially identifiable schools. Number two, we have majority minority poor schools that are showing success. Third, we have School Systems run by African Americans, hispanics, asians, we are now in the position of power in ways that we were color code wise back in 1954. But today we manage multibillion dollar school budgets. And we have people in positions of power. I am excited having this conversation because 63 years ago many of you in this room including some of the poor whites would not have been in this room if not for brown v. Education. I am proud to be a part of the conversation. Thank you. I have been asked to speak on what the Research Shows on School Choice. And i am sure you have all heard the old joke about the economist who fell down the well and people run over and say are you all right . Wait there. I will get you a rope. I dont need a rope. Just assume i have a ladder. One of the challenges in my field have said that a lot of studies that are published purported at league at School Choice dont look at data or measurements that have happened in the real world. Instead they take the authors assumptions of what they think should happen. And build a mathematical model and present that as day tachl i shift through the research. And we publish a regularly updated review of the research on School Choice and one of the things that we track and regularly publish updates on is the research on School Choice and ethnic segregation. There have been ten empirical studies to date. And that actually measure what is happening in the programs and that are measuring segregation rather than measuring various other things that are related but not quite the same thing. Of those ten studies, nine studies have a positive finding that is School Choice has some sort of beneficial effect related to ethnic segregation and the tenth study finds it makes to visible difference. What they do is take a snapshot of the ethnic composition of the Public Schools where students are eligible for School Choice and the ethnic composition of the private schools that are participating in the program. And what they ask is which is more segregated, the Public Schools where students are able to leave or the private schools. The private schools are less segregated. Now the other three studies are able to track individual students as they move from school to school. So instead of looking at the School System, we are actually following individual students. And that is a better method. We dont often get to do that, we just dont have the data. So one study like that in milwaukee and one in louisiana. The study . Milwaukee found no visible difference. The study didnt get going until 15 years after the program started. So possible the program had some effect and then reached an equilibrium. Another explanation is that milwaukee is just a really segregated city. And the students may be moving from overwhelming black Public Schools to overwhelming black private schools. The transfers of students are not increasing segregation. The two studies in louisiana have found that the program improves ethnic integration. One of the studies found that there is a small larger decrease in segregation in the Public Schools that the students are transferring out of. So on net, it was a fairly dramatic reduction of segregation as a result of the program. The other study found no change. And large positive effect in Public Schools. Now these results are counter intuitive to many people. Our culture has conditioned us to think that private schools are much more ethnically segregated than Public Schools. Not only the data in School Choice programs but the data doesnt bear that out. Often described as something that will increase segregation. So counter intuitive. So it is important to understand the context for why we find the numbers we find. And i think the main reason is because in the public system, students are assigned what schools they are going to go to based on where they live. And american neighborhoods are seg grated. And there is actually a feedback where those feed off of that. One time my wife and i moved to another city and we found our realtor filtering the housing results. And boy, was he terrified when he realized he was caught because that is very, very illegal. But i dont think that his motivation was invidious discrimination. I dont think he is concerned about the ethnic purity of the neighborhoods in that city. I think he is motivated to make the quickest sale he can and he wants to show us as few houses we are not going to be interested and he just made assumptions. As soon as we took the filter out, we found a Beautiful House that met our needs and it was at the price we wanted and we bought it and lived there for several years. We were much better off. So sometimes my friends on the right will say, they poo poo the idea that there is still discrimination in the housing market, say let me tell you a story. Now i know my personal experience is not a valid empirical study. So we can debate how wide spread this is. So i think that as long as people are sent to schools based on where they live, it is going to be extremely difficult to overcoming ethnic segregation in schools. Private School Choice was not designed for the purpose of reducing segregation. It was designed for various other purposes. But because it disconnected where you live from where you go to school, it does seem to have the effect of reducing ethnic segregation in schools and that is one reason i support it. One reason i support School Choice is because it should be a goal to reduce racially identifiable schools. I think the United States particularly without being jingoistic or nationalistic, we are on the verge where communities are not ethnically exclusive and that is historically new. Not something you find as you look back in history. I am excited about the prospects of School Choice to help position us where communities are not ethnically bounded. I think that is a great thing for School Choice to be doing. Thank you very much. Well, i have got to respond to that. So let me start by first saying thank you for inviting me to this wonderful conversation. As i was thinking about this panel, i just reflected on my own personal trajectory and how i even got there. I have an identical twin sister. We grew up in new jersey, and we both failed kindergarten. But i share that story because we were in new jersey which is a majority of white community. My parents were just had to move out of philadelphia and they wanted a Better School option for us. And when we failed kindergarten, my mother took us out of Public School and into private school and honestly, i think that has made all the difference for us and that is why i am a huge, huge proponent for parental choice. How do you best meet the needs of each individual child. And so fast forward. As i heard gerard talk a little bit, as was previously mentioned, i was a ceo of the newark Charter School fund where i am a new jersey girl born and raised and was excited to be back in newark. And as i moved back to washington, d. C. Where my husband is a sixth generation washingtonian. Believing that all politics are local. The data or the narrative, it really just comes down to what is happening locally. And about two years ago, i went out to the Silicon Valley with all the tech entrepreneurs, they do think differently out there. And the ceo of thumb tack said i hear this debate kb k12, college, but this is the reality, if we are not preparing our students for their academic life, their Economic Life and their life to be citizen in this global world then we are not doing our job. So i think about the purpose of brown v. Education, where we are now, my mission is to make sure that every single child can live a wellrounded life and when i hear data around, you know, majority minority communities, Newark Community is 100 eligible for reduced lunch. I am opening a school which is 100 African American and 100 eligible for free lunch. So if more affluent white parents want to come, great. I dont think they are coming until the school and the neighborhoods are safe and providing high education. It is majority minority, is it segregated. My perspective is that throws false debates. We shouldnt be choosing between charter or district. Every parent wants a great school. I think that is what we heard from the last panel. The other data point that i want to just really reflect on is in the last panel, virginia waldon ford talked about being in the second wave of post brown v. Education. And he described her experience as being invisible. And i thought, geez, that is exactly how the 1. 2 Million Students who are dropping out of school feel. It is how do we meet the individual needs of every single student today because the digital economy, the world is moving fast, we just heard cell phones go off. Our students are Digital Natives and have to prepare them to enter into the digital economy. That is why i am excited to launch a school focused on Computer Science. Can i enroll . Absolutely. Can you teach it, that is the question. Let me add my thanks to johnny and the center. We are going to do a little bit of directed questions. So i am going to ask a question that follows up directly on yours. You said that you are from a district that is 100 in newark. So in a School Choice system if you are meeting the individual needs of every child is it okay to have a school that is o100 minority . To me that is the wrong question. It is how do we meet the needs of individual students. Do we give students real choices. I met todd rose who wrote a book the end of average. There is no average student. There is no one size fits all. The more we treat individual students as an average, we are going to do one, miss their talents or two, bore them death. So we need to make sure that there is innovative options and look at school days, school year. Maybe school is not a place you go to. Maybe it is an online activity. I think it is the wrong question to be thinking about today. So the next question is thinking about that, what is the role of government in this conversation. So is there a situation, there are a lot of friends of mine who argues the Public School stmg, is actually doing what it is intended to do. And what is the proper role of government in this discussion. This is for each of you. Sure. I want to go back to your first question and then go to the second. If you ask gary orfill he will say absolutely not. If you ask richard callenberg, what about bannicer Public High School here in washington, d. C. A racially academic school. What about drew Magnet School in los angeles predominantly black and hispanic. They are racially identifiable schools that are doing well. The question for me isnt segregation, today, tomorrow, forever. It is education today, tomorrow, and forever. That is what matters to me. In terms of the role of government, what it can play is a small key partner. So if you have a group of Community Members who say we want to have an integrated system, let it happen. She worked in came bridge massachusetts, they have a controlled choice program. People decided i am going to move to cambridge and participate in the program. The second oldest voluntary program in the country is the metco program. Who got tired of and so the government was a small partner saying we will give you academic resources, Financial Resources and work with the law to make it happen. So i also think when necessary the government should have a heavy hand when there is discrimination going on. But it can play both discrimination as well as intervention as well as innovation. Here is